October 2005
Beginner
501 pages
15h 5m
English
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Preface
A few months ago, I was playing a classic Game Boy game, in all its 15-year-old monochrome glory. But the version I was playing was markedly worse than what I remembered from 1989—it ran a little slowly, had some graphic glitches, and there was no sound. And it was one of the most impressive things I’d ever seen.
Why? Because I was playing it on the Sony PSP.
It had been a pretty amazing week. Intrepid, brilliant Japanese hackers had discovered a security loophole in Sony’s new portable game console that let them run executable files off of the Memory Stick media. Within days—literally days—they’d progressed from a simple “Hello World” display to a program that emulated the Game Boy hardware. As we went to press on this book, there were PSP programs that played games from consoles like the Neo Geo and Turbo-Grafx CD. By the time you finally read these words, there will probably be software that lets you do much more.
This volume is dedicated to the appreciation, understanding, and application of just that sort of impressive hack. And you don’t even have to skirt copyright law to do it—you’ll find that public domain and freeware games exist for most gaming consoles. The creation of these so-called homebrew titles is in and of itself a retro gaming hack—and a damned impressive one at that! And if you want to try your hand at creating a Game Boy title of your own, you’ll find tips and tricks to help you get started right here.
As for me, I like having the actual classic game hardware. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.