Stop by Heatsync Thursday Feb 20th at 7pm to see something amazing! Bring your laptop if you want to hack on it yourself!

Thanks to the power of Linux and inexpensive arm based processors we have an abundance of gaming devices that make playing "retro" games easy and affordable. If you adjust for inflation these devices cost $25 in 2008 money compared to the $99 a Game Boy Advance cost in 2008 (note, I mostly made that up but a device far more powerful than a GBA is about $50 in today's money).

Those games are great but what if you wanted to make your own game? Would you start by learning MOS 6507 assembly and figure out how to package that into a ROM for an Atari 2600? Maybe learn Lua and program for a fantasy console?

What if you already know a little JavasScript? And what if you wanted to make the ultimate cross platform solution that also worked on the web with no code changes? While we are dreaming, what if you wanted to use these devices for something besides gaming?

Meet JSGameLauncher (real name pending!)! In this meetup Luis Montes will walk you through how it came about, what web api's it supports, what parts of the web are missing (bye bye DOM and CSS) and how to get started.

We will continue to run workshops on this for the next few months as long as there is interest! Stop by and try it out!

Sheldon

P.S. You can use AI to make games/apps too. The key is to hand it the sample utils provided by jsgames so it knows how to draw on a canvas and use the controller. It's the same as the web but it's still nice to give the AI a framework so it won't do the DOM and CSS stuff. Gemini and Claude have been known to produce some awesome results! We'll show you that too if you are interested!

P.P.S.  Yes, this is probably duplicated on Meetup. Sorry! It's a long story. I can tell you that story or we can hack on games! I say we do the latter.