The Internet Archive Now Lets You Play 900+ Classic Arcade Games In Your Browser

Looking for a nice little burst of nostalgia on this fine Saturday evening? Don’t feel like going through the process of installing MAME and lurking for ROMs, but still want to get your classic arcade on?

Back in December of last year, the Internet Archive (in their effort to backup the entire digital world, one bit at a time) launched a “Console Living Room” that offers up browser-friendly emulators for a pretty shocking number of consoles from the 70s/80s. Want to play some Atari 2600? Here you go. Sega Genesis? Yup!)

This weekend, they’ve introduced a whole new category: The Internet Arcade. 900+ classic arcade games, no quarters required.

It’s all a part of the JSMESS project, an effort to emulate as many systems as possible… in Javascript, of all languages. As they put it, they want to make “computer history and experiences” as embeddable as “movies, documents, and audio”.

Do they all work seemlessly? Nah — you’ll almost certainly spot a bug or two. Many are missing sound. But it’ll get better in time — and for now, just the fact that they got MAME working in a browser, sans any hefty plugins/runtime environments, is damned impressive.

One of JSMESS’ developers, Jason Scott, outlined the work he put into the Arcade-centric leg of the project in a blog post here.

(Pro tip: it can be a bit weird to figure out a game’s controls in MAME some times. The 5 key lets you insert a coin; the 1 key is usually the Player 1 start button. Arrows are usually used for directional stuff, with CTRL/ALT/SPACE used for the three primary buttons. Beyond that, you’ll have to mash buttons a bit to figure it out [or hit TAB to dive into the key configurations])

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Kiran Upadhyay

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