Recent content on Brian Peek
I’ve had a small stack of gaming promotional VHS tapes sitting in a box for years that I recently digitized and posted on YouTube. Let’s take a look… The Coin-Op Tapes My dad was a coin-op operator. These five Atari Games tapes were sent to him in the late 90s. Atari Games was a Midway subsidiary at that point, the coin-op business was well into its decline, and these were among…
I work on several Atari Lynx projects, mostly with cc65 , which compiles C down to 6502 assembly and then into a cartridge image. Emulators help with debugging, but you’re looking at assembly, not at the C you wrote. So I built a source-level debugger on top of the Gearlynx emulator. Gearlynx Debugger is a VS Code extension that gives you breakpoints in your C files, real local variables,…
Have you heard about this AI thing? I know it doesn’t get much press and hardly anyone is talking about it. So, what better way to give it some more attention than to write an article about it for my blog that hasn’t been updated in 8 years? Let’s begin. The Experiment I wanted to try building a full Windows application using AI as my coding partner. Since Notepad gets more and…
At this year’s Build conference, Dimitris Gkanatsios and I presented two sessions on game development and the cloud. The first demonstrates how one might use Azure Container Instances to automatically scale a multiplayer backend. The second is a demo on using Unity with Azure services like Computer Vision and Cosmos DB along with PlayFab for things like authentication and leaderboards. You…
At GDC this year, I presented a session on scaling multiplayer backends using Azure Container Instances, Event Grid, and Azure Functions. An enormous thanks goes to Dimitris Gkanatsios who wrote 99% of this. You can find the video below, but here are some additional links: GitHub project Additional GDC18 Videos Azure GameDev Sandbox
NOTE: Old content, this site now runs on Hugo. By default, Ghost does not have a commenting system of its own. When migrating my blog from BlogEngine.NET, I wanted to carry over old comments and maintain the commenting feature. Disqus to the rescue! Migrating Old Comments First, you’ll need to create an account at Disqus and select the “I want to install Disqus on my site”…
NOTE: Old content, this site now runs on Hugo. As mentioned previously, I recently migrated my blog to Ghost from BlogEngine.NET . I’ll be writing a few posts discussing what I went through in the migration process. Installing Ghost on Azure I run my life on Azure. Previously, my BlogEngine instance was running as an App Service , so getting Ghost running on Azure was important to me.…
NOTE: Old content, this site now runs on Hugo. I don’t blog very regularly, it seems, so in an effort to get back on the bandwagon, I decided to migrate my blog from BlogEngine.NET to Ghost , since that’s what much of the world has moved to. If you are seeing this post, apparently I was successful. While getting Ghost itself deployed and running on Azure was super simple, migrating my…
Many years ago, an open-source Sega Dreamcast SDK known as KallistiOS (KOS) was created and is still being developed today. I used this SDK long ago to create a few emulators that were published , and a variety of unfinished games that were not… KOS is easy to get up and running on a variety of platforms, but on Windows this always required setting up Cygwin. But, with the addition of the…
I had the opportunity to co-present a session at Build 2015 focusing on building games for Windows 10 . Jaime Rodriguez and I spent an hour talking about the new Windows 10 features related to gaming, including Xbox Live, ID@Xbox , the new GamePad API, windowing, and the various middlewares and engines like MonoGame and Marmalade that are supporting Windows 10 at present. If you care about games…
It’s that time again…another Visual Studio Live! I will be presenting 2 sessions at Visual Studio Live! in Las Vegas this March 16-20. The conference is a full 5 day event and there’s still time to register . For this event, I’ll be presenting: W23 Building Games for Windows and Windows Phone Using Unity and Other Frameworks Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2015 Time: 3:00pm – 4:15pm Level: Introductory…
I will be presenting 3 sessions at Visual Studio Live! in Orlando this November 17-21. The conference is a full 5 day event, and part of the Live! 360 conference, covering SharePoint, SQL Server, Modern Apps and more. Plus, there’s still time to register and save $600 if you register before 10/15/14! For this event, I’ll be presenting: VSH03 Games Development with Unity and Other Frameworks for…
I will be presenting 2 sessions at Visual Studio Live! in Washington DC this October 6-9. The conference is a full 4 day event and there’s still time to register and save $400 if you register before 9/10/14! For this event, I’ll be presenting: TH07 Building Your First Windows Phone 8.1 Application Date: Thursday, October 9, 2014 Time: 9:30am – 10:45pm Level: Introductory Expand your mobile…
I will be presenting 2 sessions at Visual Studio Live! in Redmond this August 18-22. The conference is a full 4 day event and there’s still time to register and save $500 if you register before 6/11/14! For this event, I’ll be presenting: TH15 Performance and Diagnostics Hub in Visual Studio 2013 Date: Thursday, August 22, 2014 Time: 11:00am – 12:15pm Level: Intermediate Visual Studio 2013 has…
I have been exploring the Xamarin tools recently and decided to try my hand at connecting some Bluetooth hardware to Android for a project that will be released soon. I have learned quite a bit about Bluetooth on Android and decided to write up a short description on how to connect to a Bluetooth serial device via RFCOMM/SPP. First, grab an instance of the default BluetoothAdapter on the Android…
I will be presenting 2 sessions and speaking on the closing panel at Visual Studio Live! in Chicago this May 5-8. The conference is a full 4 day event and there’s still time to register and save $200 if you register before 4/16/14! For this event, I’ll be presenting: TH10 Performance and Diagnostics Hub in Visual Studio 2013 Date: Thursday, May 8, 2014 Time: 11:00am – 12:15pm Level: Intermediate…
I will be presenting 3 sessions at Visual Studio Live! in Las Vegas this March 10-14. The conference is a full 5 day event and there’s still time to register and save $500 if you register before 1/22/14! For this event, I’ll be presenting: LT20 Controlling Hardware using Windows 8.1 Date: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 Time: 4:15pm – 5:30pm Level: Introductory Windows 8.1 allows developers to communicate…
Apparently the email service tied to this blog has been down for quite a long time and I had no idea. If you’ve sent me an email recently, please re-send using the Contact Me link above. Sorry!
Update: Make that 3 sessions! I will be presenting 3 sessions at Visual Studio Live! in Orlando this November 18-22. The conference is a full 5 day event and there’s still time to register and save some cash! For this event, I’ll be presenting: VST01 What’s New in Windows 8.1 for Developers Date: Tuesday, November 19, 2013 Time: 9:30 am – 10:45 am Level: Introductory Windows 8.1 contains…
Update: Slides and code are now available over on the Events page! I will be presenting 2 sessions at Visual Studio Live! in Redmond on the Microsoft campus this August 19 – 23. The conference is a full 5 day event and there’s still time to register and save some cash! For this event, I’ll be presenting: T20 Windows Store Application Contracts and Extensibility Date: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 Time:…