I was looking back through an old hard drive recently and came across this gem that I knew you all would love to see. Along with being possibly the worst Java game ever, it’s also the first one I ever coded - a little piece of Zerosign history, if you will. Below, I posted the code used for the applet. Feel free to take it and modify it however you want. You can replace the images, alter the code to make it more difficult, or build on it and turn it to the bestest computer game ever. If you do happen to make something out of it let us know and I’ll link it up.

To Play: point your mouse over the bombs and left-click to make them magically disappear. Move your mouse out of the applet to pause the game.
BombFall Applet

BombFall Source Code

OK, so apparently I’m a little late to this party. For several years now it seems that classic NES themes have been remade into totally awesome rock songs by my new favorite band, the Minibosses. Thanks to commentor “Jerk” for pointing us to this life-changing site - I know I’ll never be the same.

On their site, they sell a few CDs but clearly state that they are cool with mp3 sharing. So for the past 24 hours I’ve been reliving all my favorite NES games in my mind. If you search their forums (or even google them) you are bound to find lots of download mirrors. So get to it - these guys ROCK!

minibosses site

(…or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embed GoolgeVideo)

I don’t know how old this is, but it freaking rocks. I have always loved the music from Mega Man 2 (easily the best Mega Man game), but this cover is really great. It’s a (slightly) metal version of the Bubbleman theme played over a video of someone playing the level. I don’t know what it is, but for some reason I really like classic NES video game music. I’m thinking that it wouldn’t be too hard to put together a rough soundtrack of some of the great games from my childhood. I have an emulator, I have Audacity, that should be all I need I guess. However, I am very, very lazy.

I think this video came from GameCore, but I’m not sure.

Also, here is a great How To on PaulStamatiou.com about embedding Google Video. This was how I embedded the video above. I really like the way it integrates the media with the site, so be sure to check it out.

You know that cool little icon in the upper right-hand corner of your Firefox browser? That is your Firefox throbber - yeah, I don’t like the name either. However, its job is to let you know when there is still data being transferred from a site’s server by going through its animation cycle. In reality, the throbber is simply a combination of gif images. When no data is loading, and it is sitting still, you should see a still gif. However, when data is being loaded and the throbber is activated then the browser displays an animated gif. The process of making your own throbber is really simple, and it gives your browser a customized feel.

The first thing you will need is an idea that will translate well to a tiny square no bigger than 50×50 pixels. For my throbber, I made an animated gif that fit the look of Zerosign.net. I made a simple design using MS Paint and drew out four different gifs that could be combined together to form an animated gif. I used a really simple gif animator program that I found online here. Once you’re happy with the animations, all that’s left is modifying some Firefox code.

Navigate to “C:/Documents and Settings/username/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxx.default/chrome”. In this directory, there should be a file called ‘userChrome-example.css’. Edit this file by adding the following lines of code to the top of the file and renaming it to ‘userChrome.css’.

toolbar #navigator-throbber { list-style-image: url(”newzero1.gif”) !important; }
toolbar #navigator-throbber[busy=”true”] { list-style-image: url(”newzeroani.gif”) !important; }

Of course, you would change the gif names to correspond to the names of your own image files. Then, after adding your gifs to this directory, restart Firefox. When your browser comes back, your new throbber will be there. For a slightly more detailed explanation of this process you can check out UrbanMainframe’s post about the topic.

If you would like to use my image files, you are welcome. They are really simple and if more than five minutes was spent on the process, I’m sure you could get some better effects. But if you so choose:

[newzero1.gif]
[newzeroani.gif]