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Vinyl overlay for tactile feel on iPhone NES emulator

All > Tech > Hacks/Mods > Gadgets > Vinyl overlay for tactile feel on iPhone NES emulator by natetrue

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So the iPhone NES emulator is actually playable now, but it has always had one major flaw, inherent to its design. The touchscreen is a flat piece of glass. You can't feel your way around on this phone like you can with most phones (and all gaming controllers).

Playing NES on the iPhone, then, is a lesson in inevitability - your thumbs will eventually drift from the buttons and you won't hit the button you need at the right time and you'll die in the game.

What's a man to do? Well, if you have any excess vinyl laying around (say, from an underwater camera enclosure), or if you want to buy it from a craft store, you have all you need to make a tactile overlay for your screen.

The vinyl is perfect because if you press it against the glass it adheres like a decal (because decals are made from the same material!).

The iPhone's beautiful glass screen makes it easy to cut the overlay - fire up the NES emulator, put the vinyl over the screen, and go at it with your Xacto knife. The screen won't scratch from the knife, so you can get a perfect overlay with little effort.

If you're squeamish you can always use a marker to mark it out and cut it on some surface that you paid less for.

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I cut places for the D-pad and Select/Start buttons,

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... as well as for the A and B buttons.

The screen part is also cut out because the vinyl distorts the view somewhat.

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Download source videoAnd here's a video of me playing with it. NESapp (as of version 0.99.01) does have sound but you have to mess with console commands and disable normal phone sounds, so I don't bother with it.

In case you're wondering, you can install the NES emulator on your iPhone by using Breezy or iBrickr (download links at http://pxl.ibrickr.com ), and grabbing the NESApp PXL package also at http://pxl.ibrickr.com . ROMs need to be loaded into /var/root/Media/ROMs/NES (capitalization counts!) - you can use the Files view in iBrickr (windows) or the iPHUC client (Mac) to upload the ROMs.

iBrickr version 0.7 can also install ROMs directly from the Applications view, without needing to mess about with folders.

No, you may not ask me where to find ROMs.

Special props to NerveGas for forking stepwhite's NES emulator and developing it to the point of perfection. NESapp home page

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