Hey,

1. The Arrival and Assembly (30 min)

So my iCade arrived at 2:58pm today. It took me 30 minutes to unbox the parts and put the whole thing together with a hex-screwdriver. The completed item looks 110% win!!! There are tons of detailed unboxing guides on the internet, so I’ll just give you a shot of mine:

2. Testing it out with GAMES (30 min)

I had to check it out with a real game, so I went to the definitive touchArcade post on the subject. I realized I already had several of those titles on my iPad, so I dove right in with Velocispider which was totally awesome on the iCade!! I can only hope more devs add support! 30 minutes elapsed “fun time”.

3. Downloading the iCade SDK (1 min)

The “official” SDK is sort of useless, it’s just a manual telling us what we already knew. The great bit is there is an Open Source SDK (MIT) that is ready to go! I downloaded and unzipped that and began adding it into my project. 1 minute.

4. Being stupid (2 hours)

I then proceeded to brilliantly comment out the two lines of code that make the iCade code work. And then spend 2 hours realizing it. /facepalm

5. The iCade Integration (15 min)

Once I fixed my error, the integration took approximately 15 minutes. The bulk of the code was just a switch statement that converted the iCade SDK events to my own internal framework events. I already had keyboard support, so it was no trouble at all.

- (void)setState:(BOOL)state forButton:(iCadeState)button {
    int v = 0; unsigned char c;
    switch(button) {
        case iCadeButtonA: v=KEY_a; c='a'; break;
        case iCadeButtonB: v=KEY_b; c='b'; break;
        case iCadeButtonC: v=KEY_c; c='c'; break;
        case iCadeButtonD: v=KEY_d; c='d'; break;
        case iCadeButtonE: v=KEY_e; c='e'; break;
        case iCadeButtonF: v=KEY_f; c='f'; break;
        case iCadeButtonG: v=KEY_g; c='g'; break;
        case iCadeButtonH: v=KEY_h; c='h'; break;
        case iCadeJoystickUp: v=KEY_UP; c=0; break;
        case iCadeJoystickRight: v=KEY_RIGHT; c=0; break;
        case iCadeJoystickDown: v=KEY_DOWN; c=0; break;
        case iCadeJoystickLeft: v=KEY_LEFT; c=0; break;
    }
    Event e;
    e.v = v;
    e.c = c;
    e.type = state?EVT_KEYDOWN:EVT_KEYUP;
    game_event(e);
}

I also had to go ahead and add Universal (iPad) support to the game, this didn’t take too long as my framework has smarts for doing that pretty easily.

6. In conclusion …

I’ve submitted my update to the App Store, so hopefully it’ll be in your hands within a week.

In conclusion, integrating iCade into your iOS game only takes 15 minutes, unless you’re as stupid as I am. I encourage all devs who have appropriate games to do this so that I can play more games on my iCade!!! Go GO GO GO!

-Phil

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 at 12:00 pm and is filed under development, iphone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.