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About this blog

Geeky things I'm up to

Entries in this blog

Clash of Clans

My son managed to convince mom to install CoC on his iPhone. After watching a little bit, I put it on my HTC. It's pretty cool, although I wonder how Supercell is making any money given lack of IAP pressure and the TV advertising.   IAP - in app purchases, or the way "free-to-play" games make money. In the case of CoC, $$ buys you gems which can be used to: Instantly complete anything which would otherwise take time to complete. (More time requires more gems.) But if you're willing to w

EricBall

EricBall

CivRev

I have been playing Civilization since version 1 although I haven't played version IV or any of the version III expansions. Nor did I play on deity level. So I guess I'm not a hard-core Civ player.   But that's a good thing, 'cause Civilization Revolutions isn't for the hard-core Civ players. Unlike the rest of the Civ seies which added complexity with each version increase, Civ Rev tries to make the game more fun by removing complexity. This isn't to say the game is easy (although experience

EricBall

EricBall

chewing through codespace

Ugh. Leprechaun's movement routine chews up 637 bytes; over half the free space (1133 bytes) I have in BANK 3. Sigh, I'm sure I can juggle some stuff around, but fewer free bytes means fewer features.

Guest

Guest

channels watched versus available

A Neilsen report (picked up by USA Today, then by Slashdot) says, on average, people only watch 20 channels of the 200 they are subscribed to. Is this news to anyone with a normal cable or satellite package? It's called bundling. In order to get those 20 channels, they have to subscribe to the 200 channel bundle.** In my case, my bundle includes over 100 English language HD channels. (Included in that count are some semi-duplicate channels, like "regional" versions of the two major sports

EricBall

EricBall

Breath of the Wild - finished

After 135 hours of playing Breath of the Wild I have defeated Ganon and finished (but not completed*) the game.  It was a lot of fun, but I'm not planning on replaying it in the near future and I certainly have no desire to buy the DLC and play through a modified version of the game.     One of the parts of BOTW I loved is Zelda's story revealed through the memories and her and her Father's diaries.  Unlike the Champions who chose to be warriors and then accepted the role of Champion,

EricBall

EricBall

Breath of the Wild

Earlier this summer I heard an orchestral medley of Zelda themes and it reminded me that I hadn't bought Breath of the Wild.  When it first came out I didn't have a Switch and couldn't justify buying one just to play Zelda.  However, my son got one a few years back for Christmas so now I just needed to spend the $$ to get the game.  So I picked it up and I've been playing it since July 1st.  I haven't finished it yet, I still need to grind a while to get Ancient Armor and upgrade it before takin

EricBall

EricBall

Bloombox is not green!

I was listening to the 60 Minutes podcast and they were doing a segment on the Bloombox, which is based on a fuel cell. The thing which annoys me is they call this "green energy". Umm, folks . . . you're generating electricity by consuming gaseous hydrocarbons (typically natural gas), which isn't green IMHO unless you are capturing bio-methane. And even then you're replacing the power grid with some sort of hydrocarbon delivery system. They also talk about avoiding grid losses, but half of m

EricBall

EricBall

Beyond HDTV monitors

With the house fire, I'm in the market for a new monitor - so I dropped in at my local Best Buy to get a feel for what is available. I felt like I was buying a Model T - I could have any size I wanted, as long as it was 1920x1080. I've since confirmed this via Newegg - there are a few 1920x1200 (all 24" 16:10 so I suspect they are the same panel) and a few 2560x1440 or x1600, but the majority are 1920x1080.   Now I understand the economics at work - HDTVs use the same panels and they don't n

EricBall

EricBall

BeOS 5 Personal Edition

A recent ArsTechnica entry about Zeta brought back memories of BeOS, and my mostly failed attempts to get it running on the hardware I had access to. Hey! I've got a "new" PC, might it be compatible? Most assuraddly so. Cool. Of course, it's the one hooked up to my Tempest cabinet, so the monitor is rotated, which makes it a little difficult to use. But it's BeOS!

Guest

Guest

Beatles Rock Band

Two years ago when Rock Band was released, we gave it some serious consideration for a family Christmas gift. But we ended up giving the whole plastic instrument craze a pass until this year where we used some gift money and took advantage of the post-Christmas sales to buy Beatles Rock Band. The big advantage is we "know" most of the songs.   And we're having a blast. C is getting better banging on the skins, and I play bass while K handles the vocals (although we might swap). We've worke

EricBall

EricBall

BattleBots 2015

Watched the second episode last night, which covered off the remaining 8 battles in the first round. Unfortunately, that made it a little rushed compared to the first episode which only covered 4 battles. It also meant that a bunch of the teams didn't get their 15 minutes of fame before getting knocked out. I'm now regretting deleting the first episode off my PVR, I want to go back and make notes about each of the battles. Maybe I can find it online somewhere. Highlight of this round was

EricBall

EricBall

banging my head

I hate it when I stop working on a programming project for too long. I forget stuff, except for the problem I couldn't figure out or solve. Which doesn't provide me with much incentive to pick it back up. Thus I forget more & it's even more difficult to actually fix whatever roadblock I hit.Leprechaun has a problem. What should be a static display isn't. Enemies are moving (although they may be simply falling, although I didn't think I had added that subroutine into their logic yet) and

Guest

Guest

Back working on my iOS game

I'm back to working on my iOS game "Slide Tilt Roll" in preparation to using it for a presentation to some computer students at my son's high school.   I updated the MacBook to High Sierra, updated to XCode 9, installed XCode 8 to upgrade the code base from Swift 2.2 to Swift 3.0, then used XCode 9 to bring it up to Swift 4.0. That worked for 90% of the code, then I needed to go through and manually fix a few errors and warnings (mostly confined to sqlite and CGPath functions).   I've als

EricBall

EricBall

Back to the beginning

After a long hiatus, I'm tackling my Propeller video driver. I think I figured out why my previous attempts didn't work. First, there were some technical issues with synchronization of the cogs which I now think I understand. (Plus Chip, the head honcho, has given the step-by-step instructions on what needs to be done.) But the bigger problem is I tried to do everything at once. I was trying to achieve too many new ideas at the same time. So when it didn't work, I didn't have   So this

EricBall

EricBall

Babylon 5 reboot

I watched Babylon 5 when it was first on TV and I have every episode recorded on VHS.  One of these days I'll digitize them so I can enjoy them rather than the "widescreen" versions.  Babylon 5 was great TV - each episode and season told a story which was then part of the story told by the entire series.   But a reboot doesn't compute IMHO.  Part of the reason B5 was great TV was JMS.  He had the vision for the entire series, the backstory, and the ability to change plans when required

EricBall

EricBall

Are you ready for this? pt 2

Second try at making the VCS play 2 Unlimited's "Get Ready For This" (or at least 30 seconds of it).   Differences: 1. First 10 seconds are skipped, which means it starts with the better sounding chords. 2. Only uses AUDC 4, 6 & 12 (square waves)   Notes: it sounds better on a VCS than an emulator (although the emulator does the score color, while my 7800 doesn't, weird); not compatible with an unmodified SuperCharger.   Method behind the madness: 1. Song ripped from CD to WAV, th

EricBall

EricBall

Are you ready for this?

Brute force frame by frame PCM to TIA AUDC/AUDF coding. This version doesn't use the "noisy" AUDC values and the second half (approx 30 run time, looped) sounds almost acceptable.   Comment if you want the (unfinished, but functional) source code.

EricBall

EricBall

Apple TV 4 games?

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/01/report-apple-tv-successor-with-revamped-os-coming-in-first-half-of-2014/   Reading the article this morning I had the question - could an Kinect device make it possible to play touchscreen style games on your home TV?   The problem is the two aren't equivalent. A touchscreen gives visual position feedback and an actual touch input. While a Kinect is a "zero button mouse". The list of existing Kinect games doesn't include ports of most popular touchscre

EricBall

EricBall

Apple TV 4 games?

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/01/report-apple-tv-successor-with-revamped-os-coming-in-first-half-of-2014/  

EricBall

EricBall

Apple TV 4 games - fail

Why do I say fail? Simple: no standardized controller except for the small touchpad on the remote. Why not announce a standard controller app (similar to the Remote app) or declare the PS3 or PS4 controller a de-facto standard Bluetooth controller? (Although then they'd need to provide a USB input for pairing.) This would then allow developers to port games much more easily. Heck, with a controller app Apple could provide a way for the Apple TV game to push the controller layout down to

EricBall

EricBall

Apple TV - the next console or a lost opportunity

I was recently looking at the Apple TV as a way to cheaply provide AirPlay in a second location and I wondered if there were games for it. Surprisingly there aren't any.   Sure there are rumors, suggestions, hopes & fears there may be in the future. But right now the Apple TV is simply a media extender - great for watching streamed movies, TV & music or duplicating your iPhone / iPod / iPad display. But there are no native apps - other than those developed in partnership with Apple.

EricBall

EricBall

Apple ][ versus CoCo

Back in the day my family owned a CoCo (partially because my Mom worked at a Radio Shack computer store at the time, so got a discount), but at school I user Apple ][s (pluses and Es). Unlike the C64 (or the Atari 8 bit computers), neither the CoCo or the A2 has any sound or sprite hardware. Yet the A2 had a huge library of games, and I have to ask myself why.   I think it was the disk drive. Although a disk add-on existed for the CoCo, cassette tapes were still very popular. And, unlike

EricBall

EricBall

Apple ][ hi-res graphics

The Apple ][ was capable of "280x192 6 color hi-res graphics", but how it accomplished those graphics is bizzare to anyone familiar with modern memory mapped graphics (i.e. 256 color VGA). Even more amazing was the quality of games which were written for the Apple ][ series in spite of what the programmers must have gone through.In conventional memory mapped graphics there are two basic assumptions: 1. Each pixel is represented by a set number of bits, e.g. 1 for monochrome, 2 for 4 color, 4 f

Guest

Guest

Apple ][ Disk ][ Read Sequencer

One of Woz's design decisions for the Disk ][ was to force the MSB of each byte read to be 1. Although this restricted the number of values each byte could take, this was already restricted by the number of sequential zero bits i.e the time between changes in magnetic field; initally 1 (DOS 3.2), later 2 (DOS 3.3). But the restriction on the MSB had several positive side effects: 1. The MSB could be used as an easy "data ready" flag by the CPU. 2. The read sequencer could hold the completed

EricBall

EricBall

Apple ][ copy protection

For those interested in Apple ][ copy protection (and cracking of it) I have found two troves of information. First is the 4am Apple ][ Library at https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am Attached to each archive is a text file where 4am describes his cracking process. In most cases he simply follows the boot process, analyzes the often obfuscated code to figure out how to capture the next step in the process, then determines the minimum change required to allow the disk to be easily

EricBall

EricBall

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