So last night I played my first game of PUBG Mobile - and survived long enough to reach #34 and made 3 kills. (And I probably would have done better if the game hadn't glitched and not auto-reloaded my AR.) I'm old enough to have played Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM; but not Quake because I'd stepped off the upgrade treadmill. Multiplayer shooters also didn't interest me as I didn't have the time to sink into playing the games to get good enough not to be cannon fodder. So why am I playing PUBG M
He's right, I just didn't notice. Well, now I have and I'm going to do something about it. Unfortunately, it's tricker than it sounds.
Fundamentally, the enemies are at a major disadvantage to the player. The player can see the entire level; the enemies are almost blind. Not only is it not feasible to put in some kind of path finding algorithm, but I'd like to avoid doing any level data lookups at all. Fortunately, the enemies have a much simpler purpose - chase down the player and touc
I've done some cycle counting of the display list builder for SpaceWar! 7800 and the results aren't pretty:
103 cycles per display list (25 NTSC, 30 PAL)
403 cycles per player sprite, +191 for horizontal wrap around
248 cycles per non-player sprite, +82 for horizontal wrap around
50 cycles per sprite header vertical wrap around
200+ cycles of overhead
At 114 cycles per raster, just the display list builder is going to chew through all 62 lines of VBLANK.
So, what to do?
1. Optim
The other day I was browsing a warehouse sale which had a few 4K TVs (but no 3D, which I found interesting), and it got me to thinking about them. Not because I want one, but strictly on a why? basis. The local cable company is hyping their 4K TV offering, starting with local baseball and hockey games. But when I'm watching my 55" HDTV, I'm not thinking "boy, I'd pay big bucks to have more picture detail". Maybe if my TV filled the entire wall so HDTV looked like 320x200 VGA on a 21" mon
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
My wife has suggested getting my son an iPod Shuffle (or similar) to replace the kiddie cassette player he has. A bid advantage of going with an iPod is my son can therefore get stuff from my wife's iTunes library. However...
Reasons I don't like the current 3rd generation iPod shuffle:
1. C$70+tax
2. Controls on the headphones. However, C does think K's iPod headphones are comfy.
3. It's dang tiny, just looking to get lost.
4. Requires a special USB cable for charging & sync. (Some
It's not a game unless you can keep score.The base idea I have is to have a count down timer for the level which would start each level at 999.9s or 16 min 39.9 sec. You would have unlimitted men (restarts) but limitted time. Bonus time would be given for picking up gold. Once you completed the level, your time remaining would be added to your total score.There will probably be the ability to practice levels, but that wouldn't be scored.How does that sound to everyone?
Now that Christmas is over and I'm not trying to turn 700 slides into a DVD, I need to get back to working on Leprechaun.One item which is working (although I'm not going to post it since it doesn't affect gameplay) is the change to a reflected kernel. I wanted to get that working before the level editor sees the light of day. Kirk Israel has been working on the level editor, but the next challenge is implementing the save & load capability.My next update should include the corresponding l
Last night I replaced the hard drive (which had died) & battery in my wife's iPod color. So now she's happy again. Plus I upgraded the drive from 20GB to 30GB and replaced the faceplate with a brand new glossy black one (from the U2 model).
The only difficulties were finding a Torx T6 screwdriver (well, not that hard, but I think only one multibit at Home Depot had it) and prying open the case. (It looked much easier in the how-to video.)
Oh, and I did manage to install Win2K onto
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
This past Christmas I bought an N64 for my son (and me) to enjoy my collection of games. (Although the problem turned out to be dirty cartridges rather than a dead N64.) He's been having a blast playing Super Mario 64 and the Mario Party games.
This nostalgia rekindled my interest in what is under the hood of both it and the original PlayStation. It turns out there's a lot of similarities between the two, more than I would have expected.
Both used a MIPS CPU (PSX: 32bit R3051 @ 33.8688
As my wife often reminds me, I have a habit of not finishing projects once I've started them. (Usually while pointing at one of them.) I have to say that I've gotten better at managing this habit (although not necessarily at finishing projects). I try not to start projects, or at least start spending money instead of just time, unless I have a relatively clear understanding of what it's going to take to finish the project (and why I'm bothering). But i still have quite a few projects hanging
Reading https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/inside-iphone-7-why-apple-killed-the-headphone-jackgave me an idea. What if you combined the Apple W1 wireless chip with something like a Chu Moy pocket amplifier. So you plug your $tupidly expen$ive headphones into the pocket amp which is wirelessly connected to your phone. On the actual removal of the headphone jack, I think Apple is ahead of the curve. Bluetooth based headphones are becoming more common and there are definite advantages to
Earlier this month the family and I spent a week camping at (nee Six Flags) Darien Lake - riding roller coasters & other rides plus roasting marshmallows & drinking beer. Every night DL has a laser & fireworks show set to music. (Unfortunately the same one every night.) The laser show part of the show in particular was particularly impressive and would have made Pink Floyd (from 40 years ago) green with envy - complex animated scenes in full color. (Probably restricted more by th
The Acer Aspire One netbook we bought after the fire has turned out to be a decent computer (especially with a RAM & SSD upgrade). It came loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition and (bonus) MS Office Starter Edition. The free upgrade to Windows 10 sounded like a good idea. Not only would I get all of the ongoing security updates etc., but it wouldn't have the 2GB limit of Win7SE. Unfortunately, I just ran the Win10 upgrade check and learned the Intel GMA 3600 graphics adapter isn't supp
My son recently bought himself Pokemon Platinum so I retired the SNES & Gameboys which were only used to play Pokemon Blue. But those weren't the only SNES & Gameboy games we had. So I downloaded the entire GoodSNES collection via BitTorrent (dang that was easy, although I don't see the need for all of the bad dumps, hacks etc.) and put an SNES emulator on the Wii along with the ROMs for just the SNES titles I owned. I'll probably do the same for the Gameboy titles. And I'd like to g
Winter makes me glad to have a garage to park in. No scraping ice & snow in the morning. And I've learned to back in so I don't have to change direction if the laneway hasn't been plowed.
And there's the rub. In my old car, a Plymouth Acclaim, I could see the rear corners but I'm having a devil of a time with my new Corolla. Although I can use the side mirrors to make sure I don't scrape the sides, it takes me several tries to get squared up.
So I was wondering if I could rig som
I've been doing a bunch of think-coding over on potatohead's Blog trying to work though making Propeller code capable of generating a 240x240 resolution sprite display.
For those not familiar with the Propeller, it's an 8-way SMP processor in a very low cost ($13 each) package. Each processor (or cog) has 496x32 bits of RAM which functions as registers and code & data storage (self modifying code is almost required), with 32K of shared RAM accessed in round-robin fashion (very determini
One thing I find amazing about the 2600 homebrew scene is the strong interest in creating new bankswitching hardware, often with advanced capabilities. I think, very soon, the only remaining VCS limitations will be the capabilities of the TIA and that there are only 76 CPU cycles per line to update the TIA (hmm... shades of the GTIA/ANTIC).
Anyway, one idea which occurred to me is whether it would be possible for the cartridge to automatically bankswitch the 64K (32K usable) address space.
I've been reading & listening to Ben Heckendorn's (of VSCp fame) disenting opinions of the Wii, and I think he has some good points on why it may be doomed to failure. It comes down to two major design decisions: #1 no HDTV support & #2 unique controller which lead to three reasons why the Wii is doomed.
Currently I don't have an HDTV, nor any plans on buying one in the near future; and I suspect the same could be said for the majority of people. (Although with prices of HDTVs fall
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
Time, she be precious and in scarce supply. I'm trying to put together all of the various bits & pieces I've written or thought about and make something a little closer to a playable version. My current goal is to get most of the player logic done so you'll be able to move the little block around with the joystick.Most recently I've been working on player joystick handling for when the player isn't "on grid". I want to allow the player to reverse direction in "mid stride" as it were. Hop
Made some minor revisions to my tracker code and posted it to [stella]; no feedback yet (whine). One thing I'm not happy with is the byte to note ratio being 2+. This chews up ROM space much faster than I imagined. Certainly with a lot of repeated sequences, the total bytes per song will come down, but even my demo takes 168 bytes. Which kinda puts my idea of dedicating a page of ROM in Leprechaun for music to be woefully inadequate. I could probably come up with a data format which would lo
SpaceWar! 7800I was looking at my Expensive Planetarium code and realized I had made it 216 tiles per line rather than 256; which means I don't need to have any fancy wrap around code because the last 40 tiles are duplicates of the first 40. Ah, well.I'm also thinking that instead of creating a separate EP.bin and then trying to integrate the code into SW78, I'll try to add it to SW78 in the first place. Harder to start, but easier in the long run.I'm also trying to think if there's anything e
Ah-ha! I've got it!Currently, the code is set up for six sprites - the player and five enemies. Each frame one sprite moves one pixel. So it takes 24 frames for a sprite to move horizontally from one PF block to the next.Now, what if I change this to fractional positioning for the enemies. The player I'll leave be because he can change direction in mid-move. What if I want to still limit myself to one full sprite movement update per frame. Okay, so let's make it take 30 frames for the enem
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