So after performing some housekeeping on my PS3 (didja know that you can assign downloaded games an "Album", and then select "Group by Album" - so now my purchased games are in a separate folder) I downloaded the multiplayer demo of Blur.
First, big kudos to Activision for releasing a multiplayer demo which actually allows you to play as if you bought the game (up to level 10 at least). That's right - no timing out on the last lap or limited play time. You can really get a good feel for wh
At E3 each of the big three consoles hit the stage to excite the press and public with their latest gadgets.
Microsoft was first up and they showed off Kinect (nee Natal), where the 360 uses a camera to turn your body into the controller, along with various games (mostly sports stuff) and a staged Star Wars lightsabre battle. The other big announcement was a smaller, quieter, lower cost, Xbox 360 with built in WiFi.
Nintendo went second with Shiguru Miyamoto showing off the new Zelda fo
Even though I didn't get into computers until several years after the Cray-1 first came to market, it was still a legendary computer.
Just the look and shape of it was awe inspiring; looking like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey (or any other SF film). No simple box, but a C shaped tower with a "love seat". Then you learned that "love seat" was the refrigeration system - it was cooled with Freon - how cool was that? A computer that got so hot it needed a cooling system. (Which actual
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
My wife plays Cafe World and other games on Facebook. She's noticed that her MacBook gets hot while she's playing. I suspect it's just because Flash is a hog, but it occurs to me that I really have no idea what it's doing. And although my home network is safely hidden behind a NAT router, that doesn't protect me if something which is running from inside Flash (which has security holes) or other "trusted" environments.
What I'd like to do is put a sniffer on a hub connected between my cabl
Well, I just bought two ATI HDTV Wonders on eBay, so I guess it's gone beyond plotting.
I've read as much as I can without taking the plunge. In theory it should be fairly simple.
1. Acquire PC to use as a back-end server. This server contains the capture cards and the hard drives to store the recordings. Since I'm dealing with ATSC the CPU specs don't matter.
2. Acquire compatible capture card(s). Sure, there may be cheaper cards out there which you might be able to get working, but i
I have too many unfinished projects. I think of a project and I can think of nothing else. It rattles inside my head, making it difficult to think of anything else. But as I actually start the project the noise quiets down and life returns to normal. But then I get another idea and I can never quite get back to finishing off the project.
Currently rattling around in my head is an idea for an MPEG Transport Stream separator. This relates back to my idea of using my PS3 as a MythTV front
My home computer is close to dead - random reboots and errors which point to a hardware failure. It's at least 7 years old, so I guess it's time for an upgrade. Sigh.
I've spec'd out a Dell replacement for C$878+tax etc. My question is whether there's any real point in looking at other makes etc. Unlike the old machine, I'm not interested in researching each component and assembling it myself. I have consoles for playing games so I don't need the ultimate in performance. I just want g
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
If you do any kind of signal processing, you've probably heard of an "FFT" or Fast Fourier Transform. An FFT is an algorithm (and there are several) which calculates a Discrete Fourier Transform in less operations, typically O(N*log2(N)), where N is the number of samples. The Fourier Transform changes a time based function into a frequency based function. (The reverse is also possible.) The Discrete Fourier Transform is the same thing except it handles time and frequency samples rather than
I've enhanced my workflow, so I'll share it for others who may want to do something similar.Step 1 - using a simple video capture program and an analog capture card, I capture the video at 720x480 (YUV2 compressed with HuffYUV), and 48KHz 16bit audio to NTFS formated disk.Step 2 - use AVCutty to detect scene changes. I created a custom scene index to simplify the next step.Step 3 - compress the scenes to DV format using ffmpeg -ss hh:mm:ss.00 -t hh:mm:ss.00 -i capture.avi -target ntsc-dv "clip-
Another rental. It will be interesting to see how Wii impacts GCN title availability and pricing.
Anyway, Wario Ware is billed as another party game title (like the Mario Party series). Except it's stuffed full of “micro-games” and the multi-player game has no inter-player interaction.
So what about these microgames? Although I had fun at first, they quickly lost their charm. The problem is each microgame lasts less than in a minute. In that minute you have to figure out the objective
Why is it people think that because the 2600 is "simple" (at least in terms of what level of graphics it can produce) that it will be easy to emulate?
The reason it isn't is because the 6507 and the TIA are "tightly coupled" - each can do things which have an immediate impact on the other. The 7800 and NES are loosely coupled unless interrupts are used. But In the 2600 the 6507 & TIA could almost be regarded as a single entity.
Anyway, occasionally people suggest creating a 2600 em
A decade or so ago I bought a Hi8 camcorder. With it my wife and I have shot the usual assortment of home movies. Now my wife wants to use iMovie to change those tapes into DVDs. (Probably not a bad idea - before those tapes start dying.). These days we use the movie capability of my wife's Canon S3 instead of the camcorder. Of course, getting from point A to B isn't a simple process. The first step is to use the capture card in my old PC to make an AVI using HuffYUV lossless compression. This g
Today Apple announced the 5th generation Nano, including features not available on any other iPod models: video camera & microphone, speaker, and FM receiver. (I think the other features are 90% software, i.e. the pedometer uses the existing accelerometer.) Okay, so the iPhone has the camera and microphone, but the iPod Touch and Classic don't. (And both the Touch & iPhone have a speaker)My question is why the Nano got the goodies instead of the Touch. Maybe it's the price point. Ap
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
So I posted my OnePinTVText driver. That's right, a text display on a TV using only 1 pin. Actually, there's no reason it can't do any other monochrome display with an 8x8 font. Anyone for a nice game of chess? Not much feedback yet. Sniff. I'd like to try to get it to work with the internal RC ~12MHz clock, but my first try didn't work. So I'll put that idea on the back burner for the moment.
My next project is to add SD support to my Z-machine interpretter so it can play the Infocom
Yesterday I tidied up the corner of the basement where I store all my computer (and other tech) junk. I have no idea how I ended up with a dozen (or more) IEC power cords. I should keep enough of the best looking ones for the working PCs and monitors I currently have and toss the rest. Or figure out how to make them into a modern art exhibit and sell 'em to some gallery.
I also have a whack of serial cables which I'm trying to justify keeping. I don't think I have an external modem hidin
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
z3c.zip
It works! I found the bug in the parsing routine (dumb error on my part). I'm going to call this chapter complete.
The next chapter is to create z3.spin based on this code. I/O will probably be based on a serial terminal interface. And it will run catseye.z3, which is small enough to fit in HUB RAM (hopefully), so no SD I/O. The objective is to do as little as possible other than porting the code from C to SPIN.
Z3.C is functional, but I'm still bug hunting. It now gets to the first input in HitchHiker's, but doesn't grok the input. MiniZork starts, but misfires printing out the detailed location info. (Which probably means a bug is in the object/property/attribute code somewhere.)
What I really want is a PC trace from a known good interpretter, which I could then use to narrow down my bug hunt. Unfortunately, none of the Z-Machine interpretters I've found has this option. I could look at their
Zork! HitchHikers! Ahh, the memories of glowing green text and the frustration a text adventure can bring.
Interestingly, Infocom had the forsight to create their games as a program for a virtual computer. That way they didn't have to create separate versions of each for each home computer. The same game file could run on multiple home computers using the existing interpretters. And when a new home computer reached the market, the whole library of games would be available by just writing
Who wouldn't want to have their own pinball machine? You too can be a pinhead, all you need is the space and the cash.
I have the space . . . in theory. I have an unfinished basement but it has accumulated a lot of stuff & junk over the past decade of residence so there's not a lot of empty floor space. Getting stuff down to the basement is also a challenge as the stairs make a 180 degree turn halfway down. But ultimately no show stoppers.
The cash is kinda sorta there too. The
Last night I posted my sprite video driver to the Prop forum, complete with demo (a bouncing beanie which explodes into individual sprites). Screen capture in MPEG2 of first 20 seconds: ntsc240h.zip
So far, I've had two comments - one attaboy & one not-very-useful. (The latter obviously can't see the videogame potential.) But like the circus bugs in "A Bug's Life" I crave applause. I want that feedback!
Sigh... other Prop projects I'm considering:
PWM based waveform generator
On the Prop front, I now have 2 to 5 COGs happily working together, alternating lines to produce a stable static screen. This is very, very cool (for me).
Next steps:
1. (Easy) fold the blank line code into the active line code. Every bit is sacred!
2. Put back in the sprite -> lineRAM code.
3. Create a demo to show it all off.
And... that'll be about it, just ready for release. Which brings me to my topic question - Software licenses.
What I want to do is release the code
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