The Inner Workings Of A Coders Brain
FishGuy876
Programmer, Geek, Beer Drinker
Home page: http://www.cvgm.net
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Posts by FishGuy876
Creating A New Game & Framework In 30 Days – Piles’o’Tiles for Android/iPhone \o/
014 years
Click To Enlarge The Image
It’s been a while since I did any work on my games, which really is a shame as I still play my own games from time to time, and people are still buying them and playing them too. So, I have decided that I would motivate myself with a “New Game In 30 Days” type blogfest, where I port the old game to a brand new format in the space of a month!
The first game I picked to port is my popular Piles’o’Tiles Mahjong game, its been long overdue to be overhauled and is still fairly popular amongst players. On top of porting the game, within the same period of time I plan to develop a re-usable game framework that I will use in all of my games, so after Tiles I can easily jump in and start porting my other games such as Jelly-Othelly, Crazy Crystals and my unreleased WordHunter games. I also have some ideas for a few new games, but need the framework before I put together some experimental test versions, and see how bad the idea sucks when it’s played for real!
The plan is to have tiles in an almost-ready state by the end of the month, and from there I can fix any small issues, tweak a few bits and pieces and then release not too long after, if it even takes that long.
Today is Day 4, and most of the screen switching framework is in place, graphics are loading and being processed accordingly, and most menu/gadget functions are in and working. Once a few little things are fixed, the next steps are to start adding actual game code, such as level rendering and a few other parts critical to testing the rest of the game itself. Once they work, then I can start on the menus and level selectors etc. before finishing with the finer details.
I will keep you posted as to how it progresses, and when I am ready to find some beta testers to take a look at it! The plan is to try and get it released for Android & Desktops at the same time with an iPhone version to follow not too long afterwards. Thanks!
New Commodore C128 & 1541 Disk Drive \o/
014 years
About 3 weeks ago I found a new toy online 🙂 Meet my new Commodore 128 & 1541 Disk Drive. Both are in really excellent shape, and the 1541 is pretty much brand new, it doesn’t have a fingerprint on it! At the same time that I got the machine, I also went ahead and bought an XA1541 transfer unit, which connects to a regular PC, or a 1541 Commodore disk drive and acts like the device itself.
If connected to the 1541, the PC can transfer disk images back and forth between the drive, handy for making backups, copying downloaded images back to floppy, so they can be ran on the C128.
Software exists to connect the 1541 directly to the C128, however I wasn’t able to get it to work, so I may have to build a special DOS box in the future and try it again. The software is quite old and might not even work with this particular adapter.
Information on the adapter, and others in the series which can connect to various commodore devices, can be found on the following site: http://sta.c64.org/xa1541.html This is an open design, anyone can freely made it, although I chose to pay a fee and bought mine pre-built as I can’t solder to save my life 🙂
After playing with the new setup, it was very handy for transferring SID files to disk for playing on the real machine. Its funny to me just how used to emulated recordings I became, as the real SID versions quite often sound very different. I will eventually record some of these and put them on CVGM.net.
I plan to use this computer to do a bit of coding in the future as well, so expect a small intro or some other piece of coding poop to come from me soon! Meanwhile, some additional images!
My New Amiga Tattoo!
014 years
by FishGuy876
in Amiga
Since about 1998 I have had my eye on a nice Amiga tattoo design that I fell in love with the moment I saw it, and so finally last weekend I went ahead and had it inked onto my left arm. Over the years I had been putting it off for various reasons, cost and what-not. One of my neighbours was having a tattoo party and so I finally decided now was the time to get it done!
The Commodore Amiga has been a major part of my life for many wonderful years. I moved to the Amiga after spending several years coding on the ZX Spectrum. I learned to code C on the Amiga using SAS/C, and a few other languages including AMOS Basic and Blitz Basic. My Amiga is still a big part of my life, I currently have 3 of them in the house as well as a Pegasos II, and I am working on putting one of my A1200 machines into a tower (although its turning out to be a bit on the expensive side).
The tattoo was hand drawn & inked by local tattoo artist Jeff Benedict. The dark colouring on the boing ball and A is shadow and will eventually lighten up as my arm heals. The images represent the various logos use by the Amiga. AMIGAAAHHH!!
Toshiba L675D And Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick/Lucid No-Boot – SOLVED!
014 years
I picked up a new laptop last week (L675D-S7015) to replace my failing HP laptop, and one of the first things that I wanted to be able to do on it was install Linux. On the old machine, when it was set to dual boot the Windows part would randomly reboot during startup, which was terribly annoying. So, on this machine I was very frustrated when I went to boot my 10.10 Kubuntu Live CD, and was just presented with a blinking cursor seconds after pushing the Start Kubuntu option from the disk menu!!
After a bit of playing and thinking about the problem, I remembered an issue I had a long time ago on a different Toshiba with ACPI. I did some googling and all I could find on the subject was people trying the ‘nomodeset’ and ‘forcevesa’ modes, which didn’t work in this particular case. I was able to remedy the issue by pushing F6 on the CD menu and select ‘acpi=off’ and then booting. Fired right up!
Once Kubuntu is installed, and you reboot for the first time, you will again experience the same problem. To fix this, we need to make a slight tweak to the Grub boot options. When the Grub menu appears showing your choice of OS, highlight the Linux kernel and push ‘e’ to edit it. If your linux doesn’t show the grub menu, you can hold shift during the beginning of the boot to show it. Scroll down to the part that says ‘quiet splash’ and add ‘acpi=off’ to the end of the string. Push Ctrl+X to boot it. You should find now that you can boot to the linux desktop.
Now we can get it to work, we need to make these changes permanent. Once booted, go to a terminal window and type ‘sudo vi /etc/default/grub’ and just like before, find the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and add acpi=off to the end, it should then read ‘quiet splash acpi=off’. Save the changes, exit the editor and you MUST run update-grub in order to make them permanent. It re-generates the grub configuration file, and makes the changes permanent.
After this is done, you can reboot to test it, but it should work without you needing to do anything else! You can proceed to install updates and new kernels, and the option will automatically be applied when the kernel is upgraded!
If like me you boot to more than one OS, while you are editing the grub config file you can change which OS is booted by default. Looking at GRUB_DEFAULT which is 0 by default, and will boot the topmost option. Set it to 3, it will boot the 3rd OS in the list. Set it to whichever OS you want to boot if it isnt the default, and dont forget to update-grub! You can also change the GRUB_TIMEOUT value from 10 seconds to anything you please.
I took some crude pictures using my phone of the process. Hope this helps someone else who has been frustrated with this process!
Latest Addition To My Commodore Family!
114 years
My new Commodore plus/4, in excellent condition and fully working. Even has the original warranty, leaflets and factory stickers on it!
While at the local flea market this weekend I picked up a nice little addition to my family of Commodore computers, a commodore plus/4 in excellent condition. I even had to go out and buy a small portable TV so I could use it, as I couldn’t find my Commodore video cable anywhere, and of course none of the local electronic stores even knew what a 262 degree male DIN plug was hehe 🙂 Amateurs 🙂
The plus/4 was released after the C64. and didn’t live up to its older brother for many different reasons. While it had more memory access and some tools built into the ROM, it lacked many of the things that the C64 used for games (sprite abilities and that sweet SID sound) and so it never really took off in those areas. It did feature the first issue of what would eventually come to be the Amiga keyboard, with a much more comfortable typing experience than the C64 keys.
Still, it’s a great and welcomed piece to my collection 🙂
A Couple more pictures:
Our Thoughts & Prayers With Those In Japan
014 years
by FishGuy876
in Misc
Our thoughts & prayers go out to those people in Japan who have been affected by the huge earthquake and giant Tsunami floods. After watching the events of Friday unfold in front of my eyes on the BBC live coverage, the swift speed of the floods and the damage that they caused is just mind-blowing. I am hoping the country can get back on it’s feet very soon.
Many charities and organizations around the world are setting up donation pages. Don’t be scammed! Unfortunately, the world is full of people who are willing to take advantage of people wishing to help others in such a time of crisis. If making a donation, be sure you know about the charity first (we recommend the Red Cross or World Vision charities).
Japan has a lot of work to do yet; They are still facing more widespread problems with their nuclear reactors becoming unstable, many people are yet to be found and there are millions of homes that need to be rebuilt. The world should unite at times like this to help those desperately in need.
Android Development Finally Taking Shape!!
014 years
Over the last few weeks, I have been helping my friend Paul port some of his code over to Android. Currently he releases games for PC, Mac, and iPhone and so the move to Android is a good one. Most of my involvement was working on sound, and the C to Java handling code. Lots of stress when digging through the error logs, but it has coming along very nicely! We started the process aiming for an Android 1.6 target, to ensure we can support the most amount of users across all devices.
I have also been tinkering with some of my own Android projects, moreso converting some of the games I have written to work on the new platform. So far its working out well, I have the basis for my framework in and working, and I am hoping to have the first of my games ready in about 2 months. I’ll post more about them here as I get them ready for testing or release.
In the meantime, check out some of Paul’s great games at http://www.shoecakegames.com 🙂
New FlexIO Module – XYZ Movement Detection
014 years
I added a basic module to the new FlexIO program this week to assist in detecting moved XYZ tables. After a frustrating day at the office, I came home, had a few beers and came up with this solution to try and fix my problem for the next time. A common problem I faced was after a drawing had been created for a part, the actual part itself had been moved in virtual space. Then when the bend file had been created, the tables were completely different because of the move. Because of this, how to correctly determine if the table is actually correct, or if there was an actual geometry change in the design that had been overlooked?
The module I created just looks for simple X/Y/Z direction movements, it gets a little more complex when looking for parts that have been rotated in 3D space, so the model doesn’t look for that yet. It works by asking for the first row of coordinates from the drawing, and calculates the differences between the X/Y/Z in the bend file. If its just a case of simple movement, the offset is applied to the remaining points and the new table when updated will then identically match the drawing (if there is no geometry change). If you start seeing some points being a little off, you can check in CAD to make sure there is no rotation, and put the difference to being a design change which requires the original part designer to submit a revision change.
It’s a start, and saves me a lot of time when verifying a large number of drawings at one time. Still lots of other verification code to add to other areas of the program 🙂
Robert Kubica – Wishing You A Speedy Recovery
014 years
by FishGuy876
in Formula 1
Hoping Robert Kubica recovers from his rally injuries soon, and makes a full recovery in time for next year’s F1 season. We need you back in the car to kick Alonso’s arse 🙂
Robert was injured on Sunday during a freak crash in his Skoda rallying car. Details Here.
Get well soon mate 🙂
2011 Snow Pictures
014 years
by FishGuy876
in Uncategorized
Some pictures I took of the snowfall in 2011. Will auto-update as I add more this year 🙂
Enjoy!
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