The Inner Workings Of A Coders Brain
Software
Twinz! Free Version Released For Android
013 years
It has been a long time since I last worked on one of my own game projects, so it is nice to be able to say that I have finally released a new game 🙂 The game is called Twinz! and is based on an game I wrote back on the Commodore Amiga back in 1996 (HOL Link). The original game it was based on was written by Theo Develegas on the ZX Spectrum (WOS LINK) back in 1991, it was a covertape game that I liked to play and back then, I wanted to have a go at doing one myself. If you asked people to load games from cassette tape nowadays, they would have a heart attack! hehe.
The objective of the game is very simple, you turn over 2 tiles at a time to see if the pictures behind them match. If they do, then they stay open and you keep going. If they don’t match, they turn back over. The logic to the game comes from remembering the images behind each tile, so when you find it somewhere else you can turn it over at the right place. Points are awarded for better playing tactics (tiles that are not checked underneath lots of times) and pairs that are found in sequence (one after the other). The game features 5 levels, three difficulties, and an online high score sharing system where you can post your best scores directly from within the game.
Twinz is compatible on any mobile or tablet device. Releases coming for Kindle fire soon, along with iPhone/iPad and other markets. Stay tuned!
Twinz! Screenshots – Click any thumbnail to make it larger
Download Twinz! Now!
New Tool In Development – Litecoin Miner Status – Monitor Multiple Litecoin Miners At Multiple Pools!
013 years
| Project Update |
|---|
| This project has now been officially released. You can visit the project page (and download the tool) Here or get to it throught Discography tab at the top of the page. Thanks! |
I have been working on a new tool for the last couple of weeks to assist Litecoin miners in their quest of mining. As a Litecoin miner myself in this new coin, a few pools started to pop up here and there and there was not much of a way to track what was going on. Hence my tool came along!
A common thing with any coin mining process is hopping, or switching from one pool to another. With my tool, you can see what you are doing across multiple pools, including how much LTC you have mined and how much you have been paid.
The interface is split into 3 main portions. The top part is a “ticker” of sorts that pages through the supported mining pools, showing you the current overall stats of that individual pool such as it’s overall mining speed, and the number of individual miners currently working there (and their combined KH/s speed). The middle field view shows the miners you have listed in that specific pool (If any) and what your miners are currently doing there. The base view is an overall view of your current mining summary across all of the supported pools. The tool is quick, easy to use, and sits quietly in the background keeping itself updated.
The tool is currently going through the last few days worth of testing with some close friends and miners, and I hope to have it released in the next couple of weeks once all the fine tuning has been done to it. If you are interested in testing out the tool, feel free to get in touch with me at andy [at] andykellett.com with your information. You can also find me on IRC , irc.freenode.net in #elitist, #litecoin and #rfcpool
Support For Many Pools!
At the time of the release, or unless someone suggests otherwise, the following mining pools will be supported from the initial launch of the application:
- Elitist Jerks
- Pool-X.eu
- OzCoinÂ
Additional Mining Pools
If you own/run/reccomend another litecoin mining pool that you would like to see added to this program, let me know either by email or in the comments of this post and I will see what I can do to get it in. Your pool must support JSON statistics that can easily be accessed via the web. The tool supports all mmcfe-based pools, I just need to know your details.
The Program Is Beerware!
The program itself will be released as BeerWare, meaning if you like it and you find it extremely handy, you should donate some coin towards a beer or two for the developer! Pool owners who want their pools listed within the app are encouraged to donate a couple of extra beers as well, especially if your pool requires a lot of work to get added (custom JSON etc.) There will not be a charge to buy the program ever, and anyone who does try to sell it for money are trying to rip people off. It will always work the same if you choose to donate or not. Donation addresses to send coin to will be in the About section of the program in various different formats. All donations are truly appreciated 🙂
Donation Addresses
Some people are already asking for donation addresses to bribe with, they are as follows:
LiteCoin:Â LfrxgdK1PgJQPRkPVDqopQt3FaYVswmp74
BitCoin: 15s2vduLZSBUYDHPANgXVC9DPKz6BesZLj
More details will be released for the program as soon as they are available. Versions will also be made available for Mac & Linux in time. Feel free to comment or ask any questions in the comments section on this post. Initial testing only available to Windows users. Thanks! FishGuy876
Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and C, Has Passed Away
013 years
Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the Unix operating system, has died aged at the age of 70.
Thank-you for giving us a superior language, and being a pioneer in the age of computing. Rest in peace!
/* for Dennis Ritchie */ #include <stdio.h> main()Â { printf("Goodbye World"); }
ZD Net Article:Â http://www.zdnet.com/news/dennis-ritchie-father-of-unix-and-c-dies/6314570
Wiki entry on C:Â http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_%28programming_language%29Â
Finally Finished Working On My Amiga A1200
113 years
I Spent quite a bit of time this weekend working on my Amiga. It has been a few years since I used it for anything other than recording music (for CVGM.net) and thought it was about time I got it working again. For quite a while now I have had the itch to get back into programming on the Amiga, and couldn’t think of a better time. Its also not that often lately that I have a few hours of downtime to actually devote to filling the entire kitchen with old computer stuff 🙂
Over the years as a programmer on the Amiga, I have accumulated a fair amount of Amigas, and also bought a few bits here and there. All my Amiga 1200’s are PAL, and every time I fly home to the UK I always bring one back with me if I can find one. On my trip last year, I was able to find an “Desktop Dynamite” pack for 50 quid, so I threw away a bunch of closes and packed my suitcase with wonderful Amiga goodness instead. The machine I had been using previously had a broken pin on the PCMCIA slot, which seems to be a common thing to break on all my Amiga machines over the years.
The most useful device I ever bought for my Amiga was my Catweasel A1200, it lets me hook up all kinds of drives to the system, and access them natively. In this modification, I will be replacing the built-in floppy with a PC drive. It will prevent me from booting via floppy disk, but the benefits of being able to read Amiga and PC disks while in Workbench are worth it. I also have a Scandy VGA ScanDoubler device thingy that clips over top of some of the chips in the Amiga and lets me connect it directly to a VGA monitor, though I tend to run into a few problems from time to time with it (it might be because my PAL Amiga doesn’t like it, I bought it in the US so it might be NTSC based) such as the screen flickering green or with a tint of blue. For this particular project, I have decided to leave it out of the system and I will put it back in another time. For now, I will settle for my 1084S and a nice Interlaced screen.
The hardest part about working on the Amiga is getting the hard drive working. By default, the Amiga has a size limit of 4gb. I had bought 2 4Gb IBM HD’s online for $1 through Ebay just for this. Now we had to get them working on the Amiga! This is where UAE comes in. One of the nice new features of the newer UAE is the ability to connect Amiga hard drives natively and use them like a real hard drive, instead of the traditional HDF files. It does however still have some problems. It cannot yet (at the time of writing anyways) partition the drive correctly, so all the partition work must be done on the real Amiga. This was a bit of a ballache for me, as I have every Workbench disk except the Install disk (that contained HDToolbox) so I ended up connecting my A2000HD and using an old version from there, just to get the partitions going. From there, I could connect to the drive to the PC and mount it natively.
To begin with, I tried to copy a version of AmiKit to the drive. The copy process went very well, however I ran into a lot of problems getting it to work on the real Amiga. After a few hours of trying to get it to boot, and never reahing the desktop, I decided to take another approach and instead I went with a more simplified Workbench from ClassicWB (http://classicwb.abime.net/) which only required my OS 3.9 CD. The bare basic programs and tools were installed, which was enough to get me started at this point. I added some more games and demos for WHDLoad, and that’s all I really needed. I also took advantage of being online with UAE, and added the newest Catweasel drivers, and a few other tools.
My Amiga has a wireless Netgear card, and I need to use the prism2.device to get it to connect to the network. Once I get moved into my new place next week, I will get that all set up and working. I tried briefly with the Genesis TCP stack and just couldn’t get it to see the card. Nothing like browsing the web on a 16 colour Amiga Interlaced screen! Oh how modern day kids are spoiled!
Detailed Amiga Specs: Commodore Amiga 1200 (PAL, Personally Purchased From the UK), DKB 1240 & 32Mb RAM (030 & 6882 FPU), Catweasel A1200, 4Gb IBM HD, OS 3.9 w/Boing Bag 1 & 2, ClassicWB Image.
Some Pictures Of Beauty:
rfcpool Bitcoin Miner Status Tool Released
013 years
This last couple of weeks I have been working on my Bitcoin Miner status API for rfcpool, and finally got around to releasing the first versions of my status tool, I’m glad I’m getting the hang of bitcoin now, thanks to SoFi. The API itself can do more than monitor the status of one mining pool, and in the future it will connect to multiple pools and display the results together in the same window. Originally, it was started when I began working on an alternative to the GUIMiner application, which I hope to finish one day.
If you are into BitCoin mining, why not check out rfcpool with their no-fee PPLNS payout system and give the app a whirl 🙂
I have set up a dedicated project page for the app, you can find more detailed information about it HERE.
Creating A New Game & Framework In 30 Days – Piles’o’Tiles for Android/iPhone \o/
013 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!
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!
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 🙂
Dual-Booting Kubuntu Alongside Windows 7 Without Wubi – Properly!
014 years
The hard drive took a major dump in my laptop this weekend, left it backing up some stuff while I went to go see Tron, and when I got home it sounded like a DJ was scratching some kind of new rap tune. Needless to say, the drive was on its way out, but luckily I have been able to recover almost all of my data so far 🙂
After installing a replacement hard drive, I thought it was about time that I put a dedicated linux partition on this system as I have been using Kubuntu to do some Android development (installed via Wubi). While Wubi is nice for messing around, it isn’t the most stable system to be using and I have had a couple of disasters in the past with it messing up my virtual partitions. Wubi also has some known bugs, where after installing inside Windows, you’ll get a message about no root filesystem being defined and that you should fix it in the partition manager. Nice, if you can actually get there to do it!
So, I installed Windows 7, left 40gb of free space intentionally for Kubuntu. After the process of doing all the software installs and updates etc. for Windows I thought that I had better take a shot at installing the Linux side of things. Boy, what a mess 🙂 Firstly, there is something about the partition layout in Windows 7 that GPartEd just cannot see them (even using the GPartEd Live CD, or any LiveCD including Kubuntu). It thinks my hard drive is completely unpartitioned. Not what I was expecting, as I was hoping I could just throw some linux partitions into the free space, and then install. Very confusing 🙂 Adding any changes at this point would erase my new Windows 7 partition instantly.
I remember something a friend told me years ago about partitioning, that he had once used Linux to do the partitioning of his drives for some wierd XP install, as the Windows tools at the time were quite shit, so I figured that to get this to work the way I want it, I should probbably attempt something similar. I didnt really have much to lose (besides sitting through a few hundred megs of Windows Updates) so I went ahead and prepared the partition in GPartEd.
An important thing to remember here is the partition table. You must go into the Partition Table section and create a new ms-dos partition table, otherwise if you don’t it may try and use GPT by default (which won’t work with Windows 7). If you try to install Windows 7 without this partition type change, it will pop up a Warning message when you try to select the partition, and clicking Details will tell you that it cannot install on a GPT partition. So, after this step (which will completely zap your entire drive) I proceeded to create an NTFS partition, leaving 40gb free space for Linux later on. After applying the partition changes, booting the Windows 7 installer and installing windows by selecting the NTFS partition I just created, I was then able to reboot with a KUbuntu LiveCD and work with the free space on the drive correctly! It will even mount the Windows partition (just remember to hit Yes on the option to Unmount it duringi the Kubuntu install). Even grub works well and offers Windows 7 as an option in the boot menu.
When installing Linux with manual partitions, remember to add a swap partition at least 2x the size of the available ram in the machine, and the rest can then be an ext4 partition (that mounts to /) and thats the minimal that Kubuntu will need in order to boot correctly. Grub takes care of the rest of the issues with booting and selection etc. as most of Grub resides in the liunux part.
I am sure that several people have had problems trying to get the dual booting to work correctly, so I hope that this helps at least one human being out there who has struggled with this as long as I have.
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