My god, what a haul of goodies we managed today! It was like someone knew we were going and got out the goodies ready for us. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to have a second XBox running XBMC in my bedroom, but never thought it worth the £40-odd for a second hand XBox.

Well… how does £10 grab you? No? Well after taking advantage of our technical knowledge and bamboozling the seller we got it for £8. People’s brains fuse if you start prodding their stuff and saying “ahh the labels are intact, it’s not been opened. This one would be ideal”. It also helps if you have a female counterpart

The XBox even works. I’ve had to order a video cable from eBay, and a Modchip is now in the post too. Looks like I’ll be spending a fun hour with my soldering iron again soon. I get to go cross-eyed soldering SMD components again.

I also bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for 20 quid, including two controllers and a light gun. The light gun won’t work on my TV, but this is OK since the NES itself doesn’t seem to work either. It flashes the power light at me. Yes, this means the cart isn’t connecting properly and I need to repair the contacts. I’ve added that to my list. I’ll swap the cartridge slot from a working NES just to make sure the main circuit board isn’t faulty though.

I then bought a couple of books (a Red Dwarf book and a William Gibson), a cheeseburger and managed to block the toilets. Amy bought several of those TV games units that contain an FPGA emulation of an old console and its ROMs. She’s got a Sega Megadrive one that has Sonic the Hedgehog, Columns and other games, and a bizarre Tetris game.

We very nearly bought an Amstrad PCW1512 word processor, but having no money and no desire to carry it across the field stopped us. We also successfully resisted buying another Sega Megadrive, but David did buy a Sega Saturn. There were also many Gameboys for sale and those amusingly illegal “52-in-1″ games carts.

We will return another day looking for games and junk. I think I’ll have to start looking for a bigger house too

Programming other people’s systems is hard. Programming your own apps is easy, you just make them do what you want. The only hard bit is stopping when they’re finished, or continuing when it gets slightly tedious.

I don’t like tedious coding. I’d rather go away and code a code generator, or use Excel and search-and-replace, or anything that’ll solve the problem with the least amount of effort. I’ve got SQL stored procedures that generate C# code from other SQL stored procedures.

I’ve got that urge to write some simple retro-styled games again. I keep getting this idea every so often, but then give up when it comes down to actually writing them. I either can’t decide what to do, or get bored hand crafting yet another sprite library and doing my own implementation of collision detection.

Fortunately them I’ve found three things that’ll make my life easier. LWJGL is the Lightweight Java Gaming Library, which is quite nice. Built on top of this is the Slick 2D game library that removes some of the tedium of moving sprites and handling their collisions. Then, to make it even simpler I found something called SlickSet which is a 2D game engine. It’s got premade collision detection, “actors” and ways of managing lists of things.

It comes with nothing but the Javadoc for documentation, but the examples are fairly simple to follow. I intend on working out my own little sets of documentation, then sticking them up here at some point.

I bought the most excellent Orange Box for my 360 the other day. When Half Life 2 came out I was in the middle of the Lake District with a laptop, so missed out on all the crowbar smacking fun. This box also includes the rather good Portal, a crazy game involving making wormhole-like portals through walls and floors, the aim being to escape each test chamber.

Look what came through my door today…

£20 off eBay.

Now, the important bit. I have no way of loading games into this thing since I lack a tape player. I don’t want to burn CDs of tape images either.

Is there any way I can somehow connect a CompactFlash card to the speccy and load Z80 snapshots into it? I’ve got a “Ram turbo” joystick interface which contains a little connector supposedly for ROM carts.

I can build stuff based on schematic diagrams. I think it’d be great if I could have a little ROM loader that fetches things off a CF card and puts them in the spectrum to play.

Any ideas?

A combination of my laptop, a Z80-TZX converter and then a TZX-wav converter has resulted in this…
The real hardware is way more picky about weird turboloaders than the emulators are.

SKREEEEEE! BIP!

I had a spontaneous eBay the other day. I decided that owning an original Gameboy would be a fun thing to do, so set about trolling eBay for a cheap one. I found one for a fiver but there were other bidders on it, but not to worry I thought I’d have some fun all the same

I put in a bid of £6 about 5 minutes before the end of the bid and waited. There then ensued a small bidding war with me gradually pushing the price up to £18, thinking “sod this” and backing down at the last minute. Oh well, I didn’t get that one, but I did get more money for the seller

Then I found one with a Buy It Now price of £3.99. It was a two-tone red/yellow Gameboy Pocket, and this morning it was forced through my letterbox by the postman, and it plays Tetris and Mario just like Nintendo intended. It’ll do for random gaming on the bog.

Yes, I have a DS and I have Tetris DS, but the thing is, original Tetris is the best version and can’t be beaten. Tetris DS has differences that make it a slightly different experience, requiring different tactics. GB Tetris is just a manic “slot the pieces together quickly until you can’t keep up” game.

Got an appointment to go and look at a new house tomorrow. 3 bedroom semi with garden and usual housey stuff. Hope it’s good, can’t be bothered spending weeks finding somewhere to live, it’s quite tedious.

Yeah, I know it was almost a week ago but I was busy. Here’s a rather good video of what it’s like; just ignore the goon at the end who stands in front of the camera

Hmm, it seems I can’t work out how to embed YouTube videos into Wordpress. The link below should work though.
Wii Bowling

Lost

It’s a bit like the GMail invite system.

Oh, don’t forget the clocks go forwards tonight if you live in the UK.

Just came across this flash movie which is quite amusing. It’s Mario… but not as we know him

powered by performancing firefox

A while ago I bought a TV card for my laptop. The idea being I could connect my Nuon to my laptop and not need a crap NTSC converter or TV. Making the card work sufficiently well in Windows was a nightmare. It either dropped loads of frames, had poor audio output or randomly paused for no sane reason. Making the card work in Linux seemed quite hard so I gave it no more thought until last week when I was home.

After some help from the Video4Linux mailing list (like which card I should tell the driver I own) I had the card recognised, initialised and displaying random images and snatches of sound. It was crazy. I could plug my Playstation in, see the startup images and hear the sound, but as soon as something like Wipeout loaded the screen went black and that was it. If I then unplugged the video lead and wiggled it in its hole I could see random frames of video. Quite what was happening is beyond me, surely if it works with one game it should work with them all.

I’ve just now connected my Nuon to it and was greeted with glorious colourful NTSC and sound. Unlike Windows, the sound doesn’t skip, there’s no weird crackling sounds and the video doesn’t stop. Something’s not right if 3rd party drivers for an OS that isn’t supported by the manufacturer work better than the manufacturer’s own drivers for their only supported OS.

I am now “testing” the card some more

I could do the expensive and daft thing of buying an XBox360 to get Neon, but the XBox would have to become insanely cheap first. I think I’ll wait for the PC version of Neon to come out and see if my laptop can handle it. If not, by then I should be able to afford a new PC.

I’ve just been pointed towards this most excellent game. You have to control various robots on the surface of Earth to enable the human population to escape from the underground bunker which they’ve been living in.

The game is a remake of the original 8bit version, and it’s got quite a lot of things I’ve wanted from games for a while. It looks like Tron, is fairly open-ended in the gameplay - you have to explore the city on the surface to find things, so there aren’t set objectives to follow. Also the background story is really well written and takes a good half hour to read properly, and would make a decent short story in its own right.

Go and play it now

http://cholo.ovine.net/terminal/index.php