Disqus - Friends of supercopter

Re: Restart

Rob N ★ — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 08:37:27 -0000

Yeah, one of the things to do is to put the old site up until such time as I can get the posts imported into blosxom properly. I'm not official documentation though. If you want something preserved you'd do better to move it to somewhere sane.

Re: ruins

Rob N ★ — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:10:07 -0000

What amuses me is that Burn the Witch is rather easy to achieve whereas Do Not Disturb usually requires quite a bit more subtlety. You'd think if they were working on getting all the achievements you'd occasionally encounter someone willing to go slow. Me, I only deliberately work on achievements when I'm playing on my own - ie I start a friends-only game but don't invite anyone. Unfortunately thats not going to work for things like Zombicidal Maniac.

I'm probably exaggerating a little. I've had some great games too. It just seems so hit-and-miss. I can really be in the mood for a good game and find nothing worthwhile, or I can be playing to kill a little time but not really invest much and I find a great team and end up having to quit early and let them down. I wonder if there's a good group of players anywhere who are committed to not being jerks, and perhaps are in a similar stage of life or something. Guess I'll have to look arounda bit.

Re: i can't get no

Rob N ★ — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:44:07 -0000

Congratulations on missing the point and most of my history with the project as described in detail right here in this blog. Thanks for playing :)

Re: i can't get no

Rob N ★ — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:20:09 -0000

Well I'm hardly short on ideas, but thanks anyway. Financial software, just like the money it manages, is super SUPER boring, so thats not something you'll likely see me doing anytime soon. Anyway, I've got a couple of things I'm working on that I'm actually somehow keeping my motivation for, so I'll blog about thos soon.

Re: blast from the past

Rob N ★ — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:46:05 -0000

The cables themselves probably only cost about AU$10 in parts and a few hours work (because I suck at making cables, not because its hard). The expensive piece is the RGB->HDMI converter, which I bought from Keene Electronics in the UK. £75 plus shipping. You'll also need a HDMI cable if you don't have one spare, about AU$20 (low-end cables are fine since its only 720p).

Re: blast from the past

Rob N ★ — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:47:32 -0000

Thanks for the offer. I'm not sure its worth it at this point. Mine is definently on the blink but there's really nothing I want to do with it right now anyway. It just happened to be a convenient RGB source for testing. My real goal is to get my Nintendo gear working the same way.

Re: i've got a package

Rob N ★ — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:41:06 -0000

The converter works, as I showed with the Amiga stuff. At the moment I'm working on getting RGB out of my Nintendo 64. It turns out that only the first-generation Japanese versions had RGB available on the board. All others only have composite & S-Video. I'm having to build my own DAC to turn the raw digital output from the video chip into RGB. Its coming along slowly; I estimate another 12 hours of work before its finished. I'll be posting plenty of pics and details once its done.

I get exactly the effect you describe with any composite or S-Video input onto the digital TV - the dithering-type effect on fast-moving high-contrast edges. I'm guessing its some sort of stabilising thing that makes it disappear when the motion stops, and may also be related to signal quality/strength, as its quite subtle (though still noticable) on the Gamecube whereas it renders the N64 and SNES almost unplayable. I see the same effect from my old VCR.

The standard PAL and NTSC SNES has RGB available directly on the multi-out connector. The SNES2/SNESjr does not, but it is easily available on the motherboard.

Re: from the ground up

Rob N ★ — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:18:46 -0000

1. It would benefit native. It would sit between the graphics drivers and the applications, exactly where graphics.library sits right now.
2. No.
3. The eventual goal would be to have the graphics.library API sitting on top of cairo so that apps can use either. An emulation, if you like.
4. Stability doesn't appear to be a problem currently. cairo is certainly more advanced than graphics.library. It would probably perform better, but only because it has many more people looking at it and so is better maintained and optimised.
5. Thanks :)

And no, I hate screen dragging. Cute bit of eyecandy, but it was always a pain for me to use. That might have been me doing it wrong, I don't know. In any case, I don't much see the point these days, and I'm really not sure why Amiga folks get hung up on it.

Re: putting things in context

Rob N ★ — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:40:13 -0000

I don't think this stuff will be at all noticable by the user. Its mostly just code/architecture cleanups to make it easier for me and hopefully others to hack on hosted in the future.

I have no particular plans to work on the X11 driver. Frankly I think its a waste of time. With graphics stuff the SDL driver and things like cairo are where I want to focus my efforts.

Re: putting things in context

Rob N ★ — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:01:04 -0000

Thanks for the info! Fyi, I'm working towards a kind of "POSIX port". I think it should be possible to make this thing compile and work on any reasonably recent POSIX system, without having to resort to the use of assembly (or perhaps just a tiny tiny amount, eg to get the stack pointer). I'm not particularly concerned about ancient Unix considering there's probably under ten people who actually use hosted anyway.

Re: putting things in context

Rob N ★ — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:38:20 -0000

Everything is very well, thanks :) I should probably write something soon, there's just so much to say, so much has happened lately!

Re: how 'bout some horn? - eaten by a grue

Rob N ★ — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:36:08 -0000

Fair call :) I'll need to study the docs a little more to figure out the best place to put it. Writing useful and readable docs is a far cry from bitching on my blog :P

Re: new year's high resolution - eaten by a grue

Rob N ★ — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:34:56 -0000

I've done a little electronics at high school, and always had simple kits as a kid, but I'm still very much a beginner. Having done computer science and lots of lowlevel hacking helps, but I think I'm only ever going to be doing programmable chips/logic rather than discrete electronics - I just don't grok that stuff at all. Fortunately for most microcontroller based stuff the only tricky bits are things like voltage regulators and crystal oscillators, which a simple Google search will reveal hundreds of designs for.

The resistors were the easy and fun bit. I'd love to be able to do surface-mount stuff, and I'm sure I'll get into it eventually, but right now I just don't have the equipment or the knowledge for it. Its not like I'm in any hurry though!

Re: catch a ride

Rob N ★ — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:14:58 -0000

Yeah, I was reading the datasheet on the bus on the way home and I'm thinking SPI is probably the way to go. Whatever I do just has to be done in such a way that the inter-AVR comms doesn't disrupt the N64 or USB comms and doesn't result in any state being lost (though small delays are fine).

Re: every good thing - eaten by a grue

Rob N ★ — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:54:38 -0000

It's powered from the N64. The power supply provides 3.3V and 12V; I tap the 3.3V rail from the power switch. There is also 5V available by tapping a regulator, which is useful for the 5V supply I need on my RGB output connector (it gets used for signal selection stuff in the my SCART cable). When this is all over I want to try and document this whole mess so you can make your own.

The initial build of the USB adapter will be externally powered, since only 3.3V is available from the controller ports but I need 5V for the USB port (I think also I wouldn't be able to pull enough current from the controller line). If at some later stage it became possible to fit the board inside the N64 case then I'd be trying to power it internally, but that's a long way off if its even possible.

Re: this one time, at band camp...

Rob N ★ — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:18:34 -0000

Haven't tried Windows, but Curtis says it doesn't below. I'll comment on that bit there.

Why the regex? I didn't know about File::Basename. I think I'm going to put this on Github soon, so I'll update it after that. Thanks for the tip!

Re: this one time, at band camp...

Rob N ★ — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:20:45 -0000

I'm only using Term::ProgressBar in its most simple mode, and I could easily replace it with something else or even a nasty internal implementation. Anyone want to recommend another module? I don't want to drop it entirely (though I could make it optional) - when sending massive files its really useful.

Re: this one time, at band camp...

Rob N ★ — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:22:30 -0000

sendfile is available through Sys::Syscall but is pretty much Linux-only. I briefly considered making it use it if available, but then realised that I'd lose the progress bar. Since its not a high-performance or scalable thing, it didn't seem worth it.

Re: An Idiot's Guide to OAuth 1.0a :: Drive-by Digressions

Rob N ★ — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:23:55 -0000

Thank you, this is exactly what I need to know to upgrade my app.

Re: every good thing - eaten by a grue

Rob N ★ — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:23:15 -0000

I haven't actually done anything with it since I wrote this. I'm back on software projects at the moment. I'm sure I'll get back there one day :)

Re: SPORE

Rob N ★ — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 18:52:29 -0000

I've had on my list at work to properly implement the Google Data APIs. I'm now quite interested in trying to apply SPORE to that task.

Re: So, that was a bummer.

Rob N ★ — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:07:34 -0000

Well done guys. Large-scale services are hard and sometimes things go wrong. The clear and honest communication sets you apart from the rest and builds confidence. Cheers.

Re: Are you becoming a Facebook Ghost? Check your backups first.

Rob N ★ — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 03:14:20 -0000

Chrome's Flashblock extension interferes with the magic Javascript used to make the "Connect with Facebook" button work. Workaround is to add an exception or disable Flashblock. Its a flaw in Facebook's Connect stuff, nothing to to with Backupify.

Re: GirlDevelopIt Sydney: Round 1, A Success!

Rob N ★ — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:22:28 -0000

Glad it went well, it sounds like a lot of fun. Hopefully you'll get to Melbourne, I'd love to be able to recommend this to a few wannabe web development girls that I know!

Re: make something

Rob N ★ — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 07:51:15 -0000

You won't be surprised, you've heard bits and pieces of it over the years :P