Codejunkie

July 2008
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Rants: I hate Rogers. And Lawyers. But mostly Rogers.
Fri, 28 Oct 2005

As everyone knows, I'm a chatty guy.. and I do like to write with a little wit and charm. But today I'm annoyed, and sleep deprived, so you get none of that ;) Its late, I hope I spell correctly.

OKay, I've been frothing at the mouth all day, but decided to wait until much later before blogging anything up. I've not even called up Rogers support phoneline yet, since all they'd get out of me would be a string of savage profanities.

But first a short story from my past: I remember as a kid my father telling me that we had to try and grow to be well rounded and know a lot of different things - that focusing too much on just one thing might lead you into hot-water. "We should all know how to build things, and take things apart, and fend for ourselves." he wisely dictated. Well, it strikes me now that we've all failed to do just that - we've all specialized so far that we each know some topic or two very deeply, and only know the briefest of tidbits about anything else. Please prove me wrong.. tell me you know how a cell phone works, how a SLR camera differs from a point-and-shoot, how to navigate through a forest at night, and how to make a really really good soup from scratch.

And let us remember - there used to be freedom until the lawyers took it all away.

[ Category: / day_by_day / rants ] [link] [Comments]

Retro: Best of Sega Genesis (Megadrive)
Fri, 28 Oct 2005

Trucking along with the best of's I here give you the notables for the Genesis/Megadrive, from this posting here on GP32x.

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / retro ] [link] [Comments]

Retro: Best of the Miggy
Fri, 28 Oct 2005

As with some of my other 'best of' lists (see here) I made a post on one of my favourite little message boards to find out what folks thought were the best of breed for a given platform - in this case, the Commodore Amiga. Certainly this isn't as hardcore as making a voting website with account registration and blah blah blah, but its a good way to get a list of games recommended when you're a newbie to a given platform. So without further ado, heres a tally of the responses - the leading number is the number of times mentioned in the thread for the given game. I hope you find the list useful!

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / retro ] [link] [Comments]

You're not complete until you make an Inukshuk from jam, Or, How to make levels for Manticore
Mon, 24 Oct 2005

A number of folks in the GP32 community have chipped together to fund my getting an upcoming GP2X device, as sort of thanks for doing so much work on the earlier GP32 device and of course to help with development on the new one. I always figure turnabout is fair play, so in anticipation of the new device (and to while away the time while some unpleasant things wind themselves down) I hacked together Manticore.. a cute little puzzler that pays homage to the Palm OS classic freeware Vexed while still adding some of my usual toys into the mix (bombs!) - all coded from scratch in less than 8 hours over a few days with a total runtime of less than 64k (excepting background images.) Naturally, being me, it builds and runs on a dozen platforms from Palm OS to Pocket PC to Sony PSP to Windows and Linux... and hopefully the GP2X once it arrives.. since that was the point afterall :)

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / pda ] [link] [Comments]

Coding: How to write a CPU emulator
Tue, 18 Oct 2005

Fairly regularly folks will ask me how a CPU emulator works, or how to write one.. or even the whole shbang - how an emulator (for a game console or arcade machine, say) is written. I'm sorry to report its not really all that hard or mysterious (just tedious and painstaking to do from scratch!) as in this day and age the whole virtual machine (VM) concept, and emulation in general, has gotten pretty widespread and well understood. Its like anything else - a car is pretty magical until you look under the hood and start taking pieces off, and writing an emulator is no different. Let me know if you'd like me to post another article about porting or writing a whole emulator as its too large a topic for just one post.. but here I'll give you the high-level overview of CPU emulation.. the heart/engine of any emulation project.

[ Category: / technology / coding ] [link] [Comments]

TV: Reviewing _Sliders_ (1995-2000). Oh, and charities are annoying.
Mon, 17 Oct 2005

I surprised my wife the other day with a DVD pack of Sliders seasons 1 and 2. While most of you no doubt don't recall the show, it was one of her favourites (and I've fond memories of it as well!) Of course, my memory has never been that reliable in the long term (I thought Clash of the Titans was great when I was a kid.. but _damn_ thats some nasty to see now ;) - so I wasn't really sure if it'd survived the ravages of time. I ordered a copy of Buck Rogers in the 25th century with Gil Gerard (and Erin Gray, oh baby) at the same time and took in some Buck Rogers, MacGyver and Sliders all in a row...

[ Category: / entertainment / television ] [link] [Comments]

Cinema: A quick review of Serenity
Mon, 17 Oct 2005

Two words - "Space" "Pirates". I bet you're smiling already! Serenity is good - real good. (Oh, and Ice Pirates was good too, last I saw it 20 years ago :)

See, I don't know about you, but when those two words are put together, I'm pretty much good to go. Sure, the movie isn't really about space pirates per se, but a group of fellows forced into being bandits to put food on the table in a dirty future universe, but its close enough for me, bringing back those childhood dreams of interstellar conflict and ship to ship combat. <Smiling again!>

[ Category: / entertainment / cinema ] [link] [Comments]

TV: Vagrant Philosophy, Or, If a Plot Doesn't Make a Turn, Does Anybody Care?
Thu, 13 Oct 2005

And when I say vagrant philosopher I refer to the esteemed streetside ranters -- those colourful homeless figures standing on a box outside your nearest shopping mall, barking out when the end of the world will occur. They're usually just running on at the mouth until they've driven everyone away.. like bloggers one might say ;) Well, on the off chance I've not driven everyone away with my incessant prattlings-on about retro-gaming I offer something else today :)

We follow a few TV shows these days -- not too many since theres not a lot of really good television on at all -- but a couple shows. For instance, Lost is a little interesting, but we've started to lose our fancy... perhaps we were intrigued until the summer break and now we've lost it? Desparate Housewiveswas also interesting.. until last season ended.

[ Category: / entertainment / television ] [link] [Comments]

Review: The Stelladapter - A Giant Red Phallus
Wed, 12 Oct 2005

If theres any doubt about my being a nerd with a capitol En, pull up a chair while I out myself most ashamedly.

Likely everyone knows that I'm a classic arcade machine collector (R-Type and Pacman are part of everyones gameroom right?), which translates into my ranting about "the real thing is the only way to go" and that emulation "just doesn't get it right" (which is funny, my being an emulator author and all.) Of course, I don't always have time to swap game PCB's (pc-boards) in a machine just to fire up a game - though I do like to say "big toys for big boys" and pull out really big cartridges. Next in line is to crack out a real retro console such as an Atari 2600 or Super Nintendo (or my beloved STacy) -- but they're usually stored away somewhere in a box. (Well, I do fire up Empire - Battle of the Century once in awhile on the STacy) So whats a knurd to do when hes too lazy to head down into the basement or dig around in dusty packing boxes to find his Vic-20? Sure, fire up an emulator on your local PC or laptop of course. But how do you simulate the 'real machine feal' with an emulator? How do you get as close to the metal without digging out a console that weighs more than its age?

Stelladapter - plug your 15 year old joystick into your PC, thats how. Yeah baby. Well, at least I'm not running a D&D campaign right now ;) I'm looking at you n008.

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / retro ] [link] [Comments]

Retro: Best Movie/Comic/Hero Games
Fri, 07 Oct 2005

For more background on what I'm about here, see my previous article. Essentially, I'm asking people for their 'best of' lists for platforms and genres so we all know what to do when we nab a new emulator or machine from the flee-market. In background I'm also working on my 'favourite games played [by me]' article, which takes awhile to remember things for :) Anyway, to the task at hand!

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / retro ] [link] [Comments]

Retro: Best or Notable Commodore 64 Games?
Fri, 07 Oct 2005

Previously, I wrote about my favourite or notable Atari ST games and the posting turned out to be fairly popular -- a good way to jog the memory or find games if you never actually had an ST (or wide exposure to its game library.) With emulation being so popular, retro-gamers everywhere have all the past platforms available.. but no idea how to operate them, or what to look for if they do. (It can be funny sometimes when some 14 year old writes to ask some obscure GEM question.. how to rename a file in the mouse based GUI, etc. Weird stuff to get in your inbox :) Anyway, we all had different machines as kids (ahh, back in the day when there were different machines!) so we're all needing to find out what to fiddle with. My family went from Atari 2600 to Commodore Vic-20 to an Atari 520ST and I proceeded to skip over the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis platforms until much later, so my gaming experiences are very different to the 'average gamer'.

Not that I have time to actually play games of course, but you all know that I love making lists of every possible thing :) That said, I've started a few threads on one of my favourite message boards to ask what peoples favourites were and to help build a list of things I'd like to try when I do get time, and to amuse everyone of course! Now, I am hoping to receive an old-school joystick-to-USB adapter soon, so time will have to be made..

A quick summary follows.

Oh, I just found a site that does this, but doesn't cover so many platforms. While it does cover SNES, it doesn't go into Vectrex or Amiga for instance, so its not very comprehensive.. but its a good start, and I'm sure other sites abound.

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / retro ] [link] [Comments]

Retro: My list of Atari ST 'canon' - games you simply must try before you can call yourself a nerd.
Fri, 07 Oct 2005

This is a non-exhaustive list of games I played or found otherwise interesting or significant on the almighty Atari ST. Of course I physically played hundreds more, but these I found interesting or amusing enough to comment about and thought they might help give focus to folks who never had an ST or the resources (*cough* BBS piracy *cough*) to see them all personally. This is of course just my list, and so won't include a lot of great titles other people enjoyed.. but what can you do? :)

This took *way* too much time to put together :)

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / retro ] [link] [Comments]

Evil: Social Engineering for Idiot Unix Users
Thu, 06 Oct 2005

I saw this in a slashdot comment response. I should've noted down the author but didn't think to at the time. Brilliant.

#!/bin/bash
echo Now type your password to install free screensavers!
sudo rm -rf /

[ Category: / day_by_day / evil ] [link] [Comments]

Long long ago, I was upset by G-Force.
Tue, 04 Oct 2005

I have a lot of ideas all the time; most I don't write down or remember, and some are the good ones I keep close to my chest for Getting Rich Someday.. but I thought I'd post a few here and there just for a lark. But before I do, I thought I'd waste your time a little more ;) I'll talk about glowing carpets later, I promise. Read on spiderfriends..

[ Category: / day_by_day / inventions ] [link] [Comments]

July 2008
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

July 2008
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

July 2008
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31