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GP2X: DaveC's joystick cap, Or, How to play Black Tiger on the train
Tue, 28 Feb 2006

The seminal Turrican for the Commodore 64 was released in 1990. The venerable and future-altering Atari 2600 was still in production in 1989. These two facts are astonishing for the fact the Atari ST, Amiga, Megadrive/Genesis and SNES were all available by 1989 (with the Atari ST and Amiga being in 1986!), and the fact the GP2X puts them all in your pocket. Right now.

While the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS duke it out in the public eye, there still exists a quiet subculture of alternative devices; sure, they're harder to find and have their share of flaws, but this is where the real freedom lies - the non-mainstream is where you find the Henry Rollins of handhelds. Sony and Nintendo have a legal obligation to crush homebrew in their markets, so if you want Nethack in your pocket.. you need more. If you want SOCOM though, stick to your PSP for mobile gaming - Wipeout Pure and Nintendogs are true modern classics and a joy to behold. But if you want to fire up Gley Lancer or Bomberman 94 or Dungeon Master or Black Tiger, or you want to experiment with your own homebrew on a mobile mini-Linux platform.. the GP2X is for you.

OKay, enough with the sales pitch ;) I've not posted a tonne about the GP2X of late due to all my other assorted rants, so do let me know if you'd like some more information that direction. This post, instead, is more to talk about a little hardware mod than a fine lad has put together. (Disclosure: He sent me one for free; but thats because I'm lazy, and he sells them for $10. Not a free TV here. Not that I'm opposed to anyone sending me a TV.)

Now, with the preamble out of the way, let me delve right into the DaveC cap. The GP2x features a joystick-nub which works pretty well -- its low to the surface so doesn't get worn off from bouncing around a knapsack, and works pretty well. The one problem is the GP2X internal joystick gadget is slightly askew so it tends to favour diagonals more than it should, and it offers some 'dead zones' where the stick must travel fairly far in order to indicate a motion to the internal sensors. These design gotchas annoy some to no end, but I didn't find them particularly cumbersom, though in a tight Xenon 2 session the angling would aggravate me. Enter DaveC.

DaveC is a stickler to attention if nothing else; a perfectionist for retro - the human Occam's Razor for emulation. He also seems to know something about a lathe, so has crafted an alternative joystick 'cap' for the GP2X to help remedy these slight issues. At first I just avoided taking an interest, since I didn't quite get what it was -- let me explain.

The discussions surrounded the idea of 'pulling off' the cap, and pushing in or on a new one. The idea sounded like work, and risky, to me -- I steered clear since I've been so insanely busy of late, the idea of even a slight risk to crushing the joystick mechamism steered me away. However, once more information came out it became obvious what in fact goes on during the installation, so hopefully this article proves useful to someone. The joystick mechanism is really just a little metal shaft rising out from the GP2X casing (with a series of microswitches at its base, of course) with a plastic cap popped on its end - I had assumed the shaft and cap were all one, but this is not the case. DaveC's replacement cap is just another cap that you can pop in instead of the other, more or less. I'm fudging over the actual details, since I'm in a rush, but that explanation should illustrate the concept well enough -- its not hard, its not really risky, and it takes all of 2 minutes. No MacGyver needed.

The cap itself is wider and concave, so your thumb can rest more inside of it than atop it like with the original cap. Thus you get a better grip. DaveC's literature suggests the cap is a stronger plastic and yadda yadda performance, but I'm extremely anal about my gear so thats not important to me. Most important is the diamater of the cap surface, which is much larger than the original.. a very large 'spoon' as it were. The end result being that you can grip this sucker easier, and it tilts the given direction further and faster, so play is more accurate and much more responsive than ever before. Really, I would almost say the joystick is almost too sensitive for my big fudgy fingers. (I'm not much of a gamer.. I'm a wannabee gamer who can only handle a single firebutton :)

So if you need a homebrew fixin', fire it up on your NDS or PSP with appropriate hacks and mods (until such day Sony and N shut these down.) If you don't have one of those, and/or want to get a gadget that has a fiercely independant community thats 100% homebrew focused, dive in and get a GP2X or GP32. And if you're doubly a nerd and want to improve performance on your GP2X, get DaveC's cap -- at $10 its not a big drop, and it could just double your enjoyment. Take it from a guy with arcade cabinets in his basement -- UI is everything.

Hook up with DaveC on the GP32x website.

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Coding: Java versus C/C++
Mon, 27 Feb 2006

Trying to compare any two programming languages is akin to invoking Godwin's Law (which dictates that once a usenet poster is compared to Hitler, the conversation is immediately over, and that this ultimately will occur in any sufficiently long usenet flameware.) Still, I had an argument with a fellow one morning and thought I might pose as the C/C++ wanker for a posting.

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Day by Day: Do they use whiteboards in schools?
Sat, 25 Feb 2006

Somewhere in the mountain of newspapers that spy at me from across the room are flyers for locker storage optimizers -- from the same sorts of companies who will sell you 'space age' systems for your home closets. I'm talking magnetic clip-on shelving units with optional baskets and dividers and digital calendars. For some reason though, that sort of stuff doesn't hit my organization and office supply fetish, but it does make me wonder what school lockers are like today. Modern high-school engineering as it were.

With corporate-America getting forever stronger, have they switched schools over to whiteboards or do they still use our beloved green and blackboards? I have to admit -- when getting into trouble (quite a lot in my day :) and being assigned to sponge cleaning duty, I used to admire the slick clean black-oblivion of a freshly wiped blackboard - the same way carjocks admire the almost feminine curve of a porche's side panel. I used to love heading out with my mom to acquire new school supplies - a pencil case, some new binders with James Bondian contraptions for holding pens - even a new ruler. Baby.

I bet some percentage of you are looking at the screen and thinking nerd! but school equipment fetish (S.E.F.) is a widespread phenomena, so maybe you see yourself in the reflectoin of your cathode ray tube (er, liquid crystal display, you yuppy!) I guess the only way to really bew a nerd now is to set your command shell backgrounds to blue and text to white, just to relive the Amiga days.

Edit:

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Gaming: Features that make a game unacceptible, or, A Gamers Manifesto
Thu, 23 Feb 2006

In case I hadn't mentioned it earlier, I made numerous New Years Resolutions but also a few Unresolutions. ie: I decided I would Take Less Crap from misguided companies, which led to my realizing just exactly how much spam one gets in the physical post and how many fake phonecalls one receives every day. Anyway, in the same grain of funk, there are a few things that will require me not to hand cash over to game publishers...

Nolonger will I accept a game which uses "random dungeons." -- I played, nay, bought a Sony PSP for Untold Legends -- a simple Gauntlet-like modern action-RPG descended from some very fine console games (Baldur's Gate on the PS2 and XBox, not related to the PC games of the same name.) I enjoyed it for a little while, but something nagged away -- why on some dungeons did all the monsters sit at the end of the dungeon, leaving it lifeless? How come the dungeons were all more or less dull, and lack any form of interesting design... whereas the big-console games featured well balanced and tasty dungeons? When a game is an 'action-RPG' (hack and slash), it really needs interesting content since let's face it -- the game itself isn't all that complex. I found out one day that Untold Legends used a random dungeon generator and it suddenly made sense.. and the game hasn't been loaded since. If they want my money, they need to work for it.. not depend entirely on "user created" (modded) content, nor randomized. Thats the lazy way out. If it was $20 a title, sure, maybe then. Maybe. With sadness I found out Untold Legends 2 will continue this trend -- they announce it with pride -- do they not realize we all hate it? They tout it in the name of "increased replayability", which is a funny way to spell "no gameplay."

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Day By Day: Fitness, and How did IT get into this mess?
Sun, 19 Feb 2006

My wife is also a software developer, though she's the more well rounded of the two of us as she manages to keep her hobbies out of the technical realms, while I continue to stick my head into electronics or computing at ever opportunity... Yes folks, there is a woman who is both a Star Trek and software nerd - and she's all mine! She manages to take community classes in a wide variety of artistic and crafting topics, from painting to knitting to all sorts of things - it is important to keep that artistic soul alive. (I used to have an artistic soul but pounded it into seamless oblivion through advertising.. but thats another story :) Now, for years I've been meaning to pick up another human language (since knowing dozens of computer languages doesn't count ;), though my mind is not so adept at remembering vocabulary I don't use often. Learning fencing and such would be way cool, though I'm sure at my stress levels a sparring partner would be in serious trouble. I'm also a bit on the tubby from the endless hours of work ... what we developers and system-administrators dub "the IT gutt."

So why not join a gym or community centre? As mentioned before, I always try to park 15-20 minutes walk away from my destination, to get in half an hour of good natural exercise a few times a week, but I don't know if that helps much; certainly it doesn't balance off the hours sitting on the rump that all IT people do. I also like to drop my wife off at her classes to save her walking in an unlit area alone, so it occurs to me.. why not sign up to some sort of health facility while she's away knitting a new yarn baggie? It would allow for the sort of structure I need -- show up anytime, without being too rigid that I simply cannot make it. A community centre would even be cheap.

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Retro: My list of Atari ST 'canon' - games you simply must try before you can call yourself a nerd.
Thu, 16 Feb 2006

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 :)

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Quotes: From an interview with 'Pres' Eckert
Wed, 15 Feb 2006

Mr. Eckert worked on ENIAC, which was arguably the line between two epochs in computer science. The interview is here

What's the zaniest thing you did while developing ENIAC?

The mouse cage was pretty funny. We knew mice would eat the insulation off the wires, so we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a bunch of mice to see which insulation they did not like. We only used wire that passed the mouse test.

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Day by Day: What was your first computer? Did it get you where you are today?
Mon, 13 Feb 2006

Theres an article over at news.com (brought to my attention by Slashdot I must admit) where they ask the age old question: "What was your first computer?" I've not yet read much of the article or responses to it but when this sort of thing comes up in message boards around the planet one thing always strikes me with a twinge of sadness -- that an increasing number of people in the world have never used anything except Microsoft Windows. Even folks of my generation who had the opportunity to fire up an Apple II or Commodore 64 often didn't try a PC until the Windows 3.1 days. Good Crom, how many people never played Asteroids or a Vectrex with real vector displays burning out their retinas?

Obviously, as the retro wanker that I am, I can comment all day long about how the older machines were trailblazers in every meaning of the word (ie: innovative, striking otu against the odds in a new arena, trying everything every which way - getting some things right and most things horribly wrong) and how these classic machines had 'character' (spoken the same way your grandfather might growl "Eat brussel sprouts.. they put hair on your chest") -- I'll never forget the 45 degree tilted gray plastic grill on the Atari ST, or the stiff calculator-style punch keys on the Commodore Vic-20. But thats not why I'm writing today (just every other day ;)

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MMORPG: Why did I pass on Eve?
Thu, 09 Feb 2006

Numerous times in the last few weeks it has been asked -- why did I pass on buying into the Eve Online game experience. (An MMORPG for the new is an online game in which you're playing alongside thousands of other real people; often much more involved than single-player or arena games, and often have monthly fee's as a result.)

Quite simple really.. but first the preamble. Eve seems like a pretty good game, in the same sort of way Civilization and Sim City are good games -- theres more to it, and a lot of the game simply comes from what you (and in this case, other players) do. ie: In Civ you can dig into a city and manage its populations jobs and attitude, work over the buildings to suit your strategies, create and alter units, work with technology and religion and economics.. as deep as you want to go. In Eve you can dig quite deeply and live your dreams of a virtual space pirate, a miner, a trader, a union boss and can buy a fleet of ships, customizing them, and wheeling and dealing in the player run economy and product/stock market. Cool stuff, and probably one of the most sophisticated game settings ever. It's even very pretty to look at.

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Palm Tips: How to add ringtones to your Treo -- for free!
Tue, 07 Feb 2006

Ringtones are a huge and weird market with people willing to pay more for a 20 second craptacular rendition of a song than for the raw or mp3 version of it. With such a huge market and millions of dollars being made you can believe the telcos like to make it hard to install a ringtone without first heading to their ever-so-convenient online store. Fortunately Palm has so far not been the sort of company to throttle the function of a device in order to give them another market.. so for us, installing new ringtones is easy.

Easy as Sunday morning. Heres how...

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Day By Day: OKay - people - relax, chill out.
Mon, 06 Feb 2006

I try to live by the rule that people can do what they like, and its not my business to tell them what to do or how to do it. I also try to be respectful, and don't like to go around condemning anyone or anything - I was mouthier in my youth but I've mellowed out to my fellow man. Heck, I run a business online and its not wise to go aggravating people who could be potential friends and customers, but I'm not the sort to premeditate like that.. life by the cuff I say, as long as you're a decent person :) Anyway, permit me to descend into yet another annoyed rant. When you work as much as I do, it helps to get things off the chest ;) Time for my mind to wander... I hope you respect me in the morning ;)

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Mobiles: Where do you draw the line?
Mon, 06 Feb 2006

Another way too long unorganized thought stream.

The question I pose here is not unique to any particular branch of software development, or even in truth to development .. it is a fundamental question to all producers be they of software or frisbies. The question is - when developing and refining a product, how far is far enough? How much shine to apply to your shoes? In the case of software, where do you place version 1, version 1.1, and version 2, 3, and 8?

With regards to software, some projects just meander along their own path for years with no well-defined gates or milestones - never truly done. These projects are always in a permanent state of 'done enough' or 'not done.' Others, such as an operating system release, will draw lines and say "this here is version 1.7.3.5", based on premeditated goals - or perhaps simply on the principle of its been in the oven long enough, it must be done. The harder method of operation is to set milestones in advance - and stick to them.

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Quotes: Simply because today is sort-of-palindromic, here's one from Rucker, on Gödel
Mon, 06 Feb 2006

Found this while perusing a friends page that I happened upon through merely following links. Amazing, that. He's into library-arts so I'm sure his jobs will be very difficult over the next few years, fighting with the evil DRM masters.

Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final ultimate truth ... But, paradoxically, to understand Gödel's proof is to find a sort of liberation. For many logic students, the final breakthrough to full understanding of the Incompleteness Theorem is practically a conversion experience. This is partly a by-product of the potent mystique Gödel's name carries. But, more profoundly, to understand the essentially labyrinthine nature of the castle is, somehow, to be free of it.

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