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Entertainment: Got me an Xbox, woowoo!
Fri, 24 Apr 2009

I've generally been a pretty low stress sort of fella.. things come at me and I've rolled with them, or just gotten my head down and survived hard or tedious things without freaking out. Its one of my super powers - Everyone has a super power, just that most people's power is being an idiot :) Alas, more often the last couple of years I've had my stress-outs - which is just not my style - but such is life right now. Hopefully I can return to form this year .. lose a bit of weight and if not relax, at least be cool.

My wife, bless her heart, allowed me persuade her to get us an Xbox for my birthday. ("Don't worry about my birthday this year.. we're too busy and I have pretty much all that I want", "You can get an Xbox" "Oh, this birthday is very important, we absolutely must get something.. Xbox you say?" ) She's not much of a gamer (though does adore her DS on occasion), so this is more a gift of compassion.. help for my ailing creeky old soul maybe more than its technical merits (rent movies direct to it, etc). She knows I've been a bit of a wreck of late, and this might help.

Also she knows I'm not one for relaxing too too much -- I love a lot of things, but I tend to just 'work' instead or even when into entertainments, I'll try to over-do them -- with free time so tight, trying to max what you get done in your moments is just a new way of stressing. I've often joked the ultimate gaming is software development itself since I enjoy it so much -- the fact of it is that I barely know how to relax, since my 'entertainment' is really a form of work. I guess its the same as people bringing their work home. I enjoy rolling up my sleeves and digging into writing a new game or handheld app.. wtf?! More though -- we all know the distractions the Net can offer, so when I'm working away on some code for this or that when I should be relaxing, its easy to just waste away the time.. so maybe with an Xbox I can learn to relax a bit, kick back with a rum and coke and play a game while sitting on the couch. Or maybe watch a show or DVD or movie without alt-tabbing to email every 10 seconds. Cool. Awesome. (In the evenings.. during the day if I get a moment, I'm going to sit on the back porch, damnit!)

So with all of these and many more over-thought factors, I've wanted an Xbox despite having a capable enough PC, despite half the XBox 360's library being available on PC, and despitehalf the 360's games being arguable better on the PC. (Games that are better played with a mouse, such as an FPS shooter, say.) Well, that and pure gadget lust of course.. the 360 can drive an HD TV, and its a new toy!

The Cons to the gadget-lust of course are the price of the machines -- not cheap, especially during this economy, and the apparent risk in the production values. And the fact that the games are so utterly good looking that they're destroying my interest in building games .. no way I can keep up with those production values! Anyway, if you listen to those on the Net you'd assume that its on the order of 50-100% of them failing within a month of purchase. Of course, most of us just realize this is the usual Net BS -- the grit in the system is most felt.

But it turns out, the production issues of the 360 and the bitching online is much deserved! But despite the scratched disks, the red-ring of deaths and other curious failures, people come back. The content is that compelling.

The purchase and install: So I went to a local store with a relatively easy return policy (a little wary at this point, but not much) and picked up the current 2-game bundle. Got it home, set it up and ignored it for a day until it was my turn for a 'night off' and set to playing. Noticed some curious sparklies in the TV display (and took a couple pictures for proof), and got pissed as hell. (I mean, we got this machine for the de-stress right?) Still, as a good friend of mine in IRC instructed, there was no need to get so PO'd and the store was quick to swap me another machine. (I read later that the issue was likely related to the 1080p resolution I was having it drive - I've a pretty respectible TV so I bloody well wanted 1080p. Apparently there are a number of issues that many 360's can't handle well at 1080p, but were I to drive it at a lower bandwidth output I'd not have had _that_ issue. But no way I'm laying down that amount of cash with a defective unit day zero, right?) This was an "older model" unit - I learned later about the many various internal improvements Microsoft has done over time, and how to pick them out in the field. The older ones run hot and have louder DVD drives, and tend to fail a lot more.... so just as well I had it fail first hour, rather than blow up in another more serious way down the road and get me into the refurbish cycle of hell.

Anyway, upon returning to the point of purchase the next day I found it highly odd that the EBGames (a variant of Gamestop for Canada) fellow gave me a naked 360 unit as my 'new replacement.' "The box is pretty beat it, I just picked it out for you." I mean, if the box was so badly beaten up then may I don't want that one for my replacement unit, but more to point .. with GameStop's well known 'switcheroo' issues, I don't want a naked unit. But whatever, by this time I was resigned to expecting it to also be bad and I was ready to come back for XBox #3. By this time I was mighty good at hooking the unit up and trying various cables to test, so it took only moments for me to hook up and find out Xbox #2 was flaky in a similar way -- it would not even do 1080p at all, just blank out in that mode. Peachy! Perhaps I could've settled with 720p like perhaps most users are, but again.. no way I wanted to settle on sub-par on a brand new purchase.

I did find out one could go to a different EBGames outlet with returns so headed to a more convenient location that was bursting at the seams with fresh new units.. and by new I mean in sealed boxes without damage and the latest system revision (running quieter and cooler I'm told, and with better overall reliability.) XBox #3 turned out to be the one, and has worked perfectly for a week or so now.

The lads I spoke with did suggest they'd seen a very high (30% or more) return rate on some models of the XBox, so the Net moaning is quite possibly well deserved. Or maybe I had been getting screwed by GameStop trickery, them playing the odds I would be happy with a used or screwy unit and didn't have a 1080p TV? *shrug* Who knows. (I do like EBGames .. usually a pleasant experience, as far as game stores go.)

The Content -- so, with all that really really annoying shenanigans out of the way, that I'd not have put up with normally -- the XBox 360 is amazing kit, if a little loud when the drive is spinning. (You can copy games to the hard drive if you have one, to make that moot. And to mitigate the risk of scratching your disks, that people talk about.. *sigh*)

XBox Live Marketplace, where you can get free or rental or purchase video, previews, games and downloadable content is fantastic. As usual we Canadians get the shaft so theres not much in the way of Hollywood movies up, but theres some. Still, theres a fair assortment of indie video (The Guild, *laugh*) and a huge variety of Xbox Live Arcade games, including demos and 'downloadable content updates' for games, free to nab. Pick a game, queue up a download, and go play or watch or something and it'll happily suck down the queue in background. Theres retro titles and redone retro (Pacman and new competitive Pacman, for instance) and quite a pile of great quality new games. *Really* impressive for gamer noobs like me.

The actual on-disc purchased games.. again, while existing in overlap with PC gaming, there is still quite a bit of really good stuff. I'm playing with Fable 2 now.. simply gorgeous and pretty cool.

I do find it very odd that a couple of games I've looked into have weird "family bullshit", that I can't help assume is poached from Sims or some shit. I used to be a bit of a hardcore gamer (more a hardcore gamer wannabee as I went back to my compiler), and I just can't take this stuff seriously. When I found out in Fable 2 you could get your character and go pick of game characters (NPCs, not real humans) for dates, sex, etc, have kids, buy a house or rent them out, and that you should 'go to work' (minigames) to get cash .. I was more than a little W-T-F. I go to work and have a family in RL, I don't need that stress in-game, thanks :) But fine you can mostly ignore this stuff without losing some pieces of the game.. but _seriously._

A few days later, I found out you can do similar stuff in GTA IV, which is really just about loose driving around a city and causing mayhem. Getting on your in-game cellphone to call people and arrange dates... .... .....

I'm told again that perhaps this is just in these two games, two very high profile Xbox 360 games, but still. *BLEH*

In summary -- all told, I'm pretty damned impressed. Wireless controllers with remote on/off is way cool for flopping on the couch. It seems a capable machine graphicly, and the library of both Live Arcade and real store purchases seems fantastic. Accessory options seem good -- with a baby sleeping upstairs I was curious if there was a wireless headphone set (not a headset for gabbing with 12 year olds) and sure enough, and even pretty cheap. So now I can nerd out on the couch with my wireless headphones and controllers and chill a little bit without disturbing anyone. Cool bones.

Aside -- For a long long time I've been saying that things will get to be 'good enough' for the average consumer soon. Its been a long time coming for video card technology, but audio seems to be a much simpler thing. We got "good enough" in the Sound Blaster 16 days imho, so nowadays a good enough audio solution in a computer is pennies. Video is still expensive as heck (couple hundred for a 'good' video card for a PC), but we're getting there. With the current console generation (PS3 and 360) we've got HD consoles in the home, and the graphics are pretty damned good. Maybe this generatoin or next will be 'good enough' that people will not need to upgrade much.. except of course for the artificial stuff, when the company retires its machines and makes new content only for the new one. I just hope the XBox 360 lasts another 5 years... we're not buying another console for quite awhile.

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

Pandora: Application and firmware packaging and other magic voodoo
Fri, 20 Feb 2009

People have often been asking how applications and firmware will be packaged for the Pandora, and other variations -- how will apt-get work on the device when there are SD cards present, and so on. Now while the information that we're letting out is still subject very much to change, I did reply in a thread on the forums and I thought the discussion might be of interest to folks.. so I thought I'd repost it here.

See thread here

The main post I made, warts and all, is reproduced here. Many follow-up questions and answers by various team members are posted. Also see a discussion on the Unofficial Pandora Blog for some extra flames and discussion.

You can of course do anything you want; your box, open source evreything, make it do what you like wink.gif But let me discuss a bit from a normal user perspective (ie: not hacking in knee deep.)

The normal unix filesystem will be on NAND. ie: /usr, /etc, all that. You can reflash that to put a new firmware in and several groups are even working on alternative firmware (ie: gentoo etc.) Anyway, consider -- if you run a normal unix packager, it doesn't know about SD versus the normal filesystem. It would be unadvisable to put user homedir on SD by default, since you might not have SD in, or might swap SDs, or any number of scenarios.. so user homedir must also be in NAND by definition. This means if you use a normal unix packager like apt or whatever, its going to install things in /usr/local/bin say, and your homedir ~ etc, all on NAND, which is fine, it'll work.

But what if you keep installing packages that way..

1) They're on your NAND; which is cool, no worry about losing them. But..

2) You have limited NAND space; you might want to reserve it for user documents that you find important or whatever.. but do you want ot fill it up with new builds of firefox etc? I mean, if you want 500 packages, your NAND will not have the space for it.

3) The firmware lives on NAND; if you fill it up, it might be hard for the pandora team to guarantee theres enough space for next firmware update (ie: not a reflash, but a patch, say.) So it'd be nice to not have everyone by defaut using a packager that fills up the limited resource

4) .. and so on.

The trick is unix packagers assume the filesystem is where they want to put stuff. It is less likely to be the case on a handheld.

(You could format an ext2fs on SD and mount that and so lots of tricks, but we want to make it simple. For the knowbies, they can do all that of course.)

So a bunch of keener fellows have been banging out what we think is a better idea.

THIS IS ALL UP IN THE AIR AND IN DEVELOPMENT, SUBJECT TO CHANGE ETC AND SO ON.

The nitty gritty ideas we had were to divide NAND up into a couple regions; a firmware chunk and a user homedir chunk. The trick is we could use unionfs (or aufs, a newer union-fs style system). We'd make te union setup so that writes to the firmware filesystem are actually written to the user section in your homedir somewhere, an the unionfs proprerties make it so the system doesn't see this. ie: You write to /usr/foo and it ends up in your homedir in NAND, but reading /usr/foo works still. This way if you overwrite stuff in the firmware and blow it up, you just wipe your homedir and reboot, and bam, you're back to a fully working stock firmware. For OS patches we can mount the real NAND fs instead of the union, update the filesystem, remount he union, and poof. Seems brilliant to me, and allows normal packagers to just work, reasonably risk free.

Thats the firmware side.

The app packaging system we're designing uses some similar tricks, in theory. (We're still bangin it out, but its looking cool so far.)

We define a new package type, .pnd. An app could be whatever.pnd, and it includes the PXML file as defined by ED. (Though we've modified the contents of the PXML a fair amount since his last update.) The pnd could be a number of file formats (think of it like a zip file with a PXML appended to it, but we're likely going with an .iso format. Make an iso of the directory you want, append the PXML, rename to .pnd .. good to go.)

Insert your SD into the pandora, a daemon wakes up and detects the .pnd files in its searchpath, and it generates the .desktop files for the launcher in a configured location. (It could also be made as a module for matchbox or other window managers, but our current thoughts are to spit out .desktop files since they're pretty standard and should work simply.) you pop out the SD, the daemon wakes up and rescans, and removes the .desktop files in question. (It should also handle if you just rm the pnd file from within the pandora usage, etc.)

In essence, you go to the gp32x archive (say, or others), download a few .pnd files, drop them on your SD, and thats it. Just works.

More nitty gritty -- the idea is that when the system finds these pnd files, it uses filesystem tricks again.. using fuse filesystem it the pnd files are mounted as .iso's into the filesystem, based on their unique-id in the PXML say. ie: mount whatever.pnd into /apps/123456uniqueid123 and the PXML file part identifies which file in there is the executable and icon, etc. The launcher shows the icons based on the.desktop files, and when you tap one, the launcher knows which executable to run, right out of /apps/123etc/.

What makes this extra clever is unionfs again (ao aufs etc), so that any writes back to /apps/123etc/ go to the SD card instead (but the app doesn't have to know.) ie: Say, to SD card /pandora/appdata/123etc/ dir.

Anyway, the trick is you download a .pnd file, it gets shown in the launcher based on its PXML config. you tap to run it, and it gets mounted, run, and unmounted on exit. Everything works right off your SD including new/changed data. Your .pnd file remains clean (you can copy it to someone else, etc, or delete it) and your apps data stays on your SD card.

You can also unpack the .pnd files yourself into their directory and just drop it on the SD card. In that case, no mount voodoo is needed, so writes back to /pandora/apps/whatever just stay there, for those who want to keep it all together like a traditional gp2x app.

As to locations..

I've overkilled the design really.. everything is based on searchpaths. So pandora apps will use libpnd as their infrastrucuture (to save everyone rewriting all this every time.) A simple call will check the OS and find out the config search path (which can be altered in NAND as you see fit.) Then any time an app needs a config, the config search path is seeked to find it.. so you can use the default config in NAND as shipped, or put replacements of those config files on SD. (Pull out your SD and everythign reverts to defalut firmware config.. seems nice and safe to me!)

The search-path for where apps can be sought after is configured; by default the pnd files and unpacked pnds will be looked for in SD (both) in /pandora/apps if I recall right, including any subdirectories there so you can organize as you see fit, and also a path or two in NAND for built in pnds. (built in apps will probably be built into the normal filesystem like any unix app, but we could possibly include some apps as pnd files so that the user can remove them if they don't want them, to get NAND space back.)

Now, if you want pnd files to be droppable right in SD root, you just add a /pandora/conf/apps config file and put the search path into it, or edit the master conf file in NAND (/etc/pandora/conf/apps is my current plan for that.) Thus you can put .pnd files anywhere you want, but we'll have a defalut behaviour as shipp.ed

Now, before anyone complains, every single path and decision there is in conf files, so you can specify where you want to do things.

And you can use normal unix packagers.

And you can alter things to work as you see fit.

So I think we're keeping the usual flexibility, but also making something dumb-simple for new users, and yet you can play with it to customize it for those woh want to roll up your sleeves. There should be little risk since you can just eject SD cards and/or wipe oyur NAND homedir to revert to built in functionality. And in a pinch, if you wipe everythign out, you can reflash the whole firmware.

Safe and awesome.

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

Gaming: Tips for PSP as a travel gadget
Fri, 16 Jan 2009

I've always been pretty impressed with the Sony PSP overall; brilliant screen, some good gaming options, music and video playing, and even a crappy yet capable web browser. Still, Sony (like Apple and a million other companies) likes to mess with its customers and so to really get the full value of your purchase you have to 'unlock' the device - imagine buying a car that can only fill half a tank of gas except on Fridays, where all you have to do is fiddle with this warranty removing knob to get the full deal. Anyway, planning for a short trip I have been mulling over what gadgetry would be good to bring along.

Ideally I won't need a gadget at all, but should like some options if I find myself bored with a napping baby. You could try for a micro-laptop such as a 'netbook' or UMPC but they tend to be pretty expensive (you'd cry if it were lost, stolen or crushed in transit) and too large for a pocket; a PDA which can excel at internet communications, ebook and multimedia, but tends not to be a solid game machine for long trips; a smartphone, should you wisk to have people bothering you on your vacation. Options options.

Anyway, for a short non-working trip, the things I'd like the option to do are: ebook reading (avoid carrying cumbersome and heavy books), video watching (from video files, not internet streams), some gaming, and idle web browsing. I'm not worried about email or heavy duty activities in this case. (Should you need to do email or document edittig or whatever, then you may want a netbook or whatever.)

Rearding ebooks, I'm not going to go on a tirade about DRM and locked up data and cost versus real hardcover books and so on - I've probably ranted about that before. Suffice to say I only use open formats such as RTF and HTML and textfiles; for the PSP there are few book reader options and no time for me to write a new one so I fretted a touch, though I eventually found the most excellent BookR open source app. Because it is not Sony-blessed you'll need an unlocked PSP (free and legal, if frowned upon by corporate masters.) This is what I meant above -- if theres no sensible book reader, they shouldn't be locking down a perfectly capable device. Likewise with video -- the built in video tools only let you watch low res video except for Sony UMD bought videos. Thats just evil in my opinion -- artificial limits to encourage you to buy their products.. a clear conflict of interest. Anyway I'll go on about that later in this post.

There are some really goofy attempts to do things on the level, such as an app that reads ebooks and spits out a million image files (multiple images per book page) and you use the PSP built in picture viewer to 'read' the book; you thus don't get a memory of which page you've read to, but it sort of works. BookR is a PDF reader - which provided some reservations up front as most ebooks you get in PDF format are DRM'd to heck - but with PDF now being more or less an open format numerous converters now exist. I used the OpenOffice export-to-PDF option to convert RTF files to PDF, and good to go. I don't know if the application can render 'big' PDFs with charts and embedded crazyness but when it came to various ebooks I've bought in unDRMd format or ones I converted myself, it seems to work very well.

Further, with the PSP screen being very high resolution in the landscape orientation (480x272), you can have a full-width comfortable read of most PDFs .. you just have to scroll down the page as you read, no biggy. The application lets you zoom and pan and rotate so you can accomodate most files, but you don't want to do that when reading. If you're converting to PDF yourself you can of course just use a larger font and set the page-width should you wish to make the reading easier on the eyes. All told though, I loaded up a half dozen books onto the memstick, and I think I'll be fine. This is a big one for me, a device-picking deal breaker, so good to know.

For video I thought to bring along some 'rips' of DVDs I own and videos I've downloaded. Sadly, most gadgets require you to 'transcode' a video into a format they can understand. This is pretty annoying, but I appreciate they're doing the playback via built in hardware and thus conserving battery. Doing video playback purely in software is a battery burner, and can be hard to keep up with the full framerate. (Mind you my older Palm and Windows Mobile devices could do it no problem, suggesting the fine TCPMP Core Codec people did good work.) Anyway, I found a bajillion freeware and open source tools to do the work (such as Universal PSP convert, and PSP Video Converter (pspvc), and others), as well as commercial offerings (from Sony and other third parties.) In the end, the freebie guys tend to work pretty well, and sometimes better. The commercial offerings tend to work easier and have better less cheesie UIs, but also tend to conform to the Sony recommended specs. Sony used to (maybe still does?) require video playback to be lower resolution that the PSP can actually show, to 'encourage' consumers to buy UMD videos on disc, which get full resolution playback. This is a dirty dirty maneauver due to conflict of interest for Sony .. selling a PSP, and also selling UMD videos. As I said, its like buying a car with things built in you can see, but are not allowed to use.. but you still pay for them. No way. So you have to unlock your PSP to get full potential - unlock a device you bought - the joy of the tech sector. Still, if you want to buy something that works well, has batch mode and so forth, there is Avex software which can convert to pretty much every device.

For DVD ripping I ended up picking up DVDFab (there is a free trial download as well), though there are dozens of similar products. DVDFab again honours the lower-than-real resolution, but does a pretty nice job of ripping straight from DVD to PSP ready formats. With their mobile option (a bit pricey altogether, but what the hell..) you can select a target device (ipod, PSP, etc) and it knows the appropriate parameters and voodoo.

In the end I carried a mix of videos at full resolution from open source transcoders, and some not-full-res rips from DVD using commercial apps. All told the PSP shows them both very well and the screen is so sharp (PSP original and PSP-2000, I've not seen a PSP-3000 in person). Win.

For gaming it is also worthy to unlock your PSP. (See a trend .. unlock for ebooks, unlock for superior video playback, unlock for gaming.) Carrying a pile of purchased games on UMDs is fine (I picked up little 5-pack carry widgets to keep UMDs stored nicely, cheap as dirt), but I prefer tech to lead to simplicity, not complexity. I don't wear a watch or carry a manpurse, or keep too much crap in my pockets. There are a few tools that 'rip' copies of game UMDs onto your memorystick. Usually this is for piracy, but stay clear. (I'm a software dev; I sell my stuff. It pays the bills, kthanks :) Anyway, you can rip your games into raw files or a ".iso" disk image using various tools. Games are pretty big, and some keen folks know about removing unwanted files and so forth, but its a big hastle. In the end, you can pick up 4 gig, 8gig or even 16 gig memory sticks, and put a few games on there pretty easily.

Anyway, I didn't bother with much of that; what I was interested in was the PSP's built in PlaystationOne (PSOne, PSX, whathaveyou) emulator. Naturally, just as with Sony's UMD resolution devilry, made it so the built in emulator is meant to play only specifically authorized PS1 games. On the one hand this is probably because they want to ensure the games play well in the PSP and not give you a bad experience, but its also obviously because they wish to re-sell you games you've already bought for a real PS1, and sell PS1 games to people who never had them before -- leverage old product for new revenue is bling bling to a company, of course. Still, with an unlocked PSP it is trivial to use open source tools to transform your PS1 ".iso" disc images into files the PSP built in PS1 emulator can use. Again you tread dark waters to get these tools sometimes, but they're legal and free, just frowned upon by Sony (of course, they just want your money.) Anyway, using a million variations of POPStation you can ready up any of your old PS1 games. I don't have many, only bought a few of the true classics. but more to point.. I converted Civilization 2.

Sure, in my Atari emulator you can play Civilization 1. But Civilization 2 for PS1 was designed for a handheld controller pad, not a computer keyboard, so works pretty well on the PSP. And I mean, its Civilization 2. A few hundred megabytes ,a fraction of your memstick, and you've got Civ in your pocket. Pretty hot.

Naturally, keep a couple good games in there; I keep Lego Indiana Jones in the UMD slot.

All told, the PSP is pretty inexpensive, yet a very capable device. Just you have to unlock it ('mod' with 'custom firmware' or the like) to get half its potential out there. If only Sony would release an official ebook solution.

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

Quickie: Gamepark Holdings new machine, The GP2x Wiz
Thu, 08 Jan 2009

I've been meaning to do a writeup about the development versions of the Wiz that I've been fiddling with, but alas time has been short (darn those Christmas revelries!) .. but I must say something.

This is not a review, just a quickie.

Suffice to say that the Wiz is the evolution of the mighty GP2x device, hence their keeping of the GP2x monicker in the new device's name. It is not directly compatible with software for the regular GP2x, but thats okay. It is however an improvement on pretty much every aspect of the existing devices. Porting applications targetting the GP2x to the Wiz is pretty easy overall (with the only difficulty being that which we devs added ourselves by going right to the hardware of the previous devices.)

While the GP2x proper is a good size, the Wiz is smaller (which may be a risk to some people) and lighter, and fits well in the hand. Very pocketable and fairly durable, like a GBA Micro (just with no protection for the screen or case shine so keep your keys away.) I've got RSI or something the doctors cannot easily identify in my wrists so weight is something I'm very much aware of nowadays and this is a good fealing unit. The screen is bright and intense (OLED which some worry will dull after a few years, but I doubt by much) and the touchscreen is vastly superior in accuracy to the current F200 model. The CPU is a great deal faster than the current units. The button layout seems good (the original dev unit had a goofy button layout, but they've remedied it as they near actual release day.) It uses an internal battery and charge cable like most gadgets nowadays, not the AA battery approach previous machines used. I don't have final firmware candidates so can't speak for the interface or menus, but they're of little consequence anyway.. you spend most of your time in applications or games, and can replace a lot of the OS anyway with third party Linux distributions (such as Open2x, kudos guys!) Porting is as easy as ever, and the GPH fellows are making an effort to help the developers more than ever.

If you want a open source homebrew friendly platform, then the Wiz is really going to be a great machine when it arrives pretty soon. It ought to be a decent media player as well.

Disclosure: I've been handed both an early and a late model dev unit for the Wiz, but I do try to be fair in my benchmarks and comments. I can back this up. I am spending most of my time right now on Pandora development, but I expect to dive into some Wiz work soon, and I think the machine is targetted to go on sale end of Feb or begin of March.

Aside: _The Wire_ is some of the very best television I've ever seen. I've only just found out about it, as its wrapped up. Just as well because it seems like its 5 seasons are so utterly good as to be life destroying. Don't sit down to catch episode 1 when youi're about to go on a trip or have exams coming or crunch time at work .. you'll be fired. The Wire is _that good_. Buy it on DVD now, and watch out for Omar.

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

Gaming: Potion count versus server moves? Can we take the Eye of the Beholder around the water cooler?
Thu, 08 Jan 2009

Doing software development for a living means a lot of planning -- design work for the software, project planning to ensure dependancies come together, module and system integration strategies, testing and variance management, economics to plan the cost of various options and so on. During a recent session we sat around a table with a plethora of budget sheets arrayed before us .. this or that option, bundles of options by timeline, what we really want to push or not, and it occurred to me that all printed sheets with numbers scratched and appended and erased and lines all over linking things together .. just looked like Dungeons and Dragons character sheets, or "SSD" ship description and damage sheets for Starfleet Battles Tabletop games.

It wandered into my head that perhaps all those thousands of hours spent as a kid planning a D&D campaign or designing scenarios for massive fleet to fleet balanced wars might have been useful. You know, balancing an encounter between two 15+ ship fleets including frigates and battlecruisers, drone launchers and fighters, stealthed or agile ships versus dreadnoughts and allowing for effects of a Nebula or asteroid field .. thats nothing to shake a bag of Doritos at. How different is planning to take along so many pack horses laden with healing potions and speed boosters and spell components so you can handle the boss in the third plane, to figuring our the risk in relocating an old server or planning license counts for CPUs for a database?

Sure on the one hand, you could argue all that practice was useful, or on the other you could argue that the types of people who play those sorts of highly technical tabletop games are predisposed to that sort of work. Whatever.

Modern gaming has long left tabletops in the dust (there are some grand stalwart titles, and even a rising popularity in family games like Monopoly and Scrabble), but perhaps they all serve as more than just an idle amusement or passtime challenge.. perhaps all these online spreadsheet games (EVE Online) and time grinders (World of Warcraft) are good training for the toils of living, and possibly even help people in their time management, helping train (or damage) sharp minds.

Yeah yeah, get back to work! God, I'm such a nerd.

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Pandora: Merry Christmas on shipday, we get Warcraft 2!
Mon, 22 Dec 2008

This one is for Pickle, the eminent DOSBox for gp2x expert. This man slaved and slaved to wring every last bit of hot DOSBox action out of the little gp2x. He's been helping us out sorting out configs and fiddling to get DOSBox working on the Pandora. I asked what a good game to check would be, as I had been trying out some 'lightweights' .. he suggested WC2. Briliant I thought...Check it out..

This is a stock DOSBox (by which I mean compiled from source, with no optimizations _at all_, and not even tuning the config. Its got the wrong cycle settings and full audio enabled and installed _from my Warcraft 2 ancient CD_. DOSBox in dynarec mode though, so its working its ass off here :) The good news -- runs nearly full speed, and fully playably. I've worked through the first Orc campaign mission. USB mouse and keybord.

Aside, I also tried Wing Commander 1 -- peachy. Civilization 1 -- perfect. Wizardry 7 Crusaders of the Dark Savant -- perfect. System Shock 1 chugged it, but thats fair .. its all software math emulation to do the 3d mode, but possibly with high enough clock and optimization.. maybe. We're just scratching the surface here.

The only thing thats chuggy at all is scrolling around the screen by mousing to the edge; was that smooth back in the day? Its possible with more units it would suffer more as this first campaign is nothing, but still.. this is quite an achievement.

Pandora was set to 800MHz .. and the Panda can go higher still; I probably should've tried for 900 or more to see if it corrected that one nit, but I was too busy drooling :)

Edit

For those of us so mightily curious, here is Dune 2 running; it is also playable (though I didn't complete any levels, it seemed just fine to play.)

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

Pandora: Easy as pie to port to (ie: Linux to Linux port)
Wed, 03 Dec 2008

Was chatting with cpasjuste in IRC and he'd noted that before he even received his pandora devkit, he'd done a few 'quick ports.'; ie: Just getting them to compile in the tool chain we're all switching to for the device. I offered to give them a run so he wouldn't have to wait until tomorrow to find out if they worked and to our surprise.. they did! (You would think a run before even testing it once would fail...)

So I've already ported OutcaST (gp2x version that uses SDL that I was doing Wiz speed testing with) to the pandora last night (a quick port!), and now cpasjuste has ported Hatari (another ST emu), HUGO (TG-16 emu) and SMS (Sega Mastersystem emu.) His Hatari worked pretty well out of the box (including sound!), and the SMS as well pretty good; HUGO had some minor oddities easy to fix when he gets his dev board. FWIW, a USB mouse plugged into the Pandora worked on the GEM desktop, too, right out of the box. How hot is that?

I've got performance numbers for my OutcaST but I'm not sure I want to post here about them yet. Suffice to say that the pandora _blows the hell_ out of other handhelds; same clock, same naive port, same unoptimized SDL used for the display backend, so on and so forth (I have details in a private thread.) Much more blown away than I thought, too.. so the Pandora is both easy to port to, and frighteningly fast!

Cheers cpasjuste for your quick work, and to notaz for the pandora kernel and SDL ports!

Some quick shoddy pics (Sorry!):

OutcaST running, displaying the GEM Desktop

Hatari, in A_133 Automation loader for Xenon 2

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Pandora: Unboxing the dev kit!
Thu, 27 Nov 2008

Everyone (me included) is already bubbling over with excitement and drama and cannot wait for the true Christmas day when the devices start shipping. With the devs being so utterly busy, I thought I might take a few pics of the just-arrived dev kit; maybe a few people will enjoy the pics; a few more will be relieved that things are in motion; finally still even more will be happy that there is another conduit for some information without bugging the poor guys. Mike agrees its okay for some leaks :) Theres not a lot of free time for me, and I'd rather be hacking anyway...

But if you do have any specific requests for pics, let me know :)

YES, I realize these are very nearly the worst pics ever; I'm no camera snob. I do need a tripod for steady shots, and some way to get diffuse lighting in. Daytime shots with a steadier hand.. I'll do that next week when I've got more than 30 seconds and don't need to work on installing bootstrap code :)

THIS IS NOT THE FINAL PRODUCTION BOARD. This is a mark 2 dev kit board and break out board .. which is to say it is relatively likely the final pcb, but the devs are surely able to change things as they see fit.

This is part hardware p0rn; part the excitement of being this close to starting some hacking on the bare metal of such a powerful and teeny little beasty. And equal parts fear and annoyance for bloody UPS leaving the package upon the steps in front of my house for a full 10 hours before I could get there to ensure it was safely cuddled in my loving arms.

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Gametech: The Fusebox
Wed, 26 Nov 2008

No my friends, these are not the days when we typed in machine code from the back of Compute's Gazette magazine into our Vic-20 and prayed to Crom we got it right (and prayed the magazine didn't botch the typesetting.) No my brothers, these are the days when the big guys.. the banks and the auto-sector.. get their tax-payer funded bailouts while you stand in bankruptcy line knowing sure as hell there is going to be no bailout or mercy for your sorry butt.

The Fusebox is not the cheapest gadget but it is certainly not the most expensive, and where else can you order a brand spanking new 8-bit game console kit that you get to solder together to keep yourself warm in that bankruptcy line. While basking in the hotness that is coding your own little games. Remembering that back in the day when this was the norm they were lucky to have a framebuffer .. ah, our beloved Atari 2600s, rust in peace.

Yes, my brothers and sisters.. the Fusebox is niftyawesome. I only wish I had the time for such projects .. (instead I'll be hacking along on my Pandora and my GP2X Wiz machines while listening to Rob Zombie.)

(Hmm, where did the tone of this post come from? Nomatter, check out the Fusebox do-it-yourself console here)

Oh the humanity!

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

Gamepsych: The Philosophical Revelations of Sinistar
Fri, 21 Nov 2008

One of the great, unrecognized, philosophical geniuses of this century or any other is a figure known by some as Sinistar. Sinistar left behind a legacy of seven phrases that encompass his minimalist philosophy. We are fortunate enough to have with us audio records of what he said, so that we may greater comprehend his intent.

Sinistar will always be an enigma, as nothing is known of his life. It seems as if he lived a life filled with motivation and direction, as if desperately yearning to accomplish all that he could, before he could be brought low by those who would destroy him. Sinistar's revelations follow, with an interpretation of their intent.

1. I am Sinistar. Here, Sinistar clearly makes two ideas known. First, that he exists; he is aware and he thinks. The second is that he has a singular identity. He is unique, and, in a sense, alone. Some have argued that this may imply a sense of self-determination, but Sinistar's perspective on the free will debate is unknown. I believe that, with what little is known about his life, Sinistar would be a determinist. People are destined to act out their lives guided by the hand of another force. The rest of us are mere automatons, carrying out algorithms.

More follows --

Tis a simple thing; see here

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

Gaming: Sony PSP and TV-out; I mean, glorious uber-nerding near the TV like an 8-year-old.
Thu, 06 Nov 2008

I've always been a fan of 'tactile retro gaming' .. ie: using authentic controls if you can't have the actual device around. ie: As an emulation author you'd think I'd be all for the technology (and I am!), but I also collect arcade machines - the full cabinets - and home consoles. It is always "better" (in terms of game feal) on the real thing (and brutal on your space and room aesthetics), and then on emulation if you don't have access to the real beasties. The reason of course is more genuine controls and also some of the magic -- there is something to be said (and also said against) having to insert and flip over floppy disks on a C64 or Atari 800, and type on a nasty old keyboard that was actually made up from calculator keys (no joke there btw, check your Commodore history friends ;)

Consider also the 'knock' noise Q-bert makes when he falls off the maze; thats actually a physical knock made in the arcade cabinet, and it cannot be replicated in emulation _period._ Nor can you replicate the aging monitor and the cigarette burns on the cabinet. But I digress.

What I'm talking about today is plugging consoles, even modern ones like the Sony PSP, smack into your big screen high def fancy pants TV. Its not a genuine display, but it is certainly in the spirit of that -- how many of us sat on the floor far too close to our big 1970's CRT TVs playing with crummy old joysticks that hurt our little paws. Atari 2600, Colecovision, etc. Those are sitting-in-front-of-TV systems -- thats how they were designed. Its also a nerdy social thing, playing games in the family room on the TV, not up on your laptop in an office or bedroom.

And in these modern times, it means firing up Commodore Vic-20 BASIC on 47" of fracking television. YEAH

In my household we're woefully behind times in the entertainment arena, but finally just acquired a new TV. I mean one that is more than 20 inches, and less than that in years old. So I naturally plugged in a SuperGUN (a Super Nova in fact) to bring up Rolling Thunder (the actual arcade game board) on the TV.. AWESOME.

But for normal people, whats the easiest device to plug into a big fat TV? Sure, your XBox or the like, running old games. Nice. You do that, we don't have any modern consoles :)

I picked up the Sony PSP "component cables" (not the composite ones) and jacked my little handheld PSP into the TV. Being on cables and without remote controls means I'm sitting up there, near the TV, wired to it. Like the good old days. Big TV and me, face to face.

First up -- running my ST emu and Xenon 2 Megablast. OH YEAH. Then Dungeon Master and the mummy that scares your pants off in the dark. OH YEAH.

Next up -- VICE emulator in Vic-20 mode, and Cosmic Cruncher. Spiders of Mars. Omega Race.

And then something from this decade.. Wipeout Pure. Sweet racing action.

The only problem here is the PSP letterboxes games, so you don't get the full fullscreen action (for shame!) like the SuperGUN does. Next up I'll have to try the GP2x and see about getting my ST emu going full screen there. Sexy. Or get yourself an X-Arcade stick for your laptop, or use a STELLA-adapter to plug your 20 year old Atari joystick into your computer. Whatever it takes, man.

An hour of true transcendant geeking. Modern TV runs pretty hot and winter is coming -- plug that old small TV gear into your big hot TV and get your game on!

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Retro: Atari Jaguar console
Wed, 05 Nov 2008

Aside: My baby girl recently started speaking in 2-3 word sentences; last night when I tucked her into bed, she said "love you daddy." Another life achievement down, and well.. it just doesn't get much better than that one :)

Atari was a great company in so many ways, but I'll not go into that here. Their last real console release was the Atari Jaguar around the same time as the Sony Playstation (original), and we all know who won that race. Truly it was no competition.. the Jag was a cool platform, but it really could not compete with these more 3D oriented machines. And a lot of its software was _terrible_ (and that is being kind.) Still, it maintained Atari's playful feal with some games being very original, and always feeling like the designer was not so much a corporation but a drinking buddy. To me as a retro collector, an Atar fan, retrogamer and coder .. the Jag was always a like-hate relationship.

I mean, it had Dragon's Lair on CD. *heart*

But it also had Kasumi Ninja, which is not even as good as Custer's Revenge if you catch my drift.

Anyway, through my various moves I've dragged my poor Jaguar around, but today I've sold it off. A fine seeming lad picked it up and sounds like he'll have some fun with it, for which I'm glad. I mean -- we retro guys go through a phase of wanting to collect it all but in practice we just rarely have the space and eventually have to specialize. But more .. I like to get things into a good home, and if I'm not going to fire up this classy little beast, ever, might as well move it on along to someone who will. A museum piece kept in the dark is worthless.. a museum piece on display is worthy. So I'll miss this little machine, this indestructable black box (none of this red-ring BS in old hardware!) .. but on the other hand, my home will be forever clean of Kasumi Ninja.

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Gaming: Spectating Nethack
Mon, 03 Nov 2008

I'm a closet Nethack nerd.

Nethack is a very complex and interesting dungeon-romp game, generally played out entirely in text (though various ports and lookalikes exist with simple or even very fancy graphical frontends exist.) This isn't a text adventure in the Infocom sense, but a top-down "Diabloesque" game (for more modern people, or a Temple of Apshai but actually fun game for old schoolers like me ;) Anyway suffice to say that it has such depth that very modern games barely scratch its surface (though they of course excel in other aspects, don't get me wrong.) So nethack (and many other Hack descendants such as Dwarf Fortress, Angband and so on) are worth playing even today.

This comes up because the 10th annual Nethack tournament is underway right now. One of those few times I can point at someone else and cry "Nerd!"

Anyway, I stumbled across this frightening and yet mega-awesome tidbit:

telnet nethack.alt.org

By which I mean in a Unix-like environemnt, just do that; in Windows, you can run a DOS-like shell and do that or use some shmancy telnet client. Anyway, telnet lets you essentially visit text displays on some other machine, usually for working on a server.. but in this case, it lets you play, or like some sick ASCII voyeur, watch someone else play Nethack.

You can of course download and play Nethack locally, but this lets you goof off without bothering to download it. But the main attraction to me.. is to watch someone, usually a far better player than me, play nethack. That is just downright nifty. I want spectator modes in newer games too, but this is really darned neat. Just can't wait for someone to scratch Elbereth into the floor with a cockatrice head and see what happens.

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Gaming: Infocom sales by title, graphed
Tue, 21 Oct 2008

The number of units sold to customer ('sell through') in todays gaming industry is very different by orders of magnitude to the good old days when Lord British was hawking Ultima and Akalabeth in ziplock bags. But there were a few brave souls who carved out their niche in the fledgling indutry, and those like Electronic Arts who would survive to this day. Without going into that whole discussion however, we might be curious how some of these moderately successful companies did. Enter Infocom, pioneer of the adventure game and the text adventure (and database if you want to go that far). How did they do?

Mighty Jason Scott of textfiles has stumbled across some data, so take a peak at this graph:


See here for the Flickr page

For when the inevitable happens and the image vanishes .. from 1981-1986 Zork 1 sold 379,000 units, and HHGttG sold 254,000. Later games like Ballyhoo only sold 24,000 but even that is quite a respectible sell through for the time period.

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

Gaming: Warhammer Online Beta after 2 hours
Tue, 09 Sep 2008

Used to be gamers meant PC gamers. And PC games had Boss Keys, since a lot of people didn't have computers at home and played games at work, and needed to hit a key that would pretend to be Excel^h^h^h^h^hVisicalc real fast. Then later games had a Boss Key just for fun. And now they don't at all (sniff), and now people play games on PCs and consoles. But apparently mostly consoles, unless its Civilization, a FPS shooter, or .. MMORPGs. And with 10-odd million or more World of Warcraft players PC gaming will never die. So instead the question becomes - with each new MMORPG fantasy game, will it take over, or be another roadbump for the almighty WoW?

Will this be Failhammer Online? or Winhammer? Can Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning ("WAR") survive?

I was going to write up a one para summary for some friends, but then it turned into this monstrosity and so I'm posting it. Sorry :)

NOTE: : My play was very low level, and in beta; the higher level PVP with city-capturing and so on sounds really great, but I didn't touch any of that. The lower levels are more mundane.. so read on.

The next WoW expansion is due in just a month or two, and simply nothing will be displacing that game anytime soon; its just too big. Well, until the next Blizzard game comes out, right? So with them showing no mercy on the marketplace, any new games had better stand on their own at launch -- a tough feet against something thats been around and under constant development for half a decade. (Witness Age of Conan, which simply seemed like a beta they wanted to charge monthly for. These games are hard to make.)

Now, before I get started, let me just say .. as an old timer table top gamer, I know that Warcraft rips off Warhammer in feel and art, and I know that Warcraft was even going to be a Warhammer game way back in the day. So yes to those fanboys, I get it, WAR looks like WoW, but its really the other way around. So I won't talk about that. And Blizzard better not, since they stole their gameplay from Everquest, and their art from Warhammer. What they did do, was evolve the gameplay, and refine it down to be the best and most addicting parts of that gameplay.

Anyway, I played the open beta WAR for a couple hours last night, and thought I'd lay down some impressions.

It will beg comparison to WoW at every opportunity, since it feels and plays like WoW. WoW adopted much of Everquests gameplay, and WAR adopts much of WoWs; economicly it can't be a bad thing, but it is a tired old convention. Auto-attack and 1-2-3-win. But fine, it certainly makes it easy on new players, and makes it very eay for WoW players to move to WAR -- you're 'at home' pretty quickly.

So let me say right off -- WAR, after 2 hours, seems to be about 80% WoW, with innovation at the end of each thread. ie: You can look at world PVE, mission PVE, world PVP, PVP minigames, and so on.. in each area they've done similar to WoW, but then improved on the formula; tried to involve the players more, and make it more about the ongoing war, and tie things together more. I think this is not a half bad strategy.

For an about-to-launch MMORPG, this looks pretty pollished. Most every other game in this field has launched terribly with crashes, people unable to log in and bugsbugsbugs.. and we'll see with WAR - but if the Beta is anything to go by, it looks pretty solid; they're building a foundation using proven ideas, and adding some really good stuff, and throwing it out there. Better than starting on some really rickety buggy mess (I'm looking at you Conan.)

But you better like auto-attack, and 1-2-3-win gameplay!

Population

As a PVP-interested player, I naturally went to Horde in WoW. I love Lord of the Rings of _course_, and even sine good old high fantasy novel tripe. But theres just no way I can take anything seriosuly as a goofy floppy eared elf. This isn't Civilization or Sim city; when I go into a game with "war" in the title, I want to tear. it. up. and wreck some opponents. So when you start in on World of Warcraft, and you firts mission is to murder 10 ducks, it rather scrubs the brunt off. Anyway, I just wanted to note that in WoW the servers as I understand it are 60-70% Alliance (humans/elves/dwarves/etc) and 30-40% Horde (orcs, tauren, trolls, undead, that sort.) At least my server was. (And for the high and mighty, in WoW lore the alliance is not all good, and the horde is generally fighting the good fight, not a bunch of evil mugs.)

So I found it a little odd that in WAR Beta (note the BETA), the populations seemed skewed to Destruction; the Chaos side was really heavy and the elves and so on were much fewer. Perhaps this will flip when it goes fully public and LEgolas37 can sign up, but we'll see.

I generaly like when there is an overall high population, and I'm on the low population side of it; it gives you the common underdog-wants-to-win feel, but it also means when you go hunting there will be lots of opponents (and usually clumps of them that outnumber your hunting party); it also means for PVP minigames you queue up and get into a game fast; the larger side sometimes has to wait, since there are fewer opponents to get into a match.

I still can't play the Order side, its just not me; so I can only hope all those LEgolases will fill in, so I have someone to beat up.

Orcapult

So I created a Greenskin Shaman (damage and healing combination) and ran around for a minute; it is obvious that even for the PVE (player versus environment.. the AI computer monsters) they are trying to keep the "at war" feal of it all; your missions are usually things that, although the same structure as WoW, at least are war oriented. Fetch the weapons, take them to buddyboy. Theres also PVP missions, right off, and thats huge. Anyway, I ran around for a few minutes to see what things looked like, and found catapults.. always a good sign; when I activated one, I found out it was an Orcapult, and it fired my character way up and over and onto an 'enemy' wall where the Stuff was Going On. It was PVE stuff mind you, but thats a great way to start a game, as a level 1 newbie. Running round, shot through the air, and into the action. Nice. Of course I was confused now, didn't know where I was or barely how to play, and surrounded by enemies... but the UI is like WoW, so I was able to take them down pretty easily.

A note on zones; you start, as in WoW, in a zone where you can turn on or off that you can be attacked by other real (enemy) players. ie: By default you cannot be PVP killed (ganked!). Naturally I turned the "please gank me" flag on right away. Bring it! So the newbie area is optional PVP, and some areas are always PVP. And some quests will take you from optional PVP to always PVP and require you to nail the enemy, if you take those quests. Slick. But if you're not a PVP person, you'll be fine I think.

Questing, leveling, experience.. PVE, or PVP? Achievements?

In WoW, you will do your levelling in PVE -- either world quests, or dungeon quests and romps. Classic, refined and addicive.. but tired and nolonger new. Thats fine, classic makes it always good.. but you can burn out on this stuff. And for me, I like to PVP (player versus player) a lot more than hunt down squirrels to kill. It is important to have choices, and in WAR they've done a great job of it.

You have the usual PVE world quests; you also have Tome quests, which are like achievements (the Tome itself is like a help guide, with details about everything you've seen or done or have to do, and logging things you've completed and so on.) You have hybrid quests where you do world quest things, but also have to engage the PVP enemy; you have PVE "public quests" which are like scripted events that repeat in certain areas of the map, so as you stumble across them you get swept up in a mini-boss event with everyone else (and NPCs) in the area. And you have PVP ("RVR", realm versus realm) quests and achievements.

Its rather a lot to take in when you first sign it, but after walking around it sinks in. What they've managed is to offer a PVE levelling system, a PVP levelling system, and a hybrid; you can mix and match. From what I've read, you can level up from start to finish all the way on PVP if you like, or you can PVE it, or whatever. Nice.

From my limited experience, it seems to have potential. Note than my character is very low level so I've only just barely scratched the surface, and I know things get bigger as you level up. The PVP at low level is essentially capture several flags and hold them material, but later it gets bigger and better. Thats okay.

I mean, I did a couple PVE quests right off, since those quest-givers were obvious and right there; go kill 2 of this, collect 2 of that, and go meet this other fella; okay, but I'm sort of bored of that.. did that a few years ago with WoW. But as I wandered around I got some small experience from opening up new areas.. cool; I got some experience for doing a few quests and actions - achievements; cool; wandered into an area and it turned out to be a public quest, and got to do a multi-wave mini-boss event, with experience all along the way. Cool! And lastly, I stumbled across the battle-master who signed me up to the PVP minigame for newbies; and there too was experience, when you kill players, or support others doing so; achievements came up as I got a series of critical hits in a row or did this or thats. And big big experience form the PVP minigame. I mean, it was by far the most experience that my character picked up, and I got a couple levels there. From a few 'battlegrounds' in WoW speak.

Nice. Thats what I'm talking about.

Naturally I didn't try crafting or auctioning on the market or anything else; was only a couple hours. But from what I can see..

It's a lot like WoW; thats a let down on the one hand, but it does make it 'easy' to start into

They've added a lot that makes the EQ/WoW formula better. Theres more action faster, you can get into the 'war' easily, and the PVP minigames are right there. Theres a little world PVP if you dig for it right away, but that comes a bit later.

Overall I think they really have a chance with this one. I'm just not sure if I'm ready for another auto-attack game, but I'm definately going to give it a shot.

n008 - forgive me ;)

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / pc / mmorpg ] [link] [Comments]

Gaming: Techradar interviews me about homebrew and commercial game development on the upcoming GP2X Wiz
Thu, 04 Sep 2008

Short news piece
Full interview

Looks like a number of things were editted out (which is fine, I ramble a lot), but I had hoped one comment would slip through; I'll paste it verbatim here. (Maybe down the road I will paste the whole of the interview, but this is for them so they can have it for awhile before I post anything.) 

# 5. A lot of people would suggest
# that the GP2X:Wiz will once again be a console very popular with those
# who use emulators or pirate games, and won't actually be interested in
# a dedicated software base. How would you respond to such a statement?

        I must nit on your question; I wouldn't suggest that previous GPH
machines have been popular with those who pirate games; emulation and
homebrew yes, but piracy of published GP titles has always been _Very_
frowned upon in the community; mentioning it will get you banned from the
various websites, and discussing even how to crack the DRM on GP32 cards
was a hushhush secret affair so the 'newbs' wouldn't catch wind of it. I
expect the same for Wiz games -- with such a tight community the publc is
protective of their developers, and knows they and GPH live or die on the
economy of it all.

        If you're suggesting emulation itself thrives on pirating games
then I can only say that they are not one and the same -- ask me another
day if you'd like my essay on it but suffice to say you can enjoy
emulation to a large extent very much without breaking any laws.

        Anyway, ranting aside --

Youch, looks like my fear for this came to life - the piece got picked up (which is good) on other sites and affiliates, but for some the spirit got lost; when boiling down many of the words it has gotten turned into a "Jeff thinks its a failure" piece. That isn't what I had intended at all - its a homebrew machine - its not going to take on the PSP and probably isn't meant to. they're working up for that fight, but this isn't the time. Its like saying a bicycle isn't going to take on a car... we know that. Its fine and it doesn't suggest bicycles suck. *sigh* See, I did say.. 

        The Wiz will be enormously popular for emulation and homebrew
fans, and I expect people will buy a title or two of commercialware if it
is priced well, and is priced to the quality. Prices have been climbing in
gaming arenas, but as we can see with Apple's iTunes App Store .. keeping
prices modest can really boost the numbers.  Now, remember there are
multiple sides to economics -- on the one, you want to make people smile,
and enjoy your title, and keeping prices low does that.. and gets the
title out to more hands for more smiles. But accountants will be quick to
point out that if you half the price and sell 2.5 the quantity, you still
are ahead.. so karma, and profits. The trick is finding the balance.

        So I do believe there is a market, but I don't expect its a huge
one.

        I've never seen statistics for sales for the previous GPH
machines, but from the forums we do see people buying the games; and if no
one bought any, Play Asia and so on wouldn't have kept stocking them
right?

Another piece that got cut out; I know its a really lame analogy, but its my lame analogy. I've used it in a dozen interviews over the years, and it always gets cut. They know it sucks, but damnit, my quest on earth is to have someone publish my lame analogies :) 

        For a decade I've been telling people my theory -- if you go to
the supermarket and look in the butter aisle you'll see a dozen brands of
butter; sure, most people buy the top 3 brands, but theres room for a
dozen. Getting into the top tier is exponentially hard, but getting on the
shelf at all.. thats doable; hard, but doable. Theres no shame in being
#10 out of a hundred products, as #10 gets on the shelf. Some might call
it bottom feeding, but those of us working our tails to the bone 80 hours
a week like starving musicians - just to get onto the tiniest edge of a
shelf against the big guys.. we call it survival, fighting the good fight.

        This is how Quake mod teams suddenly end up being game developers
themselves; ten years of bottom feeding and finally getting their break.

        GPH was a nobody with the GP32, and they're getting more known
with their increased Linux support on the GP2X series; they're still a
nobody, but they're less a nobody. Slashdot posts about them now, but
thats a logn way from pretending Sony will take notice. (I don't know how
big a name they are in Korea. Perhaps I am woefully unaware!)

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PSP: Why 'mod' (reflash with customer/hacked firmware) your PSP?
Tue, 15 Jul 2008

This comes up on occasion, so I thought I might put a reply here rather than in private; doubly so since I've always pushed for folks to consider ethical and legal implications of their actions and have probably ranted on it before. (ie: As software developers, I believe we must be careful to do the Right Thing, since the implications of our work could cause much aggravation or annoyance. This is why it should always default to 'No' to the question 'Do you wish to format your hard drive?' More, it comes up with increasing frequency in todays busy business world and sometimes we have to stand up for the user and consumer, right?)

Anyway, for purposes of this discussion, 'modding' refers to simply reflashing your PSP game consoles firmware.. something Sony will ask you to do all the time, as they publish updates. The trick is, you can reflash it with Sony's official firmwares, or the more questionable firmware 'mods' you can download online.

First.. why would you do it, knowing there is some risk you might do it wrong and 'brick' (kill) your device?

(Note that nowadays there is little risk; even if 'bricked', you can usually unbrick your device trivially.)

There are more things as well, but that should cover why most people do it. I'm not going to go into how, as it can be easy or a right pain depending on your skill set, if you know someone who has done it, and so on. Ask me if you want some instruction and maybe I can sort it out for you but in general I worked out some methods for myself and do that. I don't really follow 'the scene' as it takes a lot of time, and 3/4 of the sceners are idiot kiddies :) (This is one thing I've commented on before.. when you get into some of these things for all the right reasons, you still have to be mindful that others are less kocher than yourself, like going to a seedier hotel.)

Anyway, all the above is just sillyness.. I really only wanted to pass a few notes to a friend, which would be:

So all this verbiage above serves merely to confuse anyone reading. But there you go.

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Retro: EAMON, one of the earliest CRPGs
Fri, 11 Jul 2008

The term CRPG refers to Computer-based Role Playing Games, such as the current Oblivion, but tracing back through Eye of the Beholder and back to Temple of Apshai and so on. The earliest examples were more text based due to their mainframe origins, and later the slow transmission rates of modems. Enter EAMON .. I've not done any history lookups here but its going back to the Apple 2 days, and I experienced it on the almighty Atari ST .. so back around 1987 or so I'd guess I fiddled with the system.

As fans of "Choose Your Own Adventure" style books (Steve Jackson ftw!), my brother was an aspiring adventure author at the time, putting together little adventure novellas on pads of paper. (You number each page, and at the end of a given page you have options that give you page numbers to turn to should you take that action. The pages are randomized to make it hard to guess where a given series of actoins may lead. Ultimately there are numerous plot endings, but usually more than a few times your character gets killed along the way, forcing you to re-start. Fun stuff.) I remember going through the Public Domain archives of local groups, and through BBS file listings all over the province (racking up huge bills all the time through long distnace charges), trying to find (well, to be honest, pirated games) some adventure authoring tools for him. There were a few systems, including EAMON, but they were just too complicated for us. Still, I remember playing a few EAMON games.

Well, t'other day I stumbled across EAMON Deluxe, a port of the EAMON system to DOS a decade back. The beauty of this is that you can still run it today on your modern PC (and hopefully someday he'll release the source so that it can be brought to Mac, Linux and so forth.) You could always fire up an emulator (Atari ST, Apple 2, C64 and so on) and play the games there but this makes things pretty easy.

Further, the lad has pulled all the many EAMON adventures together into a big archive, including user supplied reviews of the adventures. Now, I should note that EAMON was not a game.. it was a system, supplied with a few simple text adventure games. But the author supplied tools to make your own adventures and many did.. so there are literally hundreds of additional goofy little text adventures. (These are of different style than the pure "IF" Interactive Fiction games I've gone on about before; those are pure adventure games with no dice rolling, no skills per se and include such classics as Zork or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. EAMON is one of the first CRPGs, in that you play a character who increases in powers and gold and gear and so on over playtime, and also is a less lofty academic pursuit; the EAMON gamelets are not novellas in adventure form, but early examples of kill-and-loot games.) Fun for short bursts, which hits a certain spot in my heart.

One facet of the system I admire is this .. you have a character and you pick an adventure to play through; the character persists between adventure gamelets.. so while you might be in a fantasy gamelet (the majority) one time, the next could be sci-fi. The EAMON system defines the system, and suggests certain damage levels.. so while a new player might have 20 hit points before dieing, a slight damage hit is 1 damage, while a heavier stroke is 2 or 3 points, say. So you take your character including gear game to game and grow him over the lifespan, regardless of the actual adventure the character is in.

That is pretty ahead of its time.

Anyway, if you want to try a quck text hack and slash game, that plays and feels like a light text adventure, and definately hardcore retro.. EAMON could be just the thing.

I may just have to look around for some source.. porting this to a handheld could rock my socks :)

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Gaming: Age of Conan MMORPG
Fri, 27 Jun 2008

Updated end of month; see below

(Aside, I'm working on a new, extra crappy simple blogging system. Fun stuff for a couple hours.)

World of Warcraft pretty much took over the "MMORPG" (multiplayer life-destroying role playing games) market, with millions of players (literally.) Thankfully other companies have attempted to get into the market as well, with most being destroyed in the process.. but competition is good. Funcom's Age of Conan is the new darling on the block, the one that will possibly dent WoW a trifle (not likely can anything dethrone WoW besides apathy which will come in time, but if any game is to get on the radar it will be AoC, or perhaps the upcoming Warhammer Online.)

AoC does a number of things right, and a whole lot of things wrong.. but in this particular market that is more the norm; the UI needs work, there are lots of bugs, etc and so on but it will evolve over time, if the players give it that much rope.. and with the voume of units sold (already a million IIRC) then it should have the momentum to carry on for awhile. Good.. competition is good, and they at least are innovating in a few ways (not many, but a few.. enough to keep things fun. Good job Funcom!)

See more ...

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Gaming: When given a moment.. what to do?
Mon, 21 Jan 2008

I must admit that I've always been a gamer wannabe. I mean, as a kid growing up I was heavy into tabletop wargames: board games like Risk, Axis and Allies and Supremacy and so on, or wargames such as Battletech. Even throw in some AD&D and Rolemaster for good measure, to help establish my geek cred. Later as I got more into coding the real game began.. well, to be creating games, and far too many BBSes, and games for BBSes.

I pretty much skipped the Super Nintendo and Genesis years and didn't really game much except for a few classics on the Atari ST and early PC... Phantasie, Sim City, Civilization, and Wizardry.. but really, as Tuxedo was heard to say so many moons ago.. "the only real game you need is gcc." (Nerd in-joke of the year.) I'd extend that to be any compiler I could buy or steal, since I was basicly hooked like a junkie on honey. And any SSI or Westwood Associates game. Anyway, I'll stop ubergeeking any second now.

The last few years I've definately indulged here and there, but as always basicly spent most of my time coding.. business applications, backends, middleware, and of course handhelds and games. I've always said I'm a great fan of gaming in the same way a football fan is a fan of that sport. Read the news, follow whats going on, and eat a lot of popcorn, occasionally playing the real thing and getting creamed by the pros.

So I buy lots of games, play them for a night or two, and move onto the next thing.. more coding, or something. Anyway. I like to want to play games but never did actually played them much.. just perpetually had a long list of 'if I only had a few more minutes I'd fire that up and relax.'

Nowadays, I desparately need to relax a little :) But when I do get a few minutes, or even an hour or two (expecting to be interupted a few times therein).. a bit of panic happens. What to do now? A year ago I had my evenings planned.. but now.. uh, what? I'm not used to this 'free time' thing I've heard about..

Other beings are human and chose this moment to watch pay per view movies with their spouse; I try, but sometimes I've just got the itch.. the need to hunt my prey on the battlefield. I should've watched Spiderman 3 with my wife the other night, but I just had to kill some elves. *shrug* Sometimes I'm only half human.

Anyway, that all said .. I still don't have very much time, but the baby does sleep a little bit now (only till 11 or 12, so as to keep us up all night but mercifully she's decided we're allowed to catch a bit of TV before we pretend to retire for the night.) So I've been spending some late night time (theres a lot of that) trying to sort out .. if I was to game, for an hour or two, or maybe just 10 minutes, what should I play?

As a huge retro fan, thats a tough question since its across the breadth of gaming, and not just the last year like most normal schmucks. But at least for this discussion we can narrow to halfway recent titles as I've already installed some retro on my devices.. Dungeon Master 1 and 2, Eye of the Beholder series, Phantasie 2 and 3, Wizardry 7 and 8. I'm good on that count.

For very short matches I can pull out a handheld (as a handheld dev, I have a bunch) so I can fire up Field Commander or Jeanne d'Arc on the PSP, or maybe Ratchet and Clank or something. I'd like to copy over some Battlestar Galactica, or Dr. Who, or My Name is Earl (despite the scientology ties) or this new Terminator TV series. So handhelds and short bursts are covered. This then leaves thoughts for if I have more than a few minutes..

Strategy games; going back to my wargaming youth, I've been a LONG term fan of the Civilization series (such as Civ IV) and other similar games.. Galactic Civilization II (not related to just-Civ) is very good. Going back a few years, the Panzer General or Master of Magic games all good too. Lots of good strategy games out there. (I don't count RTS' like Starcraft strategy at all, but they're good in their own way.. just too fast for these bones nowadays :) I really want to keep my Civ IV love going, but I think I cannot stomach the long games .. when each match takes 10 or 20 hours, thats just more than I can afford.. it'd take me months for each match.

Action; Over the year I did manage to squeeze in a couple must-plays such as Portal and Halflife 2's expansion packs. At 5-6 hours each they only took me a couple months to handle each one (*sigh*), but great times. As such maybe I should keep going into Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty 4.. fantastic looking and playing, and lots of action. Pretty tempting there, but definately need a good block of time (by which I mean an hour or two) for these. Definately on the table still. Maybe Thief III .. stealth games usually let you hide your character and screw off in real life for awhile so thats pretty handy nowadays, and really.. stealth games are not about the action, but about the puzzling -- action is just one of the tools where the player manipulates the world to a useful state. Good times.

I've got a UMPC now through one of my dev channels .. a small PC. Not a PDA per se, since it doesn't run a custom OS like PDAs do.. it runs honest to god full OSes, so can run old games. Not modern ones, but games up through a few years ago might run on it, and still be portable and quiet.. so much so as to be playable while holding a sleeping baby. Win! So this brings in the 3+ year old games... not retro per se, but getting there. Perhaps I need to look into Icewind Dale, try to finish Baldurs Gate, or fire up Neverwinter Nights. Or maybe MAX, Mechanized Assault and Explore. Hmm... so many options.

I'll figure something out. But as you can see.. its more about the choices than the playing. Thats my curse. Why play when you can code, or think about playing?

Course, even just installing a game onto a UMPC (with no optical drive), and running it without its protection freaking out, is a chore. Thats a game, too.

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