Jetlag boy....

Yep, I've come up with a new super hero: Jetlag boy!!

As you may have guessed, I'm still too jet lagged to do anything, I was fine for most of today, and then once my bum hit the seat, my eye's closed and then it was 2 hours later! doh!

I was at the new Edinburgh International Games Festival today as I was taking part in a panel on getting into games. I've done this the last 3 years now and its pretty good fun even if its not very busy. I also went to have a look at the Dare to be Digial entry's which were on display and open to the public this year, and as usualy, they look pretty good for 10 weeks work. Some were of a very high standard, and some were struggling, which is normal. 10 weeks is a very short timeframe to do what they are trying, so they all do well getting anything done at all!

Anyway, I hope to be back to fighting ways as I'm back to work properly tomorrow, and then back to doing stuff at night as well; I hope.

I've been thinking more and more about making XeO3 a pretend cartridge game (that is, a self booting MMC/SD game). So that when you buy an MMC card reader, you also get XeO3 for it. This makes life interesting as theres no disk involved, and I have fast storage available.....but.... another part of me doesn't like that because not everyone plays on a real plus/4 which shrinks the market somewhat.

But, even if I do a normal version, I can still see me doing a special MMC version as well - for the C64 too, as it's just cool :)

SigGraph 2007, Day 5....

So, almost done.... Just a couple of hours left really, and then off to the shops. The show goes onto 6pm tonight, but theres nothing I really want to see after 3:30, so I'm gonna go do some last minute shopping.

Im in a Spore demo just nowm and it does look very polished, but at the end of the day, it does just look like a populous (or god sim) game. So for all their bluster they haven't really added much "game" stuff.

The problem with being at a graphics confrence, is I now want to go home and write raytracers and model some stuff in lightwave! Oh well.....Im sure this urge won't last.

SigGraph 2007, Day 4....

So, day 4..... one more to go. I now remember why we were itching to get home last year; its hard going. Until you've actually done something like this, you don't realise how hard it is to sit in a dark room for 5 days straight sitting listening to folk waffle on. Still, theres some good stuff being said, and I hope we get a chance to use some of it when we get back. Russ has been doing XeO3 stuff while sitting listening, but I find it pretty hard to code on the laptop, particually doing paths - which is what I have to do next.

I guess I could start to flesh out the front end a little and do the high scores and saving to disk etc., but I'd rather start doing the gameplay beta and start to get feedback on difficulty. I think thats the next big step for us - something playable and getting some feedback on how hard people think it is, that would help make the final one that bit better.

Still, I find it hard to think about this stuff while listening to guys go on about high end rendering on PC's and in movies. Oh well....I'll be back home on Saturday, so I can carry on with my own projects rather than vegging out over here.

The only good thing about being here is occasionally getting to shopping mall's.... but you dont really get a chance to do that very often.

SigGraph 2007, Day 2....

Well, after a really boring day yesterday with nothing of real interest, todays a little better so far - although not by much. Most of today's work has been shown in the past and they aren't really going into detail about things, but theres supposed to be an interesting paper tomorrow about taking photographs and making 3D models from them, so that could be good.

However, I hope things are about to pick up as the next talk is from the guys that did the need for speed and how they modeled the world there.... So could be good...

Later that day.... Mmm.. Not bad at all. Nothing new or ground breaking but was nicely presented.

SigGraph 2007, Day 1....

Started off with a raytraching course this morning, not quite as good as I thought it would be, and with 5 others here as well, not a lot of choice for skipping out into another one. oh well. This afternoon should be better as I'm going to a DirectX 10 course and the guys from Crysis are talking about stuff; and hopefully showing some video!

The Conference center is huge again, and it feels like you have to walk miles between talks, but it does mean you can stuff your face and walk it off!! :)

Arrived in San Diego

We've arrived after a fairly long trip of 15 hours, but we here safe and sound. Hotel seems nice, and we're not too far away from anything so could be fun! Trip was pretty good (as much as it could be!), the plane was reasonably empty so we had space to sreach out and the seats were actually far enough away for me to open the laptop!

Which brings me to XeO3. I managed to get the weapon upgrade more or less in, which means I can now kill a baddie group and pick up a new weapon. So really its just paths to be able to use them properly. The biggest problem with the pick ups is that I can't leave them on screen as I might need the sprite for baddies. This means I have to get it off screen quickly; kinda like the coins.

I'm not sure the 2 char bullets are working right either, they seem to hit things and do no damage sometimes.... I'll have to try and check that out... Working on a plane can be hard going though, its hard to concentrate 8 hours into a flight... Oh well, at least I got something done!

Plus4 SD/MMC

SO, I've spent much of the day soldering away, and I've almost got the MMC part connected up. It's hard going though, and to top it all I think my soldering iron needs a new tip - again. The more I do of this, the more I wish I had that milling machine so I could just make a new board! Soldering in the sockets etc. is nothing, but stripping and soldering the wires is a nightmare!

Any-hoo, once I've done the last few wires, I'll try the code I have for reading the card and see how close I got...chances are it'll need lots of tweeking to get it working right.

SD/MMC+Clockport Prototype

So here we go again....I've started the SD/MMC+Clockport interface. While it should be fairly simple, I've not connected a clockport before, and I need to decode the lines pretty much down to the byte this time; for both the clock port and the MMC interface. This means the board is pretty full so I won't be able to add the RAM to this test one,but if I was making a proper board, theres nothing saying I couldn't do it on that. While I couldn't see any real use for a RAM only interface, this one I can (with or without the extra RAM). Having an MMC card slot and a clockport on a card would be pretty cool, and allow all manner of C64 apps to be ported, along with allowing the +4 onto the Net - or simply better comms to the PC. But best of all really is that anything that someone makes for the C64's Clockport, would be usable on the Plus4 (with a little relocation - something +4 guys are pretty good at!).

Of course, if I added some RAM (128k,256k or 512k extra) it would mean that any clockport applications (like a TCP/IP stack or game) could make use of it, since you'd know everyone else running it would have the extra RAM as well. The only thing that worries me is the physical size of the interface. The C64 one is full of surface mount stuff - professionally done, but I guess this wouldn't be....

Oh well... first things first - lets get a working prototype and then worry about the rest of it!


Edit: Oh! And the little voltage regulator at the top, was just to see if I could solder one on without making a complete hash of it!

Getting orginised.

Yup, not been doing much.... A load of chips/parts have arrived so I've spent a couple of days sorting out my parts bin into some sort of order. I got fed up with not having the chips I needed/wanted, so I'm slowly trying to buy a few of everything (common chips at least), buit this means making some space for things.

I've also managed to source some pin headers for the clockport stuff, so Im going to start wiring up a SD/MMC+Clockport interface for the Plus4 next then I can start to have some REAL fun!!

I still need to finish doing the basic directory on the MMC, but that shouldn't be a big issue, and then loading a file should simply be a matter of getting the inital cluster from the directory entry, and reading it in.

I'm kinda looking forward to playing with the clockport the most, as it could mean some cool off the shelf toys for folk. The ethernet contoller looks the most fun, and I have the UDP slave source here to try out. Could be good!!!

I'm off to SigGraph in SanDiago next friday (3rd Aug), so I'll be back on XeO3 at that point, and I hope to get some stuff done on the plane again; but as usual it depends on how close the bloody seats in front are!

MMC Success!!

And here you go!! The ROOT directory in all its glory! I'm not parsing past the end of the 1st sector, but thats okay for now. I can now plug in any card (I have 3; 32Mb, 256Mb, 2GB - all FAT16) and I can display the ROOT directory of each of them. I guess the next thing to do is load a file from it..... or I could finish displaying the root directory, and sub directorys of course. But loading a file is pretty exciting stuff :)

I dont really want to get too far into it, as the main goal is to do a Plus4 version, not a C64 one. Although the code will be identical so its not wasted work.

Another big thanks to TNT for helping be get started with this....