Resurrected Entertainment

My Book Library

February 13, 2013

I like to read software development texts when I have the time, and over time, I have developed a sizeable game and graphics programming library. I also have a below average capacity to remember important details, although I am usually fairly good at remembering the big picture. Because of this, I often need to return to a text when I am involved in developing a new algorithm or researching information on existing topics. I have long desired a means by which I can add my books to a software library, and then have that library automatically index all of my books based on topical reference points.

When an author creates an index for their book, it is usually a tedious process of reading through the manuscript and finding the keywords and concepts they want to index, and then pouring over the manuscript looking for instances of those keywords and recording page numbers and related topics; there is software which can help with keyword indexing, but concepts are a little more tricky to isolate and cross reference. In either case, the result of all of this pain-staking labour is an index which should prove useful to the reader.

I want to take it a step further and take those indexes and make them searchable electronically along with extra-metadata, so that if I am researching a topic like collision detection, for instance, I can see which books in my library talk about it (and possibly the number of pages dedicated to the topic), along with a paragraph surrounding each hit to provide some context. Google Books is starting to provide such a service, but it’s mostly centred around indexing the brief cover summary and then offering related books for sale based on what it found. At the bare minimum, this service would require the electronic versions of the books which are much more prevalent these days but many authors or publishers do not want to share with Google. Do you know of a service which does a better job than Google Books?

Police Quest 3

January 16, 2013

“Cannot initialize audio hardware”

If you get an error message like the one above in Police Quest 3, or in some other Sierra games, then it may be due to your processor being a little too fast for its own good. On my retro box, the Pentium class processor was executing things a little too quickly, so much so that the game could not initialize the sound hardware properly. The solution was to slow it down by disabling the hardware turbo mode or running software like “PENTSLOW.EXE” which disables advanced processor features and makes the processor run more like an i486.

Vectrex Emulator: ParaJVE

April 26, 2012

This is a really sweet emulator from an author who seems to love the Vectrex experience. He even went through the trouble to add in the typical electrical noise you hear coming from the speaker — that feature can be disabled, if desired. Not too shabby for the Vectrex fans out there.

Baldur’s Gate Mystery

March 15, 2012

This could be just another Internet hoax created by someone with a few skills in Photoshop, but the domain “baldursgate.com” has popped up with a count down timer. If you scan through the source code for the web page there are some clues hidden within. Searching around brought up nothing concrete, including from the company who now owns the rights. Oooh baby, very exciting!

Update: It seems Atari, Wizards of the Coast, and Overhaul games are enhancing this timeless classic. You can bet there will be updates to the Infinity Engine, which I have yet to determine if this is a good thing (I love that engine). But a boost in resolution and definition would be very welcome, especially when our 27″ monitor arrives…

PSX: Harmful Park Schmup

December 20, 2011

Harmful ParkThe Japanese have a real talent for taking a typical game scenario and deforming it into something weird and unnatural but still make it fun to play. Harmful Park is one of those titles, and if you like shooters but are looking for something a little different, than it may be just the thing. This was released by a company called Sky Think Systems for the Sony Playstation. Basically, an evil scientist (doesn’t it feel like all scientists in games are evil?) has taken over an amusement park, and is charging families an obscene amount of money to use it, or something like that. One of the scientist’s ex-colleagues wants to stop him, but she is infirm (which means she is about 30 years old) and is incapable of action, so she recruits her two younger daughters who seem to have nothing better to do. Armed to the teeth with weapons like ice cream and delicious pies, they attempt to return the park to normalcy and do away with the evil scientists’ nefarious plot. The game environment may be a bit odd, but it’s a fun schmup and certainly steers away from the traditional formula.

Tototek PCE Pro 32MB Flash Cartridge

November 22, 2011

The device has a few quirks to it that you will soon come to enjoy; however, in order to make its hard love easier to bear I have come up with a nice list to follow if you are trying to use it:

1. Make sure the cable is IEEE 1284 compliant (the cartridge will report a size of zero, if the cable, or if any communication is disrupted between the cartridge and your computer).

2. I assigned the printer port to port 0x278 in the BIOS and in Windows; I also configured the port to use the EPP protocol v1.7.

3. I only use version 1.13 (1.3 depending on where you look) of the DreamWriter software.

4. You do not need the “pceboot.pce” file; ignore it, it’s for something else entirely.

5. When you select multiple ROMS for upload, the DreamWriter software will install a bootloader; however, it will install a Japanese version of it by default, instead of the U.S. version (assuming you are using a U.S. TurboGrafx system). Once you have chosen your ROMs (and have correctly set the U.S. region box for those Japanese games you want to play), you must select the “U.S. Region” checkbox in the lower left corner of the interface — this will ensure the right bits have been flipped on the Japanese ROM.

6. You must start the program after the USB power and printer cables have been connected; the switch labeled “SW” does not need to be “ON” for the upload to work; in fact, I have no idea what that switch does.

7. The program will never show you how much space is occupied on the cartridge (after a fresh execution), or which games have already been flashed, so don’t bother scratching your head. The DreamWriter software only knows how much space remains after writing a set of ROM files.

Launch birthdays for the *Sega 32X and **Nintendo DS!

November 21, 2011

* North American launch date in 1994 for the 32X
** North American launch date in 2004 for the Nintendo DS

The Sega 32X system was designed to breath new life into the aging MegaDrive and Genesis video game console, which was being ripped apart by Nintendo’s juggernaut the SNES. Sadly, it didn’t do so well and quickly evaporated from store shelves. Despite the poor reception, it’s still has a birthday, so make sure you play your favorite title tonight. It shouldn’t be too hard to pick one, given the limited selection of good titles for that platform. It’s probably for the best that we don’t mention the Sega CD either… well, despite my obvious misgivings about the system, I know it is near and dear to a more than a few people. So Sega fans, on this happy day, I salute you!

The Nintendo DS needs no introduction, since many of you have an incarnation of that device sitting in your house right now. With over 149 million units sold worldwide, I think it could be considered a success. Let’s do a little math, shall we?

149,000,000 x $150 + (149,000,000 x (6 * $40)) = $58,110,000,000

That’s an average cost of $150 dollars per unit, and each unit having an average of 6 games which sell for an average of $40 each. Let’s assume that 70% of that amount went to pay for everything from manufacturing, to licensing, to marketing and employee salaries. We’re still talking close to $20 billion in the clear.

So Nintendo Corporation, while you sit upon your mountain of money contemplating this special day, we the bottom dwellers of society raise our filthy hands in a formal salute!

Great site for TG-16 reviews!

Check out this site: http://www.turboviews.com/

He does a great job of reviewing titles. The videos are both information and entertaining to watch. This should definitely be parked under your review site of choice for TG-16 / Duo, and Super CD games.

Super Snapshot V5 and 64HDD

November 12, 2011

Just a note to say that 64HDD and the version of BASIC stored on the Super Snapshot V5 do not play well together. It should also be noted that my host machine is a 2.4 GHz CPU running DOS with no EMM386 drivers loaded; I am also not running the latest version of 64HDD. The symptom I was experiencing had to do with trying to load a D64 image, or more specifically trying to execute the following command:

LOAD “*”, 10, 1

The 64HDD software would beep a couple of times, and then the C64 would simply hang. It most likely has nothing to do with the specific command and everything to do with the timing between the virtualized drive and the C64 machine. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you where exactly the problem lies in either, since I am unable to debug the problem any further.

Thomson-Davis Editor (TDE)

November 6, 2011

TDE - PE of ChoiceThe Thomson-Davis Editor, or TDE, was the first programmer’s editor to ever grace my hard drive. A programmer’s editor (PE) can be somewhat different than a typical text editor used for typing up README files or other user-level documents. A good PE will usually have a large assortment of features which makes the job of editing source code a little easier. Ironically, these editors can be some of the most obtuse software installed on a desktop system. To use them effectively, you must memorize several obscure key combinations and commands. Once committed to memory, these commands can be very powerful, allowing you to perform several complex editing or searching operations.

As an aside, the usability goals for an editor within an IDE such as Borland C++, seem to be the exact opposite for the goals set out by the authors of many PEs. The editing within IDE is almost universally easy to use, while performing the same tasks within a PE requires practice and certain degree of research. Approaching this from the viewpoint of a novice looking into the dark world of a seasoned, and perhaps a little cynical UNIX-computer programmer, it would seem a little odd since the interface of an IDE can do so many different tasks (and thus have so many opportunities to botch things up), whereas a PE tends to be targeted to one task: editing source code. Surely, with fewer features, it must be easier to craft something which is even easier? It’s almost as if the author of a PE is trying to compensate for lack of development features by throwing in additional editing complexity. For example, how many standard forms of regular expression syntax does your PE support? If you answered anything other than “as many as I want since I can simply write a plug-in to support it,” then you’re not using the right editor.

I stumbled across TDE while browsing the download area for a local BBS. It included the source code for the program which was written in C, and it seemed to have a variety of interesting features; it certainly had more technical features than the QuickC editor I was using at the time. I guess I gravitated towards complexity at the time, and I quickly grew to love TDE and began modifying the source code to suit my needs. If I were to use the latest version of TDE today, I’m betting a lot of those hacked-in features would already be implemented.

The code for TDE was a great learning experience for me. It was organized fairly well so it made for relatively easy modifications and creative hacks. I lost the source code for my modified version during The Great Hard-drive Crash in the mid-1990’s. For some odd reason, I didn’t have a single back-up. It was particularly strange since most of my favourite projects were copied onto a floppy disk at some point. Frustratingly, I think I still have a working copy of the original 3.X code on disk! Anyway, the source code had excellent implementation details like fancy text and syntax handling, decorated windows, and reasonably tidy data structures. I don’t remember using any code from the editor in any future project, but I certainly took away a number of ideas. Doublely-linked lists may not seem like a big deal to me now, but I hadn’t read that many books at this point, so glimpses of real implementations using these data structures was very cool and inspiring. I found the windowing classes and structures particularly interesting since some of the windows were used for configuration, others for editing, and some for help. This was the first abstraction for a windowing system within an application I had run across. It was beautiful and gave me a lot of ideas for HoundDog – a future project which was used to track the contents of recordable media like floppies and CD-ROMs, so that I could find that one file or project quickly without needing to use those floppy labels.