My first game: Snake2K1 in Turbo Pascal

In Year 9 at Melbourne High School, the programming (Software Design, I think it was called) subject was Visual Basic 5 or 6, but the book the school has produced for it was based on VB 3 or 4, with screenshots from Win3.11 days (I think?). There were errors upon errors, which as a good student (going through awkward teenage years, who could do with the ego boost from being right) reported each mistake, correcting most of them. The subject was one short semester long, and the second semester students benefited from my fixes – the manual they received had a different colour cover signifying it had updated screenshots, and the code was correct. I enjoyed and dreaded these classes. I was a better programmer than any other in the class, but the subject bored me so much that my academic performance in the subject suffered.

Year 10 was an interesting year for me, both academically and personally. That year I had several weeks off school (or more importantly, off my feet) due to a rather sizable operation on my feet to fix (which it did) chronic ingrown toenails, and later in the year my chronic cough returned which ended the year for me. Before all of that happened however, the programming unit this year involved Turbo Pascal 6. While not the most powerful language, it was a fantastic teaching language. Our “group”/major assignment was to create a basic game. I use the term “group” loosely, as the guy I was partnered with played cards all class, such that I wrote all of the code (except the unit included from Reinout Raymakers).

My assignment was Snake2K+1 (yeah, fantastic title…), which I’ve recently rediscovered the source code/compiled exe.

It weighs in at about 500 lines of code (from memory it was nearly double the rest of the class which was made up mostly of hangman) and had more colours than the teacher said was possible (he said 256 colours was the limit of Turbo Pascal…mine can handle up to 32,000 colours).

Back in those days, Melbourne High ran entirely off floppy drives (despite having network share capability). When I finally decided to remove all floppy disk drives from the house, I went through and backed everything up onto hard drives. Despite doing that, I had hidden the source code, and it wasn’t until recently that I found it while backing up another computer to my wife’s laptop.

The next challenge was to get it to run under Vista, which I took a gamble on…and got it to work under DOSBox, albeit with major speed issues. I’ll look for a Turbo Pascal compiler so that I can get it running at a decent speed, but for now…

Download

Source Code & Executable

Don’t forget to use DOSBox to get it to run!

Dell Inspiron 1520 vs Asus G1S

Before our honeymoon, Chickz0r and I decided to buy her a laptop. It suits our lifestyle and medical needs, and if we got it before the honeymoon it meant we could play games (since I have an Asus G1S). Did I marry the right girl or what?

We decided on a Dell Inspiron 1520. They’re cheap, reasonable quality, and pack a lot of punch

* Both laptops are actually running Vista Ultimate (32bit version for now). I have licenses for this, so we downgraded the 1520 to save a dollar or two

On paper, the Dell laptop looks far superior value, and to some people this is certainly true. To me however, they are of about the same value.

My G1S was available before the 1520’s (both on paper, and terms of availability – Dell took awhile to actually ship any); and was imported from America (there are AU models now, but they weren’t available until 3->4 months afterwards); and is a "premium" laptop in the Asus lineup, compared to the ‘budget/workhorse’ line that Inspiron is to Dell, which means better build quality; thus the larger price. The AU model is available for ~$2300->2600 (I believe) today.

There are other niceties to the G1S, such as the OLED display above the keyboard. It is gimmicky, sure, but having a clock while in games is useful, or having WLM messages popup is handy. Another gimmick is a Lightscribe capable dvd-rw, but I’ve used it once or twice, and the end result is actually pretty nice.

On the less gimmicky front, the onboard sound is pretty good, and the addition of optical out (through the 3.5mm jack). Having eSATA will allow further expansion at decent performance when I fill this hard drive up (although Dell’s "counter" to this is to include a massive, relatively speaking, hard drive). Finally, while the Dell screen is pretty good, the G1S screen is the best I’ve seen on any laptop – colour and brightness wise (and that includes before I had the screen replaced due to a poor backlight!)

While I love my G1S, the 1520 is fantastic value. Huge (for laptop) HDD, a massive 4gb of ram, and very comparable specs to my G1S? It is just hard to say no. Throw in the ability to choose the colour of your laptop (and less "IM A l33t H4X0R" aesthetics of the G1S), and you’ve got a very ‘personal’ laptop.

They aren’t flawless, they both have varying problems. The 1520, for example, produces a high pitched noise through the headphone jack – however that was resolved when a tech came out and replaced the motherboard. My G1S had dull patches in the LCD panel (presumably inconsistent backlight?) as well an optical drive that sounded like it was preparing to destroy the world – thankfully both problems were solved by dropping my laptop back into Asus’ repair centre in Melbourne. They also both share the heat and noise issues associated with having the 8600M GT and 2.2ghz, which is solved (to some degree) by using an iXoft (or equivalent cooling device).

I’d be hard pressed to recommend one over the other. Those willing to pay the premium for a "more rounded" laptop, definitely go for the G1S, or those looking for best bang for buck, go for the Dell XPS 1530; its price has now dropped to about the 1520’s price.

Movie month

This post contains some spoilers (mainly about The Golden Compass), so if you intend to see these movies, it may be advisable to skip past this post.

This month my wife and I saw many films, and I’ll give a quick review on each of the ones we saw at the cinema. We’ve watched many more on TV/DVD, but those are less appropriately timed I guess.

Beowulf (3D)

The majority of movies we saw were at Village Jam Factory in South Yarra, who have one dedicated theatre to 3D films (RealD). I’ve been there before for Meet the Robbinsons, and when we saw any movie was also screening in 3D, we just had to go along to that. You get corny glasses to wear, but 3D films are just so much fun with the increased immersion.

Beowulf was presented in RealD, and to me enhanced the immersion into the story/movie, and made it all that much more enjoyable.

I could detail the story of Beowulf, but you’d be better to read the Wikipedia article on it.

Beowulf was definitely movie of the month, and is well worth seeing. IMAX apparently have it in 3D at their massive cinemas, or its in 3D in a few select cinemas, or be boring at see it in 2D.

Death at a Funeral

Death at a Funeral was an odd movie. It took awhile to get into, doesn’t really go anywhere (the movies timeframe is one day). I quiet enjoyed the film while we were watching it, but afterwards didn’t have the same sense of enjoyment as I do with other movies (such as Beowulf or Hitman), such as replaying scenes in my head or discussing the movie with others.

It’s not to say the acting, humour or story were poor, I guess the format of the movie just didn’t leave a lasting impression on me.

Hitman

Based on the game series by the same name, I can’t say I was expecting much of a movie, but being the geek I am I just had to go and watch it. To my surprise, it actually wasn’t a horrible movie. The plot follows the hitman Agent 47 (just as the games do), and his struggle to come to terms with the betrayal of ‘The Company’ that employed him. He sets out to finish the hit, but encounters a woman who changes everything.

The ending, in-fact the entire story, isn’t exactly hard to guess after the first five or so minutes, but it was nice to watch a movie that wasn’t trying to be much more than an action movie.

Bee Movie

Bee Movie was surprisingly good. The trailers certainly made it look like yet-another-3d-film-that-has-cutesy-characters, and while the film did play that card on more than a few occasions, it was still funny enough that my wife and I enjoyed it. If you go in looking for a riveting story, you’ll be disappointed but perhaps not too badly – it is the one line jokes that made it enjoyable.

The story goes one young bee has just finished his intensive 9 days through education and is getting ready to choose the one job he’ll be stuck in for the rest of his life. He leaves the Hive with the Pollen Jocks, gets caught in the rain, but is saved by a human. He thanks her by breaking one of the Bee Laws: don’t talk to humans.

The Golden Compass

For me, this was easily the worst movie of the month. While it may have had a fairly highly acclaimed cast (Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Ian McKellen, Sam Elliott and Christopher Lee), the (what I feel is weak, having only watched the movie) story combined with cramming it into a short (113 minutes) film did not give a chance for any acting talent to come out at all. This is often a problem of movie adaptations of novels – its just too hard to get everything into 2 hours without diluting the story, events, and sense of time (which is why more successful book/movie adaptations opt for 3 hours…)

Every advertisement for it I saw suggested that the movie was aimed at children, and for a large section of the movie you could very well be mistaken for thinking that. It isn’t until a jaw is ripped off one of the Ice Bears that it starts to become much “darker”. It is undoubtably riding the “Harry Potter made fantasy cool for kids” wave, but that sort of reasonably graphic violence could disturb at least some of the children who were in the cinema with us.

The story seems to resemble (at least in the first part of the trilogy) much of the Star Wars story. The Magisterium (The Empire) is bent on controlling the world with any means possible, while a bunch of Gyptians (The Rebels) defy them and rescue Lyra (Luke + Leia Skywalker combined). Lyra can operate the last Golden Compass (The Force), and near the end, Mrs Coultard (Vader), an employee of the Magisterium declares the Golden Compass is actually hers, and that she is Lyra’s mother.

In short, unless you’ve read the book, skip this movie. It’s story, acting, and effects are all a bit nothingish. It’s not absolutely terrible, edging out daytime television, but it certainly isn’t stimulating.

No net makes Paul go somethingsomething…

While the apartment we have moved into is fantastic, the lack of a net connection isn’t so great. Both of us are going crazy, its just simple things like “What’s the number for the dentist?” that trip us up. At least today (19/12) we got a phonebook from the post office.

The Good

• The exchange is only 500m away
• The apartment/complex is capable of ADSL
• There are several ISP’s in the exchange with their own DSLAM for ADSL2/+

The Bad

• Optus DSLAM is out of ports, meaning no Exetel, Netspace, or a few others that had good value plans (we were knocked back already)
• Only ADSL2+ providers in the area are out of our price range/poor value/money.
• This means..ugh..line rental

The Ugly (Reality)

• We’ll go for 1.5mbit connection through Exetel (TELJ plan). It has a good amount of quota, for a pretty low price.
• Natalie had been already been using that plan at her parents place, so we’ll just move locations….there is a $100 ‘moving-inside-contract’ fee if we do it sooner than 25/12 (Christmas day), so we’re toughing it out without the ‘net.

This post was uploaded from the the inlaws ADSL

More Cakes! Sonic and Astroboy

A few weeks ago, my soon-to-be-brothers-in-law (twins) celebrated their 27th birthday, with family and friends. Things were getting a bit hectic, so I volunteered to make the birthday cakes. Using the same recipe as my engagement party cake for the base, I went about constructing one for each of them, crafted as some of their favourite characters from their childhood – Sonic and Astroboy. The icing was a combination of butter-cream icing, and royal icing (eyes). The fancy effect on the butter-cream icing was achieved by curdling the icing first.

There really isn’t much to report, but I do have the precious photos, as I’m rather proud of my work.

Sonic for Michael…

…Astroboy for Aaron

I tried to be a blogger…

I tried to be a better blogger, I really did, but it seems every time I start getting into the routine of regular posting, something in reality steps up to delay or deter me. This time around, Chickz0r came down with a very serious bout of gastro, which had her hospitalised for a few hours. She’s okay, but she still hasn’t recovered completely. Given our wedding is looming, things have got a bit hectic because of this.

On the plus side, I’ve had a bit of time to do some research while I watch her sleep, so I do have a few sizable blog posts coming up, covering WCF, WPF, my HTPC case and a new blog theme.

Things should return to normal sometime next week, so I might once again attempt to be a regular blogger!

Painful coding

Do you know its really hard to code anything while you are in pain?
A lot of ‘geeks’ suffer from RSI at some stage, others just deal with debugging mutlithreaded programs. Me? I deal with Chronic Headaches. All day, every day.

At the moment I’m trying to setup a debugging enviroment so I can step through a different POP Library to see how I can access the message body effectivly.
It isn’t a hard task by any means, but with headaches, everything is ‘blocked’. It’s like UAC – only the way Apple describe it in the ‘I’m a PC and I’m a Mac‘ ads.

For example, I know I need to:

• go to my Start Menu
• fire up Visual Studio Orcas
• make a New Project
• Add the DLL’s for the POP Library
• Add the bits of code I need for the actual POP connection

But when I actually go to do that, this is what happens:

• Go to the Start Menu
• Remember I need to fire up an application…but…what application was it?
• Oh, thats right, VS, thats fired up now…great, cannot for the life of me find the New Project button…I mean, I’m looking at File -> New, but there’….oh, there it is.
• Project type? Crap, I know this one, why isn’t it jumping out at me…WPF App, that’ll do.
• DLL’s….dammit, I know I downloaded them somewhere…

and so on and so forth.

Thats all before I get to the actual applicationg programming part, where I have to think about algorithms and whatnot. That’s becoming increasingly difficult to do as I live with headaches. Maybe I should give up programming and go into media, since people have been calling me a ‘graphics artist’ lately anyway…

Sigh, this bites, I’m going to lay down.

Engagement Party: Costume (Cardwave)

As mentioned, our (chickz0r + me) engagement party was a costume party with the theme ‘something from your childhood’.

As most geeks my age would agree, Transformers rock. The choice was fairly easy.

So, I present, Cardwave:

(Again, using Will’s photos rather than my own, as Chickz0r has the decent camera ;))

Cardwave is my tribute to the Decepticon Soundwave.

Due to time constraints, I didn’t get to finish Cardwave.
Some of the notable peices that are missing are anything below the waist (the ‘Transformer’ belt they all seem to have – which I’ve dubbed ‘Crotchular Protection, Legs), as well as completed painting – the day before the party I ran out of paint (at ~9pm), and given the party was at midday, I didn’t fancy the fumes of spraypainting it on the day.
Cardwave is also lacking his shoulder canon (that got left at home, I didn’t figure out a good way to attach it), and eject button (its…sort of there, just really crappy).
The hands are also done really badly – they’re all fleshy!
The ‘face guard’ part of the helmet also isn’t correctly trimemd, which resulted in the helmet trying to pop itself off half the time (which was rather uncomfortable)

Construction

Materials

• Cardboard. Lots and lots of cardboard (free)
• 1mm thick Sheet Styrene (High Impact PolyStyrene, AKA H.I.P.S.) which goes under the name ‘Plasticard’ in some parts of the world. ($30 for 2.4m x 1.4m x 1mm)
• Hot glue ($5 for the gun, $9 for a bazillion glue sticks)
• Masking tape. Way too much masking tape (~$5 for three rolls)
• Paper mache (Discarded news papers + ~$5 worth of PVA Glue)
• Spraypaint (Purple $7, Blue $7 , Silver $3, Yellow $3. )
• Goggles. (50c from Mitre 10)
• Perspex Sheet (Front of the ‘tape deck’. Found it under the house, so ‘free’)

Construction Process

I didn’t really know where to start from, or how to go about constructing a cardboard costume, so I went for the age old technique of ’sticking stuff together and seeing how it looks’.
For the most part it worked well, but it did require an excessive amount of test fitting. The worst case of this was when I was home alone, tried it on after putting the shoulders and sides on, then found myself stuck – unable to move further in or out of the costume. In the end I managed to pickup a knife sitting on my desk and I cut arm holes in the side of the costume, but that was a scary time.

Once the cardboard was tapped together, I was a little worried about the structural integrity of the joints, as well as any potential ripping off of the masking tape as I put on/took off the costume. I decided to do a layer or two of paper mache to the insides of the joints. This gave me the benefit of extra ‘joining’ strength, as well as making the inside of the costume relativlty smooth, meaning it didn’t catch on my clothing.

The helmet was constructed in several phases.
First was the very basic “upside down U” look, where two peices of cardboard covered my ears, and curve was added at the top.

Getting some detail!

Detail was next, so Soundwaves two ‘ears’ were added. They joined fairly easily onto the existing ‘ears’ that I had, as well as the rest of the frame. One of the peices of cardboard I used was a bit thicker and heavier than the rest on the frame, so that had to be ripped off and replaced so things were a bit more symmetrical.

Next I had to figure out a way to make the face guard easily removable. In the end I made a ’sliding’ system, which locked into some cardboard grooves I created in the helmet.

At this stage, I will admit, I was little worried. The costume didn’t look ‘great’. It looked like your regular cardboard costume (ie, crap). However, after that came styrene. I’ve never worked with styrene before, so like the rest of this adventure, it was a bit of guess work. The end result, I feel, was well worth the ‘risk’. The styrene finish looked fantastic.

At first, I tried creating ’sleves’ if you will, that slid over the existing cardboard sections, then just gluing that down. Unfortunately, the cardboard wasn’t cut well, some was different thickness, some joints required extra tape, etc…and it would have been too much effort to get it all done like that.
Instead, I ended up cutting squares of styrene, and just gluing it on with a glue gun. If you’re working with anything thinner than 1mm styrene, be careful what glue gun you use. Mine is a 65w Arlec Glue Gun. Not fantastic quality, but it really heats up the glue….so much so that the styrene melted somewhat, but more importantly, nearly burnt my fingers through the styrene.

What was done before I left…

Some of the cutout styrene was painted already, some wasn’t. Since I was running out of time, I glued on what I could, then departed for Chickz0rs place.

Ryan rocked up the night before with my costume, styrene, paints and some tools.
I got to work and painted and cut out what else I could, painted with what little paint I had left, and went to the party the next day.

Next time..

Next time (if ever!) I do a costume like this, I’ll get all the cardboard first, and cut it into manageable sizes, rather than just cutting up various size boxes along the way. The biggest change I’d make would be to get all the same thickness/strength cardboard; that would save so much time/effort.

I love the effect the styrene gives, so I’d use that again, but much thinner. 1mm may seem tiny, but its a pain in the rear end to cut quickly.
0.25mm would be my best guess at a good thickness to use.
I guess if you didn’t want to use cardboard at all, 1mm (or even 1.5->2mm) thick stuff would be strong enough to make the entire costume out of. Adhering it (so that its actually strong enough to stand up to a bit of pressure) may be a problem though.

Finally, I’d actually draw the thing up/measure it to my body properly. The helmet (which was done nearly last) was so easy/quick to do because I had the measurements…and funnily enough, it worked first time.

‘Till all is one!

I will finish Cardwave, I’ll buy more paint, I’ll file down the corners, I’ll glue on more Styrene, and I’ll even make some legs for him.
When thats done, I’ll get many more photos (although, the quality of Will’s EOS20D really shows up compared to our S3 IS. I’ll just try get good lighting..)

Soundwave Superior, All other costumes Inferior

Engagement Party: Awesome

I r teh Queen of teh World, *hick* 

The engagement party was a blast. Chickz0r and I were (still are) exhausted, but we had a lot of fun.A special thanks to all those who worked behind the scenes to make this a possibility (decoration, food prep and serving, etc)

Will got some fantastic shots from the day. If you look at the photos, you may remember back to a previous post where I showed off the invitations to the party.
It was a costume party.
The turn out was actually better than I expected, so that was great to see, but apart from just a great turn out of people, many of those who came along were dressed up, which was even more suprising, yet fantastic to see!

I came as Soundwave (Transformers), and Chickz0r came as a Valkrie (Norse mythology). Her costume looked fantastic, and it was only put ‘all together’ at the very last moment (only one trial run…the engagement party!). Unfortunately, our costumes weren’t exactly the most comfortable, so I had to remove mine, while she got away with just removing the breastplate from her costume.

Ryan (best man) came as a Plastic Toy Soldier, my mother came as a hippie, there were an assortment of pirates, and many more.

Thank you for all of you who came along to celebrate with us, you were all so generous with the mountain of gifts we got!

Engagement party: Full steam ahead!

Not sure why I haven’t blogged about this yet, but the engagement party is drawing near and I thought I would.

It started with me doing the invitations…ugh, my fingers ache at the thought of the torture I put them through. Since chickz0r and I aren’t able to afford a massive wedding (which she wants), we’re going for massive engagement party instead.

To annoy me, the guillotine I had was inoperable – blunt bladey thing, I had to cut them all myself. It took such a long time. Maybe I should have just sharpened it, but nooo, I had to do things the hard way. Oh well, my fingers got exercise…which…is important, I have to fight off chubby fingers.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that its a rather odd invitation design. Well, its a rather odd party we’re trying to have. A costume party infact!
This has annoyed nearly everybody over the age of thirty, although I’ve managed to convince my mum to come in costume, and she’s done a very good job of it.

Back to the torture of my fingers…after that I discovered our printer wasn’t picking up the envelopes, so I had to write the addresses (and ‘return to sender’ addresses). Then chickz0r and her mother decided we needed to include maps, which meant more printing, and worst of all, more cutting!

The final ‘product’, some 85 invitations

The party is coming up in a couple of weeks, and it should be a blast.
I’m busy getting my costume ready- its of mammoth proportions, but many photos shall be posted once its actually done, although I may wait until after the event so people get a surprise.