Greatest 4K ever told?

In what is likely to be the most impressive use of 4096 bytes this year, RGBA and TBC have created a world, in a demo called Elevated. It takes upto a minute to start, but simple looks and sounds amazing for just 4KB.

If your computer isn’t up to the task, you can watch a it on YouTube – but try the real thing first!

M3 Perfect CF Software

If you’ve got an M3 Perfect CF adapter (aka GBA Movie Player) for your Nintendo DS and you want the latest Game Manager software you are out of luck at the moment. If you try to download it from the M3 Downloads Page then you’ll get permission denied, I contacted M3 and they are aware of the problem. Luckily Danny @ M3 provided me with the latest 24/01/06 Beta and I have added it to my Files Page.

Nintendo DS Homebrew

Fancied a bit of a change, so I began trying coding on the Nintendo DS. It’s a bit of an odd beast, living between the 8/16bit and 32bit worlds but the feature set is so dedicated to playing games it gives you a nice retro feeling. It’s the first machine I have programmed which has two different general purpose CPUs – an ARM7 and an ARM9. The ARM9 is the main DS CPU and would appear to be responsible for the bulk of processing and interaction with the graphics hardware. The ARM7 is used for Gameboy Advanced compatibility and also when in DS mode the ARM7 is responsible for talking to the sound and touch screen hardware – so in order to read the touch screen, the main ARM9 CPU gets data from the ARM7 via IPC.

To start off, I installed DevKitPro with libnds and began working on my first standard learning project using straight C. In this case I went for the Mandelbrot set viewer, it’s a good project for getting to grips with framebuffer mode (15bit color) and also gives a good indication of the floating point performance (which in the ARM9’s case isn’t great for obvious reasons). It didn’t take long to get it compiling and after copying the resulting NDS file to the CF card and slipping it into the M3 adapter it ran and I was pleased.

Documentation is quite scarce, but that is to be expected with everything having to be worked out by those luminaries of the DS homebrew scene (and I dare say a sneaky peek at the official DS SDK). It’s certainly enough to get some impressive stuff working as you can see by looking at some of the homebrew apps and demos which are out there. So my plan now is to add zooming using the touchpad, screen swapping so that the touch screen can be used to alter parameters and edit the palette and perhaps switch the code to using 3/29 integer calculations instead of floating point and try and get both CPUs to calculate in parallel. After that it’s straight into Mammary Manipulator DS…

Oh and because the M3 interface looked too un-DSish(sp?!) I made a skin to make it look more DSish!

WaitBook Pro

Just checked the apple store now for my order status and it’s estimated delivery is 3rd March. My heart sank when I saw that I had another month to wait, another month of resisting the allure of other toys, another month of resisting the relentless march of SLI desktops and PC Core Duo laptops (especially Tablet PCs are looking more and more interesting as time goes on).

In the meantime, I have just started reading the second edition of Learning Cocoa with Objective-C from O’Reilly, but I am not sure how different 10.4 is from 10.2. Also been looking at the Apple Developer Center and I fear if I plan to release any code on OS X then i’m going to need to find someone with a PPC based Mac to test the Universal Binaries. I just hope there are plenty of Universal Binaries available when it does arrive so that I only have to gasp about the technical feat of Rosetta every now and then.

I also uninstalled the Windows version of Quake 4 when I heared that it would be UB on OS X – so i’ll keep that one for OS X (that reminds me, I had better order a multi-button bluetooth mouse for gaming!). I wonder if I can just download the OS X UB and use my Windows DVD? I am guessing that I will so tell me if you know different.

PS3 is unsuprisingly OpenGL

Kotaku is reporting the rather unsuprising news that the PS3 graphics are coded using OpenGL. It has been known for a while now that the PS3 is using a chip based on Nvidia’s G70 architecture, so given Nvidia’s hardcore support of OpenGL and their clear lead in OpenGL drivers on multiple platforms it was probably inevitable that Sony would go for OpenGL. Probably plenty of Red, Blue and Yellow Books on PS3 developers desks already, so it’ll help the familiarisation process – but I wonder if they’ll be pushing CG?

This certainly shortens the Playstation cookbook:

• 1lb of OpenGL
• 20GB of HD video
• 1 commerical physics engine
• A sprinkle of Cell magic

Mix together ingredients and debug for many months at 550Mhz. Tada, your next-gen sequel is complete!