the mini Blog ยป HOW-TO: Cleaning the Apple Keyboard November 18, 2006
Posted by winden in Linklog.add a comment
So I just did follow this tutorial on cleaning th keyboard, and the result is so cool and shiny that it hurts me to press the keys now…
Switchout high resolution… November 18, 2006
Posted by winden in demoscene.1 comment so far
At first I decided to take advantage of my inherited 1280×1024 17″ flatpannel by hugging up to native resolution and just cranking up the font sizes for all apps, just like I had to do at work to get any work…
You see, 10px sized letters were ok back when 640×512 incredibly high resolution, but not nowdays done since I fully hate all these 10pixel size texts on 84dpi monitors…
The final nail is that I’ve decided to do over with all that, at least at home… and just run the screen at 800×600 and rely on the flatpannel interpolation to scale to it’s true resolution, now all windows look really cramped, but I’ve also noticed that the gfxcard is liking it much more and is running things one-frame instead of two-frame (the dock animation for example)
Now to unhack all apps and tell them to use 18pt fonts instead of 24pt ;)
Playing ADPCM sounds on Amiga… November 5, 2006
Posted by winden in coding, demoscene.5 comments
So yesterday I finally started to code an ADPCM sound player, since upon scrounging google I didn’t really manage to find any public 680×0 sources to do the playing like for example can be done with players like “the player 6.1” are not turned up when searched for, so maybe there are really free-to-use players… but anyways, armed with a tutorial from jurassic pack 14 by scicco/scarab about how to drive the Amiga to make a buffered sound loop, I dove into the hardware hacking and a few hours later I had a 16bit uncrompressed wav sounding as a 8bit realtime dithered wave on the Amy.
Fun started when I started trying to covert the standards-provided reference sourcecode for IMA-ADPCM into a 680×0 routine… and today after a few more hours it’s starting to sound somewhat like the original but with pops and clcks (which the original roxette song didn’t have ;)… so I think I may be nearing the first version with proper sound :)
What I’ve also detected is that ADPCM decoding will be difficult to optimise regarding cpu pairing and the like… so after I have it working maybe I’ll have to spend some time making my own compressed format which could be decoded with less serial dependencies.
Off to code some more…
Mac OSX, tale of the Amiga Sceners folding into a new home November 1, 2006
Posted by winden in demoscene.1 comment so far
Many many many moons ago it was Peskanov (most probably the same time with Estrayk and/or Dr.Slump ;) who jumped into Mac-land… something unthinkable since Mac was regarded as a much pricey computer without the powerful scene of the Amiga nor the questionable advantage of Windows regarding user base and variety of tools. In fact I can recall Peskanov telling that his G4 Cube had costed very very very big money even if being a refurbished machine…
So, this having been around 1999 or 2000, let’s fast forward some years into 2003 and I find myself depising each time more Linux (I had already abandoned Windows since having got it for about 6 months), tired about crappy PC hardware… asking Peskanov for guidance, I told him whether a Mac would be a good idea and he provided a definite yes, so off I went onto Mac land with a dual 1.25 G4, which costed a lot euros by my standards for machine prices…
But bringing it home I already found out that I was willing to pay it both for the hardware working out of the box (unlike with linux nor windows) and also for the excelent interface full of graphics joy (look ma, one frame window moving, double buffered redraw and even drop shadows!). Nowdays this machine is a bit dated (for example, having an ATI 9200, it has no shader support), and mostly my main gripe is the lack of speed for UAE because of using SDL and not having PowerPC JIT support.
Later on more people started switching… Leunam got a little ibook, I met Truck^Accession who also had gotten a mini (he detected me as Mac-owner for my iPod earbuds ;) and just a few days ago we sort-of go back to the start with Flynn/Energy^Capsule getting a G4.
So, I can’t but wonder that many more others are getting these machines…
The software rendering world 