Siest-annoyance mac os. Guitar Hero World Tour: 2008 Classic Mac OS PlayStation 2 PlayStation 3. The Microscopic Mission: 1987 MS-DOS.
I guess I don't have a complete blog entry to write on any one thing. but there are several unrelated things that I feel like writing down. I recently joined Twitter, but I must suck at using it because none of these things ended up there.
Life
ZOTAC - The original creators, pioneers, and manufacturer of Mini PCs and innovators of the fastest NVIDIA GeForce GTX Gaming Graphics Cards. Spore is a 2008 life simulation real-time strategy God game developed by Maxis, published by Electronic Arts and designed by Will Wright, and was released for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.Covering many genres including action, real-time strategy, and role-playing games, Spore allows a player to control the development of a species from its beginnings as a microscopic organism, through. Founded: October 1, 1979: Restructured: Computer Arts, Inc (1979) Activision, Inc (1979-1988) Mediagenic (1988-1992) Activision, Inc (1992-2000) Founders.
Tragic. Introspective. Complicated. This isn't really a place where I would feel it appropriate to go into detail, but it would be unjust to omit given that the other things here are significantly less important.
Helicopters
I don't have a huge amount of flying time on it yet, but I've been enjoying the Blade mSR so far. I've been flying it mostly in smallish spaces, so I haven't had the guts to really see how maneuverable it is- but I'm impressed with its stability and responsiveness so far. Also, either I'm a totally awesome pilot, or (more likely) it's actually pretty easy to fly.
DSi
I haven't had much time to work on the DSi lately. I've let Bushing borrow my hardware, and he's been working on producing a small quantity of additional RAM tracing/injecting setups. This isn't the kind of thing we can make many of (I estimate it takes about 6 hours to solder one together) but it'd be helpful for the community if more than one of these rigs existed in the world.
What time I have spent on DSi-related stuff has been on Temporal Hex Dump. It's actually coming along okay- I took a bit of a development detour to improve it's Mac OS support after I bought a MacBook Pro… but the next step is to add the part of it that is actually a hex dump. So far, it has the timeline navigation widget and a correlated list of memory transactions:
Robot Odyssey
So, way back in April, I posted the first screenshots of Robot Odyssey on the Nintendo DS. This was I guess what I'd call a 'binary port'. It runs the original Robot Odyssey binaries, via static binary translation, and with many modifications and UI enhancements to adapt the game for the DS console.
I never got around to posting pictures, but I actually did make significantly more progress on this project before getting distracted. I ended up implementing a pretty sophisticated system for patching the game and dynamically manipulating its world state, as well as 'forking' additional copies of the running game very quickly for the purposes of having those forked-off copies render additional sprites. What is this good for? Well, I could have the game proper running on the DS's top screen, while the bottom screen shows status icons for each robot, where the icons accurately depict the state of the robot's bumpers and thrusters, and even what item the robot is holding at the time. I also had a mostly complete game load/save UI implemented, including a live preview that shows you where you saved while picking a game to load. My next step was going to be a UI for editing circuits inside your robots using the stylus.
Zoa - The Microscopic Hero Mac Os Catalina
Anyway, I know I'm being cruel by describing all these great features and not posting a video or a ROM image. Sorry. I promise I'll make a video one of these days when I have a bit more time. As for a ROM image, right now the best I have is the source code for a tool which will generate a ROM given the original Robot Odyssey files. You can get the source with:
To compile it, you'll need devkitARM and Python. You'll also need to put your original Robot Odyssey files (the DOS version, not Apple!) in the 'original' directory in the source tree. You can leave them in a zip file, or strewn about the directory in random places. The translator knows what files it needs, and it will find them by SHA-1 hash.
I give no guarantees as to the current state of the source tree- I haven't worked on it in a few months, and I think I last left it in a state where loading and saving were partially but not usably done. If you aren't a developer, the source tree isn't likely to be useful to you yet.
Zoa - The Microscopic Hero Mac Os 11
Homework assignment: If anyone in the audience wants to see this Robot Odyssey DS port turn into a real homebrew ROM image that anyone can download without compiling it themselves, we need to have redistribution approval from the game's current copyright holders. Problem is, I have no idea who that is. I did email Warren Robinett about this project a while back, but he couldn't tell me who currently owned the copyright. Following the trail of acquisitions, I think it might be owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Yeah, the textbook company. I did email them about the Robot Odyssey copyright multiple times, but I never got a reply. So, what now?
Tragic. Introspective. Complicated. This isn't really a place where I would feel it appropriate to go into detail, but it would be unjust to omit given that the other things here are significantly less important.
Helicopters
I don't have a huge amount of flying time on it yet, but I've been enjoying the Blade mSR so far. I've been flying it mostly in smallish spaces, so I haven't had the guts to really see how maneuverable it is- but I'm impressed with its stability and responsiveness so far. Also, either I'm a totally awesome pilot, or (more likely) it's actually pretty easy to fly.
DSi
I haven't had much time to work on the DSi lately. I've let Bushing borrow my hardware, and he's been working on producing a small quantity of additional RAM tracing/injecting setups. This isn't the kind of thing we can make many of (I estimate it takes about 6 hours to solder one together) but it'd be helpful for the community if more than one of these rigs existed in the world.
What time I have spent on DSi-related stuff has been on Temporal Hex Dump. It's actually coming along okay- I took a bit of a development detour to improve it's Mac OS support after I bought a MacBook Pro… but the next step is to add the part of it that is actually a hex dump. So far, it has the timeline navigation widget and a correlated list of memory transactions:
Robot Odyssey
So, way back in April, I posted the first screenshots of Robot Odyssey on the Nintendo DS. This was I guess what I'd call a 'binary port'. It runs the original Robot Odyssey binaries, via static binary translation, and with many modifications and UI enhancements to adapt the game for the DS console.
I never got around to posting pictures, but I actually did make significantly more progress on this project before getting distracted. I ended up implementing a pretty sophisticated system for patching the game and dynamically manipulating its world state, as well as 'forking' additional copies of the running game very quickly for the purposes of having those forked-off copies render additional sprites. What is this good for? Well, I could have the game proper running on the DS's top screen, while the bottom screen shows status icons for each robot, where the icons accurately depict the state of the robot's bumpers and thrusters, and even what item the robot is holding at the time. I also had a mostly complete game load/save UI implemented, including a live preview that shows you where you saved while picking a game to load. My next step was going to be a UI for editing circuits inside your robots using the stylus.
Zoa - The Microscopic Hero Mac Os Catalina
Anyway, I know I'm being cruel by describing all these great features and not posting a video or a ROM image. Sorry. I promise I'll make a video one of these days when I have a bit more time. As for a ROM image, right now the best I have is the source code for a tool which will generate a ROM given the original Robot Odyssey files. You can get the source with:
To compile it, you'll need devkitARM and Python. You'll also need to put your original Robot Odyssey files (the DOS version, not Apple!) in the 'original' directory in the source tree. You can leave them in a zip file, or strewn about the directory in random places. The translator knows what files it needs, and it will find them by SHA-1 hash.
I give no guarantees as to the current state of the source tree- I haven't worked on it in a few months, and I think I last left it in a state where loading and saving were partially but not usably done. If you aren't a developer, the source tree isn't likely to be useful to you yet.
Zoa - The Microscopic Hero Mac Os 11
Homework assignment: If anyone in the audience wants to see this Robot Odyssey DS port turn into a real homebrew ROM image that anyone can download without compiling it themselves, we need to have redistribution approval from the game's current copyright holders. Problem is, I have no idea who that is. I did email Warren Robinett about this project a while back, but he couldn't tell me who currently owned the copyright. Following the trail of acquisitions, I think it might be owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Yeah, the textbook company. I did email them about the Robot Odyssey copyright multiple times, but I never got a reply. So, what now?
One approach is always to release it then look for the return address on the cease & desist letter. But, in all seriousness, I would like to be able to release a legal port of a classic game which the current copyright holder clearly has no commercial interest in. It seems like there should be some way to do this.
