January saw my largest outlay, $72, for content since canceling DirecTV. I purchased Archer, Season 5 and King of the Nerds, Season 2 from iTunes. I also picked up Breaking Bad season 4* when I saw the blu-ray collection on sale at Best Buy when I was there picking up a friend's birthday gift.
I know DirecTV would increase the bill every so often, so I checked iBank to see what I paid (at the end of December) for January's service of each year:
$130.65 for 2010
$134.90 for 2011
$13
Optimized the player 0 reposition routines for 200+ byte savings. The room generation is back in place to make it easier to test the timing of playfield updates - when the room shifts left/right any playfield timing issues become readily apparent. To aid in reviewing it, the playfield has been given priority over the players:
The X position display was changed to show which of the reposition routines are in use - there are 22 of them, 11 for each player. The routine used will b
For comparison, the top two robots are positioned using the standard reposition routine. The next two robots are positioned to the same X values using the new routines. The rest of the robots are repositioned to preset X locations using the new routines.
Move the joystick left/right to adjust the X position of player 0 and up/down for player 1. Hold fire to move slower.
Next up will be to do some ROM usage optimizations to the P0EarlyHMxx routines.
I love my 2005 S2000, but it's starting to get a little long in tooth. I'd buy another in a heartbeat (I had a 2002), but Honda discontinued them in 2009 I headed out to the Houston Auto Show this past weekend to take a look at what's out there as I don't really know what I want. It was taking forever to get into the parking lot at Reliant Park, so I decided to head to the park & ride lot at the Fannin South Metro rail stop. It's only 1 train stop away, but turned out to be a better d
The revised Reposition Player 0 routines take 4 scanlines. The routines in the prior version took 6 (5 to reposition, plus 1 to get back into sync with the main kernel loop).
This screenshot shows reposition routines P0EarlyHM25, P0EarlyHM30, P0EarlyHM35, ..., P0EarlyHM70 being triggered (the red robots). They also show NUSIZ0 being updated (the red missile).
Unlike player 1, the player 0 routines do not have any late updates. There's also quite a bit of SLEEP going
The revised Reposition Player 1 routines take 4 scanlines. The routines in the prior version took 5 (4 to reposition, plus 1 to get back into sync with the main kernel loop).
This screenshot shows reposition routines P1EarlyHM25, P1EarlyHM30, P1EarlyHM35, ..., P1EarlyHM70 being triggered (the green robots). They also show NUSIZ1 being updated (the green & white missile).
I do have a single late update - ENAM0 is updated at cycle 25 in P1EarlyHM22. That won't be
I stopped by SiliconDust's site and noticed that a firmware update, for my HDHomeRun Dual tuners, was released a few days ago. So I downloaded the HDHomeRun Config utility onto my MacBook Pro and installed the firmware update.
When I've done the firmware updates in the past, I used the mini to do so. When I'd clicked on the View button nothing happened, so I thought it was an unsupported feature on the Mac. I wondered if perhaps that button worked now so clicked it, and lo-and-behold it
Yesterday I thought the forum software was acting up because I was consistently seeing 60-70 guests reading my blog(over there in the "users viewing" box that's located at the bottom of the right column). It's still higher than normal today, though only in the teens.
Turns out Ars Technica included a link to Blast from the Past in their article Modems, wArEz, and ANSI art: Remembering BBS life at 2400bps.
Output from the new Kernel looks OK to me:
Due to the shift in timing, the new KernelEvent is more efficient than before. Before it looked like this:
KernelEvent: ; 3 27
; have to update PF2 before figuring out which Kernel Event, otherwise
; PF2 is updated to late in the Reposition Player 1 routines
ldx DS_PF2L ; 4 31
stx PF2 ; 3 34 - PF2L, before 38
sty PF0 ; 3 37 - PF0R, 2
Once again, Frantic is being rebooted
While working on Stay Frosty 2, Thomas Jentzsch suggested redoing the kernel to use VDELBL. It puts the ball on vertical delay with updates synced to GRP1. It's a clever idea - but due to how SF2 is designed that would have required me to draw the snowman using player(sprite) 1 instead of player 0, which would cause problems in the horizon due to object priorities:
I thought it could be useful for Frantic and Timmy, as their spr
As mentioned in the December Savings entry, That '70s Show is now being broadcast in HD. I found an episode I have in both HD and SD and took some comparison screenshots:
SD opening scene
HD opening scene. Much clearer picture, additional content on the sides (not zoomed and cropped)
SD title sequence
HD title sequence. Additional picture detail on sides, new cityscape and updated graphics (text no longer looks like it's laying on the dashboard, the holly images are d
While last month was 1 year since setting up EyeTV, this month makes 1 year since going live with my DVR project. December was Doctor Who Month at the Spice's, with $35 spent on Doctor Who: The 50th Anniversary Collection (whole collection) and The Time of the Doctor (just the episode). This puts the savings for December at $111 and the cumulative savings at $1411. When I started the ball rolling on this project, I thought I'd save about $800 a year - boy was I wrong I'm almost to the
Auto-detection of joystick or gamepad. The flicker-free two-color 48 pixel kernel, which I think was first publicly seen in a May 2011 build of Frantic, was originally developed in 2010 for the Stay Frosty 2 logo at the top of this screen.
Broom = Double Jump, Present = Bonus Points. Levels use full width of screen. In contrast, Stay Frosty didn't use PF0 so the upper platforms never appeared on the left or right edges of the screen. Platform color is also updated on all 3 scan line
No new content, but it's been one year since I installed EyeTV so I spent $20 to renew my electronic TV Guide subscription. Savings for November was $126 for a cumulative savings of $1300. Balance to pay off the hardware is now at $1647.
I just got back from a 2 week vacation and the mini's now at 804 recorded episodes! Stay Frosty 2 is finished, so I'll be taking a break from Atari projects for a while in order to catch up on my backlog.
Dad heads back to Nigeria in a few weeks so we're celebrating "Merry Thanksgiving". I gave Mason the new Hot Wheels Car Maker and it's been a big hit with the nephews.
The machine heats up wax sticks that are used to make the car body. The wax is not like a crayon, but instead like a plastic. The body is then snapped onto a car base which has the wheels. The body can easily be popped off and put onto another base.
It takes 20-30 minutes to make a car. The unit needs to h
Had a hiccup with the mini this week - I went to watch some TV last night and EyeTV had a message prompt up complaining that its storage device had been disconnected. I clicked OK and EyeTV crashed. I opened up a Finder window and saw that the Drobo drive was not listed.
Not sure what happened, so I power cycled the Drobo and rebooted the mini. Everything came back up just fine. I checked Console and found this from Thursday night:
That doesn't tell me much, but it does pinpoint wh
I've had a YouTube account for quite some time, but have been rather annoyed for the past year or so with the repeated requests to "use your real name" when I already was:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DarrellSpiceJr
Recently came the numerous requests to link it to a Google+ account. Now they're forcing the issue and you're no longer allowed to comment unless you link to a Google+ account. Sorry Charlie, but no more.
A year ago I started the ball rolling on my DVR project when I noticed that Tech Woot! had the HD HomeRun Dual tuners on sale for a great price. It turned out to be a good thing that I ordered 2 of them as there's been a few times when all 4 tuners (dual means each unit has 2 independent tuners) have been active.
My estimated $800 a year savings turned out to have been way off - DirecTV was cancelled 10 months ago and I've already saved $1174. Sure I miss not being current on shows such as
I stopped by the Galleria Apple Store on my way home from my monthly meeting for work to check out the new iPad Air. It's significantly better than my iPad 2. I was quite surprised that they still had some available, and even the exact model(Space Gray 128 GB WiFi only) I was interested in.
The difference in detail for The Simpsons™: Tapped Out is astonishing:
iPad 2
iPad Air
Both images are zoomed in as close as the game will let you go. The game is also much more respon
My mini's been prompting me about the new OS X upgrade to Mavericks. I finally got around to checking with Elgato to see if EyeTV had any known problems with it. Only issue they've found is with a multi-monitor setup, something I don't have to worry about for my TV. So I went ahead with the upgrade.
The download took almost an hour, so I made sure to copy the installer before running it. I did this as the installer will delete itself after it finishes, presumably to free up the 5.31 GB o
One of today's Woot items is the Harmony Touch for $120, less than half the list price of $250. I can add the Ultimate Hub to allow the remote to control bluetooth devices like my PS3, something my decade old Pronto Pro doesn't support.
I'm not going to count this towards the setup cost of the DVR Project as it's something I'd have done even if I hadn't gotten rid of DirecTV.
Spent $64 on a couple shows (The Walking Dead, Season 4 and Breaking Bad, Season 1 on sale at Barnes& Noble, plus a membership discount) so I saved $82 for the month, for $1174 in cumulative savings. Balance to pay off the hardware is $1773.
I've been so busy wrapping up Stay Frosty 2 since getting back from PRGE that my backlog of recorded shows has crept past 500. It sounds worse than it is though as there's a number of duplicate (and even triplicate) recordings. If I was tight for
Another month without any content purchased, so the cumulative savings increased to $1092. However, the additional drive for the Drobo was $216 so the balance remaining on the hardware setup is now $1855.
I've been so busy preparing for PRGE (preparing my presentating and working on Chun Li) that the start of the Fall TV Season has made a noticeable impact - I usually have around 300 episodes recorded at any given time, it's already up to 378 and another 100 episodes are scheduled to be rec
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