Archive for December, 2008
No WordPress Wednesday this week
Written by Dougal on December 31, 2008 – 4:41 pm -
Happy new year in 2009
Written by Donncha on December 31, 2008 – 3:47 pm -
Happy new year! May 2009 be even better than 2008!
PS. I shot this with my Canon 50mm 1.8 and it kicks the ass of the same image I shot with my Sigma 18-200 zoom (not surprisingly). Donations for “Donncha’s fund to buy L series lenses” should be sent to ..
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Mall of Emirates, Desert Safari
Written by Matt on December 30, 2008 – 3:00 am -
Happy Birthday Kim
Written by mike on December 29, 2008 – 7:00 pm -Happy Birthday Kim!
Lots of love,
Mike, Jan, and Jamie
xoxoxox
VirtualC64 for Mac OS X
Written by Donncha on December 29, 2008 – 5:42 pm -VirtualC64 is a new Commodore 64 emulator for Mac OS X. It’s a promising project, let down by the fact that it’s still in beta but by the looks of things development is moving at a steady pace.
When you first run the emulator it will ask you for C64 roms: basic, kernal, chargen and vc1541. Ironically, you can find all these roms inside Vice, another C64 emulator. Look in /Applications/VICE.app/Contents/Resources/ROM/. The 1541 ROM is DRIVES/dos1541.
Loading a game or demo is as easy as dragging the d64 or t64 image into VirtualC64. When you do you’ll see a dialog like this.
“Flash file into memory” works great for single load programmes but multiload could be a problem. I tried Armalyte. Mounting the d64 as a disk didn’t work. I couldn’t type anything. Loading the first file on the disk by flashing it brought up the crack intro but failed to load. The neat integrated debugger (click “Inspect”) showed the emulator had died doing jsr $2020 and unfortunately at 2020 was another jsr … ($20 is the character code for a space if memory serves, and the machine code for jsr was $20, so memory was full of spaces!)
Blue Max worked much better, as did a 3D Pool game I tried. the crack by Remember included the documentation and again using the debugger I watched as the programme checked for the various key presses. Geeky I know but it brought a smile of recognition to my lips. Here’s that debugger in all it’s glory. Anyone familiar with the C64 should recognise the code beginning at 1AA0. (I had to look up what D016 does. It’s the screen mode. I had completely forgotten. It’s only been 16 years.)
One thing it has going for it over Vice, is a real fullscreen mode. The current version of Vice uses some dodgy resolution changing in Linux (that I rarely got to work properly without screwing up my desktop) and I couldn’t get to work in Mac OS X at all. Fire this baby up in fullscreen mode and you’ve got your very own C64 laptop! Cool or what eh?
As luck would have it VirtualC64 has blown a fuse just as I finish this post. If you have a usb joystick plugged in and activated in port 2 it does strange things. First the keyboard wouldn’t work, and flashing a file didn’t run it automatically. Then the keyboard sort of worked but the left arrow character appeared for most key presses. Odd stuff. Unplugging the joystick and restarting the emulator fixed that problem.
Even my Bits ‘n’ Bobs demo worked in it! (Bah, all my screenshots failed. They only show white. I wonder if the emulator does strange things to the Mac while emulating mixed video modes? I mixed character and video modes in the screens I tried to capture, ah well.)
VirtualC64 is a very promising C64 emulator, and it’s GPL too! I’ll certainly be keeping an interested eye on it, and I wish Dirk and the other project members the best of luck with it.
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The Atlantis, Dubai
Written by Matt on December 29, 2008 – 3:00 am -
New York to Dubai
Written by Matt on December 28, 2008 – 3:00 am -
the crack [Flickr]
Written by michel v — intraordinaire.com on December 25, 2008 – 2:32 pm -michel v — intraordinaire.com posted a photo:
Crack on the south pier on the Old Port in Bastia, Corsica. December 2008.
Last month, a tempest nearly brought down this 147 years old pier, cracking it in several places.
Christmas Day Ten Years Ago
Written by Donncha on December 25, 2008 – 4:58 am -I’ll always remember Christmas Day 1998. Ten years ago on the night of Christmas Eve we returned from the Regional Hospital without our mother and my father without his wife.
I was in Kerry 2 weeks before when my father rang with the news my mother had collapsed. A massive aneurysm in her brain had burst. She spent the next 15 days in hospital, sometimes awake and able to talk, but most of the time drowsy or asleep. The day before Christmas Eve she suffered another hemorrhage. An emergency operation was carried out to insert a stint in the blood vessel and stop the bleeding but unfortunately the operation was not a success and the stint failed. Machines whirred and beeped by her bedside. She had aged so much overnight. We all said our final goodbyes.
The last conversation I remember having with her was telling her that we had decided on the Christmas gift we were going to get her. Despite her drowsy questioning I didn’t tell her, because it would be a surprise for when she came home. I hold on to that memory of sitting by her bedside. I don’t want to forget it.
We’ll visit her grave later today. Today is a sad day for my family and I but it’s also a celebration and a chance for my family to get together. We have so much to be thankful for. I know my mother would have adored Adam. Have a great day today!
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Happy Birthday Kate
Written by mike on December 24, 2008 – 7:00 pm -Happy birthday Kate.
Lots of love,
Mike, Jan, and Jamie
xoxoxoxox
