Stackpointer

Awhile back a netfriend of mine posted some long exposures of some videogames.  I thought that they were neat, so I took some as well.

I happened upon this project called dismap last week that generated fantastic artwork from 8-bit game carts.  The person behind the project, Ben Fry, disassembled the roms using a tool called NESrev, and then formatted the 6502 assembler instructions into readable columns.  To touch up the visuals, he then drew lines between all of the jmp source and destinations.  He also lead a companion project called Mario Soup, featuring tiles ripped from Super Mario Bros., and another project called distellamap, which featured assembly code from Atari 2600 games.  Prints are available for both dismap, and distellamap.

I forgot to mention on here that I saw another Bear last weekend.  This time from further away.

I was out for a hike today, and I saw a Black Bear.

My friend Simon and I were at Half-Price Books this afternoon, and I was having a wander around the Computer Science and Technology stacks, and I happened to find a copy of Steven Levy’s, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.  It was a slightly used copy; the pages were aged to a mild yellow, but there didn’t appear to be any tears, or frayed pages.  So I went ahead and bought it.  When I got home I started reading it, and happened upon a receipt from the ASUC (UC Berkeley) bookstore from 1989, that the prior reader had been using as a bookmark.

Sorry, I haven’t updated in ages. Prepare yourself for some rambling. I switched to Night Shift, then back to Day Shift. Went on a couple road trips, read a book or two, etc. Anyway, I’ve been porting Mode8 to SDL. It was sad when I decided to do so, as I had to throw away the coolest, and most time consuming classes. But actually the switch improved the over all structure. I’ve also been watching a lot of races over at the Velodrome. Good stuff. The Tour de France is currently in the Pyrenees’s; Team Columbia has been doing well. I wish both them and Garmin-Chipotle the best. Also, the teams that composed the ProTour decided not to renew their licenses, effectively ending, well, the ProTour.  FF4ds comes out next week, and it looks fantastic. DQ4ds comes out in two months and looks even better. This years E3 was utterly pathetic; the only decent news to emerge was about Mirrors Edge, and the FFXIII port to the Xbox 360.

The Xbox 360 was released on November 22nd, 2005. The Playstation 3 was released on November 17th, 2006. The Wii was released on November 19th, 2006.

The last release was well over year and a half ago. So I am wondering why people (the media in particular) insist on referring to this current generation of consoles as “Next Gen.“?

I was up until 3:30am last night working on this. :=)

You might remember blife.  It was an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life in C, and used OpenGL to render the state of the colony.  It worked in Windows, Linux, and everything else.

I threw it away.

I’ve been working on a nice and clean generic cellular automata application.  I’ve been programming in C++, and using SDL to render output.  The kicker is this, though–the ruleset isn’t going to be hardcoded.  The idea here is to abstract away the rules, so that it can be used to simulate anything.  I’m working on a LISP interpreter that will run the rulesets.

What are the advantages of this approach?  In the original blife, you were bound to Game of Life, and only Game of Life.  By virtue of implementing the GoL as a standard, you were also stuck with its default rules. Neither of these assumptions will be present in this new application.  You’ll be able to modify life to your hearts content.  And who says you have to run Life; run Wolframs ‘Rule 30′ instead.  Or use it as a tsst bed for any ideas you have kicking around in your head.

I forgot to mention, SDL wont be the only output option available.  NULL, Text, and PNG output will be available out of the box.

If you and I correspond via email, please update your Address Book entry for me to brad@stackpointer.org. I haven’t, and won’t be checking my other inbox’s very often.