Stephen’s Weblog

Hi! It’s been a while since my last post; I’ve decided that I should post more often even if I don’t have a lot to say, as sometime soon I will have more to talk about.

As usual, there have been a lot of projects in progress, but nothing I want to share publicly at this time. A few things have happened since last post though:

• I entered and did horribly in LudumDare #15 (Caverns) (My horrible entry)
• I’ve worked on some hardware projects (Like this Optical Switch, which switches between optical audio inputs. Yes, I’m too cheap to get a receiver, but with this I don’t need one.)
• I’ve built my XNA game engine up and it’s quite capable, I’m now in the process of actually putting together a game with it. (No screenshots publicly available yet. Maybe soon)
• A pile of other small stuff; I’ve tinkered with driver development, played with some hardware ideas, thought about a lot of stuff I won’t be doing for months, learned some math,… you get the idea.

Some things coming up in the near future:

• As I said, I’m working on an XNA game. I’m hoping to release it before too terribly long, so expect to see more about it soon.
• I am working on designing a PCI card / general purpose hardware development platform – This took a back seat to the XNA game a month or two ago, so is only half done, but I’ll be posting about that when I get it further as well.
• Revisiting the DS wifi is on my list for “after the current set of important projects,” But I’m going to make more of an effort to get to it this year.

Well, that’s how life is. I’ve got far too much to do but pretty happy with what I am doing. I wonder if  anyone is still paying attention to this blog :)

I’m still somewhat interested in teaching, and maybe I will still get to that arcane series on software rendering I was thinking of – Any other suggestions on things to write about?

Hey, it’s been a while. I’ve taken a few minutes (well an hour or two) to upgrade wordpress and check/tweak my site’s links – I’d like to use this blog more often

Since I’ve gone through all that effort, I should probably write something…

I’ve been involved in a lot lately,

• Work – Eats a lot of my time – I really like what I do. I actually have an office job now, never would have imagined that :)
• Personal projects – Still doing stuff all over the place. I may link these from time to time but mostly keep them to myself
• XNA games – Have a big  project or two in progress. Also not saying much about this, but I may link something from time to time…

Also, I have a lot of plans for the future,

• DS Wifi project – Reverse engineering the hardware again, more thoroughly – Completely rewriting the 802.11 and TCP/IP stacks. Not going to start for a few months at least, and it will probably take a few more months when I do get started.
• Some hardware ideas have been brewing, but I won’t say much about these…
• Some emulation ideas have been brewing, but I won’t say much about these…
• There are always far more ideas than I can imagine having time for.

I’ve decided I will post interesting milestones of large projects or interesting completed small projects here when I have spare time to do so- It shouldn’t be hard to keep this blog more active than it has been :)

I’m also currently playing with Twitter, so some additional information about what I’m doing is available there – http://twitter.com/sgstair/

One other thing: I’m toying with the idea of writing an article every week or two, but I haven’t decided what exactly to write about yet. If you have ideas I’d appreciate if you tell me, in the comments or otherwise. Currently I’m considering writing a series of articles on building a software rendering 3D engine from scratch.

Well, that’s all  for now. Maybe I’ll manage to post here more often :)

Hi! Well, the Opti compo has ended. I haven’t got around to judging cause pepsiman probably won, and I’ve been really short on time, and tied up in other things.

I’m not sure just how much I want to say yet, but I have moved (I’m in the Seattle area now), and have an office job now – which is new for me. I’m still working out how much I’ll be able to continue working on my personal projects, but I will post more on that when I know for sure. I’m not sure how things are going to unfold yet but I will certainly post more when I do know.

And then, I’ll try to clean up the pieces of all the stuff I dropped in the process of moving out here and getting started in a new place.

Since I’m not really in the business of detailing my life’s complexities in my blog (which, well, is what everyone else seems to use them for), the title of this post really sums up all I’m really going to say; Ordinarily I think life being complicated and interesting is a good thing, but it has it’s down sides too, and I’ve run into that lately.

That being said, I strive to not let things like life’s trivial and big problems bother me, and I’m continuing to work on entirely too many projects. Some things are making progress, others not so much. I’m prioritising Opti, followed by the logic analyzer, and I’ll decide what to do next when those are ready. I’ve picked up a few more smaller projects lately, tinkering around with graphics effects, video capture and image recognition, and I still have a stack of books to read.

I’m trying to decide whether I should disclose some of the smaller projects I’m tinkering around with and release binaries / possibly source / other information about them, I don’t really see this stuff being very useful to many people, and it does take time to document, depending on what level of disclosure I go with – but I think it’s generally pretty neat stuff – jury’s still out on this one but if you have an opinion I’d like to hear it.

Some of you might have been following this, but recently I’ve completed some DS homebrew code to make it simple to send data between processors; This took a good bit longer than it probably should have but it is done now, and being integrated into libnds as part of our plans for world domination, er, our plans to make homebrew easier. The basic idea behind the system is to take the single pipe between the processors (the IPC FIFO) and use a system wrapped around it to create a set of virtual channels, through which you can send data from one processor to the other. The system is set up with the ability to use callbacks, which will automatically dispatch the message on the receiving end to a user function, or the receiving code can just check the incoming queue occasionally. As it was designed, the system will pipe one of 3 types of value through to the other processor – it can either send a mainram address, a 32bit data value, or a sequence of 32bit values. It’s designed to be very fast and efficient about this sort of thing, the latency to send a value through is very low, and it’s all interrupt driven to receive data as soon as it comes in.

For now, the code is not available to the general public, right now it’s intended to be used as a low-level communication layer and currently the plans are being made to integrate it into the libnds examples as a way to quickly get information (buttons, touch, rtc) from arm7, and  provide a channel for controlling the arm7 (i.e. sound, power control, others) – the hope is to have a more solid interface for this sort of thing to help people who don’t really want to deal with the hardware directly but still want to play sound and things like that. I expect that some level of access to all this will also be provided for people who want to do their own thing on arm7, and this code I hope (and expect) will help provide a better environment for developing applications across both CPUs.

Well, some days I feel like I’m getting a lot done…. Some days I feel like there’s a lot going on but nothing’s getting done… And yet other days I don’t feel like doing anything at all.

I’ve been having a lot of that second type lately- sometimes making progress, sometimes not, but lots of things going on and not really apparently getting anywhere.

Here’s hoping next week will be different…

I’ve completed the vorbis decoder I set out to work on, mainly because I haven’t been able to think about much of anything else; It’s nothing fancy and it makes use of naive implementations of just about everything, my goal was just to make it work – which it does now… This makes me very happy because this is the first perceptual codec I’ve written completely from scratch; hopefully it is just the start of things to come :)

So, now I’m reevaluating the priority of everything agan, and will continue on the things that need to be done… Will post more soon.

Ok, so I haven’t really completed anything, but I did want to point those of you who are interested at a new wiki page in which I’ve clarified a lot of my goals and expected methodology for the “revolution” project collection that I’m working on getting started with (Wiki page for Project Revolution collection [wiki.akkit.org]).
If you want to be involved in this set of projects, of which the TCP/IP project is the first, please let me know, by any means of contact you prefer.
I’m hoping to kick off the TCP/IP project by the end of the month. It’s not essential that all developers are involved at that point, but it would help.

In other news, the number of projects I’ve been tinkering with lately is rather large. Some of them I’ll tell you about, some not – one thing I’m working on actively is an ogg/vorbis decoder.. I’m just writing a rough version for pc at the moment to verify my understanding, but I’d like to port it to DS. I’m working on an unnamed XNA game, that you might know about if you hang around where I do on IRC, but I’m not actively showing off. Some projects that I’m not working on that I should be are…. the optimization contest site, the nds test apps, and the logic analyzer code… Well, I will scrape my time together and allocate it where I see fit. I hope next post I can actually announce the completion of something or other :)

I’ve been working on a number of different projects lately, unfortunately none of them public yet.. And some new interesting directions are opening up to me, which is forcing me to rethink a few things.

In the meantime though I’ve put together a photo album of some pictures I took while the power was out here, I hope you find it interesting :) Ice Storm / Power Outage photo album (picasaweb)

Of course I know you’re just waiting for news on dstunnel, or some other project; Probably we’ll get some actual progress this month, whether it be sooner or later I’m not sure of yet.

And, my life continues to be uninteresting to the casual observer. Ah well, price I pay for not talking about things. I’m in the process of rescheduling the current tasks and deciding how much I want to make public – In a few days I’ll post some more information about when things should be done, pending the power not going out again ;)

(Not that I entirely blame the power outage; but it really didn’t help and threw a lot of things off schedule, that I now have to figure out how to rearrange.)

Also: happy new year! it’s 2008 now, which is a generally uninteresting number (factors to 2*2*2*251; is 11111011000 in binary, 7D8 hex, 3730 octal, I’m sure there are some interesting series it’s in though) I do hope this coming year is sufficiently interesting; and I expect to get a lot done.