Thoughs on programming - Big waste of time or not

[kiyotewolf]

I'm going to try (quickly) to draw a few comparisons, and such, plus ramble some, (so people know i'm still alive..), and go blah blah blah for a bit ...

3.. 2.. 1..

* ka-POW *



Study Hall.

1. Arcade games
-- a. Driving games.. : have been reduced to skateboarding games,.. very horrible game play any more..
-- b. Retro.. : There seems to be no end to something being dragged back up from the dead and repackaged. I wanna make FB games, can the OS/Hardware in arcade (shells) and sell them unit by unit. (I can dream can't I ?)
-- c. Slow Scan Monitors.. : Has anyone gotten/found a slow-scan monitor (one where you can see all the pretty and shiny pixels because they are HUGE) and hooked it up to their computer? If so, please elaborate & post pictures.
-- d. Link up arcades.. : Big and shiny.

FreeBasic notes.

1. Recycled bits, bytes, pixels & TTL logic
-- a. Reusing fonts from classic computers.. : this is ALWAYS fun. So far I can do Coco 2 & Apple ][ fonts in FB, plus Windows 4x6 tiny tiny tiny font (which is not retro btw), gotta nab that commodore character set next
-- b. Abusing all ports & registers.. : If you are going to make a game, why not use all available things for sound? Use the SB and the internal speaker. Switch back and forth to go from cut scenes to regular gameplay.

Weird stuff.

1. Non-standard hardware
-- a. iMac mouse on Acer MiniPalmtop : very fun,.. and quite relaxing actually
-- b. ZIP drive USB : very easy to go from DOS (2 gig max HD) to USB backup using swap disk between LPT1: ZIP drive, back and forth. Yay for classic hardware that works
-- c. Custom printer port redirection : project coming up -- port capture from DOS computer to FB, MODE LPT1:=COM1:, capture, encapsulate, export to printer, tada!
-- d. Mouse to paddles conversion : Slice and dice a mouse, take X and Y spinners and put into custom paddle casings, and you can easily code 2 player games, using simple mouse calls. Each player even gets own button too. Left & right. Yay!
-- e. Linux on 8bit ISA VGA card : worked for about 2 minutes then crashed.



Thoughts..

1. Going to make a sprite editor that has a feature, you take side view of image, and it creates a frontal shot (headshot), by mirror and adding some dummy pixels in the middle (for nose area), to speed up sprite generation.
2. Yes the sprite editor will be shared when done.. but it will use mostly proprietary file formats, and a few established ones,.. (which wlil be documented..)
3. MIDI is annoying -- I try to take cool music and convert it into FB, and I have to go 2000 miles out of my way to get it done. Might've found an old DOS tool that will take a TON of work out of it for me though. (Not using a MIDI file player, using a custom thingy that needs custom music script notation and such)
4. Printers -- I think lazer printers are bad bad luck. I am going to stick to inkjets for ... quite awhile now..
5. Tractor feed paper-- is expensive!! omg
6. Mini games SUCK.. get rid of all the cut scenes, wait for scoring for at least 3 to 5 cut scenes before tabulating.. just.. make it more a player oriented game, not a child-in-a-daycare type game.. omg.. please save us from Nintendo.. I thought it was the other way around 15 years ago..
7. Computers suck -- my computers always die in 6 month intervals. Every time I perfect my little workstations for crap, with all the little implementations and tricks and keythingys, sparkle and magic, they CRASH BURN DIE AND GO TO THE GRAVEYARD. omg.. scary.. I may get a Mac or Linux computer and emulate here soon.. Getting tired of all the crashesnessismings..



Kthnx!

~Kiyote Daemon Wolf

[fantastic]

On the last point...

7. Computers suck -- my computers always die in 6 month intervals....

I understand your frustrations to some extent. However, the one big thing that really is annoying for me is how slow it is to do any real work even with a modern PC, thanks to bloated windows and poor systems programming. It's getting to the stage I'll need an 8-core super processor PC just to get a half decent response when running applications or a browser. Yet, when I see my son use his Mac laptop, he screams along several times faster on hardware with similar specs. He boots up in seconds, fires up Safari browser in a second or two, starts browsing reasonable quickly limited only by the internet speed, runs his apps and development tools (he likes to write games and iphone stuff) without a pause, and when finished shuts down in seconds. I've seen him doing serious work while I'm still waiting for my PC to finished logging on when we started roughly the same time. I see this happen too often and I'm frustrated. MS needs a big kick in the backside.

[Zippy]

On the last point...

7. Computers suck -- my computers always die in 6 month intervals....

I understand your frustrations to some extent. However, the one big thing that really is annoying for me is how slow it is to do any real work even with a modern PC, thanks to bloated windows and poor systems programming. It's getting to the stage I'll need an 8-core super processor PC just to get a half decent response when running applications or a browser. Yet, when I see my son use his Mac laptop, he screams along several times faster on hardware with similar specs. He boots up in seconds, fires up Safari browser in a second or two, starts browsing reasonable quickly limited only by the internet speed, runs his apps and development tools (he likes to write games and iphone stuff) without a pause, and when finished shuts down in seconds. I've seen him doing serious work while I'm still waiting for my PC to finished logging on when we started roughly the same time. I see this happen too often and I'm frustrated. MS needs a big kick in the backside.

Serious work generally takes more than serious seconds.

- or perhaps it isn't serious.

[fantastic]

That may be so Zippy but non-serious work shouldn't take long either but it does under Windows. Unfortunately, we are stuck with it, at least for some time.

[stylin]

I have nothing to contribute, but perhaps this thread should be moved to Community Discussion ?

[cha0s]

Sure... I use Arch Linux and it's super fast.

[Dr_D]

What about #3 on random thoughts? Convert midi to FB? FB doesn't support *any* sound. Are you referring to one of the QB sound replacement libraries? You may have to tweak one by hand to get the expected results. As far as I know, those were just hacked together by the grace of the community at large. :)

[Kot]

It's getting to the stage I'll need an 8-core super processor PC just to get a half decent response when running applications or a browser.

From the Net:
In 1968 it was enough to get two C64 power to send man to the Moon. Now, in 2008 you need Pentium 3GHz just to start Windows... something went wrong.

[John Spikowski]

Is FreeBASIC doomed to the 32 bit world? Has anyone tried FB on a 64 bit OS?

[jcfuller]

Is FreeBASIC doomed to the 32 bit world? Has anyone tried FB on a 64 bit OS?

I'm not sure doomed is the correct terminology but FreeBasic is and always will create 32bit apps. I don't think there is a 64bit version of gcc or gas for windows ?

James

[AGS]

There is a 64bit version of mingw. Files are available from sourceforge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/

And that 64bit version comes with a story. Apparently the
mingw developers were not able to produce a 64bit mingw version.
So someone or rather a group of people forked the project and went on to produce a 64bit mingw version.

I don't think programmers will be eager to use an alternative version of mingw (even if it is 64bit). But who knows, perhaps the two projects will merge and 64bit support will be added to the 'official' version of mingw(-32).

[vdecampo]

-- b. Retro.. : There seems to be no end to something being dragged back up from the dead and repackaged. I wanna make FB games, can the OS/Hardware in arcade (shells) and sell them unit by unit. (I can dream can't I ?)

I have dreamed this too. I have several arcade machines and I've wanted to duplicate the shells, throw a computer inside, and start my own arcade company.

Ahh...dreams!

-Vince

[marcov]

Is FreeBASIC doomed to the 32 bit world? Has anyone tried FB on a 64 bit OS?

Hmm, is there a 64-bit Basic at all btw? I quickly checked, and while a few interpreters run, I don't see compilers?

[jcfuller]

Is FreeBASIC doomed to the 32 bit world? Has anyone tried FB on a 64 bit OS?

Hmm, is there a 64-bit Basic at all btw? I quickly checked, and while a few interpreters run, I don't see compilers?

No Windows:
http://www.basic-converter.org/

James

[Eponasoft]

On the last point...

7. Computers suck -- my computers always die in 6 month intervals....

I understand your frustrations to some extent. However, the one big thing that really is annoying for me is how slow it is to do any real work even with a modern PC, thanks to bloated windows and poor systems programming. It's getting to the stage I'll need an 8-core super processor PC just to get a half decent response when running applications or a browser. Yet, when I see my son use his Mac laptop, he screams along several times faster on hardware with similar specs. He boots up in seconds, fires up Safari browser in a second or two, starts browsing reasonable quickly limited only by the internet speed, runs his apps and development tools (he likes to write games and iphone stuff) without a pause, and when finished shuts down in seconds. I've seen him doing serious work while I'm still waiting for my PC to finished logging on when we started roughly the same time. I see this happen too often and I'm frustrated. MS needs a big kick in the backside.

So stop using Windows and start using a real operating system. There's more for the PC than just Windows. There are hundreds of flavors of Unix and Unix-like systems, plus dozens of lesser-known systems like Menuet, V2_OS, DexOS, Visopsys, Zeta, Jazmyn, EROS, BOS, etc etc etc...and then there's always ReactOS if you have to have Windows but don't want Windows. :)