The Inner Workings Of A Coders Brain
FishGuy876
Programmer, Geek, Beer Drinker
Home page: http://www.cvgm.net
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Posts by FishGuy876
Twinz! Free Version Released For Android
013 years
It has been a long time since I last worked on one of my own game projects, so it is nice to be able to say that I have finally released a new game 🙂 The game is called Twinz! and is based on an game I wrote back on the Commodore Amiga back in 1996 (HOL Link). The original game it was based on was written by Theo Develegas on the ZX Spectrum (WOS LINK) back in 1991, it was a covertape game that I liked to play and back then, I wanted to have a go at doing one myself. If you asked people to load games from cassette tape nowadays, they would have a heart attack! hehe.
The objective of the game is very simple, you turn over 2 tiles at a time to see if the pictures behind them match. If they do, then they stay open and you keep going. If they don’t match, they turn back over. The logic to the game comes from remembering the images behind each tile, so when you find it somewhere else you can turn it over at the right place. Points are awarded for better playing tactics (tiles that are not checked underneath lots of times) and pairs that are found in sequence (one after the other). The game features 5 levels, three difficulties, and an online high score sharing system where you can post your best scores directly from within the game.
Twinz is compatible on any mobile or tablet device. Releases coming for Kindle fire soon, along with iPhone/iPad and other markets. Stay tuned!
Twinz! Screenshots – Click any thumbnail to make it larger
Download Twinz! Now!
Commodore C64 Birthday Cake FTW!
113 years
For my last birthday, my wife thought it would be pretty cool to make me a Commodore C64 cake at the last minute! I thought it was a pretty awesome idea anyways!
She made the whole thing from scratch, even down to the keys and the bits that go on top for the colour strip and the power light. She likes to make a lot of fancy cake designs, and I have been bugging her for months now that she needs to set up a website or something to show off some of the fancy designs that she does.
I almost didn’t want to eat it at first, but eventually the kids helped me along by cutting into it and enjoying the Commodore flavour 🙂
Thanks, baby 🙂
I have attached some of the other pictures for your viewing pleasure 🙂 Sorry I couldn’t save you a bit of the cake …
New Tool In Development – Litecoin Miner Status – Monitor Multiple Litecoin Miners At Multiple Pools!
013 years
| Project Update |
|---|
| This project has now been officially released. You can visit the project page (and download the tool) Here or get to it throught Discography tab at the top of the page. Thanks! |
I have been working on a new tool for the last couple of weeks to assist Litecoin miners in their quest of mining. As a Litecoin miner myself in this new coin, a few pools started to pop up here and there and there was not much of a way to track what was going on. Hence my tool came along!
A common thing with any coin mining process is hopping, or switching from one pool to another. With my tool, you can see what you are doing across multiple pools, including how much LTC you have mined and how much you have been paid.
The interface is split into 3 main portions. The top part is a “ticker” of sorts that pages through the supported mining pools, showing you the current overall stats of that individual pool such as it’s overall mining speed, and the number of individual miners currently working there (and their combined KH/s speed). The middle field view shows the miners you have listed in that specific pool (If any) and what your miners are currently doing there. The base view is an overall view of your current mining summary across all of the supported pools. The tool is quick, easy to use, and sits quietly in the background keeping itself updated.
The tool is currently going through the last few days worth of testing with some close friends and miners, and I hope to have it released in the next couple of weeks once all the fine tuning has been done to it. If you are interested in testing out the tool, feel free to get in touch with me at andy [at] andykellett.com with your information. You can also find me on IRC , irc.freenode.net in #elitist, #litecoin and #rfcpool
Support For Many Pools!
At the time of the release, or unless someone suggests otherwise, the following mining pools will be supported from the initial launch of the application:
- Elitist Jerks
- Pool-X.eu
- OzCoinÂ
Additional Mining Pools
If you own/run/reccomend another litecoin mining pool that you would like to see added to this program, let me know either by email or in the comments of this post and I will see what I can do to get it in. Your pool must support JSON statistics that can easily be accessed via the web. The tool supports all mmcfe-based pools, I just need to know your details.
The Program Is Beerware!
The program itself will be released as BeerWare, meaning if you like it and you find it extremely handy, you should donate some coin towards a beer or two for the developer! Pool owners who want their pools listed within the app are encouraged to donate a couple of extra beers as well, especially if your pool requires a lot of work to get added (custom JSON etc.) There will not be a charge to buy the program ever, and anyone who does try to sell it for money are trying to rip people off. It will always work the same if you choose to donate or not. Donation addresses to send coin to will be in the About section of the program in various different formats. All donations are truly appreciated 🙂
Donation Addresses
Some people are already asking for donation addresses to bribe with, they are as follows:
LiteCoin:Â LfrxgdK1PgJQPRkPVDqopQt3FaYVswmp74
BitCoin: 15s2vduLZSBUYDHPANgXVC9DPKz6BesZLj
More details will be released for the program as soon as they are available. Versions will also be made available for Mac & Linux in time. Feel free to comment or ask any questions in the comments section on this post. Initial testing only available to Windows users. Thanks! FishGuy876
Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and C, Has Passed Away
013 years
Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the Unix operating system, has died aged at the age of 70.
Thank-you for giving us a superior language, and being a pioneer in the age of computing. Rest in peace!
/* for Dennis Ritchie */ #include <stdio.h> main()Â { printf("Goodbye World"); }
ZD Net Article:Â http://www.zdnet.com/news/dennis-ritchie-father-of-unix-and-c-dies/6314570
Wiki entry on C:Â http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_%28programming_language%29Â
Moving To A New House!
013 years
by FishGuy876
in Misc
This weekend is going to be crazy as I plan to move into a new house in the Adamstown, PA area. Its a single-floor rancher house, with a basement the entire size of the house, and that’s why I’m moving everything from my old house, using services from adtmoving for this.
The new house has a lot more room, as it has a nice garage that will hold 1 car and all my tools, a huge basement thats at least 3x the size of the current one (which means more room to hold all my Commodore Amiga & Atari machines!) and plenty of other things that the family can enjoy, such as a huge deck in the back. Great for keg parties!
Attached below are some pictures I took of the house, before it becomes full of computer parts!
Finally Finished Working On My Amiga A1200
113 years
I Spent quite a bit of time this weekend working on my Amiga. It has been a few years since I used it for anything other than recording music (for CVGM.net) and thought it was about time I got it working again. For quite a while now I have had the itch to get back into programming on the Amiga, and couldn’t think of a better time. Its also not that often lately that I have a few hours of downtime to actually devote to filling the entire kitchen with old computer stuff 🙂
Over the years as a programmer on the Amiga, I have accumulated a fair amount of Amigas, and also bought a few bits here and there. All my Amiga 1200’s are PAL, and every time I fly home to the UK I always bring one back with me if I can find one. On my trip last year, I was able to find an “Desktop Dynamite” pack for 50 quid, so I threw away a bunch of closes and packed my suitcase with wonderful Amiga goodness instead. The machine I had been using previously had a broken pin on the PCMCIA slot, which seems to be a common thing to break on all my Amiga machines over the years.
The most useful device I ever bought for my Amiga was my Catweasel A1200, it lets me hook up all kinds of drives to the system, and access them natively. In this modification, I will be replacing the built-in floppy with a PC drive. It will prevent me from booting via floppy disk, but the benefits of being able to read Amiga and PC disks while in Workbench are worth it. I also have a Scandy VGA ScanDoubler device thingy that clips over top of some of the chips in the Amiga and lets me connect it directly to a VGA monitor, though I tend to run into a few problems from time to time with it (it might be because my PAL Amiga doesn’t like it, I bought it in the US so it might be NTSC based) such as the screen flickering green or with a tint of blue. For this particular project, I have decided to leave it out of the system and I will put it back in another time. For now, I will settle for my 1084S and a nice Interlaced screen.
The hardest part about working on the Amiga is getting the hard drive working. By default, the Amiga has a size limit of 4gb. I had bought 2 4Gb IBM HD’s online for $1 through Ebay just for this. Now we had to get them working on the Amiga! This is where UAE comes in. One of the nice new features of the newer UAE is the ability to connect Amiga hard drives natively and use them like a real hard drive, instead of the traditional HDF files. It does however still have some problems. It cannot yet (at the time of writing anyways) partition the drive correctly, so all the partition work must be done on the real Amiga. This was a bit of a ballache for me, as I have every Workbench disk except the Install disk (that contained HDToolbox) so I ended up connecting my A2000HD and using an old version from there, just to get the partitions going. From there, I could connect to the drive to the PC and mount it natively.
To begin with, I tried to copy a version of AmiKit to the drive. The copy process went very well, however I ran into a lot of problems getting it to work on the real Amiga. After a few hours of trying to get it to boot, and never reahing the desktop, I decided to take another approach and instead I went with a more simplified Workbench from ClassicWB (http://classicwb.abime.net/) which only required my OS 3.9 CD. The bare basic programs and tools were installed, which was enough to get me started at this point. I added some more games and demos for WHDLoad, and that’s all I really needed. I also took advantage of being online with UAE, and added the newest Catweasel drivers, and a few other tools.
My Amiga has a wireless Netgear card, and I need to use the prism2.device to get it to connect to the network. Once I get moved into my new place next week, I will get that all set up and working. I tried briefly with the Genesis TCP stack and just couldn’t get it to see the card. Nothing like browsing the web on a 16 colour Amiga Interlaced screen! Oh how modern day kids are spoiled!
Detailed Amiga Specs: Commodore Amiga 1200 (PAL, Personally Purchased From the UK), DKB 1240 & 32Mb RAM (030 & 6882 FPU), Catweasel A1200, 4Gb IBM HD, OS 3.9 w/Boing Bag 1 & 2, ClassicWB Image.
Some Pictures Of Beauty:
rfcpool Bitcoin Miner Status Tool Released
013 years
This last couple of weeks I have been working on my Bitcoin Miner status API for rfcpool, and finally got around to releasing the first versions of my status tool, I’m glad I’m getting the hang of bitcoin now, thanks to SoFi. The API itself can do more than monitor the status of one mining pool, and in the future it will connect to multiple pools and display the results together in the same window. Originally, it was started when I began working on an alternative to the GUIMiner application, which I hope to finish one day.
If you are into BitCoin mining, why not check out rfcpool with their no-fee PPLNS payout system and give the app a whirl 🙂
I have set up a dedicated project page for the app, you can find more detailed information about it HERE.
You Cannot Arrest an Idea
013 years
by FishGuy876
in Computers
You cannot arrest an idea. Sail on strong, atopiary.
Prototyping New CNC FlexIO Program
213 years
I have been working on a new version of my FlexIO program for quite some time new, which has a lot of new features in it including use of wXwidgets for the GUI interface, better accuracy, and even more tools & control for the operator using it. This week I have finally began connecting stepper motors to it, and doing some real motor experiments.
There have been other significant improvements to the program as well, especially on the controller side. It is still using the Parker 6K4/ZETA4 Combo, only now with the new code the communication between the hardware and the controller is much more effective. It also does not need such a high end PC to run, as now there is no DirectX requirements, there doesn’t need to be any high refresh rates. This was a problem with the MicroATX computer used on Joshua, and a problem of the old program anyways. We all do crazy things when we have very little time to complete a project 🙂
Now that the new program is going through the final paces of it’s hardware testing, I hope to have this finished and out of the way within the next couple of weeks depending on how many free nights I get to work on it. I have a lot of other projects building up that I need to work on! Click on any image to see an enlarged version.
In the above picture: Hardware setup from the original FlexIO Classic program. On the left are 3 ZETA83-135-MO Parker stepper motors, each connected to a ZETA4 controller box (the 3 stacked units to the right of the motors). These are then connected to the Parker 6K4 controller box (the large box to the right of the ZETA4 units, with 4 red LED’s on the top) which controls the motor’s movement. The 6K4 is then connected to the PC via an RS-232 connection, which receives instructions from FlexIO. During the development process, laying the motors out flat like this is a good way to test the motor communication & the programs ability to switch between motors and steps accurately and smoothly, without damaging any real hardware in the event that a problem might occur.
Screenshot of the current beta program interface for setting up the cable being processed:
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