Entries from September 2005 ↓

Holy m-f doom! It’s done! The PSP 2.0 downgraders is out! Click for more.

PSP Hacks ( http://www.psp-hacks.com/ )
Joystiq ( http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000823060888/ )
Hack-A-Day ( http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000687060851/ )

The Hack-A-Day link has a nice little walk through. Nice to see it’s done - now can we focus on real software for 2.0 (or at least a rip of the web browser)?

OK Sony now where is firmware 2.x?

I was in the office today discussing the fact that the last week or so has delivered us some very good games. I got to start in on ‘Ultimate Spiderman’ ( http://ultimatespidermangame.com/ ) and I’ve got to tell you it’s an OK game so far. I’ve heard it’s a little short so I guess this game will go on the completed pile for once.

Marvel’s other properties lend a hand to the story once in a while.

There is however something about the game that just doesn’t sit right with me. I keep trying to compare it with ‘Spiderman 2′ which was an awesome game.

Even though the game seems to be decent - it will have to take a seat on the back burner because I need to get started on ‘X-Men Legends II’…

The Gametap service is now live! I received an e-mail offer for 1 free month then 3 months at $9.95 so I decided to check it out. I'll let you know what I think after the download finishes.

*update* After installing I ran the program and was able to log in but the program keeps crashing well trying to download the game library updates. So I uninstalled and cancelled my account.

I’m going to be working on the site off and on through out the afternoon today so if something is broken try back later and it should be fixed.

I don’t know who these people are but, I braved the crowd of small teen girls, large police officers and fat mall security to snap off a couple of pictures.

250 Woodbridge Center Drive
Woodbridge, NJ

Yup. That’s the spot this weekend well… ok… actually only on Saturday between 1pm and 6pm. Why is that? Well, my good friend Matthew Robert found out that some of the cast of Degrassi
( http://www.the-n…php?id=67 ) are going to be there. It’s going to be a hell of a good time watching the Matt harass *cough* I mean ‘talk to’ them (I have no idea which cast members will be there). Anyway, I’m going to be sure to bring the SLR so I can get some good pictures of the trainwreck in progress. Check back later for some pictures.

*edit* oh and one more thing… I hope to get some time in this weekend to work on the sites code so don’t be surprised if I break something.

“Urban Dead ( http://www.urbandead.com ) is a browser-based, grid-mapped, free-to-play multi-player game where you play the survivor or victim of a zombie outbreak in a quarantined city centre.”

As I mentioned a few days ago… I started on a similar project a while back. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time to work on it to much so it didn’t every really come to much. I think only one person has seen it in action the movement system wasn’t even done.

Anyway.

Let’s get to making a character. Classes are broken into four sections: Military, ‘Science’, Civilian, Zombie. The living classes are further broken down into sections to choose from. Zombies of course can only choose corpse as a sub-class. If you choose military for instance you can then choose between Private, Medic, or Scout. Each sub class gets some sort of little bonus. I went with ‘Private’ so I got to start with: “Basic Firearms training, a pistol and ammo”.

You start out with 50 action points which will get used quickly. With my first 50 action points I quickly found a zombie (-2 action points finding it) and started shooting like crazy (-48 for shooting and some punching). “You attack the zombie and miss.” That’s pretty much all I saw. I think I earned maybe 10 experience points and maybe caused 8 points of damage. So I logged out for the day to give it another go on the next. Opps. Upon logging back on I see a quick replay of what happened well I was gone. It seems your supposed to end your turn inside a building so the zombies can’t get you. I was quickly killed by someone lost my 10 whole experience and started life (death?) as a fresh zombie. Ok. Well, that can’t be that bad except I haven’t been able to get back over 5 experience without being killed… or brought back to life… and then killed again. Maybe I’ll re-read the FAQ again, maybe I’m missing some fine detail somewhere. Actually, maybe I’ll start working on my version again if I get a few minutes (yeah right).

If your at work and bored I suggest you check it out anyway. Who knows you might have fun.

So, it looks like my lappy finally died. Well, I’m not 100% sure it might just be the hard drive. I’ll have to wait till I get home from work to check it out. I’m a bit upset at the damn thing since I don’t have a backup of some of the pictures that were on it. *blargh* I hope that laptop hard drive adapter is in the pad somewhere… Damnit.

Ever since I found a copy of the 7-zip ( http://www.7-zip.org ) add on source for Mame .90u1 ( http://www.mame.net ) I’ve kind of wondered wether it would be worth the effort to maintain updated builds of it. I was able to compile a version using the .99 source tree with little trouble. And over the weekend I was able to put together builds for .100 and .100u1 for both Mame ( http://www.mamedev.com ) and Mame32FX ( http://mame32fx.altervista.org ).

So now it’s some time for some testing. I compiled a command line version that would exit after loading the roms so I could time how long it takes the loading process to finish. I threw together a simple perl script to do the timing.

use Benchmark;
my $start_time = new Benchmark;
system("mame avsp");
my $end_time = new Benchmark;
print "Script Benchmark: ".timestr(timediff($end_time,$start_time));

The results will vary a little bit from computer to computer of course - these results are from my P3 1Ghz lappy with 512 mb of memory.

avsp.zip - 14 wallclock secs
avsp.7z - 15 wallclock secs (non-solid)
avsp.7z - 64 wallclock secs (solid)

You’ll notice that the solid 7-zip archives take the longest amount of time to load and the non-solid one loads just about as fast as the zip file.

avsp.zip - 11,139,858
avsp.7z - 7,718,817 (non solid)
avsp.7z - 7,529,815 (solid)

Size wise you’ll see that 7-zip gives the best compression with solid archiving. But non solid 7-zip provides the fastest load time well still offering nice space savings.

As far as the official Mamedev’s are concerned zip will be the only method of compress Mame supports ( http://aarongiles.com/weblog/archives/2005/02/why_doesnt_mame.html )…

CoC Forums ( http://callofcthulhu.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1436 )

I work on the Dark Corners development team. The purpose of this post is to attempt to answer some of the questions appearing on these forums that I don’t think have been addressed, and hopefully povide a much better insight into the game.

I can’t believe it someone from the devteam posted something about the game!!! Go read the thread now for a great Q and A that started yesterday