Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

BlueCube4D

Monday, June 14th, 2010

BlueCube4D is a game I’m porting to Dingux/NanoNote from a GP2X game, which in turn is a port of a tetris-clone for Linux, by Sebastian Falbesoner.

BlueCube4D

Screenshot of BlueCube4D. Image grabbed with fbgrab.

It should be released very soon, and when it’s available, you’ll find it on my Google Code page, as usual. I’ll make a post for the release when it’s done.

AFAIK, there’s no tetris clone for Dingux yet. That’s all going to change now! ;)

Ben NanoNote keyboard defined!

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

I couldn’t find a list with the Ben NanoNotes key codes, so I fired up my keyCodes application, and compiled a list with all the keyboard keys, which can make your life easier when developing games or programs for the NanoNote. The file is called keyboard.c, and #defines every single keyboard key!

Download here!

NanoNote arrives, dex gets released

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

My NanoNote finally arrived yesterday. It’s made of pure awesome. I’ve tested dex on it, made a few optimizations and fixed a few bugs, so here it is, the first release of dex! Enjoy!

dex v1 stable
Download it from my Google Code page here! Please read through the readme.txt file for usage and other related information. Protip: Copy the dex binary to /usr/bin, and you won’t have to navigate to the folder it’s stored each time you want to use it. If you find any bugs, or have any feature requests, please use the issue tracker on my Google Code project. Comments can go on the comments to this article. Thanks.

Unrelated news:
I also made two mini-tools today (both for MIPS/Ben NanoNote):

  • A random password generator which will generate a random 8 character password, containing lower and upper case letters, and numbers. Download here.
  • An SDL-application to view key codes for pressed keys, which can come in handy when that’s not documented (I used it to find the keycodes of the Vol Up/Vol Down buttons). Press Escape to quit. Download here.

Some dex updates and information sources

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

dex now has all the current Pokemon included! That’s data for a total of 493 Pokemon spread across 4 generations! I also wrote a routine to replace Pokemons names within their dex entries, so all Pokemon are now “encounterable” in the GTP minigame. If a random Pokemons name appears in it’s dex entry, the Pokemons name is replaced with “[...]“, or else this game would be too easy :)

Shows GTP's new masking system

I also added Egg Hatching info in this build. You can now see how many steps you need to take in order to hatch a given Pokemon. Egg hatching information applies to all Pokemon games where you have access to eggs (Every Pokemon game except Gen 1: Red, Blue, Green, Yellow)

As you may know, every Pokemon game describes Pokemon information differently, therefore I’ve only added the description for each Pokemon from the Generation it originally appeared in:

  • Gen 1 (1-151) descriptions are taken from Pokemon Red
  • Gen 2 (152-251) descriptions are taken from Pokemon Gold
  • Gen 3 (252-386) descriptions are taken from Pokemon Ruby
  • Gen 4 (387-493) descriptions are taken from Pokemon Diamond

The next thing that will be added are attacks, though I’m having a hard time finding a parseable list of attacks, with Name, Type, Power, Accuracy, PP and description, and there’s no way in hell I’ll manually add all the attacks, there are a shitload of them.

Blargh, I want my goddamn NanoNote already!

Dingux Kernel with 8×8 terminal font

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

I built a Dingux kernel with an 8×8 terminal font instead of the hard-to-read 4×6 font today.

Check out the thread over at Dingoonity for more info and download.

This is how sexy it looks:

8x8 terminal font. Click the image for full-size.

I will probably recieve my NanoNote today! Hooray!

Yet another dex update

Monday, June 7th, 2010

After adding Gen 2 and 3 Pokemon today, I’ve decided that the GuessThatPokemon minigame will only contain the 251st Pokemon, as virtually every single Generation 3 Pokemon has their name listed in their Pokedex entries. This may be fixable by parsing through the Pokedex entry and change any references to the the chosen Pokemons name into asterisks or other wildcard character, but this has low priority as of now, though it will probably be  implemented in a second release.

GuessThatPokemon screenie

Screenshot of the latest dex-build, showing the minigame GTP. Click the picture for full size.

As you just read, I just finished adding Generation 2 and 3 Pokemon to the index. We now have a list of all the 386 first Pokemon names, Pokedex entries, weights, heights, kinds and types! Information about evolutions, moves and how many steps to hatch a given Pokemons egg will be added in a future release.

As the release of dex is closing in, I thought I’d let you know that it’ll be released with full, GPL’ed source code, along with a Windows binary and a Ben NanoNote binary. Since the source is written in ultra-portable C, you could probably compile it for any operating system that has a C compiler. Dingoo/Dingux release isn’t very high up on the priority list right now, but I will get around to it.

Another dex update

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Here’s an update on my dex application for the Ben NanoNote. As per request from urandom_ on the #qi-hardware channel @ freenode, I have added a small game to the dex, where you are presented with a dex entry, and you are to guess the name of the Pokemon that that entry belongs to. Below is a screenshot.

GuessThatPokemon, a new module in 'dex'

GuessThatPokemon, a new minigame in dex. Click the picture for full size.

I will release dex as soon as I’ve had a chance to actually test it on the real hardware (I still haven’t recieved my NanoNote), added more Pokemon, and tweaked the source a bit. Look forward to it! :) Thanks to urandom_ for the idea!

PokeDex application for the Ben NanoNote

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

I’m currently making progress on my aptly named PokeDex for the NanoNote, “Dex“. I finally was able to wrap the PokeDex entries words to that of 18 characters (that’s the line length in the Pokemon games on the GBX), with loads of help from noclaf of the DreamInCode forums, and Ayla of #dingoonity@freenode.

This program will (at first) be a command line tool for the Ben NanoNote. I might wrap an SDL GUI around it if I can be bothered to later, so it would work on Dingux aswell.

Here’s an idea of what it’ll look like:

dex beta screenshot

Screenshot of dex

I’ve added all the 1st generation Pokemon (Red, Blue, Green, Yellow) to the application, and the framework seems to work fine. After I’ve added Gen 2 and possibly Gen 3 Pokemon, it will be available for download.

Feature requests are welcome!

DOES NOT COMPUTE

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

Hai, I finally got around to set up a development blog for myself. First a little info on myself.

I’m Lars, and I’m 20 years old. I have a beatiful fiancé and a young son. I enjoy programming, development and gaming. I’ve been programming since I was 13 years of age, starting with good old BASIC, moving on to Visual Basic, which then evolved into VB.NET. After going steady with VB.NET for a couple of years, I got interested in web programming, and picked up the HTML/CSS/PHP/SQL/JS combo, and made my own full-fledged websites. In September 2008, I got interested in C programming, but never went further than creating a super-simple ASCII art creator application for the Nintendo DS. The C part lied dormant until February of 2010, when I got myself a Dingoo A320, which rekindled my fire to develop in C, and for portable devices.

I also write LUA, but that’s pretty much useless for anything that’s not a WoW AddOn :)

This blog will largely consist of my projects for Dingux (Linux on the Dingoo A320 gaming device), and the Ben NanoNote (an open-hardware mini-computer). It will at times also contain seemingly unrelated posts :)

A quick recap of handheld applications I’ve done before I created this blog:

  • An ASCII Art Creator for the Nintendo DS (C, devkitarm, hamlib) Way back in ’08, original post found here
  • A Magic-8-Ball application for Dingux (C, SDL), original post found here
  • A Countdown timer application for Dingux (C, SDL), original post found here
  • A Stopwatch application for Dingux (C, SDL), original post found here

I’m also working on some applications for the Ben NanoNote (The first of which is a Red/Blue PokeDex application), but I haven’t recieved my NanoNote yet, so I can’t do any testing on the actual hardware until it arrives.

You can find downloads of all my applications once they’re released at my Google Code site. Check back here and on that site regularily for updates!