Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Topics - Quigibo

Pages: 1 [2] 3
16
The Axe Parser Project / Axe Talk
« on: August 04, 2010, 05:10:34 am »
Get your sharpeners ready because I've decided to hold a weekly "Axe Talk".  It will be held in #omnimaga IRC and it will be an opportunity to ask questions, give suggestions, get help, debug, and other little things like that.  I will also be using the opportunity to get a feeling about what my priorities should be during development, get opinions about changes I plan to make, and what direction I should take the project in general.  I might also have some demos, screen shots, and even special beta versions for testing.

While I am unsure of what the permanent date and time will be, right now I am making the first one on Wednesday Aug 4th 9:00 PM PST.  Yes, I know that's tomorrow/today, sorry for the short notice.  I think the majority of the members here are from the US/Canada so I tried to pick a time when most people won't be busy with work/school but at the same time not unreasonably late.

In the US/Canada, that's:
8:00   PM Alaska Time
9:00   PM Pacific Time
10:00 PM Mountain Time
11:00 PM Central Time
12:00 (Midnight) Eastern Time


I'll probably be in there a little before 9:00 PST (my time zone) and then I'll try to stay as long as there's things to talk about.  I may also consider holding it twice a week if its successful enough.

Hope to see everyone there :).

17
The Axe Parser Project / Link Routine Testing
« on: August 01, 2010, 08:13:52 pm »
I've finished the link routines, and they work very nicely but I know there are slight differences between the hardware and I need to make sure I am leaving enough room for variations.  To make the routine as fast as possible and therefore usable in realtime games that have a lot of data to send, the routine is time based instead of confirmation based.  There is a minimum threshold of 10 T-states (1.7 microseconds) which is enough to give me 100% error free byte sending on 2 linked 84+'s and should be enough between all z80 calcs, but unfortunately the Nspire emulation is too slow.  Not sure if there's anything I can do about that.

Anyway, I just need to confirm that this works.  If you have an I/O cable and 2 calculators, preferably 2 different types for example: TI-83+ and TI-84+SE, then please help me test this.  The receiver should run program A which just relays to the screen and then have the other calculator run program B which sends a random byte.  Make sure both the numbers are the same on both calculators and repeat a bunch of times and then switch the roles of sender and receiver.

If there is an inconsistency, let me know which calculator was the receiver, which one was the sender, and the numbers that show up on each screen, thanks!

18
Other / OMG -Today's XKCD!
« on: July 19, 2010, 12:59:24 am »


Wow!  And its so true too.  The sad part is they've actually gotten even worse over time!

19
The Axe Parser Project / Wave To Axe Converter
« on: July 17, 2010, 08:41:33 pm »
Its nowhere near done and it won't be released until after 0.4.0 comes out.  Currently, the files are exactly 8 times smaller than the original wave file, but that is with no compression, I will add compression later.  I'm still trying to figure out how to convert the 8 bit signal to a single bit one, this is the best I've got so far but I know I can do a lot better.  If anyone knows the algorithm or where I can find it, that would be really helpful!  Especially if you know how the RealSound algorithm works or similar player.

Here is a sample executable, it doesn't sound good, but at least you can hear it on wabbitemu.  Its awful on a real calculator though, so test it on the emulator.

20
The Axe Parser Project / MIDI To Axe Music Converter
« on: July 02, 2010, 10:35:20 pm »
Get the latest version here

I spend all last night working on this.  Its exactly what the tiles suggests.  It is a working MIDI to Axe data converter than can be used to play music in your games.  Not only does it play in the background using interrupts, but it also plays chords, and pretty nicely too!  However it has a narrow rage of notes so high and low frequencies don't render too well.  Also, it only imports the first track and it has to be a type 0 midi file, but its easy to convert.  I was using Noteworthy Composer to do my editing, its free and gives you that option when saving.  Also, I got most of these tracks from VGMusic.

In the example program press a number 1-4 to play a loop of one of the possibly familiar songs.  Press 0 to stop all music and Clear to quit.

Enjoy!

(Not 100% sure if the mac version works).

21
The Axe Parser Project / Axiom SDK For Developers
« on: June 27, 2010, 03:01:01 am »
This is for all assembly programmers who want to develop Axioms for Axe, you can post your questions, related bugs, and other concerns here.  Although I have not actually finished the Axiom feature, I have finished a template for the format I am most likely to use.  It is possible that there could be some very minor changes, but you will easily be able to compensate for those.  I just want to release this now so people can start writing their routines in preparation for this feature.

I included the SDK as well as an example Axiom that shows how some of the current functions could be written as Axioms.  Unfortunately, I realized that it will not be possible to redefine the token names as I was planning since the hook would take too long to search through the program to figure out which Axioms are used in that source and then search through those appvars every time a token is displayed in the editor.  The slowdowns would be too great especially for larger libraries.

Anyway, happy programming!

22
Computer Projects and Ideas / Experimental Game
« on: June 21, 2010, 08:16:11 pm »
I just found this on my computer, it was a project I started a long time ago to test this really neat idea I had.

Basically, when you're not playing online, a 2 player FPS games on a console has to split the screen into separate regions for each player (splitscreen).  That reduces the overall room you have to look around in on the screen.  Another think that happens, is that its very easy to glance at your opponent's screen which gives away hiding positions and other location information that generally makes some games hardly as fun and much less strategic.  So I thought up a method that would solve both of these problems at the same time!

I call this new invention of mine Chromatic Multiplexing.  The way it works is that both player's screens are drawn on top of each other filling up the entire screen.  One player's screen is drawn in red monochrome while the other player's screen is drawn in blue monochrome.  Then, each player wears special filtering glasses to only see their screen and block out the other one.  I have included instructions on how to make filter glasses if you have any of those useless Red-Blue glasses laying around since those are pretty obsolete these days.  The colors seem to filter best on a CRT monitor I think, there is a little bit of ghosting on my LCD, but both should work fine and are certainly playable.

I made a 3D Tank game to test this and its surprisingly fun if you have a buddy you can play with.  The controls are the arrow keys for the right player with the right Ctrl to shoot.  ASDW keys for the left player with left Ctrl to shoot.  The game is for Windows and should work on XP and above.  It requires DirectX9 but I think it might install the dependencies for you if you're missing any, I'm not sure.

Anyway, Enjoy!


23
Miscellaneous / Ambiguously Named Companies
« on: June 19, 2010, 04:40:49 am »
Has anyone noticed that there are a lot of companies out there in the tech sector with really ambiguous names?  I did a quick Google search with some popular prefixes and suffixes and these were the results.  Basically, if there was any doubt as to if there existed a well known professional and legitimate company with the same name (or some other product, service, definition, etc.) on the top 5 entries on the first Google search results page then I did not include it.  I guess it just goes to show you how uncreative people really are.

24
The Axe Parser Project / Calling Brave Axe Warriors!
« on: June 19, 2010, 03:02:56 am »
I've finished the compiling to applications feature and I need a few people to help me do some more extensive testing.  When I release the next version, which I think will be tomorrow night, application compiling will not be included, but I will also have an identical version with app compiling that I will give to a selected few.

Conditions:
  • I've already tested this on an emulator, so I need this tested on real hardware (especially non-83+SEs).
  • I need persons who will use this feature regularly.
  • You should not have anything important in ram OR rom!  Its very possible to corrupt rom if my routine is buggy.  You may have to do a full rom clear to restore your calculator back to normal or even resend the OS so backups are mandatory!
  • You should not share this version of Axe with anyone because I don't want to be liable for any of the possibilities above.

Although it might sounds dangerous, it should be physically impossible to brick your calculator becasue I'm only using one routine to write to flash and it explicitly checks to make sure it does not accidentally write to the certificate page, which means the worst case scenario be that you have to resend the OS.  I haven't had any problems at all with the feature so far and have never needed to do any of that, so its unlikely I made any critical mistakes, but that's what I need to confirm before I make this feature public.

So any volunteers?  :P

25
The Axe Parser Project / Axe Tokens (Read Post Before Voting)
« on: June 17, 2010, 03:23:10 am »
It is very important you read all of this before you vote.  This is a crucial part to the future of Axe Parser.

The original concept behind going through the trouble of renaming some of the Tokens is that I am very quickly running out of intuitive TI-BASIC tokens to use for more complicated Axe Commands.  I've often resorted to using the r or sometimes even the double rr but that's not going to cut it soon.  In this last version, I was all out of sprite tokens, so I used what was left in the drawing menu: Tangent().  The name has no meaning to the intended function and may force one to read the documentation before figuring out what it might be used for.

This is okay though.  I realize that a lot of TI-BASIC programmers are used to their tokens and they know where they are on all the menus lightning fast.  If you hear the word "Str1" you might immediately think "[VARS][7][1]" as I usually do.  But if you hear "Bitmap()" you have no idea where it might be.  The catalog isn't in alphabetical order either so that doesn't help much (maybe I can change that with hooks in the future but I'm unsure).  So there is a concern that you have to learn new shortcuts.

There are many many new commands still to come.  For my example, I will mention the commands for reading from archive.  There would need to be an openfile and a readbyte command.  It is entirely possible that I just use maybe log() to open the files and prod() to read a byte, there is no problem with that.  But I imagine the code is much more readable with Open() and ReadByte() for instance.  This is not an isolated case, there are more than 20 other commands I can think of that don't have any meaningful tokens.

One other advantage of renaming some tokens is that often in BASIC, commands such as int() have totally different uses in Axe.   This can ease any potential misuse since the new names imply that the interpretation of the commands have changed.  While tokens that have the same name will be interpreted as working the same way in both Axe and BASIC.

So, if I start using the new token names, then that raises the new issue of documentation.  Sure, it may be possible to document both in the commands list, and maybe even the user's guide, but not having a single standard can get very confusing when reading other people's source code, writing your own tutorials or routines, and even regular conversations like asking for help and fixing code.

I could still offer the option of using the old tokens but just have them minimally documented (like a simple table that tells you the equivalences between tokens).  That way, it encourages the new standard among the forums and when documenting the code.

If I have the tokens be completely "Mandatory" then I can hook the program editor so that the tokens are automatically enabled when editing Axe programs and then automatically disabled when you quit to the home screen or edit a regular TI-BASIC program.  There could be an option to toggle this behavior in the parser even if the old names names are documented or undocumented.

The last thing I'm going to throw out there: These are only name changes.  The actual position in the menus for each token does not change and all past and future source code is totally compatible since the tokes themselves are still the same, only the physical letters displayed on the calculator are affected.

Please ask more questions if you want clarification on something or want to bring up another point.  You can change your vote at any time.

26
The Axe Parser Project / Sprite Helpers
« on: May 15, 2010, 12:40:03 am »
I'm planning to eventually write an all purpose sprite editor for 8x8 and 16x16 sprites supporting monochrome, 3 color, and 4 color grayscale on-calc.  It will be written in Axe itself, but I need to wait on it because I have to add reading and writing to the Ans variable so that the sprites can be imported and exported.

If anyone has any other good tools, particularly for the computer since I imagine many sprites will be drawn there instead of on-calc, please post them here.  I am currently looking for a good program that can output z80 hex code for a 4 color gray bitmap, but I can't seem to find anything.  I'm about to write one in C++ if I don't see anything soon, but I really don't have the time for that right now.

27
The Axe Parser Project / ASM Routines - Source Code
« on: April 19, 2010, 10:40:01 pm »
I've decided to release the source code for all templated commands the compiler uses when parsing.  I challenge anyone to improve the code :)

You'll have to ignore the cryptic scripts that surround the routines and it probably won't be very obvious what is being done in each one of them.  If you see any routine you think you can get from the start to the finish more efficiently with equal or lesser size, alert me!  If you have any specific question just ask.

Some of the inefficiencies I can't do anything about by the nature of the way the parser currently works, but I plan to correct this eventually (like the jr's at the beginning of the subroutines)

This might also benefit anyone who is trying to transition from Axe to assembly since Axe is for the most part just cookie-cut out of this template.

28
The Axe Parser Project / The Axe Pages
« on: April 10, 2010, 03:08:20 am »
The time has come!  Yes, I need to actually start making a manual and/or tutorial for how to use Axe Parser.  I need at least a small one so I can release the beta next week or else new coders will have no clue how it works and this subforum is getting way too large to find that type of information.  I'd like to have a very clean format.  HTML is okay, but I'd really prefer a pdf instead so I can have more control with the formatting and it just looks nicer in general.  So does anyone know a good free program that can do the job?  Or if someone is really good with this kind of stuff and would be willing to put the articles together, that would be great too.

Which brings me to my next point.  I think I'll need a lot of help writing this since there's already over 100 commands and I'd like to eventually have a little paragraph about each one with an example or two.  If you're already experienced with the language and you have a little time to volunteer, let me know so I can put this together this week.  Even if you aren't an Axe expert, you can still help with formatting, reviewing, and writing the general stuff.  And yes, everyone that helps gets credited.

I'm not actually going to start writing this until after the next update which should be tomorrow, but I just want to see who can help.  I'll get everyone's email via PM and partition the load depending on the situation.

This community has already helped with the project enormously with all your feedback and motivation for me to continue at this pace.  Thanks so much!  ;D

29
OmnomIRC Development / OmnomIRC
« on: April 10, 2010, 12:31:48 am »
Okay, I noticed that recently, there was the addition of the little chat box at the top of the page.  Its pretty cool, but it was kinda distracting so I hit the little minus sign on the right to move it out of the way.  However, it still constantly refreshes the page every few seconds even when the chat is not open and its really getting annoying, especially when I have multiple tabs of omnimaga open.  Is there a way to turn it off or some type of setting I can change?

30
The Axe Parser Project / Temporarily On Hold
« on: March 24, 2010, 02:13:38 pm »
I am going to have to dedicate this entire week/weekend to studying for a very important test; the Caltech Entrance Exam which is notoriously difficult.  I am going to been staying at school from 8 in the morning to 10 at night as I have already been doing this week.  I'm just letting everyone know, and this is why I am going to try to not return to this forum until Sunday evening because its a distraction.  I haven't worked on Axe since Sunday and there is no way I am going to get anything done this week so the next update won't be until the following week.

Pages: 1 [2] 3