y halo thar

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Random update before I go to bed at 9PM so I can actually wake up tommorrow at 4AM to go to my fucking job where I run around Target all day moving boxes getting paid a measley 8USD/hour At least I’m getting trained to work in the backroom, so I don’t have to deal with people. I get to deal with lifting large heavy packages and working with machinary that can crush a man in half a second if used improperly.

Or so I’ve been told.

On the dev side, I wrote a GBA thingy that is supposed to flash the screen a random color. See, I wanted to give myself an epileptic episode, because I thought it’d be fun -

DO NOT VIEW IF YOU HAVE A HISTORY OF NOT LIKING FLASHY IMAGES!!!!

As you can see, I’m having some tearing issues, even with only updating the screen during a VBREAK interrupt. I suspect this is because I’m copying each pixel over one-by-one in a nice big loop for the entire screen, which is probably entirely too slow.

Or something. It still looks pretty cool.

Going to try to get sprites working tommorrow – they’re a real pain

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DS WISH LIST 
(complete game listing)

[x]  !  Advance Wars: Dual Strike
[ ]  !  Brain Age
[ ]  !  Bust-A-Move DS
[ ]     Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
[ ]     Children of Mana
[ ]  !  Final Fantasy 3
[ ]  !  Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles
[ ]     Harvest Moon DS
[ ]  !  Kirby DS
[ ]     Kirby: Canvas Curse
[ ]  !  Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass
[ ]  !  LostMagic
[x]     Mario Kart DS
[ ]     Meteos
[ ]     Metriod Prime Hunters
[ ]  !  Nanostray
[x]  !  New Super Mario Brothers
[ ]     Sonic Rush
[ ]     Star Fox Command
[ ]     Steel Horizon
[ ]     Super Mario 64 DS
[ ]  !  Tetris DS
[ ]  !  WarioWare: Touched
[ ]  !  Worms: Open Warfare

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Okay, so I had my first (since last year) day at work, and to be honest, I’m not going to waste your time bitching and whining about it. Abou tit. Because neither of us care that I have to go in tommorrow, or that I can now afford to buy a DS game a day.

Too bad I’m going to run out of good DS games to buy pretty soon (not that I’m actually going to buy one a day, this is just a linker comment.)

But yeah, set up a nice GBA environment in VS2005. Its got all the kewl stuff. Like the buttons work (pressing build actually builds the *.gba file! And pressing debug opens Visual Boy Advance with the output file!!). Nifty. Been banging my head for days tying to get the damned makefiles to work, finally managed to do it. Now I just have to figure out how to get Visual Boy Advance to debug…

(oh, and if anyone is interested in a detailed description of how exactly I did this, just post a comment and I’ll write the sucker up. Needless to say, its actually really easy to do. There’s just craptons of places that you can screw up on…)

Still looking for DS title recommendations. I was browsing through the complete list of published titles over at NintendoDS and saw about 3 more I wanted to get, in addition to like 4-5 that come out this fall.

*DROOL*ZELDA*DROOL*FF3*DROOL*

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I officially got my job offer today, for the flow shift. I’ll be working from 05h30-13h00, basically 7 hours a day, probably 5-6 days/week. At $8/hour.

Now, I live with my parents, and have virtually no expenses to speak of (hur hur, sacrifice freedom for financial stability) so I decided to celebrate today by going out and cashing in the savings I had for next semester’s books and stuff.

So I bought a DS Lite with a few games -

* New Super Mario Brothers
* Mario Kart DS
* Advance Wars: Dual Strike

And I have to say, the DS has lived up to almost every one of my hopes and dreams. I’ve only got a couple qualms with it, the first that you can’t access the WFC settings outside of a game that uses it (oh, and the fact that there is no WPA support… had to swich my network over to WEP and it still doesn’t quite connect), and second that the very top row of pixels on the touchscreen sometimes flashes black in AW:DS during the between-mission dialogue potions (I’m suspecting it has to do with the dialogue taking place on both the top-and-bottom areas, and something going amiss there). I don’t think its a hardware problem – haven’t noticed it with any other games, though none of the other games rely so heavily on the touchpad (AW:DS uses the top screen for info, the bottom for gameplay).

All in all, its like sex. On wheels.

Granted this means development is coming to a standstill. Additionally, I decided to give up on Moola after extrapolating the probability of “success”. Though “success” seems very reasonable given the various techniques (primarily the behavioral analysis), the time required to gather the hundreds/thousands of data points required would not be worth the possible (!) gain. So that’s that.

Anyway, I’ve got the whole night ahead!

I’d love to hear recommendations for further DS purchases. I’m not sure how fast I’ll plow through these, depends on whether or not I forsake everything else, but *droooooool*.

EDIT: I think I may have figured out the router problem. DS uses 802.11b. I’ve got the router set in g-only mode. Lets see if changing that fixes the problem ^_^

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