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My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and I have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. My brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.
| Saturday, October 29, 2005 |
  Wallace and Grommit : Cheesy Good Fun | 
Posted - 10/29/2005 12:05:02 AM | Just got back in a while ago from seeing Wallace and Grommit in the Curse of the Wererabbit. That movie is without doubt the most absolutely hilarious thing I've seen in a very, very long time.
Anyone with a decent (read: British) sense of humor owes it to themselves to see this movie at least once.
"We'll call him.... Hutch!"
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| Wednesday, October 26, 2005 |
| Sleep is so weird. | |
Posted - 10/26/2005 3:06:46 AM | So, it's 3 AM. Usually, I'd be going to sleep right now. Today, I just (more or less) got up.
I decided that I'm tired of working on a 6 hour phase shift from my employer in Germany, so I went to bed around 8 last night to compensate. So far so good, although I still have a long day ahead of me to see how well (if at all) this scheme will work out. The best part seems to be that I can do the job I care about (game development) right after I wake up and I'm still more or less functional, rather than doing it after a day in a nightmarish office where I feel like ripping my eyes out with a spork.
The last time I tried something like this, it was a split schedule where I'd sleep for 4 hours after work, do game development, then sleep for another 2-3 hours before work again. That actually did a very nice job for a while, but after a few days it became pretty impractical, what with the always being asleep when I needed to take care of Real Life. With any luck a straight 6 hour shift should be a lot more manageable.
I've always liked working late at night, and I have some very deep sentimental attachment to watching the sunrise while I work, so I think this may turn out well. It'd almost be romantic, if not for the fact that I'm alone in an apartment at 3 AM.
On second thought, maybe my brain isn't working so well after all.
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| More Excessive Negativity | |
Posted - 10/21/2005 8:25:32 PM | Well, I found out today that the cleaning company has refused to cough up a reimbursement for the video card. Apparently, they are taking the maid's word for it that the card was, and I quote, "in the trash." That's a filthy lie and everyone involved knows it, but they're stubbornly sticking to their BS story. I can't say I didn't see this coming, but it still sucks.
For what little bit of justice it's worth, the company has fired the cleaners and will be refusing to pay the bill for their (dis)services. So they still lose their $150 (and more, if I'm not mistaken) for utter incompetence and stupidity on the job, and I'll (eventually) get back the cash for another card.
I guess it all evens out, though - I haven't had a chance to really miss the TV card without a sound system to go with it.
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| Pity Me. Pity Me and My Pitiable Circumstances. | |
Posted - 10/21/2005 1:33:07 AM | Well, I think this week is looking to set a record for suckiness. First there was the video card thing (we're still trying to shake down the cleaning service for a reimbursement) and then there was tonight.
I went to start working tonight and the source control server was dead. Apparently, everyone knows it is dead, but nobody knows what to do about it, or at least the ones who know were crawling off to bed by the time I got home from my day job. There are times when I'm quite annoyed by working on a 6-hour phase shifted schedule compared to one of my employers. I might have to do some crazy sleep pattern adjustments once I go fulltime there so that I can work on a more synchronized schedule.
Anyways, since I couldn't work, I figured I'd go watch some Adult Swim and maybe a little bit more of the Firefly collection that I've been hoarding the last week or so. As I may or may not have mentioned before, the center channel on my 5.1 system was having problems with cutting in and out randomly; the other night it just died completely and has been dead since. I decided that before I turned on the TV and was forced to suffer with mere stereo sound like all the Normal People out there, I would pop the amp open (again) and just make sure there was nothing that I could see wrong with it.
Didn't find anything. Just like the last two times I tried that.
So I hooked the system back up and, heavy of heart, turned on South Park and resigned myself to hearing only two measly channels of audio. To my shock, the center channel worked fine - and stayed working. For about half an hour.
Being bored and not feeling like doing any of the other stuff that I probably should have been doing (like the dishes) I popped the amp open again. I had the unit resting on its side with everything taken out of the enclosure, and it seemed to be fine again. Happy, I settled in for Adult Swim and blissfully enjoyed about an hour's worth of full 5.1 audio bliss.
Then the sound disappeared. At this point, the entire system is utterly and totally dead. The volume control unit lights up and "works" as far as that goes, but no sound of any kind comes out of the amp.
Luckily, earlier tonight I found that I do in fact own a perfectly reasonable multimeter. Armed with this gadget of fearsome diagnostic power, I set about poking at things and looking for what part of the amp might have blown up. Thus far, everything seems to be perfectly fine in about 3/4 of the circuitry, although I'll have to do some additional disassembly sometime to really know. In any case the amp is thoroughly and utterly beyond warranty, so even if I do manage to find the problem, I'll either have to fix it myself or take a hit and buy a new sound system.
The agony of all this is only mildly tempered by the fact that today I received a box of 28-pin ribbon cable, which I have already confirmed matches the input requirements of my Sharp LCD panel perfectly. Next step is to acquire (or concoct) an 8V power supply and see if I can power the thing up. Once that's done it will be a trivial additional step to add a composite video input, which will be very cool indeed. I've reserved a time slot this weekend to hit all the vaguely electronics-related stores in the area and start collecting the spare parts that I'll need to continue with the project.
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| Tuesday, October 18, 2005 |
| Son of a BITCH | |
Posted - 10/18/2005 12:17:49 PM | Well, my nice, shiny, brand-new, $150 ATi TVWonder Elite came yesterday. I gleefully opened it up and paraded it around the office in all its glory, gloating in a thoroughly geeky manner. That was all good.
Last night, I left the office in a hurry, and forgot the box in my cubicle. Crazy, I know, but these things happen.
Now, a bit of perspective is in order. This thing arrived in a Medium sized UPS priority parcel box. These boxes are 12 inches by 18 inches by 3 inches. Therefore, the box was not small.
The box contained a video capture card, remote control, manual, a large bundle of cables, assorted packing paperwork, and a bunch of padding materials. Therefore, the box was not light.
I suck at packing things into small areas, so once I gutted the box to look at all my new shineys, I just crammed it all back in, and left the bulk of the goodies sticking out of the top flap of the box. Therefore, the box was very visibly not empty.
Moreover, the sloppiness of the packing was such that it was impossible to pick up - let alone carry - the box without some things trying to fall out, at which point to proceed with the carrying of said box, one would have to pick up the loose items and place them back in the box deliberately.
The box was placed resting vertically against a dividing wall of the cubicle, and was over a meter from the nearest thing that even vaguely begins to resemble trash. Therefore, only a complete idiot would think that the box was supposed to be disposed.
The box was still there, safe and un-messed-with, when I arrived this morning. Therefore, the box was definitely here a while ago.
Alright, screw it - the suspense of all this is probably killing me more than you. The fucking cheap-ass maid service bitches threw the damn box away. A brand freaking new video capture card, with all the trimmings, sitting right on top of the box - just pitched out. The idiots carried the damn box through the office, out the back, to the dumpster, and threw it away. This walk is close to a hundred yards all told. Apparently, the time it takes to traverse that distance wasn't sufficient for enough neuron activity in the impenetrably dense skull of the maid to trigger comprehension of even one of the important points that I carefully laid out above, when the recognition of even a single one of those facts should have been ample cause to NOT THROW THE DAMNED BOX AWAY.
To make it all the more completely retarded, there's a large pile of very visibly empty boxes sitting right next to a trash can in another part of the office. They weren't even touched, let alone disposed.
Oh, yeah, and the waste disposal crew came several hours early today, and emptied the dumpster literally only a few minutes before I turned around and noticed that the box was missing.
So I'm somewhat pissed off at the moment.
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| We All Live in a Fuschia Automaton | |
Posted - 10/17/2005 1:38:41 AM | First, the most important and awesome news: X³: Reunion has officially gone gold. It is a good day indeed.
Now on to more mundane things.
Apparently, I'm not the only lunatic who's done this. The project describes how to use a PIC microcontroller to generate a PAL-compliant composite video signal. Should be fairly simple to adjust it to generate an NTSC signal instead, and rig it up to the LCD. Should also be quite trivial to adjust the concept to whatever microcontroller I end up deciding to use for this thing.
Of course, since NTSC runs at nothing remotely resembling the scanline resolution of the LCD itself, the long-term applications of such a controller are undoubtedly limited. However, I'll need a couple of microcontrollers anyways, and learning how to output a composite signal is a decent way to get acclimated with the whole notion of generating video signals in general. Since the controller on the 4L-U4EB line also takes analog RGB (i.e. the same basic format as your video card produces) I should be able to adapt the microcontroller concept to that. The difference is really just three circuits instead of one, and a slightly more complex signal format. Mastering the RGB signal would give me the ability to build a video controller ROM of sorts with the microcontroller, and set up a pixel-precise memory mapped graphics system for the thing.
All the tech data I have on the LCD is for the color model, the 4L-U4E. The part I have though is the U4EB, and the receipt I have for it clearly says "black and white." I'm assuming that the controller will simply greyscale the input signal (either directly or simply by virtue of the fact that the liquid crystal system itself only has a monochrome structure) so I'll be able to cheat and ignore a lot of the complexities of both composite video and analog RGB with respect to generating correct colors. If this does indeed turn out to be a simple greyscale display then I can cheat quite a bit with the video controller system - 1 byte per pixel for 256 intensity levels, and all that good stuff. Should be fun to see what comes of that.
When I get the ribbon cables I'll do a quick hack-job and rig the thing up to my VCR, maybe watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica on it or something. I might be convinced to do another photo archive of the whole project if anyone is interested, although the general response to my collections of blurry camera-phone pictures has been... subdued, to say the least 
Anyways, I vaguely promised myself that once we went gold I'd start going to bed at 2 AM again. I should probably make good on that, or I might find myself very angry at me in the morning.
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| Saturday, October 15, 2005 |
| More interesting parts | |
Posted - 10/15/2005 10:54:03 PM | Thanks to the comprehensive specs I got from the guy at Sharp, I managed to dig through Molex's web site and find the original part drawings for the signal input connector on the LCD panel. From there I found a cable that matched the connector specs, and then found an actual distributor of OEM Molex cables that would tolerate orders of less than 1000. So now I have 10 cables on the way that match the input connector on the LCD.
I also have (thanks to the Sharp guy) the complete pinout specs of the input connector.
The upshot of all of this is that, in about a week, I'll have all the resources I need to start working on powering up this panel. Once I've pulled that off, it should be almost trivial to actually hook up the composite inputs, and I'm in business.
I figure on cannibalizing a couple of the ribbon cables and using them to hook up dummy leads to different pins on the input connector. That should let me experiment with just powering it with no signal, and all that good stuff. It will probably be a fairly delicate and messy process until I learn enough about the panel to build a nice compact circuit - but heck, that's half the fun of it.
I got talking to the Spectral Samurai about all of this, and we've agreed that the coolest thing to do is figure out how to take advantage of the analog RGB support that the panel has, and building an actual computer from scratch with it. Once the video signal bit is taken care of, it should just be a matter of putting together a microcontroller and ROM that can be used as the video interface. Another microcontroller, some more programmable ROMs, and a little bit of wizardry, and I think we can actually build a fully functioning architecture here. Building up a complete system and coding an OS on bare metal will be a hell of a challenge, but you just can't get much more cool than that.
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| Thursday, October 13, 2005 |
| The Taming of the Beast | |
Posted - 10/13/2005 10:16:06 PM | Today I found a bunch of old pictures from when I built Celes. I had sort of intended to do this a long time ago, but for a lot of reasons (none of them particularly good) I didn't. Now I have.
So, with no further delays, I present to you: the Taming of Celes. Behold, more low-quality images from a camera phone!
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| The Exploits of Dr Geekenstein | |
Posted - 10/13/2005 2:46:29 PM | You may remember (ok, you probably don't) my post a while ago about an OEM LCD that I got ahold of. I got bored last night and sent another email to Sharp's Help Desk to see if I could get some real specs on the part and maybe a supplier for a controller for the unit. Amazingly enough, I got a reply back this afternoon.
I now have in my very gleeful possession a proper, decently-scanned spec sheet for the part, including a full schematic and details on the pinout and expected signal formats for the display. Apparently it can take a direct composite NTSC signal (e.g. from a bog standard VCR) which means that a little bit of voltage regulation and signal scrubbing will give me a miniature black-and-white LCD TV. I'm already having evil visions of using that to create myself a little games console... provided I can get a decent processor and some equipment to put out the composite signal to the LCD.
I'm also working on lining up my evaluation NA-1301 for my PVR. All in all it is a good day for the building of ridiculous electronic devices.
Of course to do all this insanity I'm going to have to break down and get a better soldering iron and a decent multimeter... which also means that I might finally get around to fixing the center channel that keeps cutting out on my 5.1 amp.
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| Tuesday, October 11, 2005 |
| Overengineering a Household Appliance | |
Posted - 10/11/2005 7:07:59 PM | I want to build my own PVR (Tivo clone).
I want to do it inside of this:
I need good recommendations for video capture hardware (see here).
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| Random pseudo-intellectual observation | |
Posted - 10/10/2005 8:51:30 AM | When I was a kid, I used to have this special idea of "late at night." There was of course the insanely late hour of 10 PM, which I got to see occasionally. That was "late," to be sure, but not all that big of a deal. The mysterious, magical "late" was, like, midnight or something. I remember having a sort of quiet respect for that magical, ineffable hour. On the rare occasions when I would wake up at 1 or 2 AM, I felt like some kind of conqueror, an explorer, challenging the frontiers of time and infiltrating a dark and silent realm of night that few ever witnessed. I was the King of the Dark.
I remember in particular once incident where I woke up at 2 or something, and started doing stuff in my room. I guess every kid does that once or twice, but I wasn't just "not tired" or "bored of sleeping" - I was on the cutting edge of Late Night Activity Research, and I was probing the depths of an hour that (as far as I was concerned) the rest of the world didn't know existed. I recall, too, a few years later, spending the night at a friend's place. We were playing old SNES classics and watching corny cable movies. Holy Crap, all of a sudden it's 3 AM... and we're still awake. We stayed up until Really Late At Night, and dammit, we were cool. There was a magic about those quiet hours, a sense of being in a time pocket that few people shared. For a twelve year old kid, that was about as religious as experiences could get.
The magic is gone now. I have no sense of Really Late At Night. Being awake at 4 AM has ceased to be a crazy adventure, challenging the unwritten law that people sleep when it's dark out. Far from being an enigmatic span of time full of potential and mystery, early morning is just another block of hours to fill with getting work done. Perhaps soon I'll be able to fill that time with the kind of fun that I used to, but somehow I think the spell is permanently broken. The naive, wide-eyed wonder of being a kid who's up Really Late At Night is gone.
In a way, it's kind of sad.
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| Saturday, October 8, 2005 |
| Hey... I got me one o' them journal thingies! | |
Posted - 10/8/2005 8:15:28 PM | I've been sort of meaning to explore this feature a bit for quite a while now, but due to being ridiculously busy and generally complacent about just about everything, I haven't.
However, I think now is a good time to start, seeing as I actually have some content to post here and all.
So, without further ado, I bring you The War Room: Aftermath of Game Development. Enjoy it, you sick freaks.
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In locus hic, omnes res dementes sunt.
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