As most of you know already, the XNA Framework beta was released so I thought I'd give it a try. It apparently requires Visual Studio 2005 C# Express (VS2005 Standard doesn't cut it), so I had to install that. Once that was installed, I loaded up XNA, ran one of the demos and kept on getting the following error:



It was time to upgrade my eight year old machine. I've had problems with it in the past anyway. The power suply was dying, it only had one USB slot, the fan sounded like an airplane. I needed something new.

So, I got a laptop. I got a Fujitsu Lifebook S Series and you can see the new rig that I have setup with it on the right. When I place it in its dock, it hooks up to the monitor, keyboard, stereo, mouse, ethernet LAN, etc. It works quite nicely and I'm really looking forward to trying it out in downtown Toronto with the new wireless network.

Here are the specs:

• Centrino Duo T2400 (2 1.83 GHz Processors)
• 1 GB SDRAM
• Mobile Intel(R) 945GM Express Chipset Video
• TouchPad and TouchStick
• 14 Inch Monitor (1400x1050)
• ... etc

The first thing I had to do was test it with some games:

• It barely runs Doom 3
• Half-Life 2 runs at minimum graphics
• Civilization IV runs perfectly (Yay!)
• N64 Emulation is perfect
• Couldn't even run Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Guild Wars is beautiful
• Beyond Good and Evil works, of course

After playing around with some games and picking up an Xbox 360 Controller for Windows, I thought I'd finally get back to trying out XNA. I went through the first XNA tutorial without any problems and it worked on the new laptop.

The Pong challenge was next on my list and here is the result:


PongXNA

What's next, you ask? I've been trying to figure out how to write XNA Game Components. Something where you can just drag the component onto your designer form and it would render the component. I'd like to have a small toolset of XNA components ready for use in any XNA application (think Framerate, BitmapFonts, Console window, etc)....

Random Interest

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