Damn, I just barely started making 2D games that use the 3D card for rotation, blending, zooms and stuff. Great, what am I going to do with all this now;)
You can program for PPC embedded systems right from your Linux PC and cross-compile. By definition, you won't be testing your code on the mac mini anyway, so why bother? I've cross-compiled OS and application code for SuperH, ARM, M32R, ST20 and other cpus from x86 servers, even using unattended build systems, and it's very efficient.
There's already two functional Unix platforms that supports all of the Mac mini hardware.. That's MacOS X and Darwin (F/OSS). Most useful linux apps will compile without trouble on MacOS X, if they aren't already available via the excellent Fink project.
My sales have dipped a bit starting exactly when people forked out $150 for Tiger (yes, it's worth that much, I know:P) and are playing with the numerous freebies with no money left to buy additional software this month:) (well, it's coming back up now)
Their website was announcing that they were going to opensource CherryOS. I guess a 1 KB diff mainly to remove copyrights wasn't enough to build a community on:P
Good news, one less parasite. I know it's against Apple's business model, but I wish they'd allow usage of MacOSX on PearPC officially, it's a damn useful too to get PC programmers introduced to the Mac at no cost (the mini is cheap, but still an expense). Hey Apple, it's in your long-term interest to get more applications on OSX:)
Anyone knows if there's "official" support for partitioning the disk to support several versions of MacOS X? While I'd love to write code on Tiger (and must make sure my games work on it), I also need to support older versions. I know how to install multiple versions on the same Powerbook, just wondering if there's any known side effects or differences from a 'virgin' mac:P
First of all, originality is in my opinion the only way to be heard above the noise, with virtually everyone doing free or shareware games, most of them of excellent quality, this year, it seems like.
Then of course when you're original, people don't know that they need or want your game, so you may not have many players even though the game is fun once you actually try it!
Gameplay for a very original game is even harder, you have no reference point. The gameplay for my debut game as an indie, Garden War is good but I've learned a lot for my next game.. Notably, how to reward the player more often, instead of only when you finish a level, etc., otherwise people rightfully feel that the game is slower paced than, say, arkanoid 30000:P.. and also what knobs to tweak to increase difficulty progressively.
I've also started an indie gaming company, FunPause, with the normal stuff (free game downloads and then you can get the full version).
Our first strategy game for everyone (the casual gamers), Garden War, is up, here.
At the moment, it is Windows-only, but the game wouldn't be a massive effort to port to Linux. As a self-assumed geek and early Linux fan (hello GGI guys if you read me!), I'd love to, but as a business person I am stopping myself from doing it. There's a wealth of hardware issues, multiple distributions, and the fact that fellow indie game producers reported abysmal sales.
If I was to start out, I'd need AT LEAST:
* hard sales data that a Linux version is worth it
* a cross-distro fancy (graphical) installer? .. at the bare minimum.
The intention is there, if I could get some convincing info that I'd better make a Linux version than spend equal amounts of time on promoting my already selling Windows version !
I'm French, and I'm married to an American citizen (kids on the way.. twins!). We live in France, purely because at the moment, we have a much better financial situation either, than we would over there in the US, but we may move across the atlantic. I have found the US to be very welcoming (once you're past the people at customs!), and my wife has no problem whatsoever here for being an American. (besides getting whistled at, and talked to, by guys!)
I am not a fanatic of Chirac, neither is my wife a fanatic of George W. Our respective parents are a bit more, since they had a longer period of time to build their beliefs.
However, we are saddened to see the mounting misunderstanding between the two countries that we like.
I would dare to summarize the differences as:
1) France - Scared of religious influence. We experienced hundreds of years of total Catholic domination of the country, which was so uncontested that it blocked any scientific or societal progress. You would never see a government leader in church, on TV !
- Scared of change. French are notorious for it, and it's a stereotype that's actually true! We are a country with an overwhelmingly uniform population, and anything new (Muslim religion becoming prominent, for example) is Bad.
- Trying to maintain a world position by using the European union to lessen US influence. (call it defending our interests).
2) US - Religious influence and lobbying of sorts (religious, business, etc.) is business as usual. Actually, a government leader wins brownie points by appearing religious. It's even on your money notes.
- Used to a very widely different population ('melting pot'), due to your country history.
- Trying to maintain world dominance by isolating and lessening the influence of other world powers, in general by identifying or inventing an enemy such as russia, terrorism, france,... I call it defending your interests, fair enough.
In the past, such cultural differences have been worked around, but it seems that lately, respective leaders are using them to stigmatize each other as political enemies, and this is really counter-productive for both countries. The US is the biggest investor in France, and (I think, from memory) the other way around.
There is a long history of helping each other. Whatever people say of US motives, that intervention was critical in WWII. I don't care that the USA wouldn't have won the war alone, I care that history would have been different without the US, most probably. France financed and greatly helped the US independence, also due to their own motives (lessening the power of the British seeming like a good one), but what country ever sends their soldier for the goodness of their heart, when they have to answer to their own opinion?
I hope both countries move on. I'm confident that things will improve after both administrations (Chirac and W.) have been replaced.
If you're a developer like me, you definitely realize the technical challenge of developing hardware and software for which you cannot explore all test cases, and cannot test under the real conditions at all, until the thing is sent off in space and you cannot do much about it if something important breaks.
There is a lot to learn from such a project, about software/hardware fault tolerance. Is there anybody from the project reading this (Bruce, do you know who to contact ?) who could give a basic explanation of the produces involved?
I know about error-correction for RAM, watchdog timers, duplicate hardware, and self-contained communication code that you can use to get control back. This is pretty classical stuff for the domain I work in (embedded systems); but this is way more impressive.
I'd love to have someone from the project give a rundown of their procedures, even if not all goes as expected - we can learn a lot from it.
He's not colonizing.. He's from Dutch origin and we love him:) He did start learning the language, but everybody just keeps speaking English to him so he used his time for other stuff.. I don't see that as a problem; his different culture brings a lot of interesting and fresh ideas.
--
Emmanuel
I don't know about Italy, but we're located in south France (weather is mostly similar to California, but life is several times cheaper) and we're currently hiring 60 more people. We already got some foreigners, more are welcome; different cultures are cool. One of the foreigners has been here for a year and just gave up speaking French; he's spoken English at the office (albeit not always great English:), all our code is documented and specified in English, most girls here understand English, what else do you need:-)
There's no point in using the transmeta chips, unless you want to run plain desktop Windows. The crusoe is quite an interesting piece of technology per se, but it's really designed for Windows. If your mobile system is ran by a portable OS (Linux,
VxWorks, now QNX RTP..) you just recompile/adapt the code for the CPU most adapted to your goals, like the ARM. No need for expensive emulations layers there.
Actually 26 bits (not 24), with the remaining bits of PC used as processor status flags (that allowed for saving them as the same time as going into subroutines.. quite smart).
But indeed, this is gone from ARM6 and above.
I guess the editor is probably not aware that arm processors already run a lot of deeply embedded applications. For instance, the soundchip of the dreamcast, or most cellphones. They have a 60% market share for the comms market I think.
I am currently working with such a platform (lowlevel system work, and trying to fix issues in gcc as well when I can), and I must say it makes a lot of sense from a design point of view.
Highest code density (especially in Thumb mode) of all 32-bit CPUs, quite efficient, and very low power consumption. No wonder it's used all over the place.
Go French researchers;-)
Well, this is nice, but what would be really needed (what I really want, anyway) is a search engine where you would be able to say "electronic music" and ( "like Kevin Saunderson" and "unlike Derrick May" ) or ( "almost like ken ishii" ). This would allow for discovering new fish in the huge digital sea of music, that I will probably like, if my current kind of music is this or that.
This would take more than fractal search tho:O
Hehe, and she was the typical female cartoon/movie character (as in, not as the same as real life, take note): getting kidnapped, trapped, imprisoned, or in big danger some way or other, so that the male heroes had to go rescue her:) Did you have that sequence after each episode, with some voice-off explaining some details of things they found in the episode? We had that in France..
I'm surprised of the popularity of those cartoons (ulysses 31, lost cities of gold, inspector gadget, jayce..) btw. Before going to the US a few years ago I never thought they had left the French ground:)
Yes, The Lost Cities of Gold is that cartoon with esteban, zia and tao (the little kids) and mendoza (the adult).. And I forgot the other ones; with all that Inca and Aztek technology driven by the sun; the great condor (the giant bird made of gold), the solaris (the sun-driven boat), etc. At least it taught children about those south-american civilizations, even if it extrapolated a little bit what they could have done:)
Btw, the whole series is available on VHS (no DVD yet, stupid people!). In Europe anyway:)
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, I just barely started making 2D games that use the 3D card for rotation, blending, zooms and stuff. Great, what am I going to do with all this now ;)
--
Cartoon miniature golf game for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/
You can program for PPC embedded systems right from your Linux PC and cross-compile. By definition, you won't be testing your code on the mac mini anyway, so why bother? I've cross-compiled OS and application code for SuperH, ARM, M32R, ST20 and other cpus from x86 servers, even using unattended build systems, and it's very efficient.
Mac games: http://www.phelios.com/mac/macsites.html
It just needs a decent internal HD now and it'll be a nice box.
Cartoon miniature golf for MacOS X: http://www.funpause.com/
There's already two functional Unix platforms that supports all of the Mac mini hardware.. That's MacOS X and Darwin (F/OSS). Most useful linux apps will compile without trouble on MacOS X, if they aren't already available via the excellent Fink project.
Cartoon miniature golf for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/
My sales have dipped a bit starting exactly when people forked out $150 for Tiger (yes, it's worth that much, I know :P) and are playing with the numerous freebies with no money left to buy additional software this month :) (well, it's coming back up now)
Cartoon mini golf game for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/
Their website was announcing that they were going to opensource CherryOS. I guess a 1 KB diff mainly to remove copyrights wasn't enough to build a community on :P
:)
Good news, one less parasite. I know it's against Apple's business model, but I wish they'd allow usage of MacOSX on PearPC officially, it's a damn useful too to get PC programmers introduced to the Mac at no cost (the mini is cheap, but still an expense). Hey Apple, it's in your long-term interest to get more applications on OSX
Cartoon miniature golf for MacOS X: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/
Don't tear the guy a new one :) It's still interesting to recent switchers like me.
Cute minigolf for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/
Anyone knows if there's "official" support for partitioning the disk to support several versions of MacOS X? While I'd love to write code on Tiger (and must make sure my games work on it), I also need to support older versions. I know how to install multiple versions on the same Powerbook, just wondering if there's any known side effects or differences from a 'virgin' mac :P
Cartoon-like miniature golf for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/
I'm a recent switcher, see http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/ for my first title.
:P
Why oh why do I come here, I get to spend more money that I make
First of all, originality is in my opinion the only way to be heard above the noise, with virtually everyone doing free or shareware games, most of them of excellent quality, this year, it seems like.
:P .. and also what knobs to tweak to increase difficulty progressively.
Then of course when you're original, people don't know that they need or want your game, so you may not have many players even though the game is fun once you actually try it!
Gameplay for a very original game is even harder, you have no reference point. The gameplay for my debut game as an indie, Garden War is good but I've learned a lot for my next game.. Notably, how to reward the player more often, instead of only when you finish a level, etc., otherwise people rightfully feel that the game is slower paced than, say, arkanoid 30000
Maybe that'll bring enough customers to Linux to justify porting my games :P
</shameless_plug>
I've also started an indie gaming company, FunPause, with the normal stuff (free game downloads and then you can get the full version).
.. at the bare minimum.
Our first strategy game for everyone (the casual gamers), Garden War, is up, here. At the moment, it is Windows-only, but the game wouldn't be a massive effort to port to Linux. As a self-assumed geek and early Linux fan (hello GGI guys if you read me!), I'd love to, but as a business person I am stopping myself from doing it. There's a wealth of hardware issues, multiple distributions, and the fact that fellow indie game producers reported abysmal sales.
If I was to start out, I'd need AT LEAST:
* hard sales data that a Linux version is worth it
* a cross-distro fancy (graphical) installer?
The intention is there, if I could get some convincing info that I'd better make a Linux version than spend equal amounts of time on promoting my already selling Windows version !
How can I put this.. :)
I'm French, and I'm married to an American citizen (kids on the way.. twins!). We live in France, purely because at the moment, we have a much better financial situation either, than we would over there in the US, but we may move across the atlantic. I have found the US to be very welcoming (once you're past the people at customs!), and my wife has no problem whatsoever here for being an American. (besides getting whistled at, and talked to, by guys!)
... I call it defending your interests, fair enough.
I am not a fanatic of Chirac, neither is my wife a fanatic of George W. Our respective parents are a bit more, since they had a longer period of time to build their beliefs.
However, we are saddened to see the mounting misunderstanding between the two countries that we like.
I would dare to summarize the differences as:
1) France
- Scared of religious influence. We experienced hundreds of years of total Catholic domination of the country, which was so uncontested that it blocked any scientific or societal progress. You would never see a government leader in church, on TV !
- Scared of change. French are notorious for it, and it's a stereotype that's actually true! We are a country with an overwhelmingly uniform population, and anything new (Muslim religion becoming prominent, for example) is Bad.
- Trying to maintain a world position by using the European union to lessen US influence. (call it defending our interests).
2) US
- Religious influence and lobbying of sorts (religious, business, etc.) is business as usual. Actually, a government leader wins brownie points by appearing religious. It's even on your money notes.
- Used to a very widely different population ('melting pot'), due to your country history.
- Trying to maintain world dominance by isolating and lessening the influence of other world powers, in general by identifying or inventing an enemy such as russia, terrorism, france,
In the past, such cultural differences have been worked around, but it seems that lately, respective leaders are using them to stigmatize each other as political enemies, and this is really counter-productive for both countries. The US is the biggest investor in France, and (I think, from memory) the other way around.
There is a long history of helping each other. Whatever people say of US motives, that intervention was critical in WWII. I don't care that the USA wouldn't have won the war alone, I care that history would have been different without the US, most probably. France financed and greatly helped the US independence, also due to their own motives (lessening the power of the British seeming like a good one), but what country ever sends their soldier for the goodness of their heart, when they have to answer to their own opinion?
I hope both countries move on. I'm confident that things will improve after both administrations (Chirac and W.) have been replaced.
If you're a developer like me, you definitely realize the technical challenge of developing hardware and software for which you cannot explore all test cases, and cannot test under the real conditions at all, until the thing is sent off in space and you cannot do much about it if something important breaks.
There is a lot to learn from such a project, about software/hardware fault tolerance. Is there anybody from the project reading this (Bruce, do you know who to contact ?) who could give a basic explanation of the produces involved?
I know about error-correction for RAM, watchdog timers, duplicate hardware, and self-contained communication code that you can use to get control back. This is pretty classical stuff for the domain I work in (embedded systems); but this is way more impressive.
I'd love to have someone from the project give a rundown of their procedures, even if not all goes as expected - we can learn a lot from it.
--
Emmanuel
He's not colonizing.. He's from Dutch origin and we love him :) He did start learning the language, but everybody just keeps speaking English to him so he used his time for other stuff.. I don't see that as a problem; his different culture brings a lot of interesting and fresh ideas.
--
Emmanuel
I don't know about Italy, but we're located in south France (weather is mostly similar to California, but life is several times cheaper) and we're currently hiring 60 more people. We already got some foreigners, more are welcome; different cultures are cool. One of the foreigners has been here for a year and just gave up speaking French; he's spoken English at the office (albeit not always great English :), all our code is documented and specified in English, most girls here understand English, what else do you need :-)
Jobs are there.
--
Emmanuel
There's no point in using the transmeta chips, unless you want to run plain desktop Windows. The crusoe is quite an interesting piece of technology per se, but it's really designed for Windows. If your mobile system is ran by a portable OS (Linux, VxWorks, now QNX RTP..) you just recompile/adapt the code for the CPU most adapted to your goals, like the ARM. No need for expensive emulations layers there.
Indeed, just something like (in thumb) :
push {r4,r5,lr}
...
blah
...
pop {r4,r5,pc}
is more elegant than:
push ebx
push esi
...
pop esi
pop ebx
ret
:)
Actually 26 bits (not 24), with the remaining bits of PC used as processor status flags (that allowed for saving them as the same time as going into subroutines.. quite smart). But indeed, this is gone from ARM6 and above.
Actually the StrongARM was designed by Digital, independently of the main ARM processors line.
I guess the editor is probably not aware that arm processors already run a lot of deeply embedded applications. For instance, the soundchip of the dreamcast, or most cellphones. They have a 60% market share for the comms market I think. I am currently working with such a platform (lowlevel system work, and trying to fix issues in gcc as well when I can), and I must say it makes a lot of sense from a design point of view. Highest code density (especially in Thumb mode) of all 32-bit CPUs, quite efficient, and very low power consumption. No wonder it's used all over the place.
Go French researchers ;-)
Well, this is nice, but what would be really needed (what I really want, anyway) is a search engine where you would be able to say "electronic music" and ( "like Kevin Saunderson" and "unlike Derrick May" ) or ( "almost like ken ishii" ). This would allow for discovering new fish in the huge digital sea of music, that I will probably like, if my current kind of music is this or that.
This would take more than fractal search tho :O
Hehe, and she was the typical female cartoon/movie character (as in, not as the same as real life, take note): getting kidnapped, trapped, imprisoned, or in big danger some way or other, so that the male heroes had to go rescue her :) Did you have that sequence after each episode, with some voice-off explaining some details of things they found in the episode? We had that in France..
:)
I'm surprised of the popularity of those cartoons (ulysses 31, lost cities of gold, inspector gadget, jayce..) btw. Before going to the US a few years ago I never thought they had left the French ground
Yes, The Lost Cities of Gold is that cartoon with esteban, zia and tao (the little kids) and mendoza (the adult) .. And I forgot the other ones; with all that Inca and Aztek technology driven by the sun; the great condor (the giant bird made of gold), the solaris (the sun-driven boat), etc. At least it taught children about those south-american civilizations, even if it extrapolated a little bit what they could have done :)
:)
Btw, the whole series is available on VHS (no DVD yet, stupid people!). In Europe anyway