My first game: Snake2K1 in Turbo Pascal

In Year 9 at Melbourne High School, the programming (Software Design, I think it was called) subject was Visual Basic 5 or 6, but the book the school has produced for it was based on VB 3 or 4, with screenshots from Win3.11 days (I think?). There were errors upon errors, which as a good student (going through awkward teenage years, who could do with the ego boost from being right) reported each mistake, correcting most of them. The subject was one short semester long, and the second semester students benefited from my fixes - the manual they received had a different colour cover signifying it had updated screenshots, and the code was correct. I enjoyed and dreaded these classes. I was a better programmer than any other in the class, but the subject bored me so much that my academic performance in the subject suffered.

Year 10 was an interesting year for me, both academically and personally. That year I had several weeks off school (or more importantly, off my feet) due to a rather sizable operation on my feet to fix (which it did) chronic ingrown toenails, and later in the year my chronic cough returned which ended the year for me. Before all of that happened however, the programming unit this year involved Turbo Pascal 6. While not the most powerful language, it was a fantastic teaching language. Our "group"/major assignment was to create a basic game. I use the term "group" loosely, as the guy I was partnered with played cards all class, such that I wrote all of the code (except the unit included from Reinout Raymakers).

My assignment was Snake2K+1 (yeah, fantastic title…), which I've recently rediscovered the source code/compiled exe.

It weighs in at about 500 lines of code (from memory it was nearly double the rest of the class which was made up mostly of hangman) and had more colours than the teacher said was possible (he said 256 colours was the limit of Turbo Pascal…mine can handle up to 32,000 colours).

Back in those days, Melbourne High ran entirely off floppy drives (despite having network share capability). When I finally decided to remove all floppy disk drives from the house, I went through and backed everything up onto hard drives. Despite doing that, I had hidden the source code, and it wasn't until recently that I found it while backing up another computer to my wife's laptop.

The next challenge was to get it to run under Vista, which I took a gamble on…and got it to work under DOSBox, albeit with major speed issues. I'll look for a Turbo Pascal compiler so that I can get it running at a decent speed, but for now…

Download

Source Code & Executable

Don't forget to use DOSBox to get it to run!

CodeSnippet: Snarl.NET using WCF (Part I)

Requirements

• .NET 3.0 or greater

Introduction

Growl is an application for Apple's OS X which provides a standard "toasts" interface. Toasts are popups which fade after a short amount of time, and host a small amount of data (usually text, but images, sounds, etc aren't unheard of).

Snarl is an application for Windows which is inspired by Growl which offers a similar implementation, currently coded in Visual Basic 6.

This article will implement several features of Snarl using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Before we get started on the actual code, I'll explain briefly what WCF is.

Continue Reading »

Dell Inspiron 1520 vs Asus G1S

Before our honeymoon, Chickz0r and I decided to buy her a laptop. It suits our lifestyle and medical needs, and if we got it before the honeymoon it meant we could play games (since I have an Asus G1S). Did I marry the right girl or what?

We decided on a Dell Inspiron 1520. They're cheap, reasonable quality, and pack a lot of punch

* Both laptops are actually running Vista Ultimate (32bit version for now). I have licenses for this, so we downgraded the 1520 to save a dollar or two

On paper, the Dell laptop looks far superior value, and to some people this is certainly true. To me however, they are of about the same value.

My G1S was available before the 1520's (both on paper, and terms of availability - Dell took awhile to actually ship any); and was imported from America (there are AU models now, but they weren't available until 3->4 months afterwards); and is a "premium" laptop in the Asus lineup, compared to the 'budget/workhorse' line that Inspiron is to Dell, which means better build quality; thus the larger price. The AU model is available for ~$2300->2600 (I believe) today.

There are other niceties to the G1S, such as the OLED display above the keyboard. It is gimmicky, sure, but having a clock while in games is useful, or having WLM messages popup is handy. Another gimmick is a Lightscribe capable dvd-rw, but I've used it once or twice, and the end result is actually pretty nice.

On the less gimmicky front, the onboard sound is pretty good, and the addition of optical out (through the 3.5mm jack). Having eSATA will allow further expansion at decent performance when I fill this hard drive up (although Dell's "counter" to this is to include a massive, relatively speaking, hard drive). Finally, while the Dell screen is pretty good, the G1S screen is the best I've seen on any laptop - colour and brightness wise (and that includes before I had the screen replaced due to a poor backlight!)

While I love my G1S, the 1520 is fantastic value. Huge (for laptop) HDD, a massive 4gb of ram, and very comparable specs to my G1S? It is just hard to say no. Throw in the ability to choose the colour of your laptop (and less "IM A l33t H4X0R" aesthetics of the G1S), and you've got a very 'personal' laptop.

They aren't flawless, they both have varying problems. The 1520, for example, produces a high pitched noise through the headphone jack - however that was resolved when a tech came out and replaced the motherboard. My G1S had dull patches in the LCD panel (presumably inconsistent backlight?) as well an optical drive that sounded like it was preparing to destroy the world - thankfully both problems were solved by dropping my laptop back into Asus' repair centre in Melbourne. They also both share the heat and noise issues associated with having the 8600M GT and 2.2ghz, which is solved (to some degree) by using an iXoft (or equivalent cooling device).

I'd be hard pressed to recommend one over the other. Those willing to pay the premium for a "more rounded" laptop, definitely go for the G1S, or those looking for best bang for buck, go for the Dell XPS 1530; its price has now dropped to about the 1520's price.

AllowTransparency=Sucks(No More!) Part II

In my previous post about WPF Performance, I blasted the poor performance associated with transparency being enabled. The 'solution'  was to force software mode, although there were statements suggesting this would be fixed in .NET 3.0 SP1, .NET 3.5, or Vista SP1.

The first two I'd tried to no avail, and only recently have I tried the third (Vista SP1)…and the results are very promising. The animations speeds are 'back to normal', with little to no noticeable difference between transparency being enabled or disabled (in terms of performance, obviously I'm noticing the transparency). Firing up WPFPerf shows that it never fell below 40FPS, a huge improvement!

Kudos on the performance increase, hopefully when Vista SP1 becomes mainstream WPF will no longer be overlooked because of performance issues!

Start the new year by not cheating…

The It's Not Cheating promotion is back again, and as I posted last year, Microsoft are offering to students, Office 2007 Ultimate for just $75. This time around, however, it is open to University AND TAFE students.

Just to recap, Office 2007 Ultimate edition contains Access, Accounting Express, Excel, InfoPath, Groove, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher and Word. According to StaticIce, the cheapest you can get it for is AUD$445 (academic license, otherwise it is about $750). Through the Its Not Cheating promotion, you can get it for $25 for one year, or $75 "for life". There is an additional cost if you want the DVD posted out ($17), but there is always the choice of downloading it.

To promote this, Microsoft has created a competition for us MSP's (and a few others), to win a smartphone or/and Xbox360 (with 3 games). I don't particularly need (although I certainly do want) either of those prizes, so I'd rather somebody more deserving gets them…and Long had the fantastic idea of opening the competition up to anybody who reads his blog, rather than entering it himself.

So, instead of competing against him, which would undoubtedly result in a Goliath (Long) vs David (Me) battle, if you want a chance to win the smartphone or Xbox360 I'm encouraging you to make your way over to Long's Its Not Cheating Competition blog post.