The last two month Scarab (amiga demo group) got active again and we did demo for the Nintendo DS. To be honest, the first graphics of this demo where drawn about 2 years ago, when DC.Clark presented his all new NDS to me, at BreakPoint 2007. I totally dig the NDS not to say I love it and was really crazy about doing a Demo. Instantly I sat down and pixeld a few screens… just doodled with no certain aim or message.

Last year than, I bought one myself.. right at BPs weekend. Me and Ramses went off to the next Media Markt and I got a new NDS lite. Back at the party, we got totally drunk to welcome the new hardware (nerds, you know…) and Ramses talked me into flashing the firmware which was kind of easy, if you where not gone too far with the alcohol. We did it anyway and all went well. Totally back on the NDS train, I sat down and did the next couple of screens on big scroller, as it was dubbed right from the beginning.

Mr. M, a NDS coder joined forces and we got a little 3D Szene ready that emulated the viper start sequences from Battlestar Galactica (funny version!). Mr. M went to bed and slept over the deadline. So no release for this year, but it turned out that it would spoil our name if would have released that little something we had.  Plans where made to do the demo for the BP2009 and we did it.

DC. Calrk and Mr.M came over for one weekend at the end of febuary and I wrote down a little storyboard that we had to shorten because of the music that was already finished by than. Two days prior to BP, StingRay installed the devkit and helped us codewise. (”Ich kann die Jungs net weinen sehen” StingRay on the reasosn for installing NDS Devkit).

Defc0n-Zero was released at the console/real wild  and ranked 4th place, which was more than we expected. Next year… now that there is another BP, we will do our best, to get further on this platform… we do have some nice ideas by now. Hope we keep staing in the zone, during the summer.

Here are some links:
Defc0n-Zero - NDS executable
Defcon-Zero - HD Video version
Defcon-Zero - Soundtrack
Defcon-Zero @ pouet.net - leave a comment, if you like

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It is a long winter… at least it feels so. It was definitely time for a holiday though. My cousin Maike lives in Berlin and went off for some days to visit her brother in Cologne - “Would you like to have my appartment for the time?” - sure thing. Here we are in Berlin and although Frankfrut seems big, huge and bussy it never stands a chance in comparison what Berlin is like. On the other hand, the people are more gently and way more relaxed than elsewhere.

The whole city is in a constant change! A good indication for that it the sheer amount of posters and stickers everywhere. The shows they announce are not even over and the next sticker/poster is put over it - like a skin, that is constantly growing and peeling. Everywhere you go there are people; even on saturday all and everyone seems to be out in the streets. Great!

We lingered through the streets drawing huge circles on the map that start and end at Maikes apartment. My feet are permanently damaged from these distances.

At the moment the sun is out and I found Peter Fox’ “Alles Neu” in the stereo. Fits perfect! We are out… damaging my feet for another round… …or should we take the bus this time? Guess we will, although that means that we miss the “Berliner Luft” that really has something about it.

Here are some impressions from the our trip… enjoy.

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Happy New Year!

Mine started very dignified. Becoming a little lazy throughout the winter time - I am more the hibernator guy when the temperature drops below 10°C. Never the less a lot has happend during the last month. My sister got married… yes, my little sister is now married, I got an all brand new Nikon D90 and someone donated me a Wii. So basically all my sparetime was spent on those three things.

Wii is a nice little toy - and I mean toy. The games are hardly for any hardcore gamer but they are great if you have party and a bunch of people with you. The homebrew scene is very active on Wii and there are really great things to be installed and tested. A good source to start your research is http://www.wii-homebrew.com/ and http://www.gbatemp.net/ if you want to watch Movies on your Wii or are looking for some free games. The all new Homebrew Browser seems to be a good choise, although I didn’t have the timt to test it yet.

Yesterday, some friends dropped by for a nice little gaming session. I was about to clean up the room before they arrived and while hovering around in our living room I suddenly noticed a little something in the doorway. Light was dim and at first glance I found it to be a sock and was about to kick it away. Blessedly I turned on the light and identified it as a small little mice. It was completely deranged and just sat there.

It took me some time to figure out where on earth a mice comes from, when living on the second floor. I often heard them running over the roof and right where I found it, there’s a little gap in the roofs casing and so it seem to have fallen of the roof. Some cheese, a slice of apple and some old papers made a good stay for the night and this morning I released Jumper - as he was dubbed when the guys appeared - ran off into our garden. I wonder when the next will fall off the roof.

That’s it for now..

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Last week some good friends  came over and we fired up Vice64 and played the old, classic Games from our childhood. Funny that you still know some of the moves in California Games although I haven’t played it for over 15 years. It was lot of fun. We hooked up the Acer ONE to my fat LCD tv and used two of those USB Competion Pros from Speedlink. Pure pleassure… they did a good job in resurrecting this classic. Only having OS X on my ONE and the external Videoport is not working - hackintoshs have their flaws, you know - I was thinking about my good old xbox with Gamebase64 installed. No windows to wait for, no freaking ugly interface like Gamebase has on PC, not much hassle with configuration and twiddeling with the USB ports… sounds like a lot of reasons to get a Competition hooked to it.

Asking google revealed that many people have already hacked their contorller and put a D-SUB9 in place. On xbox-scene bek postet a little tutorial. Sadly the pictures were far from usable and in his text he is mixing up left and right when talking about the D-SUB port and the solderpoint for the firebutton is TP76 instead TP78 which I couldn’t find at all on the both controllers I hacked. Anyway, his tutorial is great for a electrical noob like me. I zoomed aroud in photoshop till I found the point he used for the firebutton… with a little luck, off course. So here is my little help fix for you, If you would like to play old games like they where meant to. This is for the original xbox crontroller, the big version.

First off all the pinout for Atari/Amiga/C64 compatible ports, seen from the soldering side.

1   Forward  -  2   Back - 3   Left - 4   Right   5   - not connected - 6   Button 1 - 7   +5V *  - 8   GND - 9   - not connected

________________
o5 o4 o3 o2 o1/
 o9 o8 o7 o6 /
 ___________/

Unscrew the controller - 7 Screws on the outside, additional 6 on the inside, on the board. Here’s a picture that should be self-explanatory. Behind the “>” you can read the pin of the D-SUB plug.

When soldering be careful not to stay long on the pins of the controller chip - I just killed my second controllers d-pad with too much heat.

Off course I will not take any resposability for any damage to you, your console, or controller. Try this at your own risk! If you are not familiar with soldering tiny spots, you better look for someone to do it for you. Like I should have done with the second attempt.

So, I will take my chances - which are by far now better than with the d-pad - and kick some reds ass on International Karate.

Have fun!

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My little eeePC had been a good companion druing the last month, but I could’t stand XP anymore. I worte all posts of our trip to Norway on it and when I finally found a hotspot to c&p it to my blog, all was gone. It is a fact, that I hate windows and windows hates me. I grew up with my Amigas and compared to windows the structures on AmigaOS were far superior to windows. Amiga is long gone and I switched immediately  to Apple whereas the whole world got those Peecees and still rings me up in the middle of the night asking me stupid questions why their computer won’t do this nor that. My default answer should be: Get a mac! But I am too helpful too just say that.

I watched those attempts to get Leopard to run on standard PC hardware for some time and was really amazed when a good friend of mine showed me his hackintosh. There’s a way to run OS X on eee but the FSB is not recognized correctly and every second on the systemc clock is 2.5 seconds in reality… try to watch a movie with this!

So I sold my eee, with a strange feeling of losing a good friend in my stomach and switched to Acer. The all new One 150xl it is and guess what: Leopard runs like a charme. I had to replace the wificard though, as there are no drivers available. Still a few things are not working properly. The most anoying is sleepmode, but I hope that those guys at insanley mac will fix it anytime soon. Right now this is ok, but in general thers’s still nothing better to get than a mac, except you are looking for a computer to twiddle around, but than you can get a pece with xp, as well.

Here are some helpful links for every Aspire One user that is fed up with XP, like me:
good instructions: http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1505
the forum of all hackintoshs: http://www.insanelymac.com/
os x on acer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3h_OI94l0

Next, I will have to get rid of that windows key! Stay tuned…

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