Silly Programming Fun

I guess I should make this a private post, because I don’t really want people to come around and think I’m one of those hoaxers who post up fake screenshots of their programs and act badass for a few weeks before falling off the face of the planet. However, I don’t really care quite that much, so I’ll just leave this post up…

Anyway, something I’d fiddled with since I was a wee programmer in middle school was the idea of emulating one machine with another. That’s led to my current project, trying to emulate the original Nintendo (NES) on the Nintendo DS. I’ve spent the past few days working on a CPU core, and it’s more or less done and runs at nearly 4x the real NES CPU. What that means is that it’s taking up about 25% of the processor power, so I have the rest of the processing time for the PPU (the graphics processor) and the APU (the audio processor). Of course, I plan on putting most of the APU on the DS’s second processor, so I have a little more processor time for the graphics. Also, I figure once I fill out a few other things on the CPU (it doesn’t handle the special writes for I/O ports yet), that’ll take up a little more as well.

I still need to do a lot of reading on the PPU, so there won’t be working demos or screenshots or anything anytime soon. If you come across this post and get all excited about an NES emulator on the DS…just calm down. Use nesDS or nesterDS or something.

technology kicks ass

I’m currently writing from my nintendo DS. That is all.

Another day, another new laptop

Today, I received my sleek new Dell Inspiron laptop. I’m quite excited about it overall. It’s got a sexy Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a pretty screen, all the quirky little things I need like S-Video outputs and firewire, extra USB ports for my massive number of peripherals, and I’m overall quite happy.

With the hardware. The software, however, is another story.

First, Windows Vista is probably one of the more horrific things I’ve had to deal with in recent memory. First, you do not make an operating system better/more efficient by asking me MORE questions when I do something. It reminds me of something I read that was sent from my employer recently: if there is some tedious task, find a way to automate it instead of doing it yourself. Why, then, must I confirm every single thing I do in Vista? Yes, I really want to uninstall AOL Internet Offer. Yes, I really do want to run that program…I clicked on it, didn’t I?

Gah. That takes me to another thing. Not only does it ask for my confirmation for every other action, it does the asking needlessly slowly. Microsoft, just so you know, I did not buy a faster system so you could use up more of my system resources. I was hoping maybe, oh, I don’t know, I could actually…go faster? Vista is one of the biggest system hogs ever, so even though my Dell is immensely faster than my 3 year old Thinkpad, dumb stuff like uninstalling the stupid pack-ins takes much longer than it should.

(Okay, just now, I clicked on a button to change Windows features, and it asked for my permission. Vista is like the dog that doesn’t recognize it’s own tail so he decides to chase it. In fact, the little swirling loader icon looks just like that.)

Anyway, I’m going to install Command&Conquer 3 tonight. It better run like a dream, or heads will roll.