Yesterday i got my hands on a second hand Playstation 2... one of these days i might buy a console when it's current again! Along with the machine we picked up four games for a tenner from Gamestation and i was more than a little happy when my beloved found Strikers 1945 1/2 with a deal sticker on it! Since then i've added Steel Dragon EX (which comes with the original 2D Steel Dragon and that in turn surprised the hell out of me by being Gekoih: Shooting King under another name!) to my collection from another Gamestation and have a selection of 2D and 2.5D shoot 'em ups courtesy of eBay and Amazon on the way including Psyvariar, R-Type Final and Gradius V. i'm therefore rather happy today!
The irony of buying a PS2 and then stocking up on mostly 2D games hasn't escaped me, by the way... we did get some other stuff but that was for the kids!
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Monday, 1 September 2008
Up and running... twice
The new video card arrived just before the weekend so i'm back to using something that isn't the onboard hardware - yay! The new arrival is a GeForce 6200, has 256Mb of video RAM compared to the old MX440's 64Mb and fanless to boot; it's had a little exercise over the weekend since i've been prodding code together and running emulators (i've noticed that the onboard video does very badly with emulation for some reason) and all appears well.
Something that wasn't appearing well this weekend was the syndication on my websites of the assorted blogs i "keep"; Google in their infinite wisdom decided to change the format of the XML streams that Blogger distributes and, for some bizarre reason, they seemingly hate carriage returns now so the entire feed is a single bloody line which confuses things when trying to view the source. And all the tagging suddenly changed so my Atom decoders silently and catastrophically broke without warning; at least the breakage wasn't for too long, fortunately i actually appear to have regular readers now (yes, i'm as surprised as anyone) and Andy very kindly emailed me to say something was up about half an hour after i'd noticed whilst trying to arrange syndication of the dev blog on the Bullet Mechanics site.
i've basically just rewritten my Atom feed decoder from the ground upwards, so where the old version was a hybrid based on someone else's PHP code, this new one is all my own and built on the XML news decoder that a couple of my sites use. All this unexpected PHP work is why it's gone 3am and i'm still bloody awake...!
Something that wasn't appearing well this weekend was the syndication on my websites of the assorted blogs i "keep"; Google in their infinite wisdom decided to change the format of the XML streams that Blogger distributes and, for some bizarre reason, they seemingly hate carriage returns now so the entire feed is a single bloody line which confuses things when trying to view the source. And all the tagging suddenly changed so my Atom decoders silently and catastrophically broke without warning; at least the breakage wasn't for too long, fortunately i actually appear to have regular readers now (yes, i'm as surprised as anyone) and Andy very kindly emailed me to say something was up about half an hour after i'd noticed whilst trying to arrange syndication of the dev blog on the Bullet Mechanics site.
i've basically just rewritten my Atom feed decoder from the ground upwards, so where the old version was a hybrid based on someone else's PHP code, this new one is all my own and built on the XML news decoder that a couple of my sites use. All this unexpected PHP work is why it's gone 3am and i'm still bloody awake...!
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