Windows Vista, what for ??

I received my new notebook PC a few days ago. A nice HP machine with 2.4GHz Dual Core processor and 2GB RAM and a huge harddisk...... and of course Windows Vista.

This was going to be my first encounter of Windows Vista and I was kind of looking forward to it since the hype at work had been big when it was launched and many of my collegues just love it.

Well, first of all it took over two hours to get it installed and up and running. That alone should have forewarned me that this is not going to be fun :-( Anyway, Vista alone is a really nice operating system, a little slow but it looks great. I had no problems in navigating and finding the advanced features I needed so that felt good.

So, now I wanted to install the applications that I regularly use in my daily work and I started of with the CAD software that we use. Installation went fine, no indications of any problems. But after that I have nothing more positive to add about Vista. The application just will not start. It uses a License manager that keeps crashing in different ways. After trying to resolve this issue for a while another problem appeared. Suddenly Vista could not connect to the "Group Policy Manager Service" which rendered the computer completely useless and after an hour or so I simply restored everything to its freshly installed state.

Now, I am persistant little bugger and did not want to let this misshap get me down so i tried yet another time to install the CAD program to see if I could get another result (Now what was the definition of an idiot again). But as you no doubt hav already guessed it bombed again.

To see if this was an isolated incident I also tried out another of our main applications that we use in our company, a C-toolchain for developing embedded software. The same procedure here, installation works fine but the application gets thrown out before starting up. I tried some suggestions that i googled up but nothing works.

To be honest, I have absolutely no time at all to fuck around with an operating system that will not run our applications that we have invested more than 20K$ in. Yes it looks cool, but that is simply not enough. It needs to be able to handle our applications, it needs to be compatible with with previous operating systems. If it aint, I could just as well kick Microsoft products out all together and go over to using Linux instead.

Sorry Microsoft, this just aint good enough.

Also, can I get back my 20+ hours I spent on trying to get the crap to work in our environment. Didn't think so =) Going back to XP again.

Stargate SG-1, S-1-5 The Broca Divide

Plot and Comments:
In this episode SG-1 is sent to P3X-797 to investigate a world to where the Goa'ould have fled at a previous occasion. A M.A.L.P. =) have been sent through (First use of it ?) only to find the planet completely dark. Well at the scene SG-1 are attacked by grunting pre-historic creatures but are rescued by SG-3 Marines. When pursuing the creatures they encounter a team of local people out to rescue a girl who has been kidnapped by the creatures.

SG-1 accompany the locals to their palace where they learn the story about the touched and the untouched and how they are related. After they learn that the Goa'ould have not been seen in many years Jack decides that it is time to go back to earth. They do so but at the briefing General Hammond informs the team that the President has decided that all missions have to have a cultural and human aspect (For crying out load =). During the briefing one of the Marine soldiers throws a fit and attacks Teal'c (good choice of victim). Shortly after that Sam tries to seduce Jack in a force full manner.

Dr. Frasier concludes that people are getting sick by a highly contagious disease and Hammond orders Teal'c and Daniel back to the Planet to obtain blood samples of the people that are not infected. They travel back but Daniel is captured by the touched and Teal'c has to go back to where the untouched live to get the samples him self.

With the obtained blood samples Dr. Frasier is able to find out that the organism that causes the disease lives on histamine in the victims blood and anyone with low levels of histamine is immune to the organism. With this knowledge she is able to create a potent drug that starves the organism in the patient thus curing them.

Personal Comments: I quite like this episode. It contains all the elements of a good SG-1 episode, dangerous diseases, the main characters infected, ONeill grunting =), Doc Frasiers big brown eyes and a happy ending.

Prominent Figures:
Dr. Frasier, Jack ONeill, Daniel Jacksson, Teal'c

Off Worlds:
P3X-797.

Tech Stuff:
Nothing, really sad

Major Cast:
Jack ONeill (Colonel): Richard Dean Andersson
Samantha Carter: Amanda Tapping
Daniel Jackson: Michael Shanks
Teal'c: Christopher Judge
Dr. Janet Frasier: Tery Rothery
General Hammond: Don S. Davis

Comming up:
The First Commandment

Stargate SG-1, S-1-4, Emancipation

Plot and Comments:
This episodes starts with SG-1 arriving in an seemingly uninhabited world only to find a young man being chased by a pack of dogs, nearly getting killed. SG-1 chases the dogs away rescuing the young man who gets intimidated by the fact that Dr. Carter is a woman. (Personal comment: They didn't seem to be using the MALP very much this early in the show =)

The young man later kidnaps Carter to trade her for his own true love in a rivaling tribe. Of course the rest of SG-1 comes after them to free Carter. And in the end Carter fights the evil warlord and of course wins the battle freeing everyone and avoiding a war.

Personal comments:
This episode is a tad corny and sappy. It's the perfect example of an "inbetweener" which has no purpose in pushing the main story onwards. This particular episode is pretty poor in my opinion but I know of others who loves it for its rather peculiar story.

Prominent Figures:
Sam (Samantha Carter), Jack

Off Worlds:
The team makes reference to a past exploratory mission on P3X-595 where Captain Carter apparently imbibed a mind-altering substance that greatly reduced her inhibitions. The reference reveals that SG-1 has many adventures which are not chronicled in the series.

Tech Stuff:
Nothing, really sad

Major Cast:
Jack ONeill (Colonel): Richard Dean Andersson
Samantha Carter: Amanda Tapping
Daniel Jackson: Michael Shanks
Teal'c: Christopher Judge

Comming up:
The Broca Divide

Stargate SG-1, S-1-3, The Enemy Within

Plot and Comments:
In this episode SG-1 has just recently returned from the bold rescue on Chulak, where Teal'c abandoned his god Apophis when saving Jack ONeill and his team from imprisonment and certain death.

Jacks best friend, Major Kawalsky, has been infected by a Goa'ould larva and has carried it on through the gate back to Stargate head quarters. A team of skilled doctors attempts to operate to take the larva out of Kowalski's body but ultimately fails and Kawalsky gets killed by Teal'c in the ens scenes while trying to escape through the gate.

Jack is desperately working to get Teal'c on the team at the same time as a visitor from Pentagon (Colonel Kennedy) is dead set on bringing a Goa'ould back to the lab for studying. He even suggests that Major Kawalsky should be made a subject for studying which of course throws Jack into a fit of rage.

Personally I don't feel this is one of the better episodes, but it does fit nicely in after the first two action packed pilot episodes. I also noticed that Jack's hair is dark blond in 1997, I believe that in the last episodes he did it was really Gray (kind of like my own).

Prominent Figures:
Jack, Kawalsky, Teal'c and General Hammond.

Off Worlds:
P3-575
P3A-577

Tech Stuff:
Not much really, some nice computers with blinkenlights and a nice graphic display of the Goa'ould in Kawalsky's neck.

Major Cast:
Jack ONeill (Colonel): Richard Dean Andersson
Samantha Carter: Amanda Tapping
Daniel Jackson: Michael Shanks
Teal'c: Christopher Judge
General Hammond: Don S. Davis.
Colonel Kennedy: Alan Rachins

Comming up:
Emancipation

Stargate SG-1, Watching it all over again

OK, so I just restarted to watch all episodes of Stargate SG-1 again. I must be fucked up or something, cuz that will something like 140 hours of....... (riiight, now I remember) pure joy =)

Anyway, so I thought I'd use this blogg to record my opinions and thoughts about the show.

OK, so I watched the pilot (Children of Gods I and II) a few weeks ago and will not comment on these two shows just yet. Instead I will start with "The Enemy Within" in my next entry. Why !?. Just because =)

/Snip

The next step.

would be what exactly ? Well for me, my system is growing slowly. The latest addition is a small expansion board acting as an interface between VIA1 and an AT keyboard and a graphic LCD (TLC-1091) module. Quite neat, it sits on top of the VIA and has the connectors on the side. I have adapted the Monitor/EhBasic ROM to use the keyboard and LCD for output instead of the terminal. Currently only the character mode feature of the LCD (40 x 24 characters) is used but I do want to add a few graphic commands to EhBasic to make it a bit more versatile.

Yesterday I ordered a new PCB for a simple graphic card based on the old MC6845 graphic controller chip. That'll be fun toying around with when it arrives here.

Well, talk t'ya later.

Running again....

Yes, the board is up and running again. This time the VIA's work as expected =) Great since I now have the RTC working properly.

The graphic controller is coming along. I have been writing some more detailed chapters in the specification for the playfield generator. What I am looking right now is a 3-layer tile generator with soft scroll capabilities. This would allow me to have a static background and as well as two layers of background objects that could move on top of the background. This can be used to create the illusion of having mountains moving in the background or multiple levels of starfields. Good for nice platform or arcade type action games. Of course, on top of that you will have the sprites to create characters to interact with.

Right now I'm looking at a solution where the graphic memory is local to the graphic controller. That means the host CPU will not be able to directly access this memory. This has both advantages and disadvantages but in this case the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The host CPU will have to "download" the tile sets as well as the tile map to the playfield memory. The playfield memory is 128Kbyte and holds both the tile sets as well as the tile maps. There are a number of registers in the gfx controller that defines the tile sets. Each tile layer has 5 registers associated with it.

1. Tile Window Base Address (TWBA)
   
2. Tile Map Length (TML)
   
3. Soft Scroll X (SSX)
   
4. Soft Scroll Y (SSY)
5. Tile Set Base Address (TSBA)
   

The tile generator works so that a window of 40x30 tiles is moved over the tile map, allowing the viewer to see different parts of the tile map. The base address (TWBA) points to the first tile (top left corner) of the window. The Tile Map Length (TML) register then defines how long (in bytes) the map is, this is essentially how many bytes that the controller adds to the map to get the next line of information from the tile map. The soft scroll registers defines how many pixels the controller should move the window to the right (SSX) or down (SSY). Every tile layer has one tile set associated with it and the TSBA register points to where in the memory this tile set is found.

The tile layers work independently which means that they can share the same tile map or have a unique tile map and tile set.

This is the basis for what I will be starting to experiment with. The system will be designed around a time slotted mechanism for retrieving data from the gfx memory. When implementing the sprite mechanisms it will be built around the same core for obtaining its data.

That's all for now folks.

More bloopers and more..

Hrrmm, seems I forgot to connect the reset signal to my VIA's. This is highly discouraging as it seem I am not the total genius after all (and everyone smirks =). Anyway *hehe* will fix it later tonight.

Today has been a really sweeet day. Watching SG-1 and coding 6502 assembly alternatively. Really makes life worth living =)

Nops, gotta go, back to the lab.

Problem in Eden

When trying to do serial IO using Rx interrupts I noticed a design flaw in my schematic. This was the first patch on my PCB which isn't to bad, considering its me =)

I also found one unsoldered ground connection on one of the 6116 SRAMs.

So after extensive testing of the board I am quite convinced that all subsystems are working as expected. During the debug process I have decided that the board needs a few tweaks for the final revision. Nothing major but still......

Graphic game control FPGA

The specs for my graphical controller is beginning to take form. The current basic specs are outlined as follows.

• Fixed resolution 320 x 240 pixel.
• 4/8 bit color depth.
  
• 32 8-bit palette registers.
• 3-layer tile based playfield controller.
• 8 x 8 tile size.
• Flexible sprite controller.
• 64 sprites per frame.
• 16 sprites on each scan line.

More information will follow shortly.......