oldschool - Developer IT

How do I show sprites in the border on C64?

- by Danko Durbic

I've seen cool C64 demos showing sprites in the border area of the screen. It shouldn't be possible; I think they managed to fool the graphics chip somehow... How exactly did they do it?

HTML form to JSON without modern libraries

- by Rok

Does anyone know of a simple javascript library that serializes a form DOM object to JSON? I know jQuery has the serialize method but since I am writing an app for IE mobile, I can't use any of the new fancy libraries, must be oldschool simple javascript, as light as possible. Cheers

Read the article

Completely clean previous Radeon drivers on Windows 7 64bit

- by tomo

Recently I replaced my old Radeon HD 2600XT to Radeon HD 6770 from MSI. I had strange problem that after installing the newest Radeon drivers they exist only until first reboot. After reboot my new card is recognized as an old 2600. I tried to unintall ATI/AMD software completetely from Programs/Features, then reboot, then untinstall driver from device manager, then reboot, then system showed that display driver is regular VGA (and oldschool 640x480 resolutions). Then to be double sure I executed DriverCleaner3 and Driver sweeper. After the restart I installed the newest drivers from amd site but after restarting the system recognizes card as 2600. I'm completely lost. Perhaps Win7 64bit caches somewhere drivers? Are there any issues regarding drivers-shadowing or 32/64 mirroring? Reinstalling the system is not an option.

Read the article

Getting started with modern software architecture and design using a book

- by bitbonk

I am a rather oldschool developer with some basic knowledge of software design principles and a good background on classic (gof) design patterns. While I continue my life as such I see lots of strange buzzwords emerge: Aspectoriented Design, Componentoriented Design, Domain Driven Design, Domain Specific Languages, Serviceoriented (SOA) Design, Test Driven Design, Extreme Programming, Agile Development, Continuous Integration, Dependency Injection, Software Factories ... Is there good book around that I can take with me on a roadtrip while it is taking me on a trip through all (most) of the above, delivering an 10,000 foot view on modern software archiceture and desing principles and approaches.

Read the article

iPhone Dev: Animating PNG Sequences

- by Franky

What is the best or recommended technique for animating PNG Sequences. Heres what I've learned: Do it Manually Using MutableArrays containing Strings, you can animate a UIImageView with a timer which increments an index number UIImage - animation methods This works, the only problem is to find if an image has completed its animation, you have to check the isAnimating BOOL, and to do that you need a timer. What is the best and recommended? Looking to do Oldschool game sprite animations, ie: Idle Animation Attack Animation Walk Animation ect... Let me know if any one has something. @lessfame

Read the article

Loading and storing encryption keys from a config source

- by Hassan Syed

I am writing an application which has an authenticity mechanism, using HMAC-sha1, plus a CBC-blowfish pass over the data for good measure. This requires 2 keys and one ivec. I have looked at Crypto++ but the documentation is very poor (for example the HMAC documentation). So I am going oldschool and use Openssl. Whats the best way to generate and load these keys using library functions and tools ? I don't require a secure-socket therefore a x.509 certificate probably does not make sense, unless, of-course, I am missing something. So, do I need to write my own config file, or is there any infrastructure in openssl for this ? If so, could you direct me to some documentation or examples for this.

Read the article

Keep a div from reloading

- by Josh

Basically, I want the same effect as the oldschool html 'frameset' I think. Take a look at this page please: http://onomadesign.com/wordpress/identity-design/alteon-a-boeing-company/ If a user selects a project from industry - transportation for example, I would like that the right scrollmenu keeps its initial state when the new project page comes up. So they won't get lost and have to click again to be in the same submenu section. So, the right thumbnail navigation should stay in the same way, I don't want it to reload. Do I have to do it with frames or iframes? Or can I make some kind of jQuery call to 'not reload' that div? Maybe PHP? I'm sorry, I am not a programmer from origin. Thanks in advance.

Read the article

Emulating old-school sprite flickering (theory and concept)

- by Jeffrey Kern

I'm trying to develop an oldschool NES-style video game, with sprite flickering and graphical slowdown. I've been thinking of what type of logic I should use to enable such effects. I have to consider the following restrictions if I want to go old-school NES style: No more than 64 sprites on the screen at a time No more than 8 sprites per scanline, or for each line on the Y axis If there is too much action going on the screen, the system freezes the image for a frame to let the processor catch up with the action From what I've read up, if there were more than 64 sprites on the screen, the developer would only draw high-priority sprites while ignoring low-priority ones. They could also alternate, drawing each even numbered sprite on opposite frames from odd numbered ones. The scanline issue is interesting. From my testing, it is impossible to get good speed on the XBOX 360 XNA framework by drawing sprites pixel-by-pixel, like the NES did. This is why in old-school games, if there were too many sprites on a single line, some would appear if they were cut in half. For all purposes for this project, I'm making scanlines be 8 pixels tall, and grouping the sprites together per scanline by their Y positioning. So, dumbed down I need to come up with a solution that.... 64 sprites on screen at once 8 sprites per 'scanline' Can draw sprites based on priority Can alternate between sprites per frame Emulate slowdown Here is my current theory First and foremost, a fundamental idea I came up with is addressing sprite priority. Assuming values between 0-255 (0 being low), I can assign sprites priority levels, for instance: 0 to 63 being low 63 to 127 being medium 128 to 191 being high 192 to 255 being maximum Within my data files, I can assign each sprite to be a certain priority. When the parent object is created, the sprite would randomly get assigned a number between its designated range. I would then draw sprites in order from high to low, with the end goal of drawing every sprite. Now, when a sprite gets drawn in a frame, I would then randomly generate it a new priority value within its initial priority level. However, if a sprite doesn't get drawn in a frame, I could add 32 to its current priority. For example, if the system can only draw sprites down to a priority level of 135, a sprite with an initial priority of 45 could then be drawn after 3 frames of not being drawn (45+32+32+32=141) This would, in theory, allow sprites to alternate frames, allow priority levels, and limit sprites to 64 per screen. Now, the interesting question is how do I limit sprites to only 8 per scanline? I'm thinking that if I'm sorting the sprites high-priority to low-priority, iterate through the loop until I've hit 64 sprites drawn. However, I shouldn't just take the first 64 sprites in the list. Before drawing each sprite, I could check to see how many sprites were drawn in it's respective scanline via counter variables . For example: Y-values between 0 to 7 belong to Scanline 0, scanlineCount[0] = 0 Y-values between 8 to 15 belong to Scanline 1, scanlineCount[1] = 0 etc. I could reset the values per scanline for every frame drawn. While going down the sprite list, add 1 to the scanline's respective counter if a sprite gets drawn in that scanline. If it equals 8, don't draw that sprite and go to the sprite with the next lowest priority. SLOWDOWN The last thing I need to do is emulate slowdown. My initial idea was that if I'm drawing 64 sprites per frame and there's still more sprites that need to be drawn, I could pause the rendering by 16ms or so. However, in the NES games I've played, sometimes there's slowdown if there's not any sprite flickering going on whereas the game moves beautifully even if there is some sprite flickering. Perhaps give a value to each object that uses sprites on the screen (like the priority values above), and if the combined values of all objects w/ sprites surpass a threshold, introduce the sprite flickering? IN CONCLUSION... Does everything I wrote actually sound legitimate and could work, or is it a pipe dream? What improvements can you all possibly think with this game programming theory of mine?

Developer IT