So with the addition of the Xbox 360, I now have every one of the current generation of game systems.  I don’t know how I’m lucky enough to have these fall into my lap; I certainly couldn’t afford the retail price for all of them!

Anyway, because I’m in the minority of people who has had a PS3 a lot longer than a 360 (rather than the other way around) I thought someone somewhere might find it interesting to get my impressions, comparing to the PS3, with what will hopefully be a balance between “more comfortable with the old” and “oooh new and shiny it’s the best ever”.

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Greg Stephens is gonna be pretty pissed off when he reads this.

Hope you got your GTAIV from somewhere other than your usual Nottingham branch of GAME, Greg.

_{Why yes, this is a sneaky attempt to get jbury’s post to show up in a Google search for Greg Stephens..}

Play more with Konami ID

hahahaha.
LET ME IN DAMN IT, I WANT MY METAL GEAR ONLINE

Yeah, so that was a waste of time.  Trying to use MP3 audio, I mean.  It’s just not suitable as game music if you want to give people the ability to use their own files.  So I went back to libmikmod, which is fine, especially once I realised you have to allocate a couple of channels manually if you want sound effects to play..

Still, the redesign of the piece code to use the GL-like API certainly was time well spent.  Piece manipulation is much smoother now, and I can go back to shuffling tiles around instead of the fade out/in I had to settle for with the software blitting.  I think I’ll make a release soon.

I had expected to get the first update to Puzl out by now, but I got a bit more ambitious with the music options.  See, everybody wants to use their own music, but most people don’t have mods.  They do, however, have lots of mp3s.  So why not play mp3s?

Well, honestly, the DS isn’t particularly suited to streaming/decoding mp3s while doing anything else, like running a game loop.  I’m using Noda’s excellent AS_Lib (essentially a wrapper for Real’s Helix decoder) and it’s playing back, but I can only handle low bitrates and mono.  This isn’t really a problem considering the poor audio playback from the DS without headphones, but I’d be happier if people could just drop the mp3s they want into the music directory without having to reencode.

So I need to speed up Puzl itself.

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Hey howdy hey, it’s a post!

I figure I may as well use my blog again. I’ve looked at it several times a day for the past two years (it’s still my homepage because I’m incredibly lazy) and while I’m now active on other blogs (such as Gaming with Children) there are still times I’d like to jot down my thoughts about my personal projects.

One of which is Puzl, my first homebrew game for the Nintendo DS. The first version has been entered into the NeoFlash Spring Coding Compo, and I’m crossing my fingers to at least get a top 10 place and snag a sweet motion controller for either the DS or PSP. There’ll be a lot more Puzl posts in the future.

Speaking of the DS, one of the new toys I’ve gotten since the blog was last active is a DS Lite. Technically it was Amy’s, but she never uses it, so now this incredibly sexy piece of hardware is mine, ALL MINE! Other new toys? Oh, a Wii and a PS3. And my primary development platform is now OSX. Yeah, lots to talk about now.

I never did finish the game in a week, though

As I’ve been busy for the last couple of days, I’ve decided to give myself an extension on the game. Here’s an updated pic.

Yesterday, I had the crazy idea of making a game in a week that would run on 4 different platforms - Windows, PSP, Xbox, and OS X. Could this be something I actually finish?

Here’s a pic. Exciting, huh?

..and we’re done. FWIW, I have to change two files in wp-includes, links.php and templates-functions-general.php, to get rid of the list items in the link list over there on the right, and to format the archive link dates over there on the left.

Yes, I wrote that mainly to remind myself in the future.

A few things will look a little goofy while I upgrade to WordPress 2.0.  It’s a smooth upgrade for most people, but I have some jiggery-pokery to do with some of the files to get it to display exactly as I need.