Random Ideas

• Awake, but a little short on sleep. #
• A great mystery beckons. What's for lunch? #
• And so it turned out to be Lam Mee. #
• And so now Black Diamond by Stratovarius is stuck in my head. #
• Going crazy over sorting algorithms. Sort of. #
• So many movies on my 'to watch' list. Time to clear up the backlog with some DVDs! When I get the time… #
• Been working on coding the Hecatomb card game. Gonna update my blog with a screenshot soon! #
• Fixed the speed problem by rewriting my entire transparency algorithm. The speed gain is so substantial, preloading is no longer essential! #
• Don't have access to the computer I use for development for now. On the plus side, I did fix the card speed problem – one less headache. #
• Planning out the resource manager while building a temporary database. #
• Rewrote how the game handles visible cards again. Next focus will be the database – mostly under the hood changes for now. #
• Taking a day off working on the game's backend and making graphical tweaks to it instead. #
• And so I ended up repairing the game's backend to make a front end function work. I am sooooo terrible at programming. #
• Rest day today. No work. No study. Just play. And probably loads of sleep. #
• Doing strange things to my Wii. Like taking it apart. #

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I realised after I twittered about my Wii that I haven't really mentioned anything about my Wii.

I sent it to a technician – who promptly told me some nonsense thing about how I needed to replace the whole drive, and gave me a reason completely unrelated to the real reason the drive had failed – a broken gear.

I know it was a broken gear – because I checked it before I sent it in to be repaired.

He then told me that it would cost AUD250 to replace the drive. Right. It would cost me more than half my Wii to replace the drive. This repair I obviously refused. A complete drive replacement wasn't something I needed a technician for.

And so, I bought a replacement drive for about AUD80, replaced it myself, and the Wii started working again. The catch? The laser on the replacement drive was worse than the one on my original drive.

And so, yet again, recently, I had to exchange the lasers since the one I was currently using, started giving me plenty of disc read errors. (And before people start accusing me of piracy, this was on a perfectly genuine Wii Fit disc.)

I adjusted the POT on the laser, and after a few more times messing with it, I decided the best course of action was indeed to just replace the laser with the one from my old broken gear drive.

And so my Wii is working again! Nintendo either really messed up the QC this round, or something else went wrong. It's my least used console – and it's given me the most problems. One wonders if it'll die way before my other two consoles.

I've actually been building proof of concepts for a PC version of the game for a while now. I've been trying very hard to improve speeds using just the .NET CLR, but it looks like I'll have to begin looking into either making or borrowing a proper image library for this. My own very basic algorithms just aren't enough to keep up – I'm hoping to have it run on 512MB RAM computers, although it looks like whoever's interested is going to need 1GB to run this well – it currently runs using just 8MB of RAM – but it can easily balloon if I decide to preload resources into RAM. We'll see.

Oh yes, card images copyright Wizards of the Coast, or Hasbro, or whoever owns them. Definitely not mine.