Building a Web-based Media Player - Part 1

August 31, 2008

For the past month I've been tinkering with Flex and my little Linux server. One of the projects that grew out of this was a web media player with which I could listen to all my tunes wherever there happened to be some scraps of internet. This has been one of the coolest projects I've worked on in some time. It successfully blends nearly all of my programming skills: PHP/MySQL, Javascript, XML, Flex/Actionscript 3.0, and some C++. I'm going to write a series of tutorials walking through what I've done in hopes of bringing this coolness to the masses. I'm going to be fairly verbose covering subjects that any seasoned programmer can pretty much skip over. In the first installment I'm going to cover creating the database and getting song information from the MP3s.

Continue reading Building a Web-based Media Player - Part 1

From the Orlando Anime Festival

August 16, 2008

Yesterday, we (Ryan, Tyler, and I) had the pleasure of finally attending my very first convention (outside of the local county fair). Sadly, it wasn't a sci-fi convention as I would have liked, but an anime convention. I don't consider myself to be an anime nerd, and even border on disliking the genre entirely, but I did have a pretty good time none the less. The convention itself was fairly small in comparison to others, but there was still a goodly amount of things going on and plenty of dealers peddling their anime related wares.

The atmosphere or the con was... nerdy. Even so, I felt strangely out of place as I was one of the few attendees that wasn't cosplaying. Most of the costumes I didn't recognize, but there were the likes of Phoenix Wright, Yuna, Link and, surprisingly, several Snakes from Metal Gear:

It still surprised me just how many girls were there. In fact, I'd say the males were outnumbered by quite a bit which, for me, is an unusual situation to be in seeing as I go to school overflowing with testosterone. Just being around all these people was probably the most entertaining part of the day.

One of the areas we spent the most time in was the dealers floor. Just about anything anime related was being sold. Mangas, DVDs, T-shirts, action figures, plushies, costumes, weapons. And that's barely scratching the surface. As you can see in the picture above, I broke down and bought a Godot shirt. I wubs it!

There were some video games, including an NES championship tournament, but it was a side to everything else going on. There were rooms showing animes, people talking about how to improve your AMV/drawings, all sorts of crazy stuff. We wound up the night by sitting in on the "Weakest Geek" game show. It was kind of like Double Dare (sans the mess) and a quiz show with the Who Wants to be a Millionaire music playing in the background the entire time. The biggest part of this game was the "Box" game wherein a picture of an action figure would be shown and the player would then proceed to try to find said action figure in a fish tank filled with more action figures and packing peanuts. It was all rather entertaining to watch and the crew running the show was pretty cool.

I'm going to wrap this post up with a video I took while I was there (and later added music to).

Awesome Video of Errata

August 8, 2008

Now, I realize that the "system specs" spewed forth in the above video were probably intentionally skewed so as to follow the whacky, 80s style zaniness, but as an uber nerd and somebody who's intimately familiar with NES hardware, I feel compelled to correct their errors.

Claim #1: 3.58Mhz video core clock speed
The NES video processor, a Ricoh 2C02 "Picture Processing Unit", or PPU, is actually clocked at 5.37Mhz. The CPU is exactly one third of this, or 1.79Mhz. The figure they're quoting is the timing of a color NTSC signal.

Claim #2: 240x226 resolution
The PPU actually worked with an internal resolution 256x240, though most old TVs did not display the first and last eight scanlines effectively making the resolution 256x224. This was the same for both NTSC and PAL models.

Claim #3: 16 sprite pixel depth
I don't even know where to begin on this one. Firstly, the NES had enough sprite RAM (object attribute memory, or OAM) for 64, 8x8 or 8x16 sprites. Secondly, every sprite could have three colors (four if you include transparency) from a palette of 53 colors. Every scanline could hae a maximum of eight sprites, and when this limit was exceeded some sprites were not drawn causing the infamous flicker. Finally, you could have a total of 25 colors per scanline. What the hell they were talking about to begin with baffles me, but there were no 16s involved there at all. Except maybe that internal 16-bit PPU register that could be written to through dual writes to address $2006....

Claim #4: NES has a Zilog Z80 processor
This one's easy. The NES did not have a Z80. It had a Ricoh 2A03, which was a 6502 without decimal mode and a set of sound instructions. The Gameboy, however, had a Z80 and the Sega Genesis used one as its sound processor.

Claim #5 It's an 8-bit system
Well, that's about the only thing they got right. Though, the system did have a 16-bit address bus....

Well, I'm finished. I'm sure somewhere God has smote a kitten for my nerdy rantingness, but it had to be said and I said it. Caio.

Metal Gear Music Day!

July 4, 2008

I missed a week again, but here I am performing my civic duty whilst on vacation. Today, the music of choice is Metal Gear Solid. I recently just finished the first one and as soon as I return from vacation will begin work on MGS2. If you have a PS2 and have not plaed any of these games I highly recommend picking up the recently released Essential Collection as I did. Three games for thirty bucks is a really good deal for excellent games such as these. But anyways, on to the music.

Continue reading Metal Gear Music Day!

Game Music Friday - Gerudo Valley

June 13, 2008

One of the first video game songs I remember really enjoying was Gerudo Valley from Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64. Back when I had a crappy computer and little hard drive space, I would listen to MIDI files and Gerudo Valley was one of the few songs that had a pretty good version out there. Of course, now that disk space isn't an issue, I've moved on to MP3s. However, I still find myself listening to more remixes than the actual original itself (because, let's face it, the N64 instrument library sucked). But, anyways, here are this weeks Gerudo Valley music picks.

Continue reading Game Music Friday - Gerudo Valley

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• Display Time Code in After Effects with Expressions
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