It has been quite a while since i quit the IT industry now, to start studying at DTU. Yesterday though, i got tempted to try out the final release of Netbeans 6, and decided to take it for a spin and port my old BeamTrons game to J2ME.

I must say i´m really impressed with Netbeans 6! I have been working professionally with Netbeans since version 3.x, but have never really felt that any of the major versions have been really ground shaking and innovative. This time though, the thing that struck me the most was, everything in the UI is SO polished! I am a real UI nazi and there was so many UI things that annoyed me in the previous versions of Netbeans (though it was still far better than eclipse!)

Especially the new deployment options are so cool! There is even an option so i can deploy the midlet directly to my S60 nokia phone directly after building it, using the standard Nokia USB cable that came with my phone. Sony Ericsson has had this for ages with their remote debugging capabilities in their SDK. Correct me if i´m wrong, but i have´nt seen this on any of my Nokia handsets yet?

Anyway, I renamed the game to Selectrons (actually because of lazyness due to filesystem conflicts hehe), and ported it to J2ME in an evening. It´s still needs some more functionality etc. to be really fun, but i can´t really think of anything right now. Suggestions are welcome

Download

source (Netbeans 6 project)

Binary (.jar)

Some time ago my friend Søren brought me back a funny piece of hardware from Russia: A NES clone called Dendy. I wasn’t able to find much technical info about it, only small bits of history.

It seems like Nintendo never released the NES in russia, so instead they made their only clone, which was as popular over there as NES was in the rest of the world. It came in all sorts of exotic cabinets, which resembled the looks of various other console. Even today you can still buy dendy clones in new original packages, which looks like PS1, Sega Megadrive, and more! I got the Megadrive look’a'like:

I got 3 (+116) games with it:

Adventure island 3, Contra 6, Chip’n'Dale, and “116 In 1 Super game”, which funny enough features a picture of Sonic on the cover!?. The roms are pretty much just copies of the original games, and i couldn’t spot any particular differences at first sight. The 116-in-1 are as usual just 3-4 games, which has been given to 116 programming monkeys on LSD, which afterwards has changed some colours in the sprites, messed up a couple of backgrounds, and split the various levels in the games, into seperat games!

My favorite is “Chip’n'Dale: Rescue rangers”, which i used to play a lot as a kid, and regularly still listens to the soundtrack from.

Tonight i decided to play through some levels, but ended up completing the game within an hour. It has been a while since a completed a game, since all newer games seems to take months to complete, so i was of course pretty excited after completing the last boss: what was the treat, what eye candy did the developers had in hand for a worthy player like me? Well, to my dissapointment the game just showed the following picture with some japanese subtitles, and afterwards just froze the whole damn machine?!

But anyway i had a good laugh, and i certainly enjoyed the game as much as i did 17 years ago.. Waauu it has been a while…

Together with my club “8 Bit klubben” i was invited to halfmachine, to hack up some old LED displays, and make some kind of digital art out of them.

The M/S Halfmachine project

Let me quote a description from the halfmachine website:

HALF MACHINE is an artist collective based in Copenhagen. HALF MACHINE is interactive art installations, dance performance and concert event - collaborative art experiments involving the audience.

And from a review:

“Objects and dancers are suspended in a giant mobile, robots, video art and live concerts in water and light - a crazy and surreal eco system in the midst of an electronic playground”

The halfmachine project lately bought an old cable tug boat, a really cool old rusty industrial kinda’looking vehicle. Perfect for a surrealistic cyberpunk high voltage future art event! Somebody was so lucky to get their hands on the old scoreboards from “Parken” (the main football stadium in Copenhagen), which we was invited to come and hack.

The display boxes was equipped with a logical 8×16 matrix of 12 LED cells, which could display either red, green, or booth. And the boxes could be daisy chained, so you could shift data onto an infinite number of displays. Mads from halfmachine managed to reverse engineer the control board protocol, so all i had to do was hook up a microcontroller, and start coding! I was really rusty in low-level C coding, but i just felt so nice to fiddle with it again, and i kinda got the hang of it quite fast. We used the Arduino AVR boards for this, which worked perfectly with the supplied IDE and avr-gcc based compiler.

The first thing that came into my mind when thinking of what to code, was of course a sinus scroller. The displays wasn’t quite big enough for that, and i didn’t have time to make an abstraction layer that made it possible to place any number of displays in arbitrary setup, but only to chain them horizontally. So i decided to make a regular scroller, with a sinus curve behind it

I took the PC Bios font, which was the only font i could think of which was easy to find, and came in an 8×8 px bitplane, and quickly threw together a php script on my macbook, which printed out the sinus tables i used for the background.

The text that Pipaluk (the female heart of halfmachine) decided to show on the scroller was:

WHAT REALLY COUNTS IN THE HISTORY OF CULTURE AIMS AT THE BOTTOM LINE ONLY TOWARDS THE MOMENT WHEN THE NIGHT OF UNLIMITED DESIRE SOMEHOW IS CHANGING INTO THE BLINDING RADIATING DEMAND FOR MORE CONSCIOUSNESS FLUNG OUT IN EACH DIFFERENT TONE OF VOICE BY ALL PSYCHICS

L’ECART ABSOLU, 1965.

A cool text for the context, even though i still don’t quite understand the deeper meaning of it.

I managed to get time to code another little thing, for the displays placed along the main dance floor:

A man hanging in chains, above my virtual flowerbed

The flowers slowly grew up, bloomed, and eventually died out and made a new spore. All in a nice and slow tempo during the entire evening. Jacob the adventurous managed to screw it up all of a sudden though, when he demonstrated for some friends how easy it was to switch microcontroller boards on the displays, which resulted in a “bug swarm” randomly flashing in my pretty flowerbed! Funny enough, they spread out to 2 of the flowerbeds, and after about an hour they died out?!

It was a really remarkable and astonishing show, with everything from naked people in a tube of water, to Pipaluk dancing on a submarine, which sailed around in the harbor, and eventually dived with her standing on top. I can really recommend you go see it! the show is open every fri/sat/sun from 21-02 the rest of August. For further info, check:

http://www.halfmachine.dk/