kometbomb » Webfinds

Prince of Persia on the C64

kometbomb — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:33:28 +0000

This is so awesome.

It is almost in sync with the Amiga version (they use the same joystick input to play the game on an Amiga emulator and on a C64 emulator):

Wow. You can get it here and read the author’s dev blog here. Read a better article at RGCD (this was just a heads-up).

What to do when Catalyst Control Center won’t load?

kometbomb — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 07:09:44 +0000

Short answer: replace CCC with ATI Tray Tools. The software has the most common stuff like setting anti-alias options and resolution and lots more for tweaking. And it’s very light-weight in comparison.

In my case, I wanted to disable forced anti-aliasing so that the enemy outlines in World of Tanks were visible. A well-known bug in the game with a working solution, but an another well-known “feature” in the video software made working around it impossible as I couldn’t access the video settings.

The most dorky thing with CCC is that while there’s a ton of trouble with it, it seems the install procedure is the real reason for it not working. In my case, it was probably because of missing libraries and so the software refused to start (the only hint was an error message in Event Viewer: Could not find Type [ATI.ACE.CLI.Component.Dashboard.Dashboard] from [CLI.Component.Dashboard]).

Many tutorials on how to fix this is to reinstall CCC and the drivers but I found this won’t work and is very annoying even if it did work. So, I recommend skipping that and use this little tool instead. Thank you Ray Adams, no thanks ATI/AMD.

An Alternative to XML

kometbomb — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:42:06 +0000

My new weapon of choice. libconfig is a configuration file parser that supports arrays, named and typed members, selection by path (e.g. cfg.users.[3].name) and more. That is, it has basically all the useful (as in 80% of cases) features of XML and none of the bad. There’s a minimal but well defined structure that will work for most situations and that can be used to enforce e.g. all array items having to be of the same type. There’s no overkill markup so it’s easy to read and write by humans. The library can also write the settings tree into a text file.

The configuration files look like this:

screen = { width = 300; height = 200; }
users = ( { name = "Torgo"; items = [ "Item 1", "Item 2" ]; } );

And in C you would do something like this:

int screen_height = 100;
const char *name;
config_init(&cfg);
config_read_file(&cfg, "config");
if (!config_lookup_int(&cfg, "screen.height", &screen_height))
  puts("Using default screen height");
if (config_lookup_string(&cfg, "users.[0].name", &name))
  puts(name);
config_destroy(&cfg);

You can also iterate the setting tree without the path for easier array or tree traversal. In all, I would say it involves less work compared to any XML library, especially in C. I like to think it’s a good example of software designed by the same guy who also uses it and not by some external committee.

kometbomb » Webfinds

Prince of Persia on the C64

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