playbook arrived :-)

first impression: nice design, quality material and setup was super easy. update to newest OS started installing right away. only I was missing the confirmation dialog to ask for the power supply. the installer page mentions it, but no confirmation needed.

time for gambling... :-)

c64 dithering

needs some gamma correction, I'd say...

configurable...

made the dithering configurable to no, 4x4 or 8x8 bayer ordered and available for the C64 modes as well... GUI looks just more cluttered again :-(

lil' smaller actually...

to be honest, the gameboy camera had only a smaller resolution of 128x112 pixels. will add a mode for that, here a preview of the lil' smaller format:

it's even more cute ... :-)

ok, happy now :-)

bayer 8x8

after adding the bayer 8x8 matrix, have to do something about the brightness...


but this comes even closer to the gameboy cam :-)

the gameboy mode...

used some spare minutes last evenings and managed to implement the gameboy (camera) version. first approach without dithering was nice but not close to the original gameboy camera's dithering. it appears that it used some sort of ordered dithering. thanks to wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_dithering
and the matrix
CGFloat bayer4x4[4][4] =
{{0.01,0.09,0.03,0.11},
{0.13,0.05,0.15,0.07},
{0.04,0.12,0.02,0.10},
{0.16,0.08,0.14,0.06}};
it is coming closer now.
here the first approach without dithering:


and now with ordered (bayer) dithering:


gameboy rocks! :-)

easy going...

some things are quite easy in cocoa (others are not...), e.g. doing some cleanup or other tasks before quitting your application:

- (NSApplicationTerminateReply)applicationShouldTerminate:(NSApplication*)sender
{
...
}

in your app delegate and you can safe stuff or do other spring cleaning.

Metro UI sucks ...

performance, memory and screen space (who actually likes those ugly ribbons as a toolbar replacement???).

but there is help, under

http://winaero.com/comment.php?comment.news.17

(upon click you are leaving this blog, I take no responsibilities)

you find a nice small tool, which disables all those Metro UI features you might not need.

ms windows and sleeping ...

seems ms windows sometimes has similar issues with sleeping like our small one. but one thing is easier under ms windows, it is more talkative. a

Powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

in a cmd gives you the reason right away, whereas with our small one it is more guessing... ;-)

MS Windows 8 Dev Prev on Viliv S7 - minimalist HowTo

Ok, actually it is super simple:
1. Format a USB memory stick (at least 4GB, I'd guess) in NTFS
2. Open the MS Windows 8 Developer Preview .iso image with WinRAR
3. Select all files in WinRar and copy them to the USB memory stick
4. Either check if on your computer exists a directory /boot, or copy the one from WinRAR on your machine (the one on your USB memory stick might work fine as well) and cd into it
5. Execute a BOOTSECT /NT60 :
6. Unmount the USB memory stick, put it into the target machine and either configure the BIOS to boot from the stick or use a boot menu, depending on your BIOS
7. Have fun installing.
As mentioned before, most Windows 7 drivers from the myviliv page worked well for my S7.

:-)

gone astray... Windows 8 on a Viliv S7

had this nice little Viliv S7 laying around quite a while after installing an old version of Android x86, but that port was not supported anymore and having no time to get a newer version to work, I needed to install something (more or less) usable. so tried that tiny7 I once had installed, but it refused due to missing dvd/cdrom driver (the machine has neither). xubuntu crashed during start of the graphical installer and when I just wanted to give up, I found that Windows 8 Developer Preview on my harddisk. and I must omit... smooth installation, all the Windows 7 driver seem to work and it is quite performant, too. strange, strange... looking forward to the public beta end of February, see: http://www.windows8update.com/download-windows-8-beta/
(upon click you are leaving this blog, I take no responsibilities)

da user intaface...

sometimes, if not often, it is really difficult to think simplistic or minimalistic. I am still struggling with the user interface of the resizing/converting application, since the current GUI was just a quick dirty hack to play around with drag and drop. but found already something about transparent and round windows under cocoa... time will show.
this is the current GUI:



lil' ugly, ha?

a small step...

not yet implemented the colors per pixel block limitation, but quickly hacked in a low-res Flexible Line Interrupt (FLI) version. this one allows basically the full 16 color C64 palette on 160x200 pixels. these are widened then to 320x200 to keep the ratio.
here the (blocky) results...
fake 320x200x16:


more realistic widened 160x200x16 FLI:

to be more real...

yeah, results of my mini C64 image converter thingy look quite nice, but to be honest... they are fake lil' bit.

the real VIC chip has some limitations, e.g. in 320x200 an 8x8 pixel block can only have two individual colors while in 160x200 a 4x8 pixel block can have 3 individual colors out of the 16 colors palette.

want to update once I have time to see the differences in the results :-)