Paris Graphics

(more screen shots here)

For Blip Festival 2007, I was determined to do all of my visuals on game systems rather than using a laptop. My gp2x applications were ready but I wanted to try another platform. Dusted off my Gameboy Advance and thought that due to the fact that just about everyone can get there hands on one of these, it would be a great platform to write some video applications for. I spent the next few weeks reading everything that I could find on the web about GBA programming.

I ended up having several small applications written in time for Blipfestival. They were all written in C. A few use images as sprites but most are my usual style - math. Basically, I write a bunch of equations and map them to a button so that the user can push and choose (or get a random one). Each equation has some variables which are mapped to the D-Pad (Joystick) so that the values change with up/down, right/left.

The GBA uses a 16.78 MHz ARM processor and at that speed it’s kind of crazy to be writing individual pixels to the screen, but something that I wanted to try after doing it with success on the GP2X. I plan to revisit the code for these and see if they can be optimized to the point where others might like playing with them. If not, I’ll try other approaches.

I finally got around to doing some video captures of what I’ve done so far - thanks to Bitshifter for loaning me his TV out adapter. I’ll put them together with some music and post on You Tube later this month.

For now I’ve posted more screen shots on this page.

A while back ago I purchased a used copy of “A First Course in Computational Physics and Object-Oriented Programming with C++” by David Yevick and I’m finally getting around to reading it. To follow along one needs to install DISLIN and GSL.

Note that not all of this is free (as in speech, although it is free as in beer), however, I wanted to set it up so that I could read the book.

First off, I was setting this up on my Debian box which uses “etch” and found that (due to licensing, I believe) libmotif3 was not to be found so I ended up enabling the “sarge” repository to get it.

Once everything was installed there’s a few other things to note:

1. Setting your PATHS. You need to do something like
   export DISLIN=dislin_directory
   in my case that was
   export DISLIN=/usr/local/dislin
   then
   PATH=${PATH}:${DISLIN}/bin
   LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DISLIN:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
2. Write up your source code in your favorite editor and save it. In my case, let’s say it was myFile.cpp
3. Run the following to compile and link it:
   clink -cpp myFile
   Note that the extension is left off.

Some interesting examples are in the examples directory and can be compiled with:
clink -a exa_c

Lastly, typing: disman  will launch a manual.