Limited success.

Well I had some limited success on the DSI PLL clock front. I found some posts on the newsgroup and decided to look more closely at the kernel source too. Well I sort of got something working, eventually. Using the 72Mhz clock as the source for the PLL anyway. I dunno, it doesn't seem entirely right, and the monitor keeps dropping out every 20 seconds or so, so I might just leave it for now. At least I have a few of the bits needed.

I played a bit more with the matrix code. The snakey things move down the screen and react to things and bounce around like they should. The X-Y zappers move and 'zap' every now and then, planting a seed where they meet. Which ages and then drops off the screen. Even have a sequencer setup that describes the waves.

And I have screenshots! People like pictures don't they? Although it's only using putchar() as the 'rendering engine' at present!

This shows part way through wave 1, with the X-Y zappers just having fired.

And this shows a little later on - the attack ships and XY zappers have moved on a bit, the X-Y zap from the last shot planted a seed, and one of the earlier seeds have died and is currently falling down.

Bugger all code so far. Adding some user-controlled ship and bullet logic should be a doddle on top. Even played a bit with blender to draw some ships (actually I tried gimp first, but I really can't draw at all, not even slightly pleasant looking blobs), although implementing any graphics display is some distance off.

Now for another rant, sort of.

Since i've been back hacking for a while there's one thing i've really noticed. Boy is it much nicer developing using a GNU/Linux box than using Microsoft Windows (and that was XP, which is supposedly the best one). Ok this machine is a bit faster - quad core instead of dual, but the difference goes well beyond calculation speed. Everything is so much smoother and faster. I used to wait around for 30 seconds (I actually timed it) just for the friggan HELP to come up most of the time! Switching applications or desktops (using VirtuaWin) crawled. Even just using the browser ran like a pig after a few tabs were open. Pretty well everything I needed to do, every time i needed to do it, just seemed to illicit a groan of discomfort at the pain I was sharing with the CPU as it struggled to complete the task. I rarely even get the time on this box. And when it does take a while, it's usually obvious why.

Currently I have 5 x emacs, 1 x icecat (with 53tabs), 1 x javam (in icecat), 1 x blender, 1 x evince with 14 documents open (between 4 and 3500 pages long each), 1 x gimp, 1 x transmission, 1 x seamonkey (650MB alone!), 11 x xterms, 1 x xfontsel, 1 x gdb, synaptic, and even mythbackend recording tv as I type. The machine is using 3.5G RAM, and 1G of swap and has been up for 2 weeks.

Yet it just about runs like I just logged on.

Everything is snappy, and stable, I have all the tools I need at my fingertips - without having to use the mouse for every. click! little. click! fucking. click! thing. click! i. click! fucking. click! need. click! to. click! fucking. click! do. click! click!

Not going to enjoy going back to a windoze machine for work, if that's what I get lumped with.