The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I went to the funeral home today. Ran into Ila and my aunt cheri there. we chatted for a bit and then went to my moms. the trip took awhile.

I told my mom that i went vegitarian. I guess its totally happened.

My asteriods clone has undergone some new improvements. I'm trying to make it visually more interesting. I learned several new opengl commands and the basics are getting more clear.

In opengl the center point is (0,0,0). You position yourself with a translate function to a point.. and then all calls are relative to that point.

To draw stuff, you pick a mode.. point, triangle, etc and then draw the point(s) needed for that mode in between begin/end statements. If you are drawing a multipoint object, you can do blending by changing the color of each point and it will do it for you.

For 2d games, you can do a layer for each type of object.. background, forground objects, etc. There is also a function to do 2d stuff all on the same layer, but collision detection is easier on different levels.

Eventually i'll stop hacking trek and switch to my own game from scratch. I got some Objective C sample code today.. i could write a totally macintosh game.

I learned some more about the PowerPC chip today. It seems that the PowerPC prior to the G5 had a feature that allowed it to switch between endian modes IN the processor 5 times faster than doing it in memory with bit shifts.

I also found out that the Altivec Instructions fixed the biggest flaw with the PowerPC. It seems the G3 and lower were very slow when converting between integer and float.. so if you cast an int as a float in your code like this

float y;
int x;

y = (float)x;

it would really slow down the app. Altivec has instructions for doing this really quick.

The reason its slow on G3 is because the floating point and integer stuff is seperate in the chip (RISC) and had to go between memory to function on the chip.

I now have an external emagic a26 usb sound device. Basically its a sound card/mixing device that can do 16 bit audio w/ dolby 5.1 OR 24 bit stereo.

It sounds REALLY good. In fact, I like it better than my audigy gamer.

Of course the device is Mac/Windows compatible.

I have bought 280 songs from apple now. Lately, i've been buying 70s music mostly. Its rather weird.