Category Archives: Development

I write code, get over it, I sometimes like to talk about it too :)

24 hours! oh crap

It would seem I am, or have involuentarily entered a 24 hour coding competition in April when I goto France for Atari Connexion 2011.  This could be painful!  I have been assured that an Atari coding hangover is something to be proud of.. I suspect they may be forgetting I am driving everyone home too :)  Guess I will sleep on Sunday 😀

Best get more of my code finished then I guess :)  should be fun even if I produce nothing amazing (which I won’t, will have to try and get a youtube clip up or something after the fact.. assuming it runs 😀 )

Hack hack hack

I couldn’t really bring myself to get stuck into coding truly on my TT, which is a shame as I imagine it could be lots of retro fun, but I actually needed to get stuck in and not spend all my time faffing trying to get the dev environment built, and tracking down some of bits and bats I had decided I wanted was becoming a chore, that combined with the low res I would need to be working in….

e-Jagfest was as usual an eye opener, this year more than most, for one it was packed with cool people, old and new, and I also drove there which was fun.  One of the guys travelling with us was Kev who’s rather spiffy Jag set-up which he took with him introduced me to a SkunkBoard in action.  Creative juices a flowing you could say, I spent the whole event pondering things again, itching to get stuck in.

So, the ‘producer’ I guess you could label him, Gaz :)  leant me his SkunkBoard and even put down the reservation for me on my own (being short of cash sucks).  He is keen for me to not lose my way and drift off, he has ideas for games and stuff, so is providing the nudges to keep me interested, combined with promises of some art work from Kev, its all coming together.  As well as this the computer club at The Lass where a few of us get together for beers, chatting and even playing retro games, my coding jucies have been flowing of late.

This weekend I have had FAR too much fun hacking away at 68K assembly on my jag and learning more about how to use a SkunkBoard, managed to get my startup code working, VBL interrupt setup, and am now starting work on my object list compiler and some debug code for helping.

Actually managed to write a tiny little routine to convert the contents of a CPU register into a hexadecimal string representation, not terribly hard but something I had never actually thought of doing before.

Anyway, though rather than subject my Facebook status to more random comments I should probably write stuff about this here! FB pisses me off in a lot of ways but is too useful to bin, cursed thing.  Now on to find out why I am having a linking issue 🙂

Ps3 jailbreaking

Looks like Sony have crushed the ps3 hack to allow you to run ‘homebrew’ and illegal software on your ps3.

Oh dear, what a pity, nevermind.

I don’t see what the fuss is about, those who want to write home brew games.. Write them for an open system, like say your pc, or the mac or something. Just because you bought the hardware doesn’t entitle you to hack it and breach the licensing agreement you agreed to when you opened the box. You did read it didn’t you? No? Shame.

I imagine every backdoor found will be closed as quick, the joys of online patching eh?

Debian and VMware server “The path /usr/src/linux/include is a kernel header file directory, but it is not part of kernel source tree.”

Yeah a long name I know, but trying to get it stuck in Google so it will be most helpful.

I hit this snag and did a lot of trawling with little luck. Previously had no issues installing VMWare server, upgrade to Lenny, swap some hardware, decide to get it up and running and POOF! no dice!

Anyway I have solved it (huzzah!) and can finally goto bed 🙂

It seems that the error message is related to the lack of .config and or Makefile in the headers. So a .config or Makefile in /usr/src/linux/.

if you have installed your headers :

apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

have build-essential installed have set CC to be gcc-4.1 yet still you get grief, heres what I found.

If you look in the headers path, you will see .config and Makefile. Yet no joy!, look closer, the Makefile is a damn pesky SymLink!!! this goes for most if not all of the buggers. What you need along with the headers is:

linux-headers-2.6.26-1-common

which should reside in the same directory as your headers:

ls
linux-headers-2.6.26-1-686
linux-headers-2.6.26-1-common

The SymLinks point into files in there, for some reason (possibly my own stupidity) I didn’t have it, possibly deleted it in a fit of disk space recovery before starting the build.

Hopefully that will be of use for someone out there, if not, I am sure I will find it useful when I next cause myself grief 🙂