:: yaroze blog ::

:: 30.8.02 ::

Wow! As you can see, I've just discovered web logging, or "blogging" as they call it in the trade! It's new, it's cool and it's totally free!

Of course, my first thoughts were to link it to a Yaroze diary, as I'm re-re-trying to learn the darn thing, after 5 years of ignoring it. And today, after some playing with directory settings, I worked out how to get Blogger to upload to my Yaroze site. Over the past month, I've kept a simple ascii diary of what I've done during those sleepless nights I seem to be prone to from time to time, and as Blogger won't let me add notes to days already past, I'll reproduce them here one week per day until I've caught up. Then I'll try and keep the momentum going with it.

So Sunday 04.08.02 thru Saturday 10.08.02:
We moved into our new house almost 6 months ago and after agreeing which room Rosie (my beloved) would have in the attic as her study and which I would have, I never did anything more than move the boxes in. So I got the room sorted, unpacked and hooked up my old PC. Turn the thing on, and PAFF! Nothing! I had got Linux and Windows 95 installed on a hard drive each, but one of the hard drives was playing up, so I needed to do a complete rebuild of the machine. This took me all night - I decided to forget Linux for now (more time later for that when I buy a PS2 & Linux) and installed Windows 98 instead. The PC's pretty old - an AMD Pentium 100MHz with something like 48MB RAM and a simple noddy 1MB S3 video card. But it does the job. And Rosie needs the nice PC for writing up her PhD. I also took the Haupagge WinTV card from Rosie's soopa-doopa PC and installed it into the new box, alongside the extra serial ports (it uses a serial mouse and has a modem connected via the serial port too) and the PC-Comms Link card for the Action Replay. Just about all fit in! Got all the hardware working with some fiddling of IRQs etc. Unpacked the Holy Yaroze (what a good name!), linked it all up and installed the software again. Re-remembered how to set the whole thing up with the software, environment variables etc and got it all working with the basics - compiling uploading at 115200bps and running on the WinTV.

Meanwhile, at work...
Got Outlook Express working for my newsgroup client and took another look at the Yaroze NGs and also the Net Yaroze web site, which I hadn't visited for a long long while. Decided to go through all the old stuff over a period of time to reacquaint myself. Started trawling through the web sites and news groups, downloading anything that looked interesting. The plan is to document my progress with the Holy Yaroze this time, as an aid-memoire, and also revisiting the "Great Net Yaroze Manual Project" (GNYMP). I'm actually less interested in game production than merely playing with the toys and learning how it all works. Having said that, though, I'd kinda like to get into the creative side sometime, so it all helps! I'm not a big game player, but do like the occasional Wipeout etc.

Finally, for this busy week, I downloaded and installed gmax from discreet. It's just like 3DS Max, without some of the whizz-bangs, but it's completely free! Perfect for Yaroze. Thought Javier's .RSD exporter might work with it, but no luck. I emailed Javier for the source, so that I could recompile to work with Viz and Max 4. He responded very kindly and promptly, so I made the changes after looking at Matt's (from work) code for the NavisWorks exporter in order to see what small changes I needed to make. I sent the result build back to Javier, as promised, but unfortunately, it didn't work with gmax. I'll have to learn maxscript and do it that way, as the combo of gmax and Yaroze is too good to ignore!
:: Steve Parnell 6:06 PM [+] ::
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