Some guy named Landon Rodgers asked me to build the Dhrystone benchmarker for 68k Macintosh, so I did. I built it with THINK C 5, using 4-byte ints (instead of the default 2-byte ones), and without global optimizations. I had to modify the source a little bit to get it to build and run properly. (The source code and project file is included in the download.)

When the application starts, it will ask you to enter a number of runs. You should select a fairly large value here. The faster the computer you have, the larger this value should be. The more accurate measurement you want, the larger this value should be. On a Macintosh Plus, it doesn't take too long to get through 20000 runs. On a faster computer, that same number of runs would happen too quickly relative to the resolution of the system clock, so a larger value should be used. The application will tell you when you have selected too small of a value.

After the runs have been completed, you'll either be asked to enter a larger number of runs or you'll be presented with the benchmark results.

I hope you find this program to be fun, if not somewhat useful.

The source code license of Dhrystone 68k is the same as Dhrystone C 2.1, which I was told is in the public domain.

Download

Download Dhrystone for 68k Macintosh

I've had this habit of fixing up old Macintosh computers. Whenever I resurrect a dead mac, or upgrade one to be super awesome, I'll document the project in this series. I'll document some of my past projects, too.

I have added a new section to my site, called books. The books page will detail my collection of books. For every book there, I'll also describe why I got that book or why I like it. I hope that you'll be able to learn a bit about who I am through exploring this internet manifestation of my bookshelf.

Each book page links to the book on Amazon, using my referral code. If you find a book you like on my shelf, or if you were already planning to buy one of the books in my collection, please use those links. At no cost to you, you can help a buddy out and grant him more free time to work on the projects that benefit you most.

The book collection isn't complete yet, but I think it is far enough along to launch anyway. I'll slowly be adding books to the page as I have time. I can add around 15 books per day, including writing up my recommendation or condemnation of the book.

Please enjoy!

I used to run the world's best Nintendo DS links page. Since that time, I've migrated my website from static pages, through a few different custom content management systems. Some of these systems didn't support links pages. My latest website architecture does, but my content is still old, not having been updated since 2007.

To help recover the goodness that once was, and to protect future goodness, I will write a cron job to check for broken links. Checking for squatted links will be a more difficult problem, I think.

I hope you can enjoy the links still. They may provide a nice nostalgic feeling. If you need to, you can use archive.org's WayBack Machine to view many of these pages that have left the modern internet.

After a four day wait lag time, the manual is back and its source code is ready to compile with libnds 1.3.1. Thanks for waiting. Enjoy!

This release is meant to simply get the code compiling again. I don't yet use the new high level APIs that this version of libnds introduces. I'm saving that work for the next version of the manual. I have a few new chapters in the works that I'll be slipping in next time, as well.

The new version (r24) of devkitARM is here. Along with it comes the highly anticipated libnds 1.3.1 release. A new libnds means a broken Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming and a lot more other broken source code.

This new release of libnds introduces more high-level APIs and some all new low level APIs. This release renames some registers, preventing the source code included with Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming from building successfully. It also changes how the interrupt system is initialized, no longer requiring (and breaking if you do use) irqInit in main. I do like the new register names, as they match the names as documented in GBATEK.

One reason I started writing the manual was because all the other tutorials (all two of them, at that time) were out of date. I feel strongly about having fresh information available to potential members of the homebrew community; an out of date tutorial is very useless and can be very frustrating. Users of such tutorials blame themselves for the failures and have no idea where to go next, as everything explaining to them where to go no longer applies. Without some positive reinforcement (in the form of a successful build and a graphic on the screen), many would be community members give up. As such, I'm working on updating the Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming source code and will have a new release out soon.

This downtime has been the longest that this site has experienced. For that, I apologize.

It is quite surprising when you see a user on your server that you know isn't supposed to be privileged running about eight wget and eight sendmail processes simultaneously (new ones being created and destroyed all the time), using up a good portion of my CPU time. I came to the obvious conclusion that I had my server broken into (electronically) and immediately shut down the server, locking everyone out, even me.

I contacted my kick ass host and had them send me an archive of my box in a tar ball (tgz). They were very empathetic and set me up a new box with a clean OS install. The response was quick and the transactions smooth. From there, I spend the last few weeks rebuilding my server.

I began researching more deeply into computer security during my rebuild. I've been reading the NSA's guide to securing my operating system and hope that my implementation of many of its recommendations will benefit this site's security. That said, be nice and don't test it maliciously please. But feel free to alert me if you find anything that looks a bit off, if you do feel like auditing this site.

On a lighter note, it looks like devkitPro is going to be updating a lot of their toolchains and libraries, devkitARM and libnds included. The Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming manual is alive and well and far from the deadness this site has been in. It is being updated to support the new toolchain and libraries. If you feel you need a certain feature of the new library (perhaps the use of the FIFO, aside from its uses for sound or perhaps libwifi or libfat) covered or feel that something was left out in the previous (currently shipping) version of the manual, I'm open and able to implement some new ideas at this time.

Thanks to nyarla of #dsdev for putting up a copy of the manual for people to download during the downtime.

About

The following guide will help you to play Ogg Vorbis files from iTunes. This guide will work for both Macintosh OS X or Windows.

Extending QuickTime

First, you must download an Ogg vorbis plugin for quicktime. iTunes has support for QuickTime formats, so adding the ability to QuickTime to play Ogg files indirectly also allows iTunes to play them. You can get a good plugin for Ogg from the Xiph project.

Caveats

After downloading and installing the codecs, you may need to restart your computer. Next, we just add some Ogg files to iTunes and try it out. One thing you'll notice is that metadata for the Ogg file is not imported. This behavior is similar to how wav files work in iTunes. It is a product of how iTunes deals with some QuickTime formats. You can read more about this issue in this xiph metadata support ticket.

Download

Ogg in iTunes QuickTime Plugin