Nintendo 3DS #Nindie game development blog 004
October: A gamedev break and Net Yaroze stuff

This is not homebrew, it’s #Nindie

Continuing from my previous post, about the 3D world.

Well, I had to rethink it, I was trying to be too clever with RGBA values and keeping the quad formatting.
So I decided to remove the RGBA values and only use UV coordinates and triangle primitives.
The main reason for this was Silo 3D, it couldn’t tell me which texture I was using per quad, which made it impossible to edit the world.
But I let the Silo3D people know.

Not so much of a deal breaker, I can still use Silo3D’s quads for simplicity but export will be triangulated.
I used the OBJ format, but I think I’ll use something else, I’ll need to research my options, I have a simple MD2 (Quake 2) parser so I may export and convert it to that.

This also made me rethink my whole engine’s support for RGBA values, the RGB values give textures a nice colour tinting effect, which makes textures reusable, similar to swapping out a CLUT (Colour Look Up Table), this effect was used a bit in early 3D games, especially on N64 with it’s limited VRAM.
Anyway, by dropping RGBA I also lose any lighting/shading calculations, but gain it in CPU/GPU processing and GPU buffer size, so that’s okay for now.
The A (Alpha) set’s the triangle’s opacity (see-through-ness, transparency), which is important so I’ll keep it.

Anyway, that was it for gamedev, I went home to visit family and friends and picked up my old uni stuff, which of course includes my old Net Yaroze 1999-2002 stuff.
And a big stack of 40 Official UK PlayStation Magazines!

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Reclaiming my old stuff

I had my stuff in plastic tub containers, my mother put them in a shed that’s doesn’t leak but has a moisture and insect problem!
So I had to do a lot of cleaning!
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Some interesting stuff:
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One of my old Uni assignments from 1999, printed on long dot matrix paper, anyone still uses MFC for windows development?

My old high school graduate year book (year 12 1994, I was 17, and yes with an undercut 😂!

In 2004, I bought a mp3 D.J. midi peripheral, I never used it!

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Op shops

My mum has always liked Op shops, maybe out of necessity being a single mother of 3 but she genuinely likes getting a cheap bargain on anything.
I have to admit I have that bug and my partner hates it!
Well, here are a few things I picked up:

I’ve been after the S.F.W. movie for a long time!
A movie I’ve only seen once before in the mid 90’s rented from a VHS store.
I would have bought it brand new if I could find it in stores and I really looked!
And the first Op shop I visit, down the road from her house, Bang! it’s there! Absolute goosebumps serendipitous!

Excellent movie and quintessential, Gen X defining movie!
S.F.W makes more sense now then in the 90s!

• Baby boomer conservatives
• Sellout Hippies
• Disillusioned Gen X
• ‘Fake news’ mass media
• And the new wave of ‘everything matters’

Unfortunately there’s no commentary track or special features :(

I also picked up a few PC games too, these are winXP compatible so shouldn’t be too much of a pain to get going:

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Net Yaroze

I brought back 3 CD spindles full of CDR’s archives.
Back then CDR’s where used as backup because harddisk storage was so expensive.
Well, I bought the cheapest and now I’m paying for it :’(

As an aside, I recently scanned a Net Yaroze article with Peter Molyneux, petehawley and Coldcut.
http://netyaroze-europe.com/TheFaceMarch1998 - THE FACE March 1998: Vol 3: Number 14.

Thanks to Will Freeman for letting me know about the article.

Incidentally, they have a digital photo camera in the drawings, I never had a good digital photo camera, just what’s on the mobile phones.
Digital cameras, in the early 2000’s ranged from a few 100 to 1000+

Instead, what I had was a gameboy color and the camera attachment, I also had the madcatz gameboy to PC printer port cable to transfer images to the PC.
Well this is what I used to take images of textures for my playstation ‘game’.

Here are a few images from them, back from 2001:

The Net Yaroze is above the monitor and I put it on it’s side, so the heat could rise out of the vents.

The last image wasn’t a photo, instead it’s a scan of me holding the Net Yaroze reference manual on a flat bed scanner!
I also had a digital video camera, which downloaded the tapes via firewire to PC, but it never occurred to me to use it for anything other then home videos, oh well! :/

And a few random photos of family and friends :)

The CDR backup that I had with my playstation was so dead, I couldn’t get anything out of it.
But fortunately I made a few copies over time and I was able to get back my Net Yaroze stuff I coded, with some help!

dd if=/dev/sr0 of=image.iso bs=2048 conv=noerror,notrunc iflag=nonblock

Incidentally, I still backup my gamedev stuff like this!
I use a batch file witch adds the date and time to the zip file, and I keep a log file with the filename and description.

Getting this to run, is more difficult, but one day when I have it setup again I will run it and get some video!
It’s not a simple program, it uses the PC as a file server and my playstation program access the PC files like a CDROM, streaming files via the serial comms cable!
Well, I bet you didn’t know that ;)

Another thing you probably didn’t know is that Net Yaroze was used in universities, 54 Universities as part of Computer Science or Game development courses around the world as of 1999.

After they halved the Net Yaroze price and sold out, Sony UK was still offering Net Yaroze to Universities in PAL territories.
The server was turned off in 2009.

I went to a university that had them but at a different campus, and I actually went to the highschool just meters away from it, small world!

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Next month’s todo

Not sure at this stage.. we’ll see!
New world loader
Go through old CDR’s
Go through old OPSM UK magazines
I’m building a USB Net Yaroze coms cable from my old coms link.

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Well, that’s it for another month.
Thanks for reading!

Mike.
@mgarcia_org

PS: Any questions, comments, feedback or corrections, feel free to leave a comment below.