Posted 17 February 2007, 10:43 | by Ben Duguid | Perma-link
Sweet, it would appear that I can indeed post blogs from my windows mobile phone, from Opera Mini which I have to say also rocks.
Just a lack of wysiwyg controls, and some of the more important symbols missing from the keyboard; like < and >!
Filed under: Hardware
Posted 09 June 2005, 11:29 | by Ben Duguid | Perma-link
Ok, well, I got a new PC last month, and very nice it is too. I bought a couple of new games to play on it (Lego® Star Wars™: The Game - very cool and The Lord of the Rings™, The Battle for Middle-earth™ also very cool).
After I'd installed various other bits and pieces and basically got my machine all set up as I liked it, I found that 2 things were broken.
The following details the symptoms and fixes I've put in place:
The initial splash screen would appear, then disappear, and the secondary screen would not appear - it just hung. Looking in Task Manager revealed the three processes involved just sitting there (lotrbfme.exe, game.dat and ~e5.0001) but nothing happening with any of them - no new CPU time, no increase in memory nothing.
I finally tracked the problem down to my mouse settings (not drivers) - I've got a five button MS intellimouse, and prefer to have the side buttons set to Shift and Ctrl and the middle button as "middle button" rather than their defaults of Back, Forward and "Next Window" - I use Mouse Gestures in FireFox, so don't need buttons, and I find that Ctrl and Shift are more use in 3ds max and windows than those - however LotR:BfMe doens't like me doing that and won't run. Checking the "Enable program-specific settings" and browsing to lotrbfme.exe and telling the drivers to do their default thing when it's running seems to have fixed it.
Ok, this one's even more involved.
Basically, I bought Tom Miller's Beginning 3D Game Programming a couple of months ago, and instead of installing the October or December SDK that came with it, I pulled down the April one and used that - I also used the April framework code instead of his - this obviously lead to some compile errors - mostly from a couple of methods that required an extra (null) parameter passed into them.
However, I've just installed the June SDK on the new PC, and things were even more broken - Microsoft have removed a couple of methods and interfaces from the framework - namely the Framework.SetMouseCallback and Framework.SetKeyboardCallback used in listing 4.1
These should be replaced with the following:
sampleFramework.Window.KeyDown += new KeyEventHandler(blockersEngine.OnKeyDown);
sampleFramework.Window.MouseMove += new MouseEventHandler(blockersEngine.OnMouseMove);
sampleFramework.Window.MouseDown += new MouseEventHandler(blockersEngine.OnMouseDown);
And moved below the line from listing 4.5 that reads:
sampleFramework.CreateWindow("Blockers - The Game");You'll then need to modify your event handlers as follows:
/// <summary>
/// Hook the mouse moves.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="sender"></param>
/// <param name="e"></param>
private void OnMouseMove (object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
if (isMainMenuShowing)
{
mainScreen.OnMouseMove(e.X, e.Y);
}
else if (isSelectScreenShowing)
{
selectScreen.OnMouseMove(e.X, e.Y);
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Handle mouse clicks
/// </summary>
/// <param name="sender"></param>
/// <param name="e"></param>
private void OnMouseDown (object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
if (MouseButtons.Left == e.Button)
{
if (isMainMenuShowing)
{
mainScreen.OnMouseClick(e.X, e.Y);
}
else if (isSelectScreenShowing)
{
selectScreen.OnMouseClick(e.X, e.Y);
}
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Handle the keyboard strokes.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="sender"></param>
/// <param name="e"></param>
private void OnKeyDown(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.KeyEventArgs e)
{
if (isMainMenuShowing)
{
mainScreen.OnKeyPress(e.KeyData);
}
else if (isSelectScreenShowing)
{
selectScreen.OnKeyPress(e.KeyData);
}
}
Enjoy.
Filed under: Hardware
Posted 20 July 2001, 11:50 | by Ben Duguid | Perma-link
As you may have noticed on the creature cave page, I've recently been affected by the "hanging save game" bug in Black & White. This meant that whenever I tried to save the game, or join an online game (which initiates a save), the system would hang. This was a day or so before the patch came out.
After the patch was out, and installed on my machine, I was still suffering from this problem… I was unable to start the process to join an online game, and when ever I just tried to exit, the system would still hang. Regardless, for what ever reason I decided to have a play with it the other day, (12th July), played for about an hour or so, whipping about Land 3, finishing off a few buildings here and there, and basically preparing myself and my creature for Land 4. Exited, and hung during the save. 
Never mind, I was only playing for an hour.
However, I ordered some more memory at the begining of the week, which arrived yesterday: 512Mb for the ridiculous price of £70! To think that four months ago I nearly spent 70 quid on 128Mb… sickening huh? And this is from Gateway's prefered partner for memory upgrades, so I'm fairly happy with it as far as reliablility goes… So in that went last night, taking me to the rather odd number of 640Mb RAM, but never mind. Pottered about in other apps and thought, "What the hell, I'll try B&W". Fired it up, and it was where I'd left off after playing on the 12th, not where it was before I started… so although B&W was hanging, I guess the save game bit had worked.
So I played for about an hour or so, finished up, exited, and went to make a cup of tea while it saved the game… came back, and the desktop was sitting there, no error messages, all happy. 
. Looks like it's fixed.
I guess the system just couldn't cope with only 128Mb, and swapping to and from disk all the time.
One other thing I did notice though was that one of the villages (The Japanese one at the foot of the temple mountain) had a glitch with it's desire flags - it was trying to display two flags on one pole, at different heights - Need for Offspring and Need for benevolence (Heart and Praying hands). Bit odd, if I can get a screen grab (assuming that it still does it) I will do.
Filed under: Hardware
Posted 28 February 2001, 09:08 | by Ben Duguid | Perma-link
Ok, so I didn't manage to get anything done over the w/end. Didn't really feel overly inspired at the time, and bought a new telly, and On Digital, so spent most of it veg'd out in front of that, sorry
I'll try and get some more done later this week…
Till then,
Filed under: Hardware