Oddball Update

After a trying start to the week, things have begun to look up for me. I’ve gotten a lot of work cleared off my plate, we’ve embarked upon a concise plan of action to prepare for our travels in Thailand, and our roof repair has finally been scheduled for next Wednesday. Somehow, this had the effect of “drawing back the curtains” in my mind, and a surge of creative energy came straight in.

In the last 48 hours, I’ve dabbled in three of my favorite classic hobbies: gaming, web design and programming. And it’s all revolved around good old Wolfenstein 3-D. I got it in my head that I didn’t want to mess with a dedicated DOS gaming computer anymore, so I tried to see if I could “virtualize” my Wolfenstein operations with a combination of the DOSBox emulation software and a Windows-based map editing utility. I succeeded.

But this wasn’t good enough, because then I started to get it into my head that I should enhance my Wolfenstein project’s engine to include some spiffy new features, made possible by the modern crop of editors like WDC and Chaos-Edit. For example, it’s now possible to embed custom demos and end art in the VGAGRAPH file, instead of shipping a bunch of external files all willy-nilly with your custom add-on.

Additionally, I modified the engine to read the ceiling color, floor color, music selection and secret elevator “back to” floor from the level itself. Now, rather than having to recompile the Wolfenstein engine every time I want to change a ceiling color or the song that plays on a level, I can just change the values of the tilemap data in the top row of the level itself. The engine just reads the values of the tiles I’ve placed up there and does the rest. If I don’t add any more features, I won’t have to recompile the code again for the life of my current project.

So now that I’m ready to start making Wolfenstein levels again, I considered that it might be a good idea to remake my website, the Wolfenstein Records Room. Right now it’s just a static site that I haven’t updated in over a year, but last night I embarked on a quest to convert it into a WordPress blog — without compromising anything about the design. So far, it’s coming along pretty well.

Since I also went back to the Die-Hard Wolfer’s Forum to get some tips on my most recent engine modifications — simply as a lurker, of course — this emboldened me into considering accepting some comments on my work again. WordPress lets me establish a dialog with other Wolfy people, without divulging my email address. I’ll probably enable anonymous commenting and let people leave comments on my project pages, news posts and soforth. It’ll work just like Oddball Update, but people won’t have to register. It could turn into a gigantic clusterfuck, but if it does, I’ll just turn commenting off.

In addition, I can report complete success with my TiVo HD’s hard drive upgrade. Since we’ll be spending a long time in Thailand, I wanted to make sure we’d have ample space for all of our shows. The new Western Digital WD10EACS (1 terabyte) drive I just dropped in will more than suffice: After the upgrade completed successfully, the TiVo now reports a capacity of 144 HD hours and 1,326 SD hours. Gold.

To celebrate, I scheduled 5 hours’ worth of Olympic opening ceremonies in HD.

I was impressed at how easy the whole process was. The WinMFS tool makes it completely simple to copy your old drive to the new one, including all of your settings and recordings. I also made a backup of my old drive first, so that in case the TiVo goes south, I have something to restore from. It took about two hours to get everything done, from start to finish.

My timing on this upgrade was impeccable, too. Today, my TiVo received the new 9.4 service update, including a bunch of new features, tweaks and YouTube support. It’s got a fresh hard drive to install on, and even better, I’ve got a backup drive that’s still running the old software, just in case anything goes horribly wrong. Even my timing on the hard drive purchase was great — I got the new 00D6B0 variant, which uses a more efficient 3-platter design. This couldn’t have worked any better!

Anyway, I’m off — time to sit down to dinner and see what’s on.

Tagged as Life, TiVo, Wolfenstein + Categorized as Games, Life, Games/PC