Articles tagged “C#”

My latest eBay purchase was influenced by a desire for some practical test/prototype equipment, a bit of nostalgia and a desire to learn something new. A lot of my projects involve some sort of microcontroller running some software that will take inputs, perform decisions on them, and produce outputs. Getting to that stage tends to involve quite a lot of "boilerplate" hardware and software setup, and I'd quite like something that I can just plug in and get cracking with and write some quick test code instead of having to assemble a circuit on a breadboard or faff around with a clumsy IDE.

6502 Arculator C# Electronics RISC OS SmartBox SmartMove

As you may have guessed from the ratio of photos to actual content in my entries I do quite enjoy taking photos of things. One of the reasons I enjoy working with electronics over writing software for computers is that a finished product results in something physical, which I find much more rewarding than a purely virtual hobby. One type of photograph I particularly enjoy on other websites is the interactive 360° view of a product. The ability to click and drag to rotate an object on the screen makes it seem more real.

Comments C# Electronics JavaScript Lego Photography PICAXE PICAXE-08M

A recent post on Hack a Day alerted me the to the IM-me, a device designed to be used with a web-based IM service that communicated with the PC via a USB wireless adaptor. According to Hunter Davis, the body of the messages were sent between the PC and the IM-me are in plain text. This sounded like a good start to me, so I picked one up from Amazon UK for £7.49 (they're now available for even less than that). You get a lot of electronics for that price; there's a CC1110F32 microcontroller inside (the chips inside the device and its wireless adaptor are clearly marked – no nameless blob of epoxy that you might have expected from the price) and Dave has poked around the insides of his and has mapped the contact pads exposed via the battery compartment to the debug port on the microcontroller.

Comments C# IM-me

I've rewritten the remote control signal decoding software to handle multiple protocols. As well as SIRCS, it now supports RC-5, NEC, JVC and two Panasonic codes (one "old" 11-bit code and one "new" 48-bit code). There's not much in the way of screenshots at the moment, other than a debug window that gets filled when keys are pressed: NecCommand Address=27526, Command=5, Extended=True, Repeat=1 NecCommand Address=24, Command=87, Extended=False, Repeat=1 RC5Command Address=20, Command=53, Repeat=True,...

Comments C# Remote control

This is fairly embarrassing; somebody sent me an email that was flagged as spam which I accidentally deleted. So if you sent me an email and I haven't replied, I'm not deliberately being rude; could you send it again? After encountering strange crashes (not .NET exceptions, full out crashes) with emu2413 I decided to port it to straight C# instead from its existing C incarnation (emu2413.h.cs and emu2413.c.cs). Even though the original was macro-heavy it was relatively simple to port, and so there's no dependency on an unmanaged DLL to generate FM sound any more.

Comments C# Cogwheel Sega Sega Master System YM2413

I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year period! I received an Xbox 360 controller for Christmas, so have done a bit of work on Cogwheel to add support for it. (You can download a copy of the latest version 1.0.2.0 with SlimDX here). The first issue to deal with was the D-pad on the Xbox 360 controller. When treated as a conventional joystick or DirectInput device the D-pad state is returned via the point-of-view (POV) hat. The joystick input source class couldn't raise events generated by the POV hat so support for that had to be added.

Comments BBC BASIC C# Cogwheel Sega Sega Master System TI-83+

I've had to quickly learn Silverlight for work recently, which has been an interesting experience. I've had to write new code, which is fine but doesn't really excite me as far as Silverlight is concerned - it doesn't really matter which language new code is developed in, as long as it gets the job done. What does interest me more is that Silverlight is ".NET in your browser", and I'm a big fan of .NET technology with a handful of .NET-based projects under my belt. Silverlight therefore gives me the opportunity to run these projects within the browser, which is a fun idea.

Comments C# Cogwheel Sega Sega Master System Silverlight

One way of constructing solids is to use a method named constructive solid geometry (or CSG for short). I added two simple CSG operators - intersection and subtraction - that both take two surfaces and return the result. In the above image, the surface that makes up the ceiling is created by subtracting a sphere from a plane. Of course, much more interesting examples can be created. For example, here is the surface created by taking a sphere and subtracting three cylinders from it (each cylinder points directly along an axis).

Comments C# Raytracing

The first addition to the raytracer was a cylindrical surface, represented by two end points and a radius. In the two screenshots above, the cylinder is infinitely long - not very useful. However, by calculating the point on the cylinder's axis that is closest to the struck point on its surface you can work out how far along its axis you are, and from that whether you are between either of the cylinder's ends. The cylinder can have its ends optionally capped. To add the caps, you can create plane that has a normal that points in the the direction of the cylinder's axis.

Comments C# Raytracing

Original post by downgraded
How long does that scene take to render? Just over a minute, so not very good performance at all. I've made some changes since then (including multithreading) that drop it down to about 30 seconds. There is definitely something wrong with the reflections. I decided to rewrite the main raycasting code from scratch, after seeing results such as the above. I'm not sure where the speckles were coming from, nor why the reflections were being calculated incorrectly. The new code writes to regions of an array of integers (for 32-bit ARGB output), and is designed much more simply.

Comments C# Raytracing

I thought that better lighting might help the scene look a bit nicer, so decided removed all the existing lighting code (and reflection code, to make life easier) and tried to add some basic shadowing. Simple shadowing test. When a ray's intersection with the world is found, a ray is cast back from that point towards the light source. If this ray collides with another object on its return trip to the light, it's assumed that it's in the shade. In the above test, points in shade simply had their diffuse colour divided by two.

Comments C# Raytracing

As much as I claim to be interested in software rendering (be it as part of a game engine or as an effect in a demo), I've never actually written a raytracer. Having written some basic vector and plane arithmetic code for physics in the XNA Quake project, I thought I'd give it a stab. No apologies made for the coder colours. Currently, the world is just a simple List<WorldObject>, where each WorldObject has a Surface and Material property. The Surface has to implement IRayCollidable, which lets me call GetCollision(Ray) on it to find out where a ray strikes it (if at all), returning the point of collision and the normal of the surface that was hit.

Comments C# Raytracing

It's a good feeling when issue 1 is finally marked as Fixed - in this case it was another interrupt-related bug. The IFF1 flag was being used to mask non-maskable interrupts; I don't think it should and it hasn't seem to have broken anything just yet by making non-maskable interrupts truly non-maskable. Go! Dizzy Go! I have also changed the savestate format to something that will be a little more backwards compatible rather than a plain BinaryFormatter dump of the entire emulator state. The data is now saved in what is basically an INI file with C#-style attributes and CSS-style url() syntax for binary data.

Comments C# Cogwheel Sega

Note: I have been informed that the code below no longer works in Windows 7 due to changes in the way IThumbnailProvider operates. It is recommended that you use unmanaged code instead of the managed solution presented below. I have started releasing Cogwheel binaries on its project page, so if you'd like a look at the project but can't be bothered to check out and build the source yourself you can now give it a whirl. One of the newer additions is a savestate mechanism; this is a very lazy bit of code on my behalf as all it does currently is serialise the entire emulator to a file using the BinaryFormatter.

Comments C# Cogwheel IThumbnailProvider Sega

I have finally got around to adding sound to Cogwheel using Ianier Munoz's waveOut API wrapper. The technique used is fairly simple. I start with a sound buffer that is a multiple a number of video frames in length (1/60th of a second is one frame) - four seems a good number. This buffer needs to be periodically topped up with sound samples (every four frames in the above example). I run the emulator for one frame, then generate a frame's worth of audio. I add these samples to a queue. The sound callback then periodically dequeues these samples and appends them to its buffer.

Comments C# Cogwheel Sega Sega Master System

PlayStation controllers are relatively comfortable, and I have a number of them knocking about. From top to bottom - PS2 IR remote control and receiver; Guitar Hero wireless Kramer and receiver; black PS2 DualShock 2 analogue joypad; a pair of grey standard PS1 digital joypads. As I've learned in the past, a decent gamepad can help with certain games. Of course, what's much more fun than playing the games is trying to work out how these controllers work. The byte-level protocol is very simple; the PlayStation pulls a select line low (used to grab the attention of the controller) then pulses the clock eight times, writing a bit at a time onto one line and reading another bit at a time from another.

Comments C# Electronics

Scripting with .NET is unbelievably easy. I wanted to add scripting support to Brass, and have added it using .NET's excellent powers of reflection and its System.CodeDom.Compiler namespace. The first thing I need to do is find out which language the source script is written in. I use the extension to check for this. string ScriptFile = ...; // Name of main script file to compile. CodeDomProvider Provider = null; // Get the extension (eg "cs") string Extension = Path.GetExtension(ScriptFile).ToLowerInvariant(); if (Extension.Length > 0 && Extension[0] == '.') Extension = Extension.Substring(1); // Hunt through all available compilers and dig out one with a matching extension.

Comments Brass C#

Quake isn't dead, but I've shifted my concentration to trying to get Brass 3 (the assembler project) out. Brass 2 didn't really work, but I've taken a lot of its ideas - namely the plugin system - and kept some of the simplicity from Brass 1. The result works, and is easy to extend and maintain. Last night I got it to compile all of the programs I used for testing Brass 1 against TASM successfully. I'm taking advantage of .NET's excellent reflection capabilities; one such example is marking plugin functions with attributes for documentation purposes, meaning that all you need to get Brass documentation is to drop your plugin collection assemblies (DLLs) into the Brass directory then open the help viewer app.

Comments Brass C# Z80

After all that time spent trying to work out how the QuakeC VM works I finally have some real-world results. Apart from the obvious boring stuff going on in the background parsing and loading entities go, two functions in particular are of note. The first is a native function, precache_model(string) which loads and caches a model of some description (sprites, Alias models or BSP models). The QuakeC VM I've written raises an event (passing an event containing the name of the model to load), which the XNA project can interpret and use to load a model into a format it's happy with.

Comments C# Quake QuakeC XNA XNA Quake

I've started serious work on the QuakeC virtual machine. The bytecode is stored in a single file, progs.dat. It is made up of a number of different sections:
Definitions data - an unformatted block of data containing a mixture of floating point values, integers and vectors.Statements - individual instructions, each made up of four short integers. Each statement has an operation code and up to three arguments. These arguments are typically pointers into the definitions data block.Functions - these provide a function name, a source file name, storage requirements for local variables and the address of the first statement.

Comments C# Quake QuakeC XNA XNA Quake

ArchG indicated a bug in the TextInputHandler class I posted a while back - no reference to the delegate instance used for the unmanaged callback is held, so as soon as the garbage collector kicks in things go rather horribly wrong. /* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * XnaTextInput.TextInputHandler - benryves@benryves.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * This is quick and very, VERY dirty.

Comments C# Quake XNA XNA Quake XnaTextInput

The current design of the Quake project is that there are a bunch of classes in the Data namespace that are used to decode Quake's structures in a fairly brain-dead manner. To do anything useful with it you need to build up your own structures suitable for the way you intend on rendering the level. The problem comes in when you try to load resources from different versions of Quake. Quake 1 and Quake 2 have quite a few differences. One major one is that every BSP level in Quake contains its own mip textures.

Comments C# Emulation Quake XNA XNA Quake

Original post by Ravuya
Eventually I gave up on my mod (double shotguns). Heh, you might like the Killer Quake Pack. I've added some primitive parsing and have now loaded the string table, instructions, functions and definitions from progs.dat but can't do a lot with them until I work out what the instructions are. Quake offers some predefined functions as well (quite a lot of them) so that'll require quite a lot of porting. Original post by Evil Steve
I seem to recall that the original Quake used "Truebright" colours (Which were either the first or last 16 colours in the palette), and these colours weren't affected by lighting.

Comments C# Quake XNA XNA Quake

Original post by Evil Steve
Yup, I've done soem QuakeC modding before. The progs.dat is basically all the game code, and quake.exe is all the engine code. if you can load progs.dat properly, you should be able to get behaviour exactly like the original Quake. Progs.dat is responsible for all monster types AI, and I think you're right about triggers and bridges and stuff. Ah, makes sense! According to the Unofficial Quake Specs it's p-code, which at least makes parsing easier. Working out which opcodes do what will (I assume) require a perusal of the Quake/QuakeC compiler source.

Comments C# Quake XNA XNA Quake

Edit: The following code has a bug in it. Please make sure you use the corrected code! After a conversation with Thevenin regarding the Game class in XNA not letting you use event-driven keyboard input (useful, for example, for entering text) I rolled out this monstrosity. /* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * XnaTextInput.TextInputHandler - benryves@benryves.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * This is quick and very, VERY dirty.

Comments C# XNA XnaTextInput

I've been wanting to attach an SMS control pad to my PC (and be able to use it to play games with) for a while, so put in an order from those excellent chaps at Rapid for the parts needed. The joypad (as I've now learned from disassembly) is very primitive - 6 normally-open switches, each connected between a pin on the DE-9 connector and ground. The accepted layout adapter uses the 25-pin parallel port, connecting ground to pin 18, power to pin 1 (not that the control pad uses this pin) and 7 further connections from D0 to D6 for the buttons.

Comments C# Cogwheel Electronics Sega

In light of the TMDC, I thought I'd package up the .NET class for easy text-mode graphics I'd been throwing together. Click for big Once initialised, all you need are two things; the Graphics object it provides to handle your drawing, and the Refresh() method to update the console with whatever it is you've been composing. It relies on a fairly large palette (128KB) which is hugely wasted in the current version - it maps every 16-bit colour value (R5G6B5) to an attribute/character pair. For the purpose of not looking extremely ugly, the palette provided only uses a few basic characters, not the full range, hence that 128KB could be reduced somewhat.

Comments C# Text mode

I added five-level grey:
The greyscale effect is optional (adds about 8 lines of code, only runs once per frame and can be disabled with a single switch in the engine package's Settings.inc file. Anyway, I've started throwing together a very primitive level editor. (GDI+)
Insert inserts a new vertex at the mouse location; delete removes the closest vertex. Point at a vertex, hold W, move to another vertex and release W to insert a new wall. (Single-sided, hold shift at the same time to add a double-sided wall).

Comments C# Nostromo TI-83+

I've been attempting to add native TI-83+/TI-73 application support to Brass. Testing with Flash Debugger has been an entertaining experience, not least thanks to helpful messages like:
I haven't managed to get a signed application running in Flash Debugger or on hardware yet - I suspect the header is wrong - but seeing as the demo application has a different header structure to what the header generator creates, and both have generally conflicting information, I need to find some better resources.

Comments Brass C# TI-83+

What with the weekend having an extra Monday tacked on for good measure (Labour Day), I felt the need to be productive. I also felt the need to listen to VGM files converted to MIDI, so rustled up a VGM to MIDI converter. There already is one (available on the SMS Power! site), but I could never get it to work. Having never really puzzled out the YM2413 ('OPLL', FM chip) I limited it to the square-wave generating PSG. First of all, you need to be able to convert a tone register value (from 0 to 1023), the period of the output square wave, to a MIDI key value (0 to 127, where every 12 keys represent an octave).

Comments C# MIDI Sega Sega Tween VGM

Seeing as the MaxCoderz fora have died (I can't read or post on them at the temporary hosting), and I know at least kv reads this... Latest beta: /bin/latenite/ (full install). General
No more hanging or locking up when running the PTI debugger (huzzah!) PindurTI debugger is still horribly, horribly incomplete :( (Boo!)
Reworked icon extraction code works for all files (no more incorrect icons!)
File tree plugins (bundled with .emr plugin) to expand certain files into a tree. Copy/Paste doesn't accidentally copy/paste if the text editor isn't selected (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V doesn't work anywhere else, though).

Comments C# EarlyMorning Latenite

Not the www2 theme though - a couple of XP theme glitches. First up is the ListView control in .NET 2. If you switch on gridlines and scroll with the arrows on the scrollbar, it leaves the gridlines behind as nasty artefacts. This is what I came up with - and it appears to work. Create a new class that inherits from ListView. Then add to it this code:
/// <summary> /// Hacky override to fix the garbage lines. /// </summary> protected override void WndProc(ref Message m) { if (m.Msg == 0xF) { // 0xF is WM_PAINT GridLines = false; GridLines = true; } base.WndProc(ref m); }
...compile and that new class should appear in your toolbox.

Comments C#

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