I Have A Car

After my '99 Ford Contour was sold for scrap, I was officially out of a car. I had to drive my brother's old Chevy for two months, and that thing was ready to die itself.

Last week, I finally got myself another car. For $2500, I was able to get a '97 Ford Escort LX with 88,857 miles on it. For the short distances that I drive, this car should last me a number of years. My dad played a big role in me getting the car since I had not been able to find anything I could afford that was even halfway decent. The loan I had to get to help pay for the car should help my credit so I can borrow more and get a nicer vehicle down the road.

Needless to say, I'm a pretty happy person right now.

ProSonic Public Source Code Release

Here's what I wrote on some forums:

PROSONIC PUBLIC SOURCE CODE RELEASE
AUGUST 17, 2010


Here it is, the entire source code to the ProSonic engine. This by no means is an indication that I have stopped work on this engine forever. However, I also have other interests that need my attention, so I decided to go public with my source code to this project.

You will need the Allegro, Zlib, and HawkNL libraries to compile this code. The DOS version is the exception, where all HawkNL references are ignored.

My goal with this project was always to make the perfect game engine for Sonic games that everyone would want to use to make their very own Sonic game. I am hoping with the release of this code, someone will come along and make this the engine I always envisioned it becoming. I have laid what I feel is a good foundation for beginning something big in terms of a quality Sonic fan game.

There are things that could be improved. The object manager could be tweaked to be more flexible with moving objects. The PROCODE scripting support could be improved to allow more complex routines and arithmetic. The 68000 code support is only good enough to allow a certain number of objects to run in ProSonic, and no VRAM emulation is implemented.

I am granting permission to everyone to use this code in any way they see fit. It would be great to get credit for anything that is used, but I won't try to sue you if you don't, because at the end of the day it's only a video game!

If you plan to use my source code for anything at all, even if it's just a portion of it, I'd love to hear about it. Send me an e-mail about it. My address is ymtx81z ata yahoo dotod com.

Enjoy!


—Saxman

You can download the source code here.

Ke$ha's Drug is My Love

I don't even like Ke$ha, but I have to say that I have had "Your Love is my Drug" in my head now for a while. It's a catchy tune with a great hook. It's very reminiscent of the '80s sounds I have loved my whole life. I see this as a possible trend that is slowly happening. Maybe todays music scene is transforming into something more upbeat like this song is. I sure hope so, because this song by Ke$ha is a real winner in my book.

Failed Hard Disk

I turned on my desktop a few nights ago and decided once and for all, I was going to defragment the hard drive. It had been forever since it was done (possibly as long as a year). Disk Defragmenter likes at least 15% free disk space. I had about 12%. I decided to bite the bullet and clear off a bunch of stuff I really didn't need so it could do a complete and proper defragmentation of the drive. After several hours, I got it where it needed to be. I ran the process and let it go until it was done.

The next morning, I turned on my computer to check and see if it was any faster. As it was booting, I walked out of the room to do a few things. I came back and noticed that although every was up and running, the computer was running very sluggish. Everytime I tried to open a program or access any files, it would load very slowly. A few programs crashed randomly too. I knew it was something serious, and I knew it was definitely not a virus. What I feared became a reality -- upon restarting it, it wouldn't even boot up all the way into Windows because it said a directory needed by the operating system was missing.

Today I went out and bought myself a new hard drive. It's much bigger than the old one (500GB as opposed to 80GB). I haven't put anything on it yet, but I'm really hoping after I get the operating system loaded on there, I can access the files from my old hard drive and move them over. I've had hard drives malfunction and go bad, but I was always able to access files from them. This situation is different as the drive really seemed like it was dying a very painful death judging by the inability to read some very basic stuff from the drive. I backed up some of the important things, but not everything. I would like to keep as much as possible, and that is the big upcoming test I face.

Does anyone have any suggestions of what I should do?