Thursday, September 8, 2011

Nintendo - the early bird will fail

Now before we get into things, it seems to be a weird next generation start for Nintendo. With 3DS sales not being very high to the price drop & Analog add on that probably would've been integrated on the console in the first place.

On to other news, nintendo's Wii U controllers (according to 01net) have had multiple issues leading to the developers to label it "Development Hell". now this kinda reminds me with with the xbox's infamous reputation of failing. do you think the Wii U will go down the same road? (source)

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Thursday, July 28, 2011

3ds price drop?

yes its true the 3ds will take a huge price drop down to $169.99(from its original $249.99) on August 12th by almost 30% what surprises me is how early this happened! it's only been four months, I thought their price drops wouldn't happen in at least a year (source1)    source2

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Live USB booting - Ubuntu 11.04 was not made to do

   when I first tried to boot up Ubuntu 11.04 via a USB, using Unetbootin to create the USB boot, it took quite a long time to load nothing for around 15 minutes then generating random 1s and 0s. this apparently goes for any 11.04  based distro. I've confirmed the same issue in Linux mint 11 and Zorin OS 5 also. the only way i was able to boot and install Zorin OS was taking the "go to installation" directly so I had no idea if the operating system was for me(good thing it was though). The installation process of Zorin OS killed my flash drive(R.I.P.)


   well, here's a video of what happened when i tried to boot Linux mint 11 via USB:
 

Let My JRPGs go?

I haven't been stalking this games down like the other Nintendo fans but I have been waiting for Xenoblade since last year. it was confirmed a long time ago( about last year) according to the Nintendo power magazine. they had a page long article on it.  I don't know if it's still coming. I would love to play that game and it will be probably my 3rd Wii game I've bought (second to be skyward sword and 3rd is______).


Wednesday, May 4, 2011

How I Got Into Programming

How I Got Into Programming
Written: 5/3/2011 - 5/4/2011
After watching a interview of notch(the creator of minecraft), I created this entry to archive my programming journey into digital history so I or no one could possibly forget and for readers to understand my experience as a programmer. Its personally funny to me because I wanted to become a lawyer first before I decided to become a game designer.

This transition started with my Nintendo DS lite I got for Christmas in 2007. I got a few games for it but one really stood out to me, "Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney." If you havent played this game its gameplay genre is a mix of a visual novel but also click and point mystery lawyer game. Itstead of just selecting text phrases, the game needed you to sumbit evidence and examine crime scenes and evidence to find clues and logic to use in court(Link). I was amazed by the quality of the story, music, and how they had responses for every little interaction(which i now understand are scripted responses) in the game. after beating this game, which had an amazing ending( you should pick it up if you haven't played it), I started to notice that I haven’t heard too many great stories about lawyers in real life so I wanted to create that story.

The next year I went on a summer trip with my friend. before we left, we stopped at Walmart to pick up anything we needed. so naturally we stopped in the game department were i found a DS cartridge called “Games n Music”(Link). This was my first step into programming. after spending most of the summer looking into ways to develop I found DS GameMaker (Link). This studio was like the PC program Game Maker but not the same. The program has dependencies , and really depended on Palib(Link). The main reason i had so much trouble was i had to configure the ds hombrew compiler just for Palib which gave me linker errors when I tried to compile other programs.

I decided to use Palib itself and set out to learn C++. But due to poor documentation about Palib and DevkitArm(Link) I abandoned DS homebrew development. In the months to come i found out that games could be made for the PC(for free). I searched into this option and the first thing i found in my google search were game maker tutorials until I youtubed “the game development process”  and found a channel named gyrovorbis which had a video explaining programming languages and what they can be used for game developing wise. he also linked to another channel(Link) which showed new guys and girls the concepts of game developing with C++, allegro(link), and SDL(link). I spent the next year(2009 - 2010) messing with SDKs, tutorials, and optimizing code for a crappy laptop I had. Late May I released Cartridge Collector(Link). after making this game I started looking up open source games and found 1 single problem: there were no anti-hack protection, which left these games the best place to get into hacking. By August, I had found enough tutorials to write my own trainer( & it only took me that long because no one told me that “0x” was required by win32api for the address to be complete).

The months to come I stayed on forums and joined a few game programming projects and found out about that scriptable code i was looking for as a kid with Lua(Link). Today I'm currently working on this concept of scriptable hacking instead of dll injection(which i dont know how to use). hopefully this method can become useful in the future than executables for every single hack. I will continue to update this blog on any information I find and an open source (didn’t see that coming) Implementation & examples will be available. If you have any questions feel free to contact me at @grandmasterhack

GrandMasterHack