I should hardly have to mention anymore my glorious walk for free vacation time. The graph has been sitting there up at the top of my blog page slowly counting up to the grand total of 750,000. And today, one week before deadline, I have hit that total. This little exercise has added quite a bit to my life, from friendly competition with co-workers to some much needed think time. Now, to celebrate this achievement, I give you some more photos of my journeys.

Punny titles aside, I have made more than one allusion to my walking sessions. Currently my graph is telling me that I had a pretty crappy week last week, but that's not what we're here to discuss.

The Pathfinder Parkway has been my preferred walking path of choice for the weekends as it removes me from all the loud roads and reminds me of the lengthy walks I took to the bank in Winter Park via the Cady Way Trail. The Pathfinder runs right along the Caney River, Bartlesville's local body of poisoned water, but it does provide that "nature" feel. But, I could throw words at you all day and not get the point across, so queue up the photo gallery!

Okay, so it has it's downsides. Arguably the most annoying part is the dozen or so oil pumps, but it's amazing the crap I've spotted along this trail. I will, perhaps, update again with more pictures later as these just barely scratch the surface.

As I'd briefly touched upon in an earlier post, my place of employ is currently having a little fitness competition: can you walk 10,000 steps a day for 75 days? If you reach the grand and glorious total of 750,000, you are awarded two free days of vacation. Everybody was provided with company branded pedometers to keep track of our steppings and left to our devices.

Now, I'm never one to turn down an opportunity to make money for nothing, so I'm doing my best to make a firm effort and accomplish this goal. If you take a look at the blog main page, you'll see that there is a graph with my current progress on this mission (assuming you're using an HTML5 compliant browser). As you may well notice, I'm a few thousand steps shy of my quota for this week (shame on myself).

Now, that's the boring part. The cool part (and the reason I'm posting) is the really the graph itself. Back in December I switched the site codebase over to HTML5. Now, this was mostly a change in semantics, using new tags such as <article> and <section>. I'd not done anything special with CSS3 or some of the newer, funner tags such as <video> or <audio>. One major thing I'd really not looked too much into was the new <canvas> tag, with the ability to draw images in the browser on the fly.

That all said, I needed some place to test this exciting new functionality, and making the graph was just the place. To update update said graph, all I do is modify a JSON data file with my step information, and HTML5/JS takes care of the rest. Of course, this leaves people using IE in the dust, but this site was never designed for them anyways.

So, there you have it. A fitness contest spurned my thirst for learning. Now, if IE9 could speed along and summarily obliterate the install base of all previous versions before it, life would be a joy of canvasy win!

Now, I realize that the "system specs" spewed forth in the above video were probably intentionally skewed so as to follow the whacky, 80s style zaniness, but as an uber nerd and somebody who's intimately familiar with NES hardware, I feel compelled to correct their errors.

Claim #1: 3.58Mhz video core clock speed

The NES video processor, a Ricoh 2C02 "Picture Processing Unit", or PPU, is actually clocked at 5.37Mhz. The CPU is exactly one third of this, or 1.79Mhz. The figure they're quoting is the timing of a color NTSC signal.

Claim #2: 240x226 resolution

The PPU actually worked with an internal resolution 256x240, though most old TVs did not display the first and last eight scanlines effectively making the resolution 256x224. This was the same for both NTSC and PAL models.

Claim #3: 16 sprite pixel depth

I don't even know where to begin on this one. Firstly, the NES had enough sprite RAM (object attribute memory, or OAM) for 64, 8x8 or 8x16 sprites. Secondly, every sprite could have three colors (four if you include transparency) from a palette of 53 colors. Every scanline could hae a maximum of eight sprites, and when this limit was exceeded some sprites were not drawn causing the infamous flicker. Finally, you could have a total of 25 colors per scanline. What the hell they were talking about to begin with baffles me, but there were no 16s involved there at all. Except maybe that internal 16-bit PPU register that could be written to through dual writes to address $2006....

Claim #4: NES has a Zilog Z80 processor

This one's easy. The NES did not have a Z80. It had a Ricoh 2A03, which was a 6502 without decimal mode and a set of sound instructions. The Gameboy, however, had a Z80 and the Sega Genesis used one as its sound processor.

Claim #5 It's an 8-bit system

Well, that's about the only thing they got right. Though, the system did have a 16-bit address bus....

Well, I'm finished. I'm sure somewhere God has smote a kitten for my nerdy rantingness, but it had to be said and I said it. Caio.

As you may recall a few months back I released unto the world my envisioning of an NES Guitar Hero commercial. If I recall correctly I complained about directing my younger brothers in the video. Well, I guess I can quit complaining... because now they're international movie stars!

This is taken from the pages of Ngamer Magazine (Brazil Edition) and was kindly sent in by YouTuber, muzinfa (thanks, bro). It's quite awesome that somebody was tickled enough to put it in their publication but the fact that it also crossed the language barrier is doubley sweet.

This is the subject of my new faux commercial. Joe and Steve are the stars this time and it thrilled them to death. However, I can see where directing little kids in movies can be a pain in the ass. If you notice they're constantly looking at the camera. Ugh. I tried to caputre the feel of a standard commercial you'd see on Nickelodeon, but the flow feels a little off. However, on the whole, I'm definitely pleased with the effects shots (I did all of them, including the last one). One thing that'll be good about Full Sail will be all the professional tools at my disposal. But, enough banter, here's the video:

50 points for the person (who is not related to me) that can say where "vwaooo" comes from.

Anyways, I have good news! And, no, I didn't save a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico. No, it seems that my laptop has FINALLY been repaired (going on over a month now, I believe). From the repair center: "repaired- replaced fl inverter, fixed latch,and cleaned heatsink,very". It seems I got everything I asked for and thensome, though the heatsink was very what? Very big? Very sexy? Very... whatever?! I dunno.

Over the weekend I finally managed to snag that which I have been seeking my entire life. The very purpose of man's existance. The driving force of all creatures... a Super Nintendo Entertainment System!! (in box, even). Of course, no SNES is complete without the greatest game ever made... FINAL FANTASY VI!!! Ah, the sweet, sweet days of care free gaming, when all was right in the world.... it's a pity those days are gone.

Ah, well. I shall be off with sweet dreams of snes's and laptops in my head :-)

Save the comic posts and podcast, it's been a little bit since I've written anything. So I guess I'll start by dropping this bomb: Hi.

Yesterday, as many know, I turned the magical 20. I can't even be called a teenager anymore, so basically all my ties with kiddom have been severed. Though, that hasn't stopped me from watching a cartoon I used to tune in to religously every morning: The Super Mario Super Show. The show itself actually isn't all the bad once you get past the fact that Bowser was named King Koopa back then and that the live action stuff oozes 80s. *sniff* It was a golden age.

Back to the present, however, I've been considering selling off my old NES collection and buying a used Xbox off eBay. The way I see it, not only would I be able to play Halo 2, but I'd probably soft-mod the thing and then I could run the stuff on emulator (of games I own, mind you). Also, I could use the all powerful Xbox Media Center (XBMC). The more I read about the thing the more I drool. It'll play basically any video/audio file you feed from anywhere (including the network). Talk about sweet justice.

In work related news, not much new. However, I believe I am going to become a lowly cart pusher. Now I know there are some questions on your mind, namely: But isn't that cut in pay? Won't you bake out in the sun? I wonder if this candy bar I found under the couch is still edible? The answers are yes, yes and you'll probably die if you eat it. Actually, three little words sum things up: shorts and free gatorade (wait, that's four...) But, I digress. I've always had more fun outside than inside and being stuck behind the register drives me insane (mainly the not moving part). I need to be moving and doing something. Take now for instance. My fingers are moving all over the place whilst my lazy butt relaxes in bed.

Well, I suppose I'll get to bed now. I'll try to have the comic finished and posted before I go to work tomorrow, otherwise look for it in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

After writing a beautiful, heartfelt post on Blogger and having it lost because it was never able to upload the stupid thing, I am now using Wordpress. It's completely in house (i.e. on my server) and shouldn't have any of these inane issues. Now, on to that heartfelt entry :-).

Today, Friday, March 17th marks my official last day as a cashier. Starting at 4am on Saturday I will be an Overstock Manager*. Al I looking forward to it? Yes, yes I am. Not only is the cashier job driving me insane right now, but it'll be nice ot have my day back again. I plan on using the extra time to start working towards my GED. I hereby solemnly swear that I, Matthew Scott Hackmann will obtain my GED before May 1st, 2006. There, it's in magnetic bits, can't back out now. It really is something that needs to be done, and Wally World will reimburse me anything I spend on it too :-).

My emulator is coming along quite nicely, though there are more annoying hurdles to get over yet. I can basically say that Mario Bros. and Metroid are completely playable (last I checked). Zelda and Stringer (my two new scrolling test apps) are still buggy (like it's on the wrong table all the time), but otherwise everything is looking pretty sweet. However, I'm going to hold off for now while I pursue a new project.

My Uncle Dave (hey dude :-D) was nice enough to give me his old Handspring Visor (circa 1999) and that will be my new programming toy. The only thing I really have in mind for it right now is an app to take to bowling to score games and give statistical reports on the fly. Luckily Palm has all their development stuff opened up so that'll make it much easier.

I can now say I've played Doom on my iPod. Last week, while still swept up in the initial "wow! this is cool"-ness of the whole iPod thing, I installed Linux on it and played Doom. However, it was borking up music playback on the Apple side of it so I toasted Linux and have my music playing greatness back. I'm really getting into podcasts, my favorites being this WEEK in TECH (TWiT), RevoGaming.net, and Diggnation (gotta love Kevin Rose). Also, I bought an album full of SpongeBob goodness and the theme from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (for you old timers, the original Eagles version).

Well, I believe that's all I needed to say. Just remember, vote for Pedro and all your wildest dream will come true :-).

Now it may be a fairly unkown fact about me, but I can't stand cats. Mainly, if for any reason, it is because at our old house there were cats that made a permanent residence there. And when the males went around marking their territory, it wasn't pretty.

But, anyways, I have another reason to hate cats: It seems I'm allergic to them. Yesterday I went to an allergist to see what the heck I'm allergic to because I have nasty allergies at certain times of the year (and I've got asthma so we were there for that too). Well, I went in and they poked my back with all sorts of pollens and stuff. It appears I'm not allergic to anything organic (as in trees and such), just cats and dust mites (apparently I got a huge welt from the dust mite test). They also put me through a treadmill test to test my lung function and I got another surprise there. I'm not asthmatic enough to even be labelled with having activity enduced asthma. So I'm testing that by laying off my inhaler whilst being active and seeing what gives. I made it through bowling last night without a problem. Tomorrow when I go to work I won't "deasthmaize" and see how I do there.

Speaking of tomorrow it's my first payday (yay!). It's driving me insane to see how much I've made in the last two weeks. I'll probably have a picture of me and my check stub up for you people :-)

In the land of NES development I've gotten two opcodes interpreted but now I'm stuck on something else: it seems I'm not interpreting the ROM data right. I've run my test ROM through a couple of disassemblers and they're reading the first four bytes in as something else (actually, the two disassemblers had different results. Go figure :-P). I'll have to do more research to figure this out. In the mean time you can read a blow-by-blow run-down of development here.

Just a quick low-down before I launch into more Matt lore. We've started ripping up carpet in the house and using the hardwood floors underneath. I've also decided that I'll be writing a platform game as my next project.

But without further ado, here's what you've been waiting for!

My First Love: Nintendo

Ah, the Nintendo. Such a wondrous machine that could send one on fantastic adventures. My first encounter with the magical gray box was in the early '90s. I believe that one day Dad just showed up with an NES (rental). He got it all hooked up and slapped in Mario 3. My world was forever changed. I don't remember exactly how old I was at the time, but I'm thinking probably four or five. After the first encounter we would every so often jaunter down to Popingo (long since out of business) and rent a machine and good ol' Mario 3. Now in my mind this was a good as it got. I don't think I ever really thought of owning one (maybe in my dreams), so it was a complete surprise when that day came:

It was a usual day; I was waiting for mom to pick me up from school (yeah, I went to school at one time). She pulled up and I plopped myself in the backseat and next to me was a box and inside that box was an NES. My first thought was "Whoohoo! Another weekend of fun!" until Mom said "It's ours". My Uncle Dan had mailed us his old machine and game collection. I believe the games we had were: Top Gun, Spy Hunter, Mario & Duck Hunt. About a year later he also sent us Paperboy (which had apparently been sitting in his car). Needless to say I was probably bouncing off the walls with joy. The next big thing was the day that Dad rented the original Zelda (though to this day he denies that he's the one who picked it out). So that was that: I was a Nintendo Fanboy for life.

Over the years we expanded our game collection. We eventually bought Mario 3 which has an interesting story behind it. Apparently some guy bought it thinking it was an SNES games. Of course it wasn't so he took it to some video rental store (name escapes me) and they sold it dirt cheap. We also picked up some other games like Star Trek and Gauntlet II.

But after a while the same old games are, well, the same old games (though I still enjoy Mario 3 to this day). So I started pining away for the new kid on the block (which was about four years old at that point :-P): the SNES. Whenever we'd go to a store, if they had an SNES set up I'd be there playing it. At one point I actually had enough money to buy one... and then it went off sale. I was pretty ticked. My Uncle Dan was down and I know I tried to get him to give me enough money to buy the thing. <WARNING>DEEP DARK REVEALED HERE</WARNING>I even went so far as to write a priest friend of mine saying more or less:

"I broke a lamp and my mom wants me to replace it but won't let me do any kind of fund raising and I don't have any money. Could you lend me $50?"

Yeah, lying to a preist. Reeaaall smart :-P. Needless to say I didn't get a reply. I saw him a few years after I wrote that letter and I was afraid he'd mention it. Maybe he didn't see it, maybe he forgot about it, maybe he realized that I was a stupid little kid then because he never mentioned it.

But anyways, I believe it was that Christmas of that year, 1996, that my dream finally came true. I remember it like it was yesterday:

* rip rip rip *

Me: (hold SimCity in hand) Why did we get an SNES game if we don't have an SNES?

My thought process at that moment was: Well, maybe some games work in both NES and SNES. I was trying not to be too hopeful.

Chris, a couple feet from me, was taking the paper off the machine. Well, screw that thought.

That was a pretty magical time. Probably the high point of my gaming experience. Not too long after Christmas we, Jeff, Chris, and I, were going to buy Yoshi's Island. I could have afforded it myself but, as happened earlier, it went off sale. But at the last minute Chris backed out to pursue his own whims and we couldn't afford it anymore. So I opted for Zelda: A Link to the Past instead. All I had to do was borrow a dollar from Jeff to make ends meet on that one. It was probably one of the best games I ever bought. It took me over a year to make it through that game (recently I beat it in about a week :-P).

There's a tale that I have to tell and not sure where it fits in chronologically, so I'll tell it here. I was pals with an older dude (I call him a dude because he was one) called Dick. I knew him mainly through the Knights of Columbus breakfasts. A side story: I remember one time when he came to school to drill my class on math facts. Everybody was appalled that I called him Dick "*gasp* You're supposed to call him Mr. Kamp!". He never had a problem that I called him, in fact, I think he got a kick out of it. But anyways, he would often bet me that I couldn't do something (and I usually couldn't). So one day he said "If you can make it through Link's Awakening I'll take you out to eat if you don't you'll buy me breakfast." Well, I nought him breakfast. But along with Zelda he also lent us Final Fantasy III and Donkey Kong Country (yeah, he was a dude ;-)). The next time I saw him I bet that he couldn't make it through _my_ Zelda game (same deal, go out to eat or buy breakfast). Well he didn't make it through so one afternoon we went to Murphy's. That was probably one of the best afternoons of my life. I was glad that we did that before he passed away.

Somewhere in our SNES the N64 was released. I remember well playing Mario 64 at Wal-Mart and being absolutley blown away by it. 3D games were something I had never really thought about so this was something totally new to me. As with the SNES I would play any N64 I came accross. But it was never to be that we'd own one and thus I entered the Dark Times.

We had the Dell by that time and I was starting to get a sense of the vastness of the Internet and somewhere in there I discovered ROMs and emulators. I believe it was on a Zelda site that I first discovered them. So I got to thinking: If they have these ROMs of Zelda perhaps they have them for other games. Yeah... they did. I believe the next thing I got was Final Fantasy III. It went around like this for a little bit until one day I went looking for N64 ROMs. I found them and being on dial-up at the time was appalled at the size. Mario 64 I was able to get in one run when Mom and Dad were out and Zelda 64 I downloaded over the course of several 20 miute spurts when Mom would take Dad back to work (see the trend here?). But I didn't stop there, I also got Star Fox 64 and Mario Kart 64. I was a crazy little copyright infringer. Then came the big hard drive wipe (my fault :-P). I never really delved into emulation quite as much again.

Christmas 2001 was the next major step and probably the most shocking of all the Christmases: Jeff, Chris, and I all got our own Gameboy Colors (mine was purple ;-)). I couldn't believe that that was actually happening. It started with Chris opening his and I thought "Lucky butt". Then Jeff opened his and I was more like "Oh.. my.. GOSH!!". We quickly forgot about the fact that the SNES had been put up forever becuase now we had portables! Chris went on to own every GBC Zelda game there was (and they are good, good games too). We have such a large number of GBC games it almost rediculous. This came, hilariously, around my decline in the video game immersion. Out of the 15-20 GB games we owned, I had two.

We were happy for a year or more until all the good old SNES games started coming out for GBA (Mario 3, Yoshi's Island, etc.). That's when we started yearning for more (greedy little brats we are, eh? ;-)). One day last year I just upped and said "I'm buying a GBA whether you like it or not!" and mom said "OK". Well, that opened the door and everybody got GBAs (curse them, why can't _I_ be on top? ;-)). Well, actually, that's a stupid question there because I do own the brunt of the GBA games now: Zelda: Link to the Past, Mario 3, Minish Cap, an eReader. Sometime this year, and I really couldn't tell you why, I decided I'd rather have an SP. So I used some of the money I got from felling trees to upgrade and I am really happy now that I did. Heck, even mom likes the thing :-P. It's the perfect portable: small, foldable, very sleek. I have a media player for it and so it's also my "iPod". My ultimate goal is to have all the games that I played as a kid on the SNES for my GBA and then I think I can stop there (Jeff and Chris went on to get DSes, I'm pretty happy where I am).

Now that the GBA stuff is out of the way there's only one last thing to cover: Gamecube. 2003 came and we had been console-less for a few years. The Gamecube was the new trinket so I made it my goal that Christmas to make sure I could squeak in a little Gamecube plug to the parents. I never actually expected it to work, but apparently it did. I was shocked to say the least. It's been fun to be riding the edge for a change and the games for GC are awesome. Mario Sunshine is every bit as fun as Mario 64, Wind Waker just rocks the house as does Super Smash Bros Melee and I'll be looking forward to playing Twilight Princess this fall.

So there you have it. Our journey towards Nintendodom got off to a rocky start but we're certainly in the thick of things now. And one thing I forgot to mention: It was probably Nintendo that sparked my intrest in becoming a game programmer (as you can well see it certainly played an integral part of my childhood). Looking towars the future I plan on owning a Revolution if not just to have all those wonderful NES, SNES and N64 games at my fingertips. That's all for this entry, tune in next time for: Memiors of a Kid.