Back in the summer of 2002, I taught myself C++ by learning to program the Gameboy Advance. I started a few projects, most of which never went anywhere, but eventually I got slowed to stopped by my inability to configure the make file correctly so I could set up a sound interrupt.

Since developing on the Gameboy Advance was so utterly easy (compared at least to most closed videogame consoles), I wasn't too surprised when I discovered that there were, at one time, plans to publish a unofficial book on how to program the system.

Of course, Nintendo ended up getting their panties in a bind about it and scuttled the publishing deal down with legal threats (in my view, the law wasn't on their side - and of course I say that as a lawyer) but the upside of this is the book was made available freely online.

While browsing it, I found out about HAM, an all in one programming / development environment. I'd heard of HAM long ago, though at the time, I figured it was some kind of make-a-game tool for the kiddies, one that maybe even used its own simplistic programming language.

It was quite tragic that I assumed that because HAM isn't anything like that at all. Its basically an integrated C / C++ development environment similar to something like Microsoft Visual Studio that helps you make your code compile the way you'd probably want it to without having to learn the intracies of how the makefile works, which would've helped me tremendously back in the day.

Anyway, by the time HAM came out I had decided the Gameboy Advance was a bad dev target since my game would never be able to be legally distributed in an authentic form, baring some miracle. But since I've always had a passionate love affair with the GBA, I think if I'd known how easy HAM had made things I probably would've found some way to justify it.

Playing around with HAM filled me with nostalgia, so I decided to create a page dedicated to my old, primitive GBA offerings. If you want to read about them, you can do so here.

This very long article was written by someone who was an editor at Nintendo Power during its early years. In it, he talks about the various ways Nintendo screwed him over, such as:

• He worked as a Nintendo Game counselor AND as an editor at Nintendo Power, and at times helped lay out a third of the entire magazine, yet still kept his old pay-check.
• He came up with the idea of Captain Nintendo, and wrote two stories featuring him in Nintendo Power. He then talked to marketing about it, and later found that the idea had been stolen from him and used to create the cartoon Captain N, which he never saw a dime for. Despite it being open knowledge that Nintendo never planned to pay him for this idea, everyone there called him Captain Nintendo, and when kids sent letters to Captain Nintendo (based on their familiarity on the first two magazine stories that were published) he was asked to respond to them.
• He figured out that Nintendo was not data mining any of the thousands of letters and calls it got every week to figure out market trends, and created a form and series of surveys to pass to other departments so they could keep track of what their target audience was most interested in seeing, common questions, etc. He showed this to marketing at the end of a month and they immediately sent out an order telling everyone to use it, and it became a standard at the company for years. This never affected his career.
• Apparently the Japanese people in charge back then only hired people they personally knew to the top management positions. For instance, the person in charge of Nintendo Power had been a foreign exchange student to Japan that had nearly no experience to qualify her for the position, and didn't even like games. She also suggested turning Captain Nintendo into an unpopular ugly dork due to her view of game players, and passed our hero up for promotion but only because they didn't like each other. Simultaneously, she offered him the chance to do the work he would have done had he got the promotion, sans an increase in pay.
• He was responsible for recreating Power Blazer as Power Blade and saw no credit, because Japanese development studios never put non-Asian people's names into the credits at that time.

It is a truly gripping, bittersweet tale that if true offers in concrete all of the ways the system we live, work and die under is often not the meritocracy we'd like to think it is.

This passage, early on, stuck with me as quite haunting:

...I imagined that with my education, maturity, and experience, I would rise more quickly than the great throng of my peers if I could demonstrate that I could make a significant contribution. This has always been my approach to any company I’ve ever worked for. It is the way I was raised. It is the American business value system. It has never worked once for me.

Some of his claims seem almost too much of a stretch - such as when he claims credit for getting a select handful of Super Mario Bros 2 cartridges released early to help a small child in chemotherapy - but true or not, the narrative is so engrossing that I believe it's still worth reading.

Read it here.

Ask my bank and they'll tell you, I ain't a rich man. But if I were, the first things I'd treat myself to would be an amphibious sports car, a Tango, a Playstation 3 with a Dual Shock 3 controller (exclusively for playing Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metal Gear Online), and the Unicomp On-the-Ball Plus keyboard - in that order, reversed.

Check this out:

For starters, Unicomp holds the rights to the technology behind the old Model M series of IBM keyboards, which are so cherished by crazy people on the internet that it has its own extensive Wikipedia entry. In case you don't feel like simply following the link and reading it instead (and I must willfully assume you don't, lest I risk accepting that writing this post is a tragic waste of my precious time upon this mortal coil), the key feature of the Model M keyboards are it's buckling spring keyswitch mechanism. The diagrams on Wikipedia imply that the inside of these keys are made up of a zipper like object which, as it is depressed, makes a nice clicking noise and gives some rich tactile feedback to the user.

Lately I've found that I'm kind of dissatisified with most of the keyboards I use. I guess I never really gave this much thought, as keyboards are ubiqutous to the point I'd never actually considered that some might be substantially better than others. But as stated in this intriguing blog post, there was a time when people had no other way to interface with computers aside from keyboards and the quality mattered substantially to them. Various manufacturers competed to produce better keyboards, and the buckling spring keyswitch mechanism was the pinnacle of this period of evolution.

The old Model M's were heavy and nigh indestructable, and are apparently still found in good condition today. It wasn't until reading up on this I realized that the keyboard my computer loving uncle has been using non-stop for the last decade and a half is a Model M. A few times I've even seen him take off all the key caps and put them in the dish washer, and lovingly clean the innards using compressed air and the casing with rubbing alchahol.

The new Unicomp produced keyboards apparently feel just or almost as good as the old Model M's, though not quite as heavy (the original models apparently had a bit more steel inside of them which weighed them down). They also don't have detachable chords, for whatever that's worth.

In addition to the buckling springs, the Unicomp on the ball plus contains not just a track ball, but also a "pointing stick." The later was once a popular mouse replacement for laptops that I personally never liked. What is desired are the accompanying extra pair of mouse buttons below the space-bar - something not present on the non-plus model.

The sheer decadence of including not one, but two integrated mouse replacements on an already high-end keyboard alone warrants this product for inclusion in anyone's "if I ever become rich" list.

The idea of being able to avoid the delay and dreaded arm movement needed to switch to a mouse is intoxicating. It reminds me of those warm memories from the time when I made games in GW and Q-Basic, and could just blast away non-stop using onlya keyboard. Something rotten about mice is they don't turn your gears for production like a keyboard does. Think about it - the majority of creative endevors require extensive time spent switching between the keyboard and the mouse, but most mouse-only tasks are the kind of crap PC users waste all their time on, such as web browsing or... web browsing. like opening up web browsers while they're working on something serious. Think about it - you're worthless right hand is to blame for you reading the entirety of this dribble. Unless you start playing a game, there aren't many time-wasters that require only a keyboard, yet for the mouse there are hundreds. Mice are also the primary force behind multi-tasking, as they let you let you start up web browsers to waste loads of time. Almost any creative endevor on the PC requires a keyboard but also a mouse, yet something ab at while you can never really escape one using today's software, they make it possible for time-wasting, non-sense programs they make it possible to avoid the keyboard entirely for long stretches at a time so long as whatever you're doing is completely non-productive. Think about it - any great creative endevor requires extensive time spent switching between the keyboard and the mouse, but most mouse-only tasks are the kind of crap PC users waste all their time on, like browsing garbage on the internet. Think about it - you're worthless right hand is to blame for you reading the entirety of this dribble.