Programming Praxis V

The “Perch” is a roulette betting strategy based on ignorance of the “Gambler’s Fallacy”: the gambler perches in a position where they can monitor all roulette tables; when a roulette table has had a run of red or black for the past four spins, the gambler places the minimum £10 bet on the opposite colour, reasoning that a run of five of the same colour is unlikely (the “Gambler’s Fallacy”, as the probability of the fifth spin landing on a given colour is the same as the first spin landing on a given colour); if the bet fails and the run of the colour continues, the gambler reasons that the odds of six in a row are even more unlikely, and increases their original bet by 50%; if that bet too fails, the gambler returns to the perch; the strategy ends when the gambler has either achieved their target winnings, or has insufficient money to place the £10 minimum bet.

Anyway, this {source code & compiled:Mac OS pre-X} is my solution for the fifth Programming Praxis held by The Daily WTF: a program to play roulette using the “Perch” strategy, with a user-entered number of roulette tables, starting amount of money, and target amount of money; the program ends when it has either achieved the target amount of money or has insufficient money to place the minimum £10 bet.

The solution was developed on an Apple Power Macintosh 8100 in C compiled with Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE 2.1 (Discover Programming Edition.)

Programming Praxis I

Supposedly, Russian peasants perform multiplication in the following interesting fashion: they write the two numbers which are to be multiplied at the top of two columns; then, they multiply the number in the right column by two, and divide the number in the left column by two – throwing away any fractional part – continuing until the number in the left column is one; then, those numbers in the right column whose corresponding number in the left column is odd are added together to produce the result.

Anyway, this {source code|compiled:Mac OS pre-X} is my solution for the first Programming Praxis held by The Daily WTF.

The solution was developed on an Apple Power Macintosh 8100 in C compiled with Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE 2.1 (Discover Programming Edition.)

Image-to-GBA 0.2

Download the Image-to-GBA tools and the source code to those tools, for Mac OS X, by clicking here.

These are the image conversion tools (and the source code to those tools) I released in the dark days of 2003 to try to help anybody doing homebrew GBA development on Mac OS X; I’m posting these tools here as, although I stopped offering these tools for download long, long ago, I still receive requests for the source code to these tools every few months – if only those making that request knew the horror that awaited them… These tools convert an image into a C-language header containing either a one-dimensional array of 16bit pixels suitable for GBA screen modes three or five, or two one-dimensional arrays containing 8bit pixels/colour palette indices and 16bit colour palette suitable for GBA screen mode four.

To use the tools, run part1, and choose the image to convert; then in Terminal.app cd to the directory containing the image conversion tools, and run either ./part2-16bitConversionToHeader or ./part2-16bitPaletteConversionToHeader.

The source code to part1 is known to compile in METAL BASIC 1.7.3, whilst the source code to part2-16bitConversionToHeader and part2-16bitPaletteConversionToHeader is known to compile in Project Builder 1.1.1; beyond that, I’m afraid you are on your own…

I can’t claim that the tools are particularly well-conceived or well-coded; about all I can claim is that if compared to the source code to any of my more recent releases, the source code to the tools is a good example of how far I have come as a coder in the last three years.

If I manage to tweak the (unofficial) GBASDK to run on Mac OS X 10.3 (a denizen of the iDevGames.com forum reports that the (unofficial) GBASDK runs on Mac OS X 10.4 if sufficiently tweaked) I’ll likely return to GBA coding, and to updating these tools – in particular, I never considered that images might need to share a palette, so batch conversion, or conversion of images to match a previously converted palette, will likely be the major feature of any update to these tools I release.

Changes in version 0.2 of Image-to-GBA (4^th July 2003):

• may now convert images for GBA screen mode four;
• slashed the size of temporary files;
• now appends “.h” suffix to the C-language header files produced;
• slashed the time taken to convert images.

Version 0.1 of Image-to-GBA released on 2^nd July 2003.