Mar 18

New CorsixTH version and video

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I’ve just pushed a new version of my port of CorsixTH to Android (v0.1.7). You can download it here

I figured this was worth posting about because this is the first version that doesn’t require any manual steps in order to get it up and running. You can just download the APK and the wizard will give you the option of downloading the demo version of Theme Hospital. Of course, you can still copy over a full version of Theme Hospital if you want, but the demo version will let you play a cut-down version without the hassle.

In other news, simonjonnemeth from GitHub has uploaded a superb video of the application on his YouTube channel which shows the full process from installing to playing.

Continue reading →

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Feb 27

32GB MicroSD card for ZTE Blade / Orange San Francisco

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There seems to be a bit of confusion as to which 16GB cards are compatible with the ZTE Blade, let alone 32GB ones, but my lust for high quality music required me to upgrade from an 8GB card.

I went with the cheapest 32GB Class 10 MicroSD card I could find on Amazon, despite being a unknown brand, and found that it worked perfectly with about 10MB/s write and 14MB/s read which seems reasonable for the price and size. I can confirm that it works perfectly on my rooted Gen 1 Orange San Francisco phone running CM7, but I would hope that it would similarly work on any flavour of Android you choose to install.

Amazon link:KOMPUTERBAY 32GB Class 10 MicroSDHC Card 32 GB High Speed Micro SDHC with SDHC adapter and USB adapter

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Feb 22

Running Theme Hospital on Android with CorsixTH

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19/05/2012 – Please note that the paid version on the Google Play is based off my code but has absolutely nothing to do with me. I can’t offer any support for it whatsoever. I have no idea what changes he has made to the code, if any, so my advice is to always download versions from here or compile your own. I will NEVER charge for this port as I think it discredits the work done by Corsix and the CorsixTH team to develop this amazing clone.

I’ve used the Android SDK for a few bits and pieces, but I’ve never tried to work with the Android NDK before. So, as an attempt to try and find my way around it, I set myself the goal of porting one of my favourite games – Theme Hospital – to the Android platform in the form of CorsixTH.

I’ve been following CorsixTH for a while, and they’ve made superb progress in recreating a Theme Hospital clone using the original assets from the game. There’s still a fairly extensive list of features in the original game that haven’t yet found their way into CorsixTH, but a large amount of the core game functionality is there.

CorsixTH has a great choice of open source libraries powering it, which actually made compiling it for Android surprisingly easy. In fact, SDL and some libraries that commonly accompany it have already been ported over with great success which really meant that all I had to do was rename a few functions and create a few makefiles in order to get it running; I’m sure that someone with experience with the NDK could do it in half the time it took me.

In any case, you can get the source code from my GitHub repository and there’s a link to the APK in the downloads section so that you can install it straight to your Android device without compiling the project yourself. I would happily invite anyone to fork the repository and make some improvements as there’s still a fair bit left to do, such as getting it to scale on different device resolutions and scrolling by dragging.

Download App

Download

Links

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Mar 19

Foot Pedal Input With Line 6 POD Studio UX2 – MIDI Control

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I’ve had a few problems getting the foot pedals working correctly with POD Farm 2 and I think I’ve finally solved my problem. I’m using Windows 7 and it seems as though if I launch POD Farm after my computer has been on Sleep/Hibernate, POD Farm will totally refuse to recognise and accept the input from my pedals, which are connected via 1/4 inch jacks to the back of my UX2. The only solution I’ve found so far is to totally reboot my computer which is a bit of a pain, but it does work.

The following video (not created be me) outlines how to go about setting it up inside POD Farm, and a quick Google search will reveal  plenty more on YouTube and other sites, so I’m not going to go through how to do that. If you do get stuck though, please leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to help out if I can.

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Feb 18

CyanogenMod on the Orange San Francisco / ZTE Blade

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Since my last post about the ZTE Blade went down quite well, I thought I would post a little bit on the latest changes for owners of the Blade, in particular the first steps towards running CyanogenMod on the Blade.

If you’re not familiar, CyanogenMod (CM) is a ROM based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) which adds additional features, enhancements and overall improvements both to performance and reliability over the stock ROMs. What’s so special about Cyanogen, at least to Blade users, is that unlike the previous ROMs we’ve been used to which have been custom made and designed specifically for the Blade, CyanogenMod has been compiled for and run on numerous devices from HTC, Google, Samsung etc. From the CyanogenMod site:

CyanogenMod (pronounced sigh-AN-oh-jen-mod), is a customized, aftermarket firmware distribution for several Android devices […] Based on the Android Open Source Project, CyanogenMod is designed to increase performance and reliability over Android-based ROMs released by vendors and carriers such as Google, T-Mobile, HTC, etc. CyanogenMod also offers a variety features & enhancements that are not currently found in these versions of Android.

The most recent version of CyanogenMod is 7 (CM7) , which made ‘Release Candidate’ status a few days ago. This version is based off Android 2.3.2 so satisfies the demand for a Gingerbread ROM for the Blade.

Continue reading →

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Feb 01

Wrong partition sizes after cloning

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I’ve just finished migrating multiple partitions from a series of old hard drives onto brand new 2TB disks. I created the new partitions on my new HDDs and then used dd, or more specifically ddrescue, to copy the partition data over. When I booted into Windows though, the partitions were still showing as being their old sizes from when they were on the old HDDs. I made the (wrong) assumption that Windows would automatically correct it when it detected there was a discrepancy between the partition table and the indications within the partition.

I tried chkdsk and chkntfs to run and schedule Windows’ disk checker, but this found nothing of any particular interest and didn’t fix my problem. The solution I found was to use a tool like parted (or gparted) and shrink the partitions down by some arbitrary value (1MB in my case) , reboot, and run chkdsk again. This will hopefully change the size of the partition to be correct in Windows. Note that the disk management in Windows doesn’t seem to like to shrink the drives and fired back an error whenever I attempted it; I had to boot into gparted to resize them.

As they were only partitions I had used for archived files and such, I think a better solution in future would be to copy the files over, retaining permissions etc., rather than copy the raw data from the partition directly.

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Jan 26

Disassembling Maxtor Basics External Hard Drive

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I recently had the need to disassemble my Maxtor Basics external 640GB hard drive. I was looking for a way to find out what was on a spare hard drive and not having an external SATA dock handy, I decided to strip this external drive down. A quick Google search found this Australian site with a great guide on how to disassemble the drive although it lacks detail and pictures.

I’ve taken pictures of various points in the diassembly process and hopefully I can give a few tips along the way to those looking to disassemble the drive. Continue reading →

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Jan 05

Windows XP running on an O2 Joggler?

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Update 2011/10/13: Thanks to verg0′s update, I’ve taken another glance at this. Looks like there’s been some progress since I last checked! XP seems to be running pretty well, and apparently Server 2003 runs even better. I’m happy with Ubuntu for the time being, but those adventurous enough will be wanting to check out these jogglerwiki.com threads: release: jogglerxp foshiz edition (image up)plus revised and Windows Server 2003 so far. Please feel free to leave me a comment and let me know how you get on. Good luck!

I love my O2 Joggler. I bought it for £50 about a year ago fully intending to use it as a small bedside internet radio and alarm clock but with thanks to the modding community, it’s now running a fully functional web browser and media streamer as well as having the option to boot into a full desktop environement (Ubuntu Linux at the moment).

There’s one thing that’s always been missing though, and that’s the option to run Microsoft Windows. Sure, Linux is great on the Joggler and with a few tweaks here and there, it could almost serve as a backup PC thanks to it’s 1.3GHz Atom and 512MB RAM, but there’s a time when you find yourself missing Windows. I didn’t expect this endeavour to make any progress as despite having a great community working on bringing the most out of the Joggler and with it having specs similar to a netbook PC, there’s a few fundamental differences that make running Windows more difficult than might be expected.

I am now pleased to say that after quite a few months of inactivity, there has been a great advance in getting Windows to run on the Joggler, and a video of Windows XP successfully running has been seen floating around the Chinese community hi-pda.com (you may need to register to see the post + images). It looks like it’s missing some functionality (mostly driver issues) and from what I understand, instructions on how to get this running on your own Joggler aren’t freely available. But hey! It’s progress!

You can watch a crude video of Windows XP booting on the Joggler here.

I hope that when I next update this, I’ll be able to show Windows XP booting on my Joggler but in the meantime, you can probably get up to date information from the hi-pda thread (see above) or at the joggler.info forums, or more specifically this thread.

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Dec 22

The Orange San Francisco (ZTE Blade): A Few Thoughts

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As an introduction to the world of Android smartphones (and as a replacement for my aging Nokia N95), I treated myself to a San Francisco phone from Orange.

Although I’m not going to give a full review (I want to wait until I’ve had the opportunity to play with the phone a bit more), I’ve got a few  thoughts and pointers to give to any new owners or anyone who is planning to get one.

First impressions

Although it’s only £100, the phone should still be pretty snappy when navigating through the interface. Despite only having a 600 MHz processor ( a lot of the higherend – more expensive – Android phones can be expected to have ~ 1GHz processors), you can expect it to perform admirably despite what you throw at it. In short: Angry Birds will work quite well.

The build quality is fine although the back cover and the power button could be a little sturdier. I wouldn’t want to push it by popping the back off too often or pressing the power button too hard. A turbosim / dual-sim adapter may work, but there’s not a lot of room to work with. Continue reading →

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