I’ve been working on my first retail product and I’m really excited about it!

After trying to secure a 3rd party trading bot for Magic The Gathering Online (MTGO) v3 from Wizards of the Coast (WotC), I decided it was time to strike out on my own and write one. A lot of people had done so already using automation software (like AutoIT), but I went the path of a more professional software development environment and wrote it in .NET using C# and WCF.

WCF you ask? Yep! I don’t want to dive into the details too much at the moment but it will revolve around a central data hub providing real time updates to users of the application (vs. having to download and deploy a new version every time an update is published from WotC). There will be a bunch of good features as well!

I wanted to poll people on pricing though. I’ve seen prices for ‘Simple’ Magic Online trading bots for anywhere from $99 to $399! And to that, I haven’t even been able to find the price of a ‘Smart Bot’ anywhere, as it seems the people who build them keep the software to themselves.

What I’m thinking about doing is setting up a monthly pricing model. Here’s the matrix:

 Trade Bot: Your basic Magic Online trading bot. “Buying/Selling x Cards for x Tickets” or “Trading x Uncommons for x Rares”

Smart Bot: Each card in your library can be assigned a specific price. You’re running a Virtual Store on Magic Online.

Some features I’m working on for the Smart Bot will be:

• User Credit System (and ability to create Credit Network spanning multiple bots)
• Interactive Website Showing Sales History / Income Information

I’m offering a time based licensing because I think it’s the most fair pricing structure for this type of software.

So I’m curious to hear back from anyone who stumbles across this blog post! I want to hear features and requests you would have for such a piece of software! I know Magic Trading bots are a shadey business at best, but I wanted to try to make a legitimate alternative to having to pay a lot of money up front for a piece of software you might not like.

I’ll try to post some screen shots of the bot in action while I’m testing it. I’m really excited about this project!

Cheers!

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Reunion Title Screen

Does anyone else remember playing Reunion back on their 386′s with a staggering 2MB of RAM? Lord knows I remember!

Reunion came out over fifteen years ago and I still feel the urge to play it now and then even today. It’s a great game and can be downloaded from many abandonawre sites across the internet.

I started playing again recently using DOSBox and I was amazed, because I didn’t even know the game had sound! When I played “back in the day”, my system didn’t have a Sound Card (because I couldn’t afford a Creative AWE32), so needless to say it was a whole different experience. The game has a fantastic production value and even when modern development languages, I’m not sure that even I’d be able to create a game of such depth a complexity!

Anywho, I began to get frustrated because I knew there were parts of the game I was missing because I couldn’t meet certain goals or didn’t have enough resources. Granted, I should have spent the time perfecting the game and working towards those achievements….. but it’s an old game and I don’t have as much free time as I did when I was thirteen years old

To that end, I sat down and studied the Save Game format for a while and also the (paltry) Save Editor that was included in the Abandonware version. I knew I could come up with something better that gives me even more options in the game. It took me a couple hours but I was able to come up with a pretty functional Saved Game Editor for Reunion that works around a couple glitches the previous version had.

I know, I’m a total cheater but it was a fun little project and I figure perhaps ONE person on the entirety of the Internet must need something like this as well, so I figure I’d throw it out there for anyone who needs it

Reunion Saved Game Editor – Download (92kb)

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Turns out that the MP4 files made by the Samsung NV24HD camera are a of a non-standard H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. So what’s to do?

Well, if you’re an Apple user (which I assume you are since you’re reading blog entry about iMovie ), then you’re in luck. There’s a tool you can download called ffmpegX which allows you to convert the MP4 files to iMovie compatible MOV MPEG-4 files. In addition, ffmpegx can convert video files to a multitude of formats inlcuding iPod, iPhone and DivX formats. So even if your issue isnt EXACTLY the video files from the Samsung NV24HD camera, ffmpegx is still a great utility to use for video transcoding/covnverting in OSX

Screen Shot of ffmpegX

The only down side I had to doing this was the time it took to convert. It took over two hours to encode a 25 minute movie at 640×480 on my 2.4ghz Macbook Pro. So if you’re planning to use this method, plan to leave your Mac plugged in for a while.

Also, I’ve yet to try newer iMovie ’09 which also just may fix this issue. When I’m able to get my hot little hands on a copy of iLife ’09, I’ll be sure to let everyone know if it works out!

Hope this post is able to help out my fellow Samsung and Apple users out there!

Cheers!

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SCIENCE!

Backing up to DivX is another story though. I’ve always been a stickler for quality and control over the process. A perfect example of this is my use of “old” programs such as VirtualDub and refusal to use the “1-Click” applications because I feel like I lose control over the quality. I think this stems from my age and time of use because back during DivX 3.11 there were no “1-Click” applications that could copy a DVD and any attempt at making one usually failed terribly.

So I’ve always manually converted them, again, out of my own stubbornness. I thought I’d post my steps here to see if anyone agrees that there’s some method to my madness (or to tell me that I’m getting old and should get with the times!)

My process allows me to encode any DVD content into DivX using 2-pass XviD encoding while still maintaining the original Dolby Digital AC3 audio track.

To use my process, the following programs are required:

1. DVD Decrypter
2. DGIndex
3. VFAPI (codec + utility)
4. XviD (codec, koepi’s build)
5. VirtualDubMod

Step 1: Backup the DVD

Actually, that’s a misleading title. Really it should be decrypt and demux the movie. Using DVD Decrypter, I demux the MPEG-2 (M2V) and the Dolby Digital Audio (AC3). This gives me the raw video and audio files I need. Set the AC3 aside because we’re only going to deal with the M2V file.

Open DVD Decrypter and select the drive with the DVD you wish to backup. Select “IFO Mode” from the Mode menu and choose the “Stream Processing” Tab.

Inside this Tab, you’re able to select which streams you want to backup from the DVD. Usually I only select the Video Stream and the 6 Channel Audio Stream. Be sure to also select the “Demux” radio button for each stream. Start the backup!

DVD Decrypter

Step 2: Create a D2V File

Open DGIndex and open the demuxed M2V file. This will generate a D2V file which contains information needed by other programs to open and process the M2V file properly (such as Framerate, Aspect Ratio, etc., etc). Once the file is opened, select File -> Save Project. This will start DGIndex processing the video file and analizing its contents. Once the process is complete it’ll give you a D2V file that you can now use in VFAPI

DGIndex

Step 3: Create AVI File using VFAPI

Using the VFAPI driver and utility, you’re able to create a .AVI container file that uses the D2V information and M2V file as the video source. This allows you to open the .AVI file in a program (such as VirtualDub) and access the video information without having to actually go through an MPEG-2 parser.

Open VFAPI Converter, hit “Add File” and select the D2V file generated by DGIndex. Then select “Convert”. This will create the .AVI file we will work with in VirtualDubMod.

VFAPI Utility

Step 4: ENCODE!

I use VirtualDubMod as my video editor here because the “Mod” version supports muxing the AC3 audio back into the video file we create.

I do two pass encoding using XviD because it gives me the highest quality video and a more precise file size. This way I can set my movies to be encoded into an exactly 2GB file and TV show episodes into 700MB files.

Before I begin encoding the first pass, I also add the Virtualdub Deinterlace filter to it’ll handle the deinterlacing of the input video. This is important so you don’t lose any bits of data with the encoder trying to give data to the interlaced movement when it shouldn’t even be here!

VirtualDubMod Deinterlace Filter

UPDATE 01/27/2009: It was brought to my attention by my good friend Paul that there is a ‘better’ Deinterlacing plug-in for VirtualDub called Smart Deinterlacer which can be had from their website It sports some good features such as edge-directed interpolation which is a feature of the (formerly) Faroudja DCDI video processor used in quite a few high end video processors! As far as quality comparisons/speed between the default VirtualDub plugin and Smart Deinterlacer, well, I haven’t been able to spot a difference yet. I used the movie Leatherheads as a test and the frames seemed identical when I compared the deinterlaced output (Smart Deinterlacer v2.8 beta 1 used). I guess it’s up for you to decide which you prefer, but I felt I owed it to my readers to at least offer up an alternative!

Another option in the latest version of XviD is the ability to encode using multiple threads, thus enabling XviD to encode faster on multi-core machines. Currently encoding a movie at full resolution with the deinterlace filter, my Q6600 can encode a movie at 70fps first pass and 35fps second pass.

XviD Multi-Threaded Encoding Option

(Note: Not all modes of XviD encoding are multi-core friendly. Enabling cartoon mode for example will force the XviD encoder to use only a single thread)

On your second pass, this is where we remux back in the AC3 audio stream. Add it to the stream list and encode!

Adding the AC3 Stream back to the DivX Video

Your finished product will be a high quality DivX backup of your original DVD movie!

Now, I’m sure there’ll be some questions from the peanut gallery on why I do things one way or another. So I’ll just handle a few obvious ones here

Q: Why do you use DGIndex/VFAPI to handle the MPEG2 Video? Why don’t you just use the MPEG2 Input filter for VirtualDub?

A: I gave that a try for a while but it turns out that handling an MPEG2 video in VirtualDub using the plug in is hella slow. The file is not easily navigated, takes a long time to load and in the end is just burdensome to work with. I find using the DGIndex/VFAPI driver solution better because the input file is loaded quickly and is easily worked with. It doesn’t require loading the entire MPEG2 stream to memory

Q: You’re crazy! You know single click solutions probably give you just as good quality with much less work!

A: You’re probably right! I never claimed that this is the “one and only way” to encode a DivX file to get the highest quality. I just find this way works best for me

Q: Can I use this method to backup a DVD using the new ‘corrupt IFO block’ copy protection found on newer DVD releases such as “The Dark Knight”?

A: Short answer, no. The new copy protection mechenism used causes DVD Decrypter to just crash. Even if you’re using a driver patch decrypter like DVD43, DVD Decrypter still won’t be able to handle the corrupt IFO information. Have I been able to work around it? Yes, but the only process I’ve come up with thus far is long and cumbersome. I’ll blog about that later if it’s requested, but it’s not pretty.

Q: Why do you keep the AC-3 audio? Why not just conver it to MP3 so you can get more space for better video quality?

A: I’m an audiophile. I’m willing to deal with the recoded video because I know the audio will still be the same sweet sounding Dolby 5.1 that was on the original DVD. If you are so inclined to convert the AC3 track to MP3, you can do so using HeadAC3he. If you are going to be converting the AC3 to MP3, I suggest when demuxing the DVD you select the Dolby 2.0 track, this way it’s down sampled to stereo by the studio which will yeield much better results than letting HeadAC3he down sample six channels to two.

Q: Why XviD? Why not use an official copy of DivX?

A: I chose XviD because it keeps my method of backing up DVD’s to only free/open source programs. Also, I’m a fan of the XviD encoder options in letting me configure and specify a lot of different things. Such as number of threads to encode with (so it’ll take advantage of my multi-core machine) as well as different encoding types (such as enabling Cartoon Mode). Koepi’s build is lightwight and easy to use.

Q: Why are you still using the AVI container? You know that there are much better containers out there such as MKV, right?

A: Of course I know! I just don’t use them… well, to be honest, because nobody else uses them! Seriously though, I haven’t run across a commercial DVD player or network media device that can demux Matroska files in my every day use. So until then, I’ll stick with tried and true AVI

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My projects as of late have mostly been electronic in nature. I’ve actually had three projects on the burner:

Replacement of the capacitors on my Mortal Kombat 2 arcade machine’s CRT controller

This was far more time consuming that I thought it would be. Not because it took me an actually long time to desolder and replace the capacitors on the board, but ordering the CORRECT caps and waiting for them to be delivered took the most time. I decided to use Mouser for my components and they delivered as promised. I posted pictures of my extracting the CRT controller here. From what I was able to gather with some Google-Fu and the few English markings on the board, I determined it was a Wei-Ya C829HR CRT board. Of course there aren’t any cap kits for this board (for whatever reason), so I had to order all the caps (about 30) one by one getting their voltage and capacitance from the one’s that are currently on the board. The one cap that I wasn’t able to find (easily) a replacement for was this monster bipolar 75v 4.7uf cap.

FINALLY finishing my Replica 1 computer (which I posted about starting here… over a year ago)

I know, totally lame right? I’d like to say it got put down during the move and I forgot but I literally think it was just the time of year and I was tired of freezing my ass off in the garage with only the glow of a soldering iron to keep me warm So I picked back up the kit and finished soldering the rest of the 50-or so IC pins and fired it up. I got a response on the video port but when I reset I get random giberish. I checked and the oscillator is clocked in at 1mhz and voltage at the test points looks OK. I’m thinking it’s probably a bad rom. I’m currently e-mailing the project creator and he’s been very helpful!

Building a Blue Box

This year I decided to be Woz for Halloween (I figured Fat Nerd is an outfit I’d be able to pull off ) and I wanted to have a sweet accessory to go with my outfit of a vintage apple shirt, name tag and rockin facial har. I decided what cooler than actually building a function blue box! I found this schematic which seems to be the defacto one that everyone since the 80′s has been using. The down side? Exar no longer makes the XR2207 voltage controlled oscillators. I tried to get samples straight from the company, but no luck. I was able to find them through some IC resellers, but they wanted $30 per chip, so F’ that noise!

Again, I activated some hardcore Google-Fu and found this slick project by a website called ProjectMF.org. He used a PIC microcontroller to generate the frequencies which is waaaaay easier and makes sense in a more modern world I used his schematics and again ordered the parts from Mouser. I was able to solder together the power supply portion and will fire up the PIC programmer later this week! Super cool!

So anyways, I haven’t been hacking away on the code or software projects lately but I find my creativitiy comes and goes through phases. I’m just in a hardware one right now, but I’m sure sooner or later I’ll fire up Visual Studio again

Cheers!

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I recently purchased a MacBook Pro for the sole purpose of developing software for the Mac/iPhone platform. It’s completely unknown to me and currently the XCode IDE looks nothing if not completely confusing compared to the friently intuitive interface of Microsoft Visual Studio that I’m used to

What brought me to this point? Well, two things.

First, I’ve been wanting to dive into Objective-C for a little over a year now and started dabbling with it a while back on my old G4 Powerbook. I was impressed with the coolness of it, but being that I was developing on a G4 Powerbook, I was limited as by this time Apple had begun the mass migration to Intel based systems.

Second is that I want to develop applications for the iPhone. Not to make a mint or anything, more or less because I think I have some good ideas on programs people would use. Like how Apple provided the iTunes controller, well, hows about a WWWinamp controller for the iPhone? Perhaps one that lets you search your library locally on the iPhone without even connecting to WWWinamp?

I started down this path because there’s currently a program for sale on the iTunes App Store that lets you control your instance of WinAmp remotely… for $4.99!!! What the crap?! I was floored that the author would expect that kinda money for a program when there are PLENTY of other FREE alternatives out on the web (like WinAmp Remote, AjaxAmp or WWWinamp). I made it my mission to release a comparable program

It’s just going to take a month or so to ramp up on the new IDE and learn how to do SOAP calls and whatnot. Should be a fun adventure though! My wife begins the final semester of her Teaching Credential program in a couple weeks, so I’ll have four nights a week alone to myself to nerd out and gorge on Hot Pockets!

I have another version of WWWinamp in the works as well. This is basically some code modernization for sections that I wrote over a year ago. Updating things to use Generic Methods and whatnot. You know, fun .NET stuff

Cheers!

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“The Network Connect session terminated. Do you want to reconnect? (nc.windows.app.23711).”

I did some Googling and I came across this support manual from Juniper which discusses the error codes/messages returned by the VPN client software and what could be causing the issue. Error code 23711 Juniper describes the problem as:

“The Network Connect client disconnected from the secure gateway because the
client’s routing table was altered.”

I thought to myself, “What the hell could be changing my routing table?” At first I suspected it might have been a VPN tunneling issue with my Apple Airport Extreme but that known issue has been fixed since early 2007. The issue obviously was being caused by something on my company laptop.

I tried different media (wired vs. wireless) and also updated and rolled back different network drivers to no avail. Another long Google search put me upon this blog entry at kevinluck.com where he states:

After a bit of googling I found out that there were complaints about the early betas of CS3 and the Bonjour service that they installed affecting networking. And this is what was causing my problem. If you press Ctrl-Alt-Del and look at your processes then you will find a “mDNSResponder.exe” service running after installing Flash CS3. Ending this process allows you to connect through Network Connect.

Presto! Stopping that Process and eventually uninstalling the Bonjour application from my computer fixed my VPN disconnection problem! A big THANK YOU to kevinluck.com for being a great resource and I hope that this blog entry helps others trouble shoot the same issue I had with our Juniper VPN client!

Lord knows I was ready to pull my hair out

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What happens in this update is that the Virtual Machine configurations are incompatible between Beta and RC0, but only the configurations That’s the catch. The actual virtual disk (.VHD) is still fine, as it’s only a mountable partition. So what you’ll need to do is the following steps:

• After installing Hyper-V RC0, create a NEW virtual machine in the configuration manager
• Use the existing VHD file for the ‘old’ virtual machine on the ‘new’ one.
• Boot the VM!

What you’ll notice after the first boot is that Windows 2008 can no longer control the mouse. This is due to the beta version of the Hyper-V Integration Services being installed on the Virtual Machine. You’re still able to use the keyboard, so if you’re savvy enough to know how to tab around and make your way through Windows, you’ll be able to “Insert Integration Services Setup Disk” in Hyper-V and update the software package

After all this, you should be good to go!

One note is that after I updated to RC0 I had to set back up the network adapter in Hyper-V as it seems my previous network configurations were lost after the upgrade.

Cheers!

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I’ve taken the “beta” tag off of it as it seems the recode of the HTTP request processing seemed to work without issue and no bugs were reported (other than the ‘paging’ issue, which really was a defect in the script parser).

Changes for this version are:

• [HTTP] Daemon will now start if a WinAmp instance is not found
• [HTTP] Able to specify max number of HTTP threads to process (Default 25)
• [Script Parser] Fixed “Paging” issue when searching through the Libary
• [Script Parser] Script Files (*.wwa) will be run from the same folder as the file requesting them
• WinAmp Handles will be updated if a new instance is detected

Be sure to use the latest config file included with this release as it has a new key value, WWWinamp.HTTP.ListeningThreads, which tells the HTTP daemon how many threads to use max. This is set to 25 by default if no key is found, but it will throw an error. So if you don’t want to use the packaged configuration file because you’ve hacked together your own, you can manually add this key with any value you’d like.

This value isn’t a huge addition but it can help maintain system stability under heavy load. This way WWWinamp won’t spin up an infinite amount of threads if there’s heavy resource contention or there’s a problem that is causing threads to hang.

Also, the other ‘fixes’ were requests made by  ‘dawolf’ here in my blog so I suggest more people get involved and we can make WWWinamp better!

In addition, if you’ve made your own skin and want to share it, please feel free to contact me and I can post it here to my blog for others to use.

As for future releases, they may be a little slow in the coming month. I’m going to be diving into the iPhone SDK and Objective-C programming using XCode on my Apple. I think a remote media interface would be totally awsome if I can have a native WWWinamp application on the iPhone talk to the WWWinamp server using WCF/SOAP. It’d be way easier than using the webkit crap and I could make it have a lot more functionality (perhaps tuning in to a shoutcast stream VIA the iPhone?). Anyways, just thought I’d give you guys a little bit of information on that.

Cheers!

WWWinamp v4.2 Build 2990 – Download (56k)

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It’s a bit tricky getting a Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machine working in the new Windows 2008 Virtualization Environment, Hyper-V. You’re going to run into several issues:

1. Because of a significant hardware change visible to the VM, you might need to reactivate your Microsoft OS.
2. You will need to uninstall the Microsoft Virtual Machine accessibility drivers/software.
3. You will need to install the Hyper-V accessibility drivers/software.

The biggest issue I ran into was step #2. One of my virtual machines that was running Windows 2003 Server R2 and when I went to uninstall the ‘old’ Virtual PC accessibility drivers/software, I was told by the uninstaller that I was only able to uninstall the software while running in a Virtual Environment, which it was under Hyper-V. I did not have this problem with another Windows 2003 Server VM, so it might have been an isolated incident. Be that as it may, I had to boot up the VHD in Virtual PC and uninstall the software.

Also, the Hyper-V drivers/software will not install OVER the Virtual PC software, which is why you must uninstall it first. Once you install the Hyper-V software, it will install a new HAL, reboot, then install the new drivers for the network, video and sound devices.

The performance gains from Hyper-V are noticable and worth the upgrade! I believe Hyper-V being built into Windows 2008 Server will be a huge success over third party solutions such as VMWare. One thing to keep in mind is that Hyper-V is only available in the 64-bit version of Windows 2008 Server! Also, running Windows 2008 Server on a machine that has a CPU that supports Intel’s IVT or AMD’s AMD-V allow the Hypervisor to run the Virtual Machines at nearly full speed.

I’ve found that the setting for Intel VT-i on Dell machine’s is turned off by default and has to be enabled in the BIOS. Unfortunately, Dell has the Virtualization option in different locations in the BIOS menu depending on the system. On my Dimension 9200 it’s under ‘Security’, on my Precision 4300 Laptop it’s under ‘POST Options’ and on my Precision 390 it’s under ‘Performance’.

One thing I am noticing is that Hyper-V is still obviously BETA and there are some issues, with VM’s ‘locking up’ or the network adapter in a Hyper-V VM showing ‘Network Cable is Unplugged’, when the other VM’s are not having any issues. So user beware!

I hope this was able to help some people out!

Cheers!

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