the sacred heart of Jesus Christ superstar

The title alone says it all. I did a small version of this piece, but I loved it so much I decided to do it larger and add a couple nice touches to it. It can be found here. It’s based on the sketch I did of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

thank god

My life has been made 100x easier. So, I finally got the whole DC toolchain rebuilt. (I’ll start with the bad news first – yeah, there’s bad news) Since I had to rebuild it, I figured I’d go with a brand-new, shiny build of everything, rather than the dusty old versions I was using. So I’ve got GCC 3.4.3, binutils-2.15, newlib-1.13.0, and the latest version of KallistiOS. Everything went through seemingly w/o a hitch, until I tried to test the cel-shading demo. It don’t run. No errors or warnings. Just don’t run.


--
KallistiOS ##version##: Tue Apr 19 22:44:40 PDT 2005
  greay@heosphoros.local:/Users/greay/cross/kos/kos
maple: active drivers:
    PuruPuru (Vibration) Pack: JumpPack
    VMU Driver: Clock, LCD, MemoryCard
    Mouse Driver: Mouse
    Keyboard Driver: Keyboard
    Controller Driver: Controller
  DMA Buffer at ac0e0a00
vid_set_mode: 640x480IL NTSC
fs_romdisk: mounting image at 0x8c05b854 at /rd
maple: attached devices:
  A0: Dreamcast Controller          (01000000: Controller)
  A1: Visual Memory                 (0e000000: Clock, LCD, MemoryCard)
  B0: Dreamcast Controller          (01000000: Controller)
  B2: Visual Memory                 (0e000000: Clock, LCD, MemoryCard)
vid_set_mode: 640x480IL NTSC
pvr: enabling vertical scaling for non-VGA

Soooo… what’s the good news? Well, my testing process has been a little… convoluted, through necessity. The coder’s cable (what ya use to transfer a program to the Dreamcast to run it, w/o burning a CD) doesn’t work on my Mac. So I have a poor, lonely, Windows box w/o a monitor (Johnboy) connected to the DC. I use VNC to access that, FTP back into my machine, grab the file, and upload it to the DC. Except the old Windows DOS prompt doesn’t have a scrollback buffer… So oftentimes, logs get lost. Well, since I got my old laptop fixed, I built dc-tool for that, instead. Now instead of VNC, I can just telnet into the machine connected to the DC. And linux is a lot nicer than DOS. Full scrollback, better command history, etc.
This’ll make troubleshooting my current problem, to round this post out w/a nice sense of closure, 100x easier.

inkscape + gimp

I recently installed ←Inkscape, which is a nice GNU vector graphics program. Been playing around w/it a bit, and realized it’s perfect for an experiment I’ve been wanting to try, mimicking digitally the way I build monoprints with layers. Its “trace bitmap” function is actually rather nicer than Flash’s (I’ve never used Illustrator). So here is the first attempt. I also rewrote the markup for my galleries. No more tables, they’re now unordered lists, which I think makes more sense. They look pretty much the same, though.

that idea?

I haven’t forgotten about it. I’m still thinking about it. But I have a bunch of projects I’m working on, and (much to my delight) another one has come to the forefront recently. But I want to post an update on where that other mystery idea stands, and I will as soon as I have a development.
In other news, this mystery project is, well, a mystery. Not that I really have to worry about it, but I don’t want to say anything about it until it’s ready.

another hitch

none of my disc drives are working reliably so the backup all my cross-compiler toolchains are inaccessible at the moment. I either need to rebuild them, or find another method of getting them back. Either way, it’s another pain I don’t want to have to deal with. Ah well.