August 2006 Archives

If you haven't yet, head over to Claus' entry for a sneak peek at the FC64 trailer for Flashforward.

As mentioned in the profile of FC64 for Flashforward, "Wait until you see the trailer for this one… if you ever sat in your basement programming Demos in assembly on the good old C-64, you’re going to love it!".

Essentially, the trailer was programmed with 6502 assembly. FC64, which was recently featured on Boing Boing, contains a 6502 Assembler, Disassembler and Debugger. This ability allows you to write programs in 6502 Assembly that get converted into machine code at runtime, which can then be executed by the FC64 Commodore 64 emulator as if it was just another program.

All of those old demos from the 80s can, in theory, be run inside of the Flash Player now. There's still work to be done on FC64 (like sound.. yikes), but it's pretty amazing to think about how much of an impact our beloved emulator is having.

Thanks to everyone for your support. We hope you enjoy the trailer! :-)

I'm pleased to announce FVNC, the rebirth of my FlashVNC project. The project is released as open source under the terms of the GPL.

I've updated the code to compile with the release version of Flex 2. Previously, the application was only functional in beta versions and stopped working when Flash Player 9 was officially released. I've also started to do some refactoring, but decided it was better to get the code out there as-is than keep it locked up while I tweak it. I've been beyond busy lately, and I don't see myself finishing this round of refactoring any time soon, so better to release now than wait a few weeks…

That said, keep in mind that FVNC isn't complete yet. There are a lot of items on my TODO list that need to get done before I would consider using this in a production application. The software is somewhere between alpha/beta quality right now, not entirely feature complete, rough around the edges, in need of some performance tuning, and in general still a work in progress.

If you're interested in contributing, please get in touch. Also, check out the mailing list if you're into that sort of thing. Everything you need to know about the project can be found (or will be found in the future) on the OSFlash FVNC page at: http://osflash.org/fvnc

Enjoy!

Big news today -- All of the IFBIN examples are now available as open source software! All of the examples, that is, except FlashVNC. Why?

The answer is multi-part, but the short of it is that FlashVNC has been a "dead" project of mine for longer than I care to admit. Bad Darron, I know. I don't want the code to be included with IFBIN because, well, it's busted, broken, kaput, faulty, defective, out of order, malfunctioning, etc. The last time FlashVNC was updated was to support the Beta 2 drop of FlexBuilder on labs. It may have been updated for Beta 3, but to be honest I don't really remember.

Needless to say, if you download the source and try to compile it, it's very broken and won't work in Flash Player 9 and won't build with the official release of Flex 2. I don't want people to struggle through that experience, so I thought it was best to take a different direction.

So, what's the plan then?

Well, I very much want to see FlashVNC released as open source software. In fact, I've contacted Aral about setting up a project on OSFlash, which will be the new home of FlashVNC.

I fully support IFBIN being open source and letting the community learn from the examples we've created. However, I wanted FlashVNC to live alongside my other open source projects, and I look forward to using OSFlash's Trac and Subversion support to foster a community around the project.

The plan is to update FlashVNC in two waves. The first will update the outdated codebase to support the official release of Flex so that there is finally a working binary (.swf) again. The second update involves some refactoring that I've been meaning to do but haven't had the time to devote to it. Once these are complete, I'll do an intial commit into the OSFlash Subversion repository.

In the next few weeks you can expect to see FlashVNC reborn, this time better than ever. Its fate as open source software is guaranteed, I just need to find some time to breath life back into it. Please bear with me though, my wife and I just moved, so most of my free time has been spent unpacking and getting settled in the new place.

My ultimate goal is to make FlashVNC the default VNC client for TightVNC, replacing the Java version with a Flash one. A little lofty maybe, but definitely something worth striving for...

[By the way, my ActionScript 3 Klondike implementation is not available in IFBIN anymore either. I'll be giving Klondike an overhaul as well, and will be releasing the source code once its been updated for the official release of Flex 2.]