Subscribe via RSS
14May/100

Photo Album

19Feb/100

Links

[link-library settings=1]

26Oct/092

Time is a figment of your imagination.

This is amazing, I was just looking at the main page of this site and realised it's nearly been a year since I've posted any real content!

I can't say I have any more content to post today either... I've been busy on weekends with life (moving state, etc..) and so I haven't had much of a chance to do any work on the models. I'm currently shifting to the state I bought the Shinkansen layout from... how ironic. The layout (due to taking up half of the parents garage) has now been all but deconstructed and boxed. I intend on turning it into a dog-bone, but an L-shape, with a single join. I have 4 weeks to do this, and since sleeping 40 metres from the layout, should see progress. The goal will be to then be able to store this layout on shelves in the garage and not consume too much space.

I've also been busy (call it an addiction) checking out Yass Junction.
Check my page out on the yellow links above... Yass is the closest 'Main South' station to Canberra and gets a lot of good traffic on a Saturday. I usually venture to get down there just before 0600 to see the grain trains, but it all depends on the weather.

Anyway... more news as I get to it.

8Sep/092

Yass Junction Diary

Please note

This page is no longer updated regularly as I now live over 500km from Yass

Yass Junction Railway Station is the only remaining station serving the town of Yass in New South Wales, Australia. It lies on the Main Southern Line between Sydney and Albury. The station opened on 3 July 1876 as Yass but changed to its current name on 20 April 1892. The station is not in the town itself but is located approximately 4 kilometres away near the Hume Highway.

It is the closest 'Main Southern Line' railway station to Canberra. Due to this, it's my station of choice for checking out the traffic on the line. This includes passenger trains from Sydney to Melbourne and freight in every other direction. Every so often there is also a shutdown on the route over the Blue Mountains and Yass therefore becomes part of the line from Perth to Sydney.

Most of my expeditions to this station occur on a Saturday morning as you'll find a good selection of traffic at frequent intervals; dependent on how well the trains are running to the timetable. Sometimes, due to dead engines or special services, there will also be trains layed over in the Yass Junction passing lane (which happens to be the opposite side of the mainline to which whatever priority train is running on.)

External Resources

Yass Junction photo galleries

Unscheduled Trains...

LVR 5917 en-route to Sydney

The Indian Pacific (twice)

Sleeper Trains

AK Cars

ARHS ACT Tour from Melbourne

Rail Grinder

Southbound Steel wrong-road

QR's rail grinder

QR Rail Grinder

ELs at Yass

Sightings

Below is a list of sightings that I've noted from my visits to the Junction. I initially started recording only times, but that soon lead to recording engine numbers as well. It's actually quite a challenge to take photos and also remember/record the details. You'll notice that not all numbers are there, if it's only two digits/numbers then that'll be the model of the locomotive and not the build number (i.e. 8101,81 is 8101 and another 81 class, not 8181.)

Time 6/6/9 22/8/9 29/8/9 12/9/9 17/10/9 24/10/9 7/11/9 14/11/9
0530 0556
Grain
8132, 8140, 8169
SOUTH
0600 0600
Grain
SOUTH
0610
Grain
SOUTH
0603
Grain
8104, 81
SOUTH
0604
Grain
8136, 8175, 8146
SOUTH
0606
Grain
8169, 8137, 8176
SOUTH
0630 0648
Container
SOUTH
0648
Container
NR40, NR
SOUTH
0641
Grain
8182, L270
NORTH
0634
Container
NR23, AN3, NR3
NORTH
0700 0721
Container
QR LDP005
SOUTH
0701
Grain
8150, 8155
NORTH
0724
Container
NR6, NR30, NR8
SOUTH
0730 0750
Grain
8145, 8160
NORTH
0742
Container
NR62, NR65
SOUTH


0757
Grain
8158, 8174
SOUTH
0742
Grain
EL55, EL60, EL54
NORTH
0751
Container
NR90 ,NR94
SOUTH
0732
Grain
8163, 8101, 8150
SOUTH
0800 0827
Steel
NR118, NR, NR
NORTH
0809
Indian Pacific
NR28
NORTH
0808
Container
NR86, NR119, NR41
SOUTH


0824
Steel
NR69, NR121
SOUTH
0830 0831
Grain
NORTH


0839
Steel
NORTH


0841
Steel
SOUTH


0855
Grain
NORTH
0833
Steel
NR111, NR10, NR68
SOUTH
0852
Steel
NR81, NR113, NR5
SOUTH
0900 0917
AK Cars
4833, 46
NORTH
0902
Container
NR17, NR117, NR62
SOUTH
0930 0938
Steel
SOUTH
0936
Container
SOUTH
0959
Steel
NR72, AN, NR85
SOUTH
0958
Steel
NR70, NR5, AN5
SOUTH
1000 1020
Steel
NR89, NR71
SOUTH
1027
Container
NR47, NR117, NR
NORTH
1030 1053
Container
NORTH
1031
Container
NR10, NR118, NR31
NORTH


1046
Container
NR66, NR118, NR102
NORTH
1058
Steel
NR12, NR84
NORTH
1058
Container
NR14, NR, NR79
NORTH
1058
Griffith XPL
SOUTH
1100 1105
Griffith XPL
SOUTH
1100
Container
SOUTH
1101
Griffith XPL
SOUTH
1125
Melbourne XPT
SOUTH
1130 1140
Steel
NR21, DL40
SOUTH


1150
Melbourne XPT
SOUTH
1137
Melbourne XPT
SOUTH


1144
Container
NR13, NR78
NORTH
1154
Melbourne XPT
SOUTH
1200 1200
Melbourne XPT
SOUTH


1224
Steel
NR70, NR96
NORTH
1205
Steel
NR73, NR66, NR106
NORTH
1219
Melbourne XPT
SOUTH


1220
Steel
NR87, AN5, NR119
NORTH
1226
Container
NR84, NR91, NR47
NORTH
1230
1300 1328
Steel
NR52, NR45
NORTH
1330
1400
1430 1443
Grain
8152, L251
SOUTH
1432
Oiler
X52, X50
NORTH
1500
1530
1600 1603
Sydney XPT
NORTH
1605
QR Rail Grinder
NORTH


1619
Steel
NR1, NR18
SOUTH
1630 1630
Sydney XPT
NORTH
1700 1728
Container
NR22, NR8, NR30
NORTH
1730
Filed under: Administrative 2 Comments
1Sep/093

OpenTTD on Dreamcast

Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (or OTTD) is an open source clone of Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon Deluxe (1995). TTD is the sequel to 'Transport Tycoon' (TTO) which was also released by Chris back in 1994.

OTTD's main goal has been to update and enhance the greater majority of original game features, including the ability to add new graphics and sound.

Introduction

After originally developing with the guys of TTDPatch, I decided to see what OTTD was like and how portable it was... since it was open source.

Dreamcast

My first attempt was to see if it would run on the Dreamcast. This console, released by Sega on November 27, 1998 and was way ahead of it's time. It unforunately failed to gain a strong market and instead brought on more of a cult following. Games like Shenmue were to define the Dreamcast experience; but never really made it big in the western world.

One benefit of this failure is that nowadays you can pick up a console for relatively cheap. The Dreamcast also had accessories such as the keyboard and mouse which would aid gameplay for titles such as Quake and its sequels.

Anyway, back on topic... a few years after it's release (2004) Dan Potter released an OS based on GNU Linux known as KallistiOS or KOS. This included famous libraries such as SDL, OGG and MP*. This meant it could be very straight forward to compile other open source titles for the Dreamcast in a minimal amount of time. The only issues would be the physical hardware limitations of the Dreamcast itself (Hitachi 200 MHz SH-4 CPU with 16MB Main RAM.)

You can still find great tutorials on Dreamcast programming all around the web.

Either way, I can't entirely remember the issues I encountered whilst programming for the Dreamcast apart from the fact that I'd be running out of RAM whilst trying to create the initial game map or hitting other endian issues whilst loading external files. The major hindrance was any form of debugging output/logging... I ended up using 3rd-party code to output raw text to the screen (akin to a BSOD.)

Here's the final ISO Image that I built: OpenTTD for Dreamcast CDI

Run this with DEmul... It's a pain to get working, but in the end it'll run... you'll just need to source BIOS' and stuff yourself if you want to test it.

Update: It seems that the CDI Image is fail!... The output from nullDC (search for a 'NullDC Dreamcast Emulator' torrent) reports that all the GRF files are missing... I never knew it had a nice console output :D...
Stay tuned, I'll attempt to re-image a CD that I have.
dcfailottd
Either way, the compiled game ran in an Emulator (and on real hardware) and the end result was as follows:

about title

It was heaps of fun and, at times, frustrating to get it going but in the end the performance really meant unplayable... The learning experience is what counted...

I've recently had a query about it on tt-forums where I responded with a link to my original post on the porting. I might dig everything back up again and see if I can't do a cleaner compile.. as I've now worked out the beauties of config.guess and config.sub :)

Anyway... I'll update if I ever get back around to it.

For a bit of help, here's a few links to find out more information on Dreamcast Programming:

After downloading the Dev ISO (as linked above) again, I had a bit of help from Rubidium on tt-forums and got the mongrel re-compiling. To the point where the debug screen (stderr) of nullDC actually outputted my text!

Current command-line:

/usr/local/dc/kos/kos/examples/openttd
$ CFLAGS="-I$KOS_BASE/include -I$KOS_BASE/kernel/arch/dreamcast/include -I$KOS_BASE/../kos-ports/include/SDL-1.2.9 -I$KOS_BASE/../kos-ports/include/zlib-1.2.3" LDFLAGS="-lm -lconio -lSDL_mixer -lSDL_image -lSDL_129 $KOS_LIBS" ./configure --os=KOS --without-libicu --without-fontconfig --disable-network --without-allegro --without-threads --endian=LE --cc-host="kos-cc" --cxx-host="kos-c++"

itbegins
Now to painstakingly add in debugging messages to work out where it's failing... actually, it may not even be failing... as I don't even have SDL compiled in :D

Update (as of 3rd December..)
Rubidium has been doing some more great work ... a lot more solid than my hacking around... we've added a lot of support to the OpenTTD codebase to interact with the KOS build tools to the point where the command-line arguments are minimal and compiling is a much happier task.

With the kos_v2.diff patch seen here and this command-line:

$ LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS romdisk.o" ./configure --os=KOS --cc-host="kos-cc" --cxx-host="kos-c++" --with-sdl --with-png --endian=LE --personal-dir="/rd" --install-dir="/rd"

You'll nearly get a working version... apart from the romdisk which you'll also need... so this update is pointless until I sort that out :D

Well, After a lot of rapid hacking the app compiles... finds resources... but it seems that no SDL example will display anything on my version of nullDC. Rubidium reportedly had the game running but it soon ran out of memory... something that would require an overhaul of every part of the game.

Anyway, since it's more or less done... and that no one is interested in even playing it... I think, as I did last time, this will just be put to rest again. The challenge was set and the game ran 'enough' on an emulator. Done.

Here's a link to a forum talking about this port.

Filed under: Administrative 3 Comments
22Aug/093

Back to WordPress…

The novely of Drupal wore off.... it's back to WordPress...

I've also slapped Gallery2 in the backend and will be integrating soon enough. Hopefully I'll be able to create better stories on adventures such as this morning in Yass where 3 trains ran wrong-road.. ... more on that later.