XNA HiDef you Don’t Want

I was doing a lecture this afternoon to the first years and, frankly, it wasn’t going well. The microphone was not working, which meant I had to shout, and I’d not uploaded my slide deck correctly so I had to wait for my little laptop to download the presentation from Live Mesh.  Then I fired up my first empty XNA project to show the class how it worked and was rewarded with this.

Not good. Id used the machine to write Windows Phone games with no problem and I’d never seen that message before.  Fortunately we were near the end of the lecture and so I just showed that I could in fact get Windows Phone to work and then everyone had to leave.

Someone at the back had shouted “Use Reach” but at the time this hadn’t registered. Later, I took a look at the project settings:

 

Turns out that if you have fairly simple graphics hardware, like the one in my little laptop, it can’t handle the HiDef graphics and you have to select the Reach option for Game Profile.

I did this and everything worked, so I should be OK for tomorrow.

Above & Beyond on Yamaha QY100

The original is worth searching out too

The Internet is an amazing place. I was looking for help because the backup battery in my Yamaha sequencer is flat and I happened across this lovely little video. The original track is worth seeking out too.

Bronte Country

The six Bronte children had a pretty raw deal in many respects.  Their father, Patrick, lived long enough to see every one of them die, along with his wife and, from the look of the church graveyard, loads of the local population.  Haworth in the nineteenth century was a world apart from the neat town it is now, with squalor and disease running rampant.

The three Bronte sisters grew up watching loved ones die around them, starting with their mother and two sisters. That they chose to escape into a made up world of stories is not terribly surprising. When they grew up they took this story telling into the wider world and produced a collection of books that was like nothing before.

I’m not a great fan of their writing, but I do like going to the Parsonage in Haworth where they grew up and wrote their greatest works. There are only a handful  of  rooms in the small building, but actually being in the room where Charlotte wrote “Reader, I married him” is pretty darned cool, although I did rather spoil things for number one wife when we were in the shop on the way out and I pointed at a row of paperbacks saying, in tone hushed with awe, “Hey, they wrote books as well!”.

I also insisted on buying a genuine Bronte Parsonage combination spirit level, torch and screwdriver tool. Apparently Emily used to use one just like it it to change the batteries in her digital watch.  Or something.

Getting to Haworth was made much more interesting by the unexpected arrival of a large amount of snow overnight. This made driving great fun and meant the first thing we had to do in Haworth was find somewhere that sold wellington boots.  On the other hand, it did make the pictures nice. And I was lucky to see a steam train arrive at Haworth station. (although of course you know that Haworth was not actually connected to the railway network until some time after the death of the sisters, who had to travel to the station at Keighley when they wanted to go to London to meet their publisher).

Of course I took a camera, and a bunch of pictures.

Genuine bona-fide steam train

Platform

Haworth rooftops

Fairly quiet for a Saturday..

Haworth graveyard

Train home

Night Driving and Getting Lost

A couple of rules for night driving:

1. If you ever decide to not bother with the Sat. Nav. because you’ve been there before you are instantly dropped into a parallel universe where your destination is now on the other side of the road from where you remember it being.
2. If you are driving slowly in the dark on an unfamiliar road a dirty great big 4x4 with enormous headlights will instantly appear behind you.

Never mind, at least we got there eventually.

Windows Phone Rock Star

Just finished my Windows Phone Rock Star session. Now I can put the guitar back on the wall. Thanks for being a great audience and staying to the end. Some great questions too.  You can find the sample code here.

There were some questions. If you are not based in the ‘states and are wondering how to get the tax side of things sorted you can find some interesting information here:

http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/19464.aspx

When I figure out how to do it myself I’ll put a post up explaining what I did.

You can find my Blue Book (and my Yellow Book) here:

http://www.csharpcourse.com/