DJ Katy

Deployment with IExpress: How to turn your MSI file into an EXE

I have no problem with MSI file downloads. They are as simple as running an EXE. However, for reasons unknown, a lot of people don’t seem to like or understand downloading and running an MSI file; they feel more comfortable with EXEs. Visual Studio Setup projects turn your application into an MSI and a setup.exe…

How to determine programmatically whether your application and OS are 32 or 64-bit

First of all, we must clear up a misconception. Some people want to programmatically determine whether the underlying processor in use is 32 or 64 bit. This is a misnomer, as modern Intel and AMD processors can and do run in both 32 and 64 bit modes, in addition there are considerations of cache width,…

How to determine programmatically if your processor has hyperthreading, SIMD and other processing capabilities with __cpuid

One of the machine intrinsics in Visual Studio is the __cpuid function, which returns a 4-byte array containing various bit-wise information about the processor hardware capabilities. While all the gruesome details can be found on MSDN’s __cpuid, __cpuindex page, here is the basic principle:

Tutorial: A Modern Approach To Implementing High Score Tables in C++ using STL and Boost

In this article I shall demonstrate a modern, object-oriented, re-usable technique to adding a local high score table to your C++ Windows games using STL and Boost. I shall use our SimpleTetris game of which this article is a follow-on. Please note that this is by no means an efficient implementation, it is designed to just…

Coding Challenge Postmortem And Analysis: Asteroids in 10 Hours

If you missed the live blog then check out Coding Challenge: Write Asteroids in 10 hours or less for the background. Let us now take a retrospective look at the results. The latest version of the game and source code can be found here.

Coding Challenge: Write Asteroids in 10 hours or less

Update 17-Jun-2012: Fixed some typos, the broken formatting in some of the code and the missing types after static_cast and dynamic_cast operators, and updated the code snippets to reflect two bug fixes. Update 18-Jun-2012: Wrote the final section regarding the implementation of shields and waves. The sun is shining brightly, it’s nice and warm outside…

Tetris Revisited: Bells & Whistles 1

This is a follow-up from the 8-hour Tetris prototype article. Now we have a working game prototype, I shall walk you through how to make a series of basic improvements. The full source code is available below (see the original article for other dependencies you need to install to compile the code; the game is…

Coding Challenge Postmortem And Analysis: Tetris in 8 Hours

You may have seen that yesterday I coded Tetris from scratch in 8 hours in C++ (source code and EXE links on that page). Today I shall reflect on the whys, the good and bad points and lessons learned.

Coding Challenge: Write Tetris In 8 Hours or Less

UPDATE (next day): You can read the postmortem report here! Can I write the entire game of Tetris in 8 hours or less using my Simple2D wrapper library? Let’s find out. I’ll update this blog as I go!

Learn To Program 2: Ground Rules

So you’ve decided you want to learn computer programming. That’s great! Now what? I’m not going to start teaching you to write programs in this article; instead I’m going to give pointers and topics for thought that apply equally to all beginning coders.