AA1: rocks! 2009: Rocks!

I've not updated this blog since sept, I hope I'll write more posts this year.
Actually I have 5-6 posts which are in a "draft" state, as they need to be polished before appearing here.

I recently got a white Acer Aspire One. This little baby has already undergone a serie of heavy modifications:
- ram increased to 1.5gb
- bios updated to rev 3309
- extra 16gb sd
- internal sd reformatted with 32kb clusters
- two installations of windows xp, the one currently running being an nlited xp sp3
- created a 256mb ramdisk to store temporary files
- removed virtual memory/pagefile.sys file

Boot time is approx 35-40 secs while shutdown takes 40-45.

I'm happy, as I brought it in a supermarket at a good price: 199€. The only problem with my configuration is the bios update. It seems some LCD panels have problems when brightness is set to minimum. Mine was fine but acer increased the minimum brightness in 3309 bios rev, so this results in a shorter battery time. I knew about this bios problem, but I've been forced to upgrade because the original version wasn't able to properly detect/use the additional 1gb 667mhz ddr2 ram. I know the baby has 533 ddr2, but the only memory available (and cheap) was clocked at 667mhz.

Hope acer will fix this problem ASAP.

I've been able to launch a couple of simple apps I wrote. They run, but some of them are vertex shader limited. The problem is Intel945 doesn't support hardware vertex shaders, as they are software emulated. It's weird to see an application run at the same speed at 320x200 and 1024x600.

I tried sound streaming code but external SD card is slow. Of course when using the ramdisk everything is fine. The problem isn't about the sound itself, as I can stream it without glitches from an SD. The problem is the thread decoding audio takes too much time, thus the rendering one is slower. Sounds like a good test.

Rendering seems fine until I generate an huge octree (65-70k polys). In that case I get visual artifacts and the app slows down to 4-5 fps. If I render stuff as single meshes, I get 29fps. When "octreeing" a 5k polys scene I get up to 250fps.
Skinning also works seamlessly, including animation mixing.

I've spent the first day of 2009 speeping. Kinda of. The problem is I came back home at 11.30AM, too much tired to work. :D

Happy new year!