My software projects:
I have worked on many projects over the years, for various platforms. The projects on this page will pertain to non Atari projects. See the Atari Projects section of my web site for information on those.Many projects I have worked on were either commercial projects for clients, or projects of my own I never finished. So the stuff below is projects I released in some form to the Internet.
Apple OS X
- In the last few years I have become a big OS X fan. I have an iBook G3 I use quite a bit, and also a Powermac dual G5 which I spend most of my time on. I haven't really released a lot of programs yet for the Mac. I have quite a few things I have started on, but need to finish. Here are a few of my Mac programs or ports of Unix applications.
- I compiled cdrecord for the Mac. It is a pretty easy program to compile, but some friends who don't have the developer tools installed wanted access to it for burning some Atari Jaguar CD's, so I compiled it. Click here to download my binary. Go to the cdrecord website for the source code to cdrecord.
- I also compiled ccxstream for OS X. ccxstream is a media streamer for the Xbox. At the time I compiled this for the Mac, it wasn't available elsewhere. This version may be outdated, but it has worked well for me. Click here to download it.
- I have written a Tetris clone for OS X when I first got my iBook, but never released it. If there is any interest in yet another Tetris clone, drop me an email and I will release it.
- Some projects I have in unfinished states. I have a program to control a DirecTV receiver and make it change channels when needed by EyeTV. This is pretty neat. Drop me a line if your an EyeTV user with DirecTV who might benefit from this.
TiVo
- I grabbed a TiVo when they first came out. Originally I bought a 14 hour unit because it was the cheapest at the time. The 14 hour limit was a bitch so I was looking for ways to increase the storage space. Some hackers on the net came up with a way of putting in a second drive, but it required console access on your TiVo, and running a few Linux tools also. I used this method to expand my TiVo, but I wanted an easier way. I wrote a program called BlessTiVo that was a Linux program that you ran and told it what drive you wanted to initialize and it partitioned and wrote all the magic stuff onto the drive the TiVo wanted. You could then just pop the drive into the TiVo and you had instant expanded storage. A member of the TiVo community named Dylan was working on a Linux boot floppy also at the time so we combined forces and released my BlessTiVo application on his boot floppy.
- After releasing this many people started using it to add more storage space to their TiVo's. I even got interviewed by a CNET reporter about hacking the TiVo. Click here to read that article.
- To download the Linux boot floppy with BlessTiVo (and other tools), click here. For the GPL'ed source to BlessTiVo click here.
- I also compiled a view Unix utilities for running on the TiVo itself if you have shell access.
- I compiled the text editor Joe for the TiVo. Click here to download.
- I compiled the terminal program m102 for the TiVo. Click here to download.
- I wrote a program to work with the on screen display routines of the TiVo. Click here to download it.
- I wrote a little program that plays raw video straight off a TiVo hard drive to your TV connected to the TiVo. I did this when playing with a new TiVo unit that had never been turned on. I found lots of video on the drive from California. It must have been video recorded while the TiVo was being tested in the factory. Click here to download my little video player hack.
- I also wrote a little logger program for the TiVo. You could run it and specify a source file or device and it would dump the contents of it to a hex file. The GPL'ed code is included also. I used this for people having trouble with their TiVo drives. They could email me a hex dump of their TiVo hard drives boot sector. Click here to download the logger. The executable for this was included on the boot disk linked above with BlessTiVo.
- Click here to download a short media clip (sorry it is a Real Media file) of the old TV show "The Screen Savers" when they showed how to add a drive to the TiVo. In this episode they show my TiVo hacking site, and use my tools to setup the new drive.