I got me a Dingoo. It’s suposedly an open-source generic handheld gaming computer. Designed and made in the People’s Republic.

I managed to brick it in about an hour.

I’ll try and unbrick it today. Then maybe I can have some fun with it.

So there’s this new game that just came out for the DS, called Pokemon. I don’t really get it. There’s these wild semi-magical beasties that you catch, squish them down into little balls, then release them now and then and force them to fight each other for entertainment and money.

Anyhow, it came with a pedometer that connects wirelessly to the game card, and I wanted to know how it worked.

Before I got out the magic screwdrivers and scalpel, I did play with it for a bit. I got a Totodile, and I named him Bungee. He defeated a bunch of other wild creatures. He can scratch and squirt water and glare menacingly.

But then I got bored and started prying things apart…

The cartridge casing looks black, but it’s transparent – you can shine light through it. The big chip is the ROM, it’s 1Gb (128MB). The smaller chip above that is a flash ram for the game saves, it’s 4Mb (512kB). At the top is the IR transceiver bit, below that is an oscillator. The chip on the right is some kind of microprocessor.

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A few weeks ago I posted about poking around inside a Nintendo DSi – I took mine apart and had a peek inside, and was looking for any info out there on hacks or mods for it. I was more thinking about hardware hacks, but most of the ‘hacking’ people have been doing appears to be in terms of running homebrew apps and games and stuff.

Anyhow, so eventually I learned about ‘Flash Carts’, although this isn’t actual news to anyone who’s been a gamer any time in the last 10 years I’m sure.

These things are neat though – one of the things I wanted to do with my DSi was to be able to copy some of my games onto an SD card and then I’d have my favorite games in there all the time. Most DS games are less than 64MB in size, and with a 4GB SD card you can fit a whole lot of games. But Nintendo doesn’t let you do that. For one thing you can’t copy the game data off the game card, and then even if you could, the DSi won’t run games from the SD card.

So back to the Flash Carts – in olden times, these were a dedicated cartridge that had a flashable memory chip (i.e. instead of a factory-burned ROM it was an EEPROM that could be burned, erased, rewritten, etc.) and with special hardware you could copy a game file onto it, or if it had lots of memory you could copy a few game files onto it.

Nowadays they have Flash Carts that themselves have a micro-SD slot, so you can put any size micro-SD card into it and have almost unlimited storage space. I got one of them, an “Acekard 2i” and a 4GB micro-SD card.

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Occasionally when I get home from work, I’ve been known to collapse on the sofa. By occasionally, I mean frequently.

So, there I am, sprawled on the sofa, typically with an arm hanging over the side. That’s when the Pixie creeps into action… for what seems like ages, if I’m laying on the sofa, she’ll come alongside, bump into my hand, then flop over and start scratching at the sofa.

Obviously she knows this is ‘bad’ and I’ll try grabbing at her feet or catch her tail or rubbing her tummy (she hates that) to try and dissuade her. Then she attacks my hand / arm, biting and scratching, and I yelp in pain and let go. Then it starts all over.

All this time, I just thought she was being a naughty kitty, exploiting my exhaustion so she could peel the fabric off the bottom of the sofa.

Until the time that I was too damn tired to care. As usual, she bumped my hand, then flopped over and started scratching the sofa. Except this time I didn’t bother to try and stop her.

Then after a few moments, she stopped by herself. She moved back to my hand and bumped it again. Scratched the sofa some more, then bumped my hand again.

…

It’s been a game, the whole time, and I didn’t even know it. She wants me to grab her feet, catch her tail, rub her tummy, so that she can ‘fight’ my hand. I guess I didn’t clue in to the fact that she was just playing around, because she uses full claws and teeth – the blood and scarring caused me to think it was for-reals.

It just crossed my mind that sometimes you can form sentences out of the tags under blog posts. Ok, maybe my mind wanders a lot, but at least it gets out now and then. Anyhow, here’s the rules of the game:

• You must use all the tag words in a given post, words may not be duplicated.
• You must form a grammatically correct sentence, or a plausible newspaper-style headline sentence.
• You may add your own punctuation.
• Optionally, you may chose to allow pluralization / depluralization of available words.
• One point is awarded for the first sentence you can come up with from a given blog post’s tags. Two points if you can make a second unique sentence. Three points for the third sentence, and so on.
• There is no time limit, no competition, and no way to win – you can lose however, but only if you don’t play.

Here are some examples, using the tags from some recent posts:

Tags: early, insomnia, morning, sucks.

This is a very easy one, it becomes “Early morning insomnia sucks.”

Tags: army, battle, fish, rebellion, snail.

This one makes a good newspaper headline: “Fish army battle snail rebellion!”

There you go!  Now you try – but not with this blog post, the tags suck.