Edenwaith Blog

This is the third part of a continuing series of articles as I explore the inner workings of Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI). This article will focus on the use of colors in these 80s games.

When I was working on my example to export the views from an AGI game, I noticed that there seemed to be some inconsistencies in the color palette values I had originally used from another code example. The original color palette had appeared to vary slightly from the standard CGA palette, but after more carefully inspecting the available colors in several AGI games, I noticed that it was indeed using the CGA colors, and not some variant palette.

The following table lists the CGA color palette, which consists of four highlights and twelve colors formed from a mixture of red, green, and blue components. Note how each of the RGB elements increments by a perfect third. In the 8-Bit Guy's video Modding a consumer TV to use RGB input, he explains how with a digital RGB signal, there are only eight colors possible using three bits (2³ = 8), but an intensity signal effectively doubles the number of colors, which is what we see with the CGA color palette where most of the colors have a light and dark variant, the exception being for the brown color.

Since the CRT monitors of the era were based off of RGB, instead of the standard primary colors of red, blue, and yellow, so the available colors are more of a mix of red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow along with several levels of highlights from black to white.

Most of the standard colors are represented with this color palette, with the notable exceptions of orange and purple, two of the three secondary colors on a standard RYB color wheel, which are absent. These two colors are simulated with the light red and magenta colors.

In the AGI version of Mixed-Up Mother Goose, the giant pumpkin (which houses Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater and his estranged wife) was more of a salmon color, since a true orange was not available. Of interest, in the SCI remake of Mixed-Up Mother Goose, the pumpkin looks much closer to orange, but upon further inspection, one will find that it still maintains the similar salmon color, but the higher screen resolution and dithering effect trick the eyes into perceiving that the pumpkin is closer to orange. It's interesting to see how doubling the screen resolution, yet keeping the same color palette gives the illusion of more colors.

Also of interest is how the colors might even vary slightly from one system to another. The screenshot at the beginning of this post is from King's Quest on an Apple ][, where the colors are slightly different from a PC, plus there are some artifacts around the edges of objects where the color bleeds. However, if the screen uses a mono tint, the images and text are a little sharper.

When the Mac version of King's Quest 2 is run through ScummVM, the green is a little more fluorescent in appearance when compared to the DOS version of the game. Whereas the PC uses the traditional #55FF55 color for the light green, the Mac uses a more vibrant #00FF00, which is in line with many of the Mac colors which tend to be a little brighter.

As can be seen by comparing the Macintosh and CGA color palettes, they hold many similarities, but the Macintosh palette uses better representations of orange and purple.

This article was originally intended as an addendum to a previous post, but it became far more involved as I further explored how AGI and various computing platforms presented color.

AGI Color Palette

[5 April 2019 Update] I have been experimenting with a fair bit of AGI-style art lately. It was becoming annoying having to continually set the colors I wanted, so I created this custom AGI color palette for macOS. Download the file, unzip it, place the AGI Color Palette.clr file into your ~/Library/Colors folder, and then the AGI Color Palette will be available in the standard color picker under the Color Palettes tab.

References

• Reverse Engineering Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter - Part 1
• Reverse Engineering Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter - Part 2
• export_view.m
• List of Software Palettes
• Color Graphics Adapter
• RGB Color Model
• RYB Color Model
• Modding a consumer TV to use RGB input
• AGI Color Palette for macOS

With the advent of CD-ROM technology, the size of computer games in the 1990s were no longer constrained to a couple of megabytes delivered on a handful of floppy disks. Now, with several hundred megabytes available, improved graphics and audio were available, which included full voice acting.

However, the computers of the early half of the 90s still had relatively small hard drives, often smaller than what a CD contained. This led to game installations where the primary files were installed onto the computer's hard drive, but the bulk of the audio remained on the CD.

Moore's Law continued unabated for a number of years, and the features and capabilities of PCs increased dramatically. In comparison to more modern systems, optical drives are the bottleneck which slows down games by waiting for the CD to spin up to play an audio track. Even more telling with the progress of technology, optical drives are a rarity these days. On my main computer (an iMac) I have an external optical drive so I can still install games I purchased back in the 90s, but I'd prefer to not have to connect up the drive and insert a CD if I wanted to play a particular game. This post will detail how to install the Sierra On-Line game The Dagger of Amon Ra and configure it in DOSBox so the CD is not required when playing the game.

My copy of The Dagger of Amon Ra comes from the King's Quest Collection Series which contained the first seven King's Quest games, several early Sierra Apple ][ games, plus the two Laura Bow games — Colonel's Bequest and The Dagger of Amon Ra. If you have this game on an original game CD or are using a non-Mac system, adjust the instructions as necessary.

In DOSBox, mount the appropriate CD and install the game using the following commands:

mount d /Volumes/KQ_CD3 -t cdrom -usecd 0
D:
cd LB2
install 

Next, copy the file RESOURCE.AUD from the CD into the LB2 folder on your computer. This should be a 355MB file. Then, a couple of edits need to be made to the RESOURCE.CFG file so the game will search for the extra audio files on the computer and not on the CD. For Amon Ra, the value for audioSize needs to be set to 32k, otherwise the speech will result in odd beeps, scratching noises, or cause the game to freeze up. Remove the audio key-value pair and replace it with resAUD and resSFX and their associated values. The following is how I configured my RESOURCE.CFG for The Dagger of Amon Ra.

videoDrv  = VGA320.DRV
soundDrv  = ADL.DRV
audioDrv  = AUDBLAST.DRV
joyDrv    = NO
kbdDrv    = IBMKBD.DRV
mouseDrv  = STDMOUSE.DRV
memoryDrv = ARM.DRV
directory = \SIERRA\LB2
audioSize = 32k
minHunk   = 206K
cd = no
 
resAUD=.\
resSFX=.\
patchDir=.\;audiosfx\. 

Setting Up Other Games

There are other mid-90s Sierra games (e.g. Quest For Glory IV or Space Quest 6) which can also be configured in a similar manner so the CD is not required to play the game. For other games, the audioSize might be a larger value, such as 63K. For Amon Ra, I had initially tried setting the audioSize to 63K, but that resulted in the audio glitches, possibly due to a different audio driver is used for Amon Ra (AUDBLAST.DRV), versus what some of the other Sierra games used (DACBLAST.DRV). Otherwise, the configuration process is pretty similar. Happy gaming!

References

• The Dagger of Amon Ra
• King's Quest Collection Series
• DOSBox MOUNT command

In Part 1 of this blog series, I displayed some examples on how to parse out various data from a game that used Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI). In this post, I will cover aspects from a more complex program that is used to extract the views from a game. The views represent pictures such as animations and inventory objects.

In an age where game sizes are measured in gigabytes instead of kilobytes, the effort to save a paltry byte here or there is hardly worth it, but in the 80s, every byte counted. This post will also cover a couple of the interesting techniques which were used to make the most out of the limited resources of the computers and media of the 1980s.

Due to the memory and space constraints of the 1980s, Sierra's programmers came up with some interesting techniques to optimize the size of their files. Some of their programming trickery, such as requiring the program to be decrypted against a key phrase or switching between using both big and little endian was likely employed to obfuscate the files so casual hackers could not easily take a peek under the covers to garner some hints about the game. However, a basic compression method called Run Length Encoding (RLE) is used to reduce the size of the views, which works fairly well, especially when the same color is repeated in a row. However, RLE does not work well if there is a lot of variance in the picture, such as random static on an old TV.

Big + Little Endian

If one peruses an old Sierra catalog, they will see that Sierra supported a multitude of different operating systems and computers in the mid to late 80s. AGI was built to support each of these different systems so the same game resources and logic could effectively be ported to many different systems (in theory, at least — applying this task was likely much trickier).

The following table lists the various systems which Sierra supported in the latter half of the 1980s.

As you can see from the table, Sierra supported a wide range of architectures, which included both big and little endian processors. In the programs I've written to parse out the data from the AGI files, they use an odd combination of reading data using both big and little endian methods. There seems to be little reason to do this other than to obfuscate the file format and less on the particular type of processor.

The endianness of a machine was a topic which was much more carefully observed in the 80s with a variety of systems available. It's one of those areas we probably learned about in school, but haven't actively had to worry about so much these days. This section will be a quick refresher for all of us.

Let's quickly review the difference between little and big endian. A brief overview from the web page Byte Order - Big and Little Endian:

Little Endian

If the hardware is built so that the lowest, least significant byte of a multi-byte scalar is stored "first", at the lowest memory address, then the hardware is said to be "little-endian"; the "little" end of the integer gets stored first, and the next bytes get stored in higher (increasing) memory locations. Little-Endian byte order is "littlest end goes first (to the littlest address)".

Machines such as the Intel/AMD x86, Digital VAX, and Digital Alpha, handle scalars in Little-Endian form.

Big Endian

If the hardware is built so that the highest, most significant byte of a multi-byte scalar is stored "first", at the lowest memory address, then the hardware is said to be "big-endian"; the "big" end of the integer gets stored first, and the next bytes get stored in higher (increasing) memory locations. Big-Endian byte order is "biggest end goes first (to the lowest address)".

Machines such as IBM mainframes, the Motorola 680x0, Sun SPARC, PowerPC, and most RISC machines, handle scalars in Big-Endian form.

Since an unsigned 8-byte integer can only go up to 255 (2⁸ = 256 values which are 0 - 255), if a larger value is needed, such as an offset to find a resource in one of the AGI VOL files (which contain much of the game's resources), then two bytes are needed to save a larger number.

In this example, the decimal number 49619 will be stored as two 8-bit numbers, 193 and 211. This is calculated by multiplying the high byte by 256 and then adding the low byte to the result.

In binary, the numbers 193, 211, and 49619 are represented in binary as follows:

193   = 1100 0001
211   = 1101 0011
49619 = 1100 0001 1101 0011

The example code is taken from export_view.m, which grabs two bytes from the file, and then calculates the value. In this instance, the low byte is first and the high byte is second.

// Little Endian : Low - High
int lowResByte  = getc(volFile); // res len byte 1 
int highResByte = getc(volFile); // res len byte 2
int reslen = highResByte*256 + lowResByte;

In contrast, there is big endian which stores the high and low bytes in memory which looks more "correct" and conventional to how we read numbers by placing the first part (the big end) in memory first.

The example code shows that the high byte is read first and the low byte read second.

// Big Endian : High - Low
int ms_byte = getc(volFile); // high byte, most significant
int ls_byte = getc(volFile); // low byte, least significant
long signature = ms_byte*256 + ls_byte;

Side note: Another way to calculate the high byte value is to left bit shift by 8, so ms_byte*256 = ms_byte << 8.

1100 0001 = 193
1100 0001 << 8 = 1100 0001 0000 0000 = 49408

193*256 = 49408 = 193 << 8

Run Length Encoding

One crafty technique which is implemented to conserve space with the views is run length encoding. When retrieving the data for a view, a byte is read from the file, which cleverly holds both the color and the number of repeated pixels of that color. Since there is only a maximum of 16 colors which can be used with these games, only 4 bits (half a byte) are needed.

This leaves the remaining 4 bits to detail how many times to repeat that color across the row. This might seem limiting, but for each pixel that is read, two pixels are drawn to the screen, so 4 bits can theoretically represent up to 32 pixels on the screen. If you look closely at how pictures are drawn (take Graham's nose from King's Quest 1 or 2), one will notice that the pixels are fairly wide, but they can be fairly short in the vertical aspect. This is due to the typical AGI screen has a resolution of 160x200, which is stretched out horizontally to 320x200.

Going through a number of the exported views, few of them are ever overly wide. Many of the character sprites might only be 22 pixels in width, so 4 bits can hold enough data for a majority of the time.

But what about background images, which might have large swaths of the same color (such as the sky or ground)? Backgrounds are actually drawn with vectors. If one plays an early AGI game (such as King's Quest 1 on an Apple ][), one can see the backgrounds being slowly drawn. For a plethora of other examples of backgrounds being drawn, check out the slow motion drawings at the @agistuff Twitter account.

The following is a code snippet from export_view.m to read and parse the byte containing the pixel data. The color index is stored in the first half of the byte. The number of times (loop indicator) to display the color is in the latter half of the byte. The example data will be the byte: 01000111

int pixelByte  = getc(volFile);          // NOTE 1
int colorIndex = pixelByte >> 4;         // NOTE 2
int numPixels  = pixelByte & 0b00001111; // NOTE 3

NOTE 1: Grab one byte from the file and store it as an integer into the variable pixelByte. In this example, the byte of data is represented as the decimal number 71 (01000111). The first four bits of this byte is the number 4, which is represented as 0100 in binary. The latter half of the byte, 0111 represents the decimal number 7, which indicates how many times to repeat the color (times two, since the width of the screen is doubled).

NOTE 2: To isolate the color index value, bit shift the value to the right by 4. As seen in the example below, each value in 01000111 is shifted to the right by four places. The four high bits are shifted to the lower section, which isolates the value. In this example, it leaves the binary value of 0100, which is 4 in decimal. This is the index used for a look up table to determine which color to use (in this case, a deep red). To see the list of predefined colors, look at the initialization of the colorPalette array in export_view.m.

01000111 >> 4 = 00000100

NOTE 3: To determine the number of pixels to draw, we'll need to isolate the lower half of the byte. Perform a bitwise AND operation against pixelByte with the value 00001111 (or 0xFF in hexadecimal). Reviewing our truth tables, only 1 & 1 will result in 1, whereas all other combinations of 0 and 1 will result in 0. So, to null out any of the high bits, we perform a bitwise AND operator with the operand 0000 on the first four bits, and then 1111 on the lower four bits to ensure that those bits are preserved.

  01000111
& 00001111
----------
  00000111

To isolate the concept of Run Length Encoding, I created a simple example program in Swift to further exemplify how to take a given string and perform run-length encoding on it.

Constructing + Saving an Image With NSBitmapImageRep

Once we finally get to the cel's data (that's not a typo — that's cel as in cel animation.), we need to take it and load it into an appropriate container object and then save it to disk. Since most of my examples are programmed in a mix of C and Objective-C, I use the Cocoa class NSBitmapImageRep.

NSBitmapImageRep *bitmap = nil;
bitmap = [[NSBitmapImageRep alloc] initWithBitmapDataPlanes:NULL
                                                 pixelsWide:image_width
                                                 pixelsHigh:cel_height
                                              bitsPerSample:8
                                            samplesPerPixel:4
                                                   hasAlpha:YES
                                                   isPlanar:NO
                                             colorSpaceName:NSCalibratedRGBColorSpace
                                                bytesPerRow:4 * image_width
                                               bitsPerPixel:32];

Setting the pixel data in the NSBitmapImageRep is straightforward by only needing to set the color of the pixel at a given position. Since the NSBitmapImageRep uses an NSCalibratedRGBColorSpace for its colorSpaceName, each of the NSColors in the color palette use the [NSColor colorWithCalibratedRed:green:blue:alpha] method.

An example color of bright green is defined by the following NSColor: [NSColor colorWithCalibratedRed: 0.0 green: 1.0 blue: 80.0/255.0 alpha: 1.0]. As you can see, each component can have a fractional range from 0.0 to 1.0, where 0 is dark and 1 is light, so an RGBA value (0, 0, 0, 1) is black and (1, 1, 1, 1) is white.

When looping through the data, each pixel color is set easily with the method [bitmap setColor: pixelColor atX: x y: y]; After reaching the end of the cel image data, the bitmap is saved out as an image. In this example, the image is being saved as a PNG, but it is possible to also save in a variety of other modern image formats, including JPG, GIF, TIFF, etc.

NSString *imagePath = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/export_views/%@_%d_%d.png", agiDir, key, i, k];
NSData *data = [bitmap representationUsingType: NSPNGFileType properties: nil];
[data writeToFile: imagePath atomically: NO];

Conclusion

Much of the enjoyment I have derived from reverse engineering how the AGI engine works is due to the clever techniques used during an era where the computing power was still woefully underpowered, so the programmers of the day had to be inventive in how they could stretch out the capabilities of these early microcomputers. Concepts and techniques I might have casually brushed against in a computer science curriculum (bit shifting, bitwise operations, big vs. little endian, run length encoding) are actually practiced here. Today we enjoy far greater resources so we need not have to resort to methods to pinch and save every last spare bit and byte, but it does not dismiss the practice that we shouldn't be more mindful about out code and assets and consider ways we can always try and optimize what we are working on.

References

• Reverse Engineering Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter - Part 1
• Reverse Engineering Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter - Part 3
• Adventure Game Interpreter
• Byte Order - Big and Little Endian
• DAV's Endian FAQ
• An Essay on Endian Order
• Wikipedia - Run-length encoding
• RLE compression
• Run Length Encoding
• NSBitmapImageRep Reference
• How to create NSBitmapImageRep from scratch?
• Quickies For NSImage
• Drawing into bitmaps and saving as a PNG in Swift on OS X
• export_view.m

Recently at my job the macOS Calendar has been having problems properly syncing with the Exchange server, likely due to a corrupt attachment. I came across this post by Michael Kummer detailing the steps to resolve the problem I had encountered. I went through all of the listed steps and it corrected the problem. Calendar resynced itself and the annoying warning disappeared.

Well, for a little while, at least.

The problem popped up again. Unfortunately, I haven't determined which particular event is causing the conflict, but for the time being, I had to go through all of the steps again. But if this is liable to happen again, the situation invites itself as an opportunity for a little scripting to simplify the process.

I whipped up the following bash script which performs four steps:

1. Quit the Calendar app
2. Delete all of the Calendar cache files
3. Kill all running processes related to the Calendar
4. Restart the Calendar app

Remember to set the executable permission on the script via chmod 755 clear_calendar_cache.sh. To make things even quicker, an alias can be set up in your shell so the script can be quickly run from anywhere in the Terminal.

Out of technical curiosity, I wanted to inspect the internals of an Android app. I'm well acquainted with being able to download and inspect iOS apps on the Mac, so I was interested in how I might be able to perform the same task with an Android app and a Mac. Finding the answer proved to be a little more convoluted than I initially expected.

There are several tools and esoteric methods to try and download an APK to a Mac, but my initial cursory attempt did not meet with immediate success, so I investigated other routes. There are many options to transfer standard files (photos, documents, etc.) to and from an Android device using the venerable Android File Transfer app, but that did not allow the capability to transfer an app from the phone onto the computer.

I was already familiar with using adb to sideload an app onto an Android device, so I figured that the reverse might be a feasible solution. Indeed, this is possible. This took a couple of steps from the command line to copy the apk (named myapp in this example) onto the Mac.

1. Get a list of all of the packages available on the device:

   adb shell pm list packages

2. Search for the identifier of the app you want and run the following command to get its path:

   adb shell pm path com.example.myapp

3. Finally, copy the apk file to the selected destination on your computer:

   adb pull /data/app/com.example.myapp-1/base.apk path/to/destination/

Similar to how an iOS app's ipa file is just a loosely disguised zip file, the same applies to the apk file. One can use a simple command of unzip myapp.apk to dump the contents of the apk file for further inspection. However, some of the files, such as the XML files, might be saved in a binary format, so it is not read as easily as an unencrypted text file. This was a good start, but some further work was needed to be able to more thoroughly explore the package's contents.

Android Studio can also be used to open up an APK, but since I did not have that installed on my laptop, I opted for the recommended tool apktool. However, if you have Android Studio already available, that is the ideal route to take.

I installed a current version of Java and the apktool. Once it was in place, I was able to extract the contents of the APK using the command apktool d myapp-base.apk. This dumps the contents of the apk into a separate folder, making the xml files, assets and other support files readable.

I hope that this small tutorial proves useful for anyone else who is also interested in being able to take an app from an Android device, put it on a computer, and then inspect its contents to see how an app was constructed. Happy exploring!

I've been thinking a lot about King's Quest lately.

My most recent bout of Sierra nostalgia is likely due to having met a merchant at a comic con selling shadowboxes and prints of classic 8-bit games, such as this piece of desktop art of the opening screen from King's Quest 1. Now this scene of verdant greens and waving flags calls out to me on a daily basis, beckoning me to delve deeper and learn its most difficult of secrets. No, not the location of the three treasures or even the name of the gnome (ifnkovhgroghprm), but the secrets of unraveling the Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI).

When King's Quest was first released in 1984, it was quite a progressive game for the time. Although I do not recall the exact details, it is quite possible that the first Sierra game I ever played was the original King's Quest back in the mid-1980s. Even thirty-some years later, I am still ferreting out new secrets from this game (e.g. Zombie Goat, Walk On Water, Walk Through Walls), however my interests now delve deeper than finding interesting quirks and easter eggs.

A couple days ago I was curious if it was possible to reverse engineer AGI, the game engine which ran fourteen of Sierra On-line's games in the 80s. The original game (and its various remakes) have held up fairly well over the years, but there are still a number of fun "what-if" type of ideas I would love to implement in the AGI version of the game. While I am not interested in recreating the entire game, I think it would be a fun exercise to be able to hack the game and make some custom edits to further build upon the 8-bit realm of Daventry.

One quick Google search revealed that there are quite a few resources on creating your own AGI game or inspecting original game resources. Many of the references and tools date back to the late 90s, but some of the content is still quite useful. One of the most interesting things I came across was Barry Harmsen's presentation Reverse Engineering 80s Sierra AGI Games. You can see the results of Barry's magnificent digital spelunking at the Twitter account @agistuff. Barry has written a number of Python scripts which can extract the data from the common components found in AGI games. However, he is not even the first person to write a series of programs to extract AGI resources. If you look through the various pages of the AGI specifications, there are quite a few contributors, especially Peter Kelly who wrote several programs, mostly in Pascal.

It cannot be overstated how amazingly impressive the work is that has been put into figuring out how AGI worked. Inspired by the work previously done by Barry Harmsen and Peter Kelly, I wrote a small program in a mix of Objective-C and C which parses out the words in the WORDS.TOK file and then saves the results into two files: a plain text file and a JSON-formatted file. I mostly followed Barry's Python example, but did take a couple bits of logic from Peter's Pascal code to get my own example working. The following is my code example I used to extract the words from the 1987 PC version of King's Quest 1.

This is just my initial dip into the AGI pool, and I hope to return to dive into it deeper. Many thanks go out to Barry Harmsen, Peter Kelly, Lance Ewing, Claudio Matsuoka, and everyone else in the AGI community. Another tip of the ol' adventuring cap goes out to the designers of AGI: Jeff Stephenson, Chris Iden, Sol Ackerman, Robert Heitman, and likely many more who had a hand in creating these Sierra classics. Some people programmed microcontrollers for traffic lights, others developed websites for now-defunct companies, but a few people have been lucky enough to have worked on a product which still garners people's attention even thirty years later. Well played. Well played, indeed.

21 July 2018 Update: I have added two more small programs to extract the directory structure and the inventory objects for AGI games. I am also compiling the extracted words and phrases from a number of the AGI games. The lists can be (*ahem*) interesting at times to see what words are recognized. In some games like KQ1 and SQ2, the programmers took the liberties to include their names as recognized phrases (Mikel Knight and Scott Murphy). KQ2 in particular has some unusual (and unusually naughty) terms, as the programmers took other liberties to slip in some not-so-innocent terms into the vernacular.

It is interesting to see how similar terms are grouped together so the game logic has an easier time understanding what is being intended. In King's Quest 2, a number of terms and names for female characters are grouped together. This means that Hagatha, Valanice, maiden, woman, grandma, mermaid, little red riding hood, girl, and hose bag are all equally recognized, even if the actual context in the game is not correct. So you can say kiss valanice while in Hagatha's cave, or say marry hag while in the Quartz Tower (probably not a good way to start off the marriage, Graham!).

References

• Reverse Engineering 80s Sierra AGI Games
• WORDS.TOK specs
• ExtractAGI
• export_words_tok.py
• export_words_tok.m
• words.pas
• Artovision
• A history on remaking King's Quest

In this year's Platforms State of the Union at WWDC18, Apple reiterated that they are deprecating support for 32-bit Mac apps and frameworks and will fully stop supporting them after macOS Mojave. Apple explicitly showed on a presentation slide that their aging Quicktime framework is one of the casualties, which is a vital piece for 33 RPM to function.

Apple also hinted at something they are working on where they will bring over certain elements of the iOS UIKit framework to the Mac sometime next year, which might aid in the ability to more easily write apps which can run on both the iOS and Mac platforms. We have only been given a brief acknowledgement that this is in the works, but we likely won't have any concrete details for at least another year. Yet, it entices some interesting ideas.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've entertained the idea of making an iOS version of 33 RPM to supplant the horrid native Music player, so if I do rewrite this app, it might be useful to wait and see what the Mac version of UIKit brings, so I might be able to support multiple platforms.

If the promise of the cross-platform UIKit does pan out, it still will require a heavy investment of time and effort to update 33 RPM to work with the modern frameworks. These are merely ideas I'm considering at this point, but for now, 33 RPM should continue to run on macOS for at least the next year without any major issues.

References

• 33 RPM's Future
• Platforms State of the Union
• Apple's Software Chief Details How iOS Apps Will Run On Macs

Permanent 2.8.0 has been released, which features the ability to delete write-protected files, such as files owned by another user. The system will ask for administrator credentials to use this feature. Due to Mac App Store restrictions not allowing for granting administrator privileges, this version of the app will only be available for download from the Edenwaith website.

This is the version of Permanent Eraser I have been looking forward to for a long time. With this release and the recent addition of the Erase Free Space Automator action in Permanent Eraser 2.7.2, two long standing features I (and other users) have wanted have finally been added to this app. A lot of features and improvements have gone into Permanent Eraser over the years, and this is the culmination of all of the major features I wanted to include in Permanent Eraser 2.

The Future of Permanent Eraser

Aside from any patches, this is expected to be the last major release for the Permanent Eraser 2.x line. It's been a fourteen year long trek from the initial release of Permanent Eraser 2.0 in April 2004 to today's version. There have been numerous changes in the world of computing since then, but none of have affected Permanent Eraser as much as the change from mechanical hard drives to solid state drives (SSD). It's time for a change.

The first fledgling ideas for Permanent Eraser 3 emerged in 2007, and the next incarnation formed in 2014, so the ideas on how to reimagine Permanent Eraser have been floating around for a number of years. Permanent Eraser was made to securely erase files on hard drives, but that need has declined precipitously over the years, but it leaves open the possibility of solving some new, interesting problems which have arisen over the past few years. There are a number of intriguing ideas I'm eager to explore with the next version of Permanent Eraser.

Permanent Eraser 3 will be a massive rewrite and require an extensive amount of time and effort, so I do not expect the next version to be released for at least a year or more. Permanent Eraser has long maintained an extensive backwards compatibility with older versions of the Mac operating system (PE 2.8 is still works on PowerPC Macs!), but that legacy support will be dropped and PE 3 will likely require at least OS X Yosemite as it makes use of more modern features and capabilities in current hardware and software.

Permanent Eraser 2 has had an amazing run with thousands and thousands of users, and this has become one of my favorite projects I've developed. I look forward to see where I can take this app in the future.

After three years, I have finally been able to upgrade the system software on my HTC One M7 (HTC6500LVW) phone from Android 4.2.2 to 5.0.2. I had previously used a Google Play version of this same phone before at a previous job and had encountered no problems in upgrading the operating system to 4.4 KitKat (which was the most recent version of Android at the time). However, whenever I tried to upgrade my current phone from its stock 4.2.2, there was no response. I looked into what it would take to try and upgrade the phone to Lollipop manually, but directions were confusing and inconsistent, often reliant on which carrier the phone was tied to, as well. One thing might work for GSM phones, but not for CDMA phones, et cetera. It was beginning to look like I would need to bypass certain securities and then root the phone before being able to upgrade the software. It shouldn't have been so complicated.

Oddly enough, it was when I was trying to restore an iPhone 5S back to factory settings did I stumble across the solution to be able to upgrade my Android phone, as well. I was erasing and then restoring an older iPhone for testing purposes, but one glitch I encountered was a SIM card needed to be in the device to properly finish the setup process. This iPhone was originally set up on AT&T, but I had a Verizon SIM card available for a similar model of phone, but that did not work, unfortunately. However, I did have a number of other older phones which had originated on AT&T. I first tried the SIM card from an iPhone 4S, but it was larger than the SIM card found on the iPhone 5/C/S models, but I then noticed it was the same size as the SIM card required in the HTC One, which did not have a SIM card since I had purchased the phone from a fire sale clearance.

Curious, I put the AT&T SIM card into my Android phone, which was set up for Verizon. Considering the earlier failure trying to set up the AT&T iPhone 5S with a Verizon SIM card, there were no expectations that this would work, but it was worth trying, at least.

Previous attempts to check for available software upgrades had always failed. I was pleasantly surprised to find that once the phone had a SIM card present that it was able to find software updates. The entire process took several hours since the phone had to upgrade to each to each iteration (Android 4.3, 4.4, 5.0) before stepping to the next version, plus updating any new software that was made available with each update.

All these years I had investigated convoluted methods to upgrade the software and the ability had been available to me all of these years. (sigh). All I needed to do was add the SIM card and it was ready to go.

Welcome to the fifth iteration of the Edenwaith blog. The original incarnation started as a development log with many small updates (micro-blogging years before Twitter was even started) with a couple of longer form posts interspersed. The second version of this blog was a short lived WordPress blog. I did not care for the lack of the visual customization so it would properly match appearance of the rest of the Edenwaith site, and the performance was horrendously slow, so I quickly replaced the WP blog with my own custom solution, which mixed PHP and RSS. In 2011, the blog migrated from using an XML file to a database to help correct several issues.

Which brings us to today. In the efforts to revamp the entire Edenwaith website, the blog has been relocated to a more memorable www.edenwaith.com/blog URL, improved responsiveness for different screen sizes, and pagination so the entire blog isn't crammed into a single page. In determining the best way to go about implementing pagination, it was nice to see that my ideas were pretty much spot on with what others have recommended in their own approach. It's encouraging to see that after 20+ years of programming that I'm getting the hang of this from time to time.^*

^* This is intended as a very tongue-in-cheek statement with an included sly wink and grin. Programming can be a very rewarding and daunting endeavor, but it is notoriously difficult and frustrating at times, so programmers love to celebrate their victories, no matter how minor or major.