eSolarThe solar thermal power producer eSolar shows off.
A picture was worth 24,000 mirrors when eSolar, a company based in Pasadena, Calif., that specializes in solar thermal power, transformed a vast field of heliostats at its Southern California solar farm into a Fourth of July tableau of the American flag and the Statue of Liberty.
The Google-backed start-up, which is building solar farms for Southern California Edison, P.G.&E. and El Paso Electric, uses software and imaging technology to create a dynamic parabola from tens of thousands of closely packed mirrors, focusing the sun’s rays on water boilers that sit atop towers. The intense heat vaporizes the water to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.
As the holiday weekend approached, eSolar’s software engineers got a bit creative.
“The programmers have very accurate software control over the field,” said eSolar’s chief executive, Bill Gross, in an e-mail message Friday evening.
The company’s five-megawatt Sierra demonstration power plant northeast of Los Angeles deploys 24,000 mirrors — each one capable of being individually moved by computer. “To celebrate Independence Day,” the company announced at its Web site late last week, “eSolar’s Sierra SunTower power plant has employed this high-precision technology to declare energy independence.”
Mr. Gross, the founder of the tech-incubator Idealab, contends that eSolar can deliver electricity cheaper than natural gas by using sophisticated algorithms to control inexpensive and lightweight mirrors called heliostats.
“The bigger picture here is that we invested like crazy in Moore’s Law instead of more steel,” he said, referring to Intel’s co-founder, Gordon Moore, who famously remarked that computer processing power doubles about every two years.
“We have such precise control over the field that we can do anything with the mirrors we want,” Mr. Gross said, “and this is proof of it.”
This year the fireworks moved crosstown to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the exploration of the Hudson River by Henry Hudson. Shot from Hoboken, NJ, it was spectacular. For tech info, please visit my blog, mikekobal.com/blog/?p=179 Music: Mozart, Turkish March, you can buy it here: amazon.com/Mozart-Rondo-Turca-Turkish-March/dp/B000JIDN5W
In 1983, the arcade smash hit Donkey Kong was ported to the Atari 400/800 home computer systems by Landon Dyer. It was at the time the best home computer/console port for this game.
Mr. Dyer, in between pulling his hair out while working on this game, included what is known as an "Easter Egg" in the game's code. If a certain sequence of moves or scores were done correctly, the designer's initials would appear somewhere on the screen. He writes on his blog, "There’s an easter egg, but it’s totally not worth it, and I don’t remember how to bring it up anyway (something like: Die on the ’sandpile’ level with 3 lives and the score over 7,000)."
The Digital Press web site has a whole section dedicated to Easter eggs, and they are even offering cash rewards to those who can find out how to trigger them. Even Landon Dyer himself did not remember how to trigger this Easter egg in Donkey Kong for the Atari home computers. It was suggested on the Digital Press site that the initials would appear in the bonus score box.
26 years later, I am pleased to announce that I have discovered the way to trigger this long lost Easter egg. Here is how to do it:
1. Play a game and get a score of 33,000 through 33,900. This score must become the new high score. [Some other scores will work as well, see below.]
2. Kill off all of your remaining lives. However, your last life must be killed off by falling too far - by walking or jumping off a girder that is too high to land safely. If the last life is killed any other way, the egg will not appear.
3. Set the game difficulty to 4 by pressing the Option button 3 times. The icon for this difficulty is a firefox.
4. Wait a few minutes, and the demo screen where Kong jumps across the screen will appear.
5. The title screen will then appear, and Landon Dyer's initials [LMD] will be at the bottom center of the screen:
Other base scores that will work are 37,000 ; 73,000 ; and 77,000. The hundreds digit can be anything, as can the hundred thousands digit.
It doesn't matter what difficulty the game is played on to set the high score. But to see the egg, the current difficulty must be set to 4 (firefox).
Technical Details
How on Earth did I figure this out?
I started by getting a very good emulator for the Atari system - MESS [Multiple Emulator Super System]. Once in to the game, I activated the game's debugger and did a complete disassembly of the entire 64K RAM bank. This file is over 25,000 lines long.
I faced a few false starts - I first believed the initials were to appear in the bonus score box. So I looked there but found nothing. I also closely observed the input routines, so see if a special sequence of joystick moves were required. This search came up empty as well.
I kept digging around and eventually discovered the subroutine for drawing text to the screen. Right after the data for the "GAME OVER" text data , I found the following:
8D3E: FE ; location code to follow 8D4F: 50 BC ; screen location #50, #BC 8D41: 16 17 0E ; "L M D" [designer's initials!] 8D44: FF ; end code
It was quickly after this that I traced back to the command which would display this line. It was preceded by a test based on several factors, which were all then discovered. Each of the factors are logically ANDed to each other, and the end result has to be equal to 3 to trigger the egg.
861C: A5 D2 lda $D2 ; load number of lives 861E: 2D 01 0E and $0E01 ; mix with high score, ten thousands 8621: 2D 02 0E and $0E02 ; mix with high score, thousands 8624: 25 CB and $CB ; mix with difficulty 8626: 2D 31 0E and $0E31 ; mix with Mario's last state 8629: C9 03 cmp #$03 ; result == 3 ? 862B: D0 07 bne $8634 ; no, skip Easter egg ; Easter egg 862D: A0 3E ldy #$3E 862F: A9 8D lda #$8D ; Easter egg text location at #8D3E 8631: 20 B8 AB jsr $ABB8 ; print Easter egg to screen ; resume program 8634: ...
It turns out that the number of lives is set to #FF (255 decimal, or 11111111 binary) after a game is over. This provides a starting point with all of the bits turned on. Most of the bits turn to zero with the first AND at line #861E. For the high score, since the numbers 3 and 7 both have the same lower 2 bits turned on, they both work as far as this routine is concerned. [3 = 0011 binary and 7 = 0111 binary].
The game's difficulty is counted starting at zero, so level 4 has an internal value of 3 which is needed for the correct answer.
Finally, line #8626 mixes in Mario's last state. The memory location referenced (#0E31) changes based on how Mario is moving. It is set to 3 when Mario falls and dies.
Comments & Conclusions
Of all the game hacking that I have done, this has to be one of the most rewarding and enjoyable. I played quite a bit of this game back in the day at a friend's house. It really was the best port of Donkey Kong that could be played at home.
Another puzzle solved. What will I do next with all of my spare time?
- end original article -
Updates
7/5/2009 - There has been some speculation about this Easter egg "not being worth it". Maybe for some people, but for me, it was worth $75 in reward money from the Digital Press web site and their Easter Egg Contest. This contest, by the way, still has many bounties waiting to be claimed.
Someone even put a how-to video up on Youtube: [not very well made, IMO; to save time you might want to skip ahead to the last 10 seconds after watching the beginning.]
Organ removed as investigators seek clues to star's death
Michael Jackson will be buried this week– without his brain. As his family tries to finalise details for the King of Pop’s funeral on Tuesday they have been told it will be held back for tests.
They faced the grim choice of waiting up to three weeks for Jackson’s brain to be returned to them or go ahead and bury him without it – which they have decided to do.
Los Angeles Coroner’s spokesman Craig Harvey confirmed that neuropathology tests will be carried out to see if it holds any clues to the exact cause of his death.
But the examination cannot begin until at least two weeks after the death when the brain has hardened sufficiently to slice it open.
Jackson died from a cardiac arrest at his Beverly Hills mansion on June 25 after a suspected overdose of painkillers.
Sources at the coroner’s office revealed that his brain was removed before his body was released to relatives the next day.
A forensic neuropathologist will test Jackson’s brain for, among other things, past drug use and whether he has suffered overdoses in the past.
The brain can also show any past abuse of alcohol or if the deceased had suffered from any one of a number of diseases. The source said that removing the brain is the “only way to carry out the tests”.
“The tissue has to be examined,” he said. “I can’t tell you how long that is going to take.”
One expert explained that the Jackson family could decide to wait and bury the brain with the rest of the body. But it is far more common for the lab to burn the remains once they’ve been examined or for them to be placed into the grave at a later date.
“It’s up to the family. They can bury him and then bury the brain later on,” said Dr Cyril Wecht, a former coroner and one of America’s foremost forensic pathologists.
But he added: “It’s rare for the body to be held back for two weeks or more.”
Jackson’s body was handed over to his family soon after the three-hour autopsy was completed and the Jacksons went on to order a second forensic examination.
But Dr Wecht said: “The brain cannot be properly examined at the time of the autopsy. You cannot test it while it is in the body. So it is cut off at the spinal cord and removed.”
The brain would usually be placed in a plastic bucket, suspended in formaldehyde fluid, and put in a refridgerator at 4C to preserve it.
Dr Wecht went on: “People don’t realise how soft the brain is. To do the type of detailed examination required you need to have the brain much harder – and for that you have to wait for at least 10 days to two weeks.”
Dr Wecht, who was not involved in the Jackson autopsies, has reviewed and been consulted on many high-profile deaths, including John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley and Anna Nicole Smith.
“In Los Angeles they have a neuropathologist they work with, and he will be looking at the brain,” he said.
It is cut into sections of less than half-an-inch thick and reviewed first by the naked eye and then through a microscopic. “That all takes 17 to 18 days,” Dr Wecht added in an exclusive interview.
Dr Wecht, who chronicles his career dissecting more than 16,000 bodies in his best- selling memoir A Question Of Murder, added: “In the 47 years I have been doing this I reckon only about one per cent of families say they want the brain back so they can bury it. In most cases it is incinerated.”
The autopsy is expected to show that the 50-year-old singer had drugs in his system when he died.
At various times, he is said to have been taking Demerol and Oxycontin for pain from old back and leg injuries and Diprivan, a hospital anaesthetic, to help him sleep.
- MICHAEL Jackson starred as the Scarecrow in The Wiz, the 1978 musical version of The Wizard of Oz – playing the character without a brain opposite Diana Ross as Dorothy.
The Army's Band of the Coldstream Guards have done their own tribute to the late Michael Jackson, as they played one of his most famous hits Thriller near Buckingham Palace. Around 40 drummers, tru...
.
All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
eSolar The solar thermal power producer eSolar shows off. 
.
Posts
