Super Mario World Soundtrack Revisited!

Today, on my daily reddit navigation , i've found something absolutely über cool. A guy rearranged and re-recorded the entire Super Mario World (Super Nintendo) soundtrack. It is a master class on Video Game music arrangement. Click here for official hosted site


Just push play and take the time to feel nostalgic. Lots of people(me included) got this game with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System package in the early 90s(composed of SMW Cartridge/Booklet, Two Controllers, RCA and RF cables and Power Supply)

SMW is a true classic, being Nintendo's kickstart on its victorious 16-bit generation. I still remember hooking the SNES on my TV and having my first baby steps on the console and Dinosaur Island simultaneously. It just blew my mind in every aspect back then because i never played any mario game before (my 8-bit console was a Sega Master System).

Remembering: If you own a Nintendo Wii, you can download it from Virtual Console.

It Seems Sun is intending to port Java to the iPhone!

This is gonna be interesting! I don't know if Apple have legal constraints for the
development of a Virtual Machine for the iPhone, considering that IMHO a VM isn't a application at all

Here are some comments concerning the article :

"Will there be an iPhone emulator for NetBeans, too? This is really great news, it means I can bring my entire portfolio of mobile content to the iPhone without having to dust off my crufty 1994 Objective-C manuals. Go JAVA"!

It reinforces my theory that Java programmers don't dig Objective-C. Obj-C kicks ass! Go OBJ-C!!!

"What a crock. Safari runs interpreted code. And you can argue that any half-decent game with AI logic and loadable levels runs interpreted code. Sounds like Apple just reserves the right to be jerks to products that undercut their distribution control, because you can bet that Java apps that can be downloaded over the net connection won't be sold through the App Store."

Everyone knows that Apple tends to have the SaaS approach when developing some of their products... they want to get a piece of the cake in therms of software. Control is needed when we are dealing with cell-phone content.
I don't see the fact concerning the "VM prohibition" as a threat for developing scripted game code. If you don't use a bloated scripting language it is totally possible. I think we can embed a Lua interpreter to any C-based program without big efforts..

iPhone Software Roadmap Keynote Review


Yesterday, Apple announced the roadmap for iPhone software development , and it's video is already available and really worth watching. When iPhone was initially released last year i (plus a big bunch of tech junkies around the world) got kinda disappointed when development was constrained to Web-based apps only. We were expecting a Mac OS-like Cocoa API and the Objective-C programming language/runtime to harness all of iPhone features.
Well, our prayers were listened by the Cupertino guys and here we are , with a full-blown native application development platform and business model to distribute iPhone apps.
Cooler than all the iPhone-corporative-value-talk were the game development demos from EA and Sega. EA's demo was a mobile version of Will Wright's Spore!

With the Mac OS X based kernel, OpenGL ES, OpenAL , Cocoa Touch, Accelerometer, XCode IDE, Remote Debugging and Profiling, developing software for iPhone seems at least attractive. Can it beat J2ME and Symbian native apps in the future? If Apple does in practice everything it was said yesterday we will have some interesting competition in a near future.

Strengths
- The iPhone is a single phone device. You don't have to worry with the implications and code-bending to make it run in multiple phone devices like in J2ME and Symbian.
- Application provisioning done by Apple (which have great experience of selling content with iTunes) instead of Phone Companies, which opens up the distribution range
- Code is natively compiled and written with industry proven Objective-C (alive and kicking since NeXT times)

Weaknesses
- It's a brand new platform. Time is needed for it to achieve maturity
- Objective-C is a very expressive and powerful object oriented language, but i don't know if that big mass of "Die-hard Java lovers" will have the guts to embrace it (Not offending Java programmers, i pay my bills with it. But i've seen around lots of java dudes around that hardly sympathize with the words "Smalltalk Messaging" and "C")

Opportunities
- Application profit distribution goes 70%(developers) and 30%(apple), i doubt of any Brazilian Phone Company that can do better.
- If the iPhone reaches a iPod-like popularity in the Mobile Phone world, the amount of users developers can reach is huge.
- Good range of applications that can be developed (personal, high quality 3d games , media , business)

Threats
- Unfortunately, with this kind of development platform, malware efforts tends to increase


I officially announce: After this keynote the iPhone is on my gadgets crush list :)