About to embark on some hardcore porting.

My brother and I have pooled our resources to buy a new company computer: Specifically a Mac mini for my use. Since I have a lot more free time than my brother, I'm going to be taking over the bulk of the work on porting Sorceror's Stripes onto the iPhone, but lacking a Mac, I found myself in need of one to do the job.

It's not going to be easy. I first need to familiarize myself thoroughly with Objective-C, brush up on my C++ (I'm strongly considering writing the bulk of the code in C++ instead of Objective-C for performance reasons), apply a couple of optimization tricks, and then settle down for the long and (I suspect) largely tedious task of translating 10,000 lines of code. It's gonna be a bit painful at first, switching from the cutting-edge C# to these 1980's technologies. Then of course there's the whole memory management issue. (How painful it is, not having automated garbage collection on the iPhone).

But it needs to be done. Porting the game is a big task and I'm the only one with enough time on my hands to get it finished within a reasonable timeframe. Fortunately, my brother has already done a lot of work figuring out how to make things work on the iPhone, so the learning curve won't be quite so steep.

Hoping to have Sorceror's Stripes iPhone version completed within a month. Might be substantially less than that, as long as I don't run into any major stumbling blocks.

Ah, but first I have to wait for the iPhone SDK to finish downloading, it's over 2 GB, and the Internet is being really slow today. Stupid Internet...

Now, I'm off to play some Cross Edge.

- Satellite Observatory (James)