tdavis's blog

The other day I was trying to play an old game I bought some time ago on my LAN. I was just trying to enjoy a little cooperative bot killing fun with my buddy, but for some reason, the game kept telling me my 'master key' or something along those lines didn't check out. Needless to say I wasn't happy with it... I bought this game... and maybe I wasn't supposed to play it on two machines at once... but at the very least I certainly didn't want it phoning home for a simple LAN game, a game mode where no master server or internet should be required.

So I decided to see what my 'game' was up to. A quick download of Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) and an even quicker packet sniff and sure enough I could see where my 'game' was initiating connections and across what port.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Basic Stamp, its a small microcontroller available from Parallax. It runs at a whopping 20Mhz and has a full 2K of storage on board for instructions. Although it may not sound like much, its more than enough to program the stamp to do some interesting things. The Basic Stamp is programmed in PBASIC, parallax's version of BASIC the stamp interprets.

Rather than waste your time explaining the coolness of the Basic Stamp, (if you've found this page you're probably already interested) I want to focus on how it can be utilized under linux. Currently, Parallax has a very nice PBASIC IDE but its available for windows only. It can however be run under Wine, and with the proper font settings it doesn't look too horrible and is quite functional. But what is the fun in that?

Today is the triumphant day ohmpie.com gets its start. Hail ohmpie.com.