Team: Larry Dyde

Recently I bought a new laptop for email, surfing and general usage but this time I decided to go with something a little different. Ever since Asus announced the Eee PC I've been fascinated by the idea of a small, cheap laptop with long battery life and good connectivity so when I finally got the chance I went for the 4GB model.

In desktop terms it's not very powerful, with a 900MHz processor, 512MB RAM and 4GB storage, but it copes quite well with day to day use and rarely seems underpowered. With the addition of an 8GB SD card I've got plenty of storage for documents and the built-in WiFi makes it easy to get online at home or round the office. After a few weeks I can't imagine not having it around to fill in the gap between my smartphone and my desktop PC.

Of course being a developer and working at Astraware I couldn't just leave it at using the Eee PC for serious and useful jobs, I had to play too

After a bit of tweaking and following the guides from the excellent eeeuser.com I added the developement tools and was able to build software. Once I'd got that working I couldn't resist, so I tried building a couple of our games and after some tweaking I was able to get Astraware Solitaire and Astraware Sudoku up and running as tech demos. Obviously, they aren't ready for release and not everything works properly but it was a great feeling to see two of my favourite games running on a new device.

Once I'd got the games running I was curious to see if they would run on an unaltered Eee PC so after some quick negotiations with Paul S and promises of death if I broke his 2GB Eee PC I copied the files over. Since he was still using the default interface which discourages this kind of thing, it required a little creative thinking, but I was also able to get the game running on his unmodified laptop.

At the moment that's where the story ends, but who knows, the Eee PC is a very popular device. If people start buying software and games for their new laptops then one day you could see your favourite Astraware games coming to a tiny laptop near you.

I've recently been involved with writing Baccarat and Roulette for our forthcoming game, Astraware Casino. Unfortunately I had very little experience of either game before this project so I've learnt a lot over the last few weeks.

As a starting point we searched the internet and found Casino Help with a lot of information about the rules for each game and the variations of each.

Once we had a basic idea of how to play each game we organised a games evening for the whole Astraware team so that we could all play some of the games. It was a fun time and really helpful for understanding the mechanics of the games, but to actually write one of the games you also need to understand what people will expect from them.

To get a deeper understanding of each game we researched both the game played in real casinos around the world and various computerised versions.

A major help with information about the different versions of the games was Wikipedia. The articles on both Baccarat and Roulette include a lot of information about the rules of the games and how they vary around the world.

For Roulette we decided to go with a standard American wheel design, including 0 and 00, but the major decision came when deciding what bets to support on the board. Initially we were thinking of simplifying our betting system since a full Roulette board has over 150 different bets and it seemed excessive to try and give the player so many options on the small screens we normally support.

As we looked through the various bets to see which ones were vital to the game it soon became obvious that we would have to include all of them. As a result we have created a system of highlights to allow us to keep the traditional placement for the bets and still make it clear which numbers are included in the bet. We hope this should help make it easy for new players to understand the different bets and more experienced players should have no problems making sure they place the bet they want.

When it came time to work on Baccarat the betting system was much simpler with only three bets. The complication came from the number of variations played around the world, from James Bond's favourite 'Baccarat Chemin de Fer' to 'Baccarat Banque' played by larger groups. After considering the options we decided to go with Punto Banco, also known as North American Baccarat. This is normally played in American casinos for high stakes and is an easy to understand but thrilling game of chance that is perfect for a single player casino game.

A lot of people here at Astraware have worked together on the different parts of creating this game, from designers to developers to artists and we've all tried to keep the fun of a casino and the ease of use of an Astraware game. I hope you like the end results and who knows one day maybe I'll see you around the Astraware Casino.

Another day here at the Orange Partner Camp here in Cádiz and this morning I've attended a session about a subject very close to my heart.

I'm very interested in the latest multi-media entertainment systems and use a media server along with a specialist player for watching movies, viewing my digital pictures and listening to music around the house. In the past this has needed some pretty heavy magic to get it working and it's never been a smooth solution so I was very interested to see that ACCESS (formerly PalmSource) are working on products based on the Digital Living Network Alliance standards.

They are still working on various prototypes but they were demonstrating the idea of having each device be a server, controller and a renderer (viewer), depending on its capabilities. This means that any device that can act as a controller could select a server and renderer from the available list and then play/show any file. The best bit was that the devices used can range from a file server to a television to a mobile device letting you use your mobile phone to play files anywhere in the world or control what plays on your TV all from one program.

It's a long way off but I'm really looking forward to seeing this technology in release products and I'm sure it will make a great addition to my home cinema system.