Larry’s Personal & Tech ramblings

Over the next few days (weeks), I’m going to profile various graphics routines running on the ARM to see which gives the best performance.  Specifically, I’m going to compare the speed of converting planar data into chunky data with lookup tables versus brute force calculations.  Also I will examine the time to render graphics from planar (e.g. 2/4 bpp) sources versus pre-converted 8bpp chunky sources (which use 2 or 4 times the memory).  The relevance of this is to help speed up Nintendo game emulation.  The GBC, NES, and SNES all store their sprite and tile data in planar format, but this must be converted to chunky format to work with most display memory.  If anyone already has some insight on this, please feel free to comment.

I’m not sure the exact number of days, but starting last week and up until Monday, my HTC Vox acted as if the battery was fried and had a life of about 2 hours of standby and a few minutes of talk time.  Many thoughts went through my mind such as a firmware bug, MicroSD card bug, battery fried, and so on.  I had never seen a battery deteriorate so quickly.  My wife’s phone was doing the same thing, but since it’s battery is more than a year old, I thought that was the problem.  Well…starting yesterday I noticed that the battery life was back to normal and the same with my wife’s phone.  The only conclusion I can come to is that T-Mobile did something strange with their towers that caused my phone to waste lots of energy.  Has anyone else seen this (in S. Florida)?