Solving Color Problem In DirectDraw Games Update

I've received a few more e-mails and blog comments containing input and information about the famous DirectDraw palette problem which messes up colors in older games.

In particular, Windows contains compatibility entries in the registry, and Jari Komppa has written a ddraw.dll which wraps DirectDraw.

I've updated my blog post from 2009 once more to reflect this new information. Currently, the easiest way to run Age Of Empires 2: The Conquerors without any hassles still seems to be my tool, which you can find there as well.


P.S.: Also, I will be competing in the Google A.I. Challenge again this year. I look forward to seeing you there!

Python Web Scraping Tools

Just a note for myself, a list of interesting Python tools for my next web scraping project:

• urllib2: extensible library for opening URLs.
• PyQuery: jQuery-like traversing and selecting for Python.
• mechanize: stateful programmatic web browsing in Python.
• Beautiful Soup: not supported/maintained that much anymore. Latest versions are rather slow and buggy.
• Scrapy: looks nice, includes the URL requesting part as well, with cookie support and such.
• lxml.html: lxml is a Pythonic binding for the libxml2 and libxslt libraries.

Probably going with Scrapy.