I was hoping to have finished Gem Quest by now, but May didn’t afford much time. With Summer arriving and the pandemic seeming to be winding down, at least in Boise, my attention is elsewhere. With a short list of ideas, I decided to play off last month's theme. Picture in Motion isn’t new, but it is more interesting to watch.
When Simeon Dwyer shared his machine language line drawing routine, I immediately thought of redoing “The Picture.” Most of my z80 assembly has been with my Gem Quest game. I decided it would be a nice diversion to work on something else, even if a quick one. Picture Asm is the result of that diversion.
I’ve talked about ZX-Ultima before. It was first attempt at building an Ultima like game on the ZX81 using BASIC. Written in 2012, it was a pretty ambitious project for me. I really enjoyed playing Ultima III on my C64 as a teenager. I always wondered what it would look like on my ZX81. It was bad. Yet, at the same time you could see the seeds of what would come later.
If you’ve been following me the last couple of months, you know I’ve been revisiting Gem Quest. Intended to be an Ultima style game for the ZX81, outside of a few demo’s I really hadn’t gotten far. That isn’t the case now. I’ve spent the last month learning z80 assembly code and hacking my way through the game. Tracking my progress, I’ve been capturing that journey in pictures and movies, which I’ve uploaded into a Flickr album.
After sharing Tiles, I started to dig into my previous attempts at building an adventure game. Digging through my past research, I thought about encoding the world differently. Sadly, my experiments using MCODER failed. This spurred me to try assembler again and, to my surprise, build a good start to my game. But first, a trip down memory lane and review my first attempt at building Gem Quest.
In 2012 I wanted to see if I could make an Ultima style game on the ZX81. I had an ambitious plan centered on the tile based graphics. After a few months of testing, I was able to create a working prototype called Tiles. Although the game isn’t done, the idea behind it shows promise. You can move around the map using the standard ASDW movements. Other commands are placeholders for what could be. This article explores how Tiles came to be.
Although my late 2013 MacBook Pro still works well, it was showing it’s age. Sadly, I found it freezing from time to time and generally not running like it used to. Given that my Window’s laptops lasted only a few years, I’ve been very happy with longevity my mac. Yet, this was going to be the last year it received an OS update. With the release of the M1, I took the opportunity to upgrade and try it out. That means it was time to render some LEGO bricks!
As 2020 wound down, I had a couple of different ideas for new ZX81 programs. Most of them were graphic programs of various sorts. Themes ranged from dumpster fire pictures, an advent calendar, a virus action game, to a solo RPG. Although they were all great ideas, I didn’t think I’d get any complete enough to publish. In the end, I decided to enter in one of my old graphic programs of the Ocean Pacific logo.
Tis the season to render Santa. Well that wasn’t really my plan, but it worked out that way. I was browsing around Bricklinks, mostly trying to update some of the recent sets. Searching for a small reindeer figure, I ran across LEGO set 1628 Santa with Reindeer and Sleigh. A great set from 1989, it looked like it would be a fun set to render.
As usual, I procrastinated a bit in finishing my ZX81 program for November. Between holidays, work, and NaNoWriMo, I didn’t get around to it until this last weekend. I decided to try something a little different for this month’s program. The program itself, Charts, is a simple line graph plotter—spelling and bugs galore. As interesting as that program is, the real story is how I entered it.