Articles by Steven

T.W.M. is March’s program of the month. It is a simple animation that tries to mimic a computer’s destruction of its defined target. February was actually pretty prolific for me as I transcribed this and another program, as well as updated a number of older programs using MCODER. Fortunately, that means I have a few more programs available than I normally do. Of course, one is more than I normally have ready so I’m not sure that means much. Anyway, go give it a try and enjoy the animation in all its simplicity.

E.T. may not have been my best game ever, but it was an interesting exercise in 1985. Loosely, and I really mean loosely, based on the Atari 2600 game, E.T. follows the exploits of the title character as he tries to find his way home. Originally written in ZX81 BASIC, I revisited E.T. to better understand how to use MCODER II. I was ultimately successful in compiling it and getting it to run. If you are adventurous, you can compare it to original version, bugs and all. Instructions for E.T. are available off my old ZX81 website.

It isn’t all programming around here! Some days it is fun to just play around. I was adding an image to my other site which led to me reviewing some of my old Flickr images. This got me playing around with Wordle again to see what Tag Clouds I could build form the ZX81 articles.

I posted this a couple of days back on Flickr, but hadn’t made it around to posting here. Happy belated Valentine’s day to all!

What's this, another version of Road Hog? Yep. This is January’s Program converted to machine code using MCoder II. I was surprised how easy it was.

February is upon us and that means another program of the month. This month it is another one from 1983: Light Walls. In case you hadn’t guessed, it has its roots in Tron. The game requires you to steer right (“.”) or left (“z”) to avoid hitting the light walls. I wrote this program while a friend was over and we took turns trying beat others high scores. Who says you need color and 3D graphics to have a good time! Not convinced. Give it a try yourself and see how good your reactions are.

It is a strange time for me. For years, I have run my web site locally as a way to test out new designs and programs. I have used that site as the home for my catalog of LEGO parts and colors. Unfortunately, the computer that housed that catalog failed and I still haven’t gone through the trouble of reinstalling Apache. While working on a recent project, that decision is becoming a problem. Today I decided to do something to correct that. I uploaded my L-Bricks catalog to my hosted web site. Now I can find the names I need to put parts and colors into my POV-Ray renderings.

As more and more people turn to mobile and tablet devices for their entertainment and consumption needs, it is becoming harder to share my ZX81 preservation project. I remember how excited I was when I found a Java based emulator that would run my ZX81 programs on the web. Although Java and I haven’t always gotten along, I was happy to be able to show off my programs on the go with nothing more than a browser available. To my surprise, however, Java isn’t even part of the conversation when talking about those on-the-go OS’s like iOS and Android. All that effort isn’t of much use when a large portion of your audience can’t enjoy it. Fortunately, and much to my surprise, I ran across Zed Ex (Beta) in the Android Market. You can also find it on AppBrain.com.

Short and sweet. Monthly mini-build for Jan 2012 rendered with POV-ray. Interesting that these in-store promotions are now numbered. 40036 Cobra by SafePit, on Flickr

Welcome to the new year! Starting off the second season of monthly programs is January's program Road Hog. Road Hog is a driving game similar to my later Flywheel game. I hesitate to call it a racing game as there is no acceleration. You just move the car left or right using the Z or . keys. The game is pretty easy due to the slow speed of the animation. Go give it a spin.

Well, the celebration of thirty years since the introduction of the ZX81 is now over. For the last year I've been bringing you an original ZX81 program each month as a tribute to my first computer. It was a lot of fun typing in those old programs or fixing tape recordings I made back in the eighties. I even rewrote one which brought me back to those old programming days. For those that found your way here, I hope you enjoyed my ramblings about the programs. Perhaps you've learned something or I just invoked a kinship from a fellow programmer.

I can’t believe December is here and the year is almost over. To celebrate the last program of the month, I present Creature, an animation program. Unlike many of the smaller programs submitted throughout the year, this one is the largest weighing in at 14KB. Although Creature isn’t as exciting next to more modern computer animations, I still find it interesting to see what could be done with this little machine 26 years ago. Give it a watch, enjoy the nostalgia, and try not to laugh too much.

Although I like my existing weather userbar, I really wanted an easier city search. I decided to stick with NOAA and the NWS for now and ran across a nice all in one weather page with an XML link. The XML requires latitude and longitude meaning I need to find a way to find your city from a search string. Here is where the mash-up comes in. After a quick search, I found the Google Geocoding API. It accepts just about any search string and returns the closest match with the coordinates I need. The result isn't much different, but the location is easier to read.

You know you've been spending too much time playing HALO when Microsoft names you a VIP. Interestingly, they offered me a badge to prove it.

As of today, you can use RSS to subscribe for your monthly dose of ZX81 goodness. I originally hadn’t planned to offer an RSS feed for my ZX81 site. The original goal was to cross-post articles to my main site and rely on its feed for subscribers. Sadly I tend to forget to cross-post.

When I first created my re-visioned ZX81 site, my goal was to integrate it as a sub-site of my existing one. However, the CMS I use doesn’t lend itself to easily do that. Technically, that wasn’t a show stopper in and of itself.

Another great build from the architecture series rendered with POV-Ray. I was trying to add some back light, but I'm not sure I'm happy with the results. It took 3 days to render and it still has anti-alias artifacts. Overall, it looks pretty good though. Besides the title brick, I only had to model a few new pieces: the fence pieces and the 4 stud brick on top. The tap on top is actually from the LGEO library since I was too lazy to build it myself.

November is here and the year is flying by. This month’s program Lander 2 is an earlier one from 1983. Oddly, the game displays Space Lander. Not very original as I’ve used that name before. I’m using the name I noted in my listing.

Today, like most Fall Sunday’s, is a great day to watch Football. It was fun watching San Fransisco play, but I often hack around on the computer during games. Fortunately there is plenty of time between commercials and time-outs to work on code.

I recently started using FlashControl for Chrome to control which sites use flash. I was getting annoyed with sites I ran across sucking up my computer’s CPU with flash programs. It is annoying how many sites use flash, my own included. I’d swapped out my original JavaScript slide show some time ago for Flickr’s slide show to show off my recent LEGO renderings. It always annoyed me that Flickr wrote the slide show using Flash and wouldn’t display properly on my iPod. I didn’t bother me much until FlashControl started blocking it. It was time to do something about it.

October’s program is one of my later games from 1985 which is aptly named 1985. It has decidedly simple game mechanics. Set in an alternative reality, the Earth is gone in this version of 1985. Humans are colonizing Earth II, but you need to clear the mountains for agriculture needs. Yes, your job is to hit any key to clear the land. Things couldn’t be easier, right?

This month I present another simple game, Odyssey. It doesn't include instructions, so here is a quick synopsis. An evil computer has trapped you in a space ship. To escape, you have to remove the memory boards in order to shut down the computer. Sounds familiar? Obviously this program was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. To play, use “Z” to move left and “.” to move right. Hit the “M” key to remove a memory card. Try to remove all of them in time to beat the computer.

Sometime back I created an animated userbar that showed the current PPV movies on Dish. Sadly, soon afterwards Dish changed their support pages to require a login, breaking my script. Sure, I could log in to get the information, but that kind of defeats the purpose. I decided to try to at least get the UB working again, even if not the full movie list.

I couldn’t leave well enough alone. All that analyzing and nitpicking of the original Space Lander made me wonder what it might be like if I had rewritten it. Almost 28 years later, here is the reborn version of Space Lander 2011.

Okay, this may not be the large program I promised, but I choose Space Lander for a different reason: it's horrible! Okay, maybe it isn’t that bad, but it definitely wasn’t one of better programs. This was from 1983, clearly one of my earlier attempts. Actually, it is kind of refreshing reminder how much better my programming has become. If this helps others learn, then by all means check out the listing.