Articles by Steven

Funny enough, I'm still having a surplus of fun creating AI art. Between challenges and random ideas, it's been quite a year. I love reading articles and seeing what other creative minds come up with. Reading "This AI Tool Combines Stable Diffusion's Level of Control and Midjourney's Image Quality — It's Called Distillery," by Jim Clyde Monge, I was intrigued by some of his images and thought I'd give it a whirl with my own whimsical prompt.

I've talked about Tower of Love before, but that was a much different version of the game. That version was all about the intro screen and my initial attempt at the story. I even showed another design I had made. To my surprise, I had a third version of the adventure that I started. Time to share!

Pitfall! without the peril, with this accurate ZX81 simulator.--> While contemplating what ZX81 program to write about this month, I completely forgot that I had created a Pitfall! Simulator. It began as a fun project to occupy my time during winter break. My initial goal was to recreate David Crane's LSFR (Linear Feedback Shift Register) in Z80. However, after learning more about its functionality, I took the project much further than I had originally intended.

A recently posted meme reminded me of the silly things we did on computers. In the early eighties, most computers came with BASIC as their default OS. A common starting point was a s simple “hello world” program. But almost as often, someone wrote something a bit more personal. This is my tribute program to the “I was here” concept of those days.

I saw the Commodore 64 maze generator for years, but ignored it on my ZX81 for different reasons. For one, the characters needed didn’t exist on the ZX81 keyboard. The other was the lack of automatic scroll. Undeterred this month, I created my own version in Sinclair BASIC. I’m quite happy with the results, even if not quite the same.

It’s been some time since I moved my music over to Myspace after the reboot of Acid Planet. I’ve never been happy with it and have looked for alternatives on and off again. I ran across another offering called Audio.com and decided to give it a try.

Hard to believe, but I’ve been futzing with AI art on NightCafé for a month now. I’d dabbled with DALL-E for some time, but not consistently. The social aspect of NightCafé is probably the biggest draw. Besides sharing content and seeing what others have made, but I get prompt ideas and support. Perhaps the biggest advantage are the challenges. I‘m slowing getting better. Today, I got into the top 20% for the third time in an official daily challenge.

In my final article about Mandelbrot sets, I’m sharing the hybrid program built from the last two. After finishing the chunky graphics version, I envisioned a merged version. This split graphic version is a nice compromise to showcase the beauty of the fractal.

I haven’t done a short blog post in some time but today is an opportunity. I’ve been playing around with AI generative art using NightCafe. It is quite a fun community. Whether you love or hate generative AI, it is the narrative of the day. Always one to try out technology, it is interesting to see what things emerge from various prompts.

I was futzing around with my site yesterday, checking stats and stuff. Seems my Wordle article using word clouds is one of the more popular ones. I have a feeling it relates more the game than the word cloud I wrote about it. After a quick view, I realized that the site I was linking to wasn’t active anymore. Thus, I began a short journey to find something else?

After completing my Chunk Graphics mode, my thoughts went to how best to use it. My first idea was something new, such as a flight simulator. After pondering, I stuck with something current by modifying my Mandelbrot Set program. With three gradients, it would be an interesting use of the mode.

I recently purchased the Princess Leia (Boushh) Helmet. It looks great next to my other helmets, including the custom C-3PO Helmet MOC I assembled some time back. The problem is C-3PO doesn’t have a matching name plate. I’ve been wanting to fix that for some time, but couldn’t find a decent template. Given up, I decided to create my own. Follow along to see how I made it.

Out on a run back in November of last year, I had this idea to create a 3-color screen mode of the ZX81. The idea was to use the checkered, or gray, graphic characters to add a third color. After reading about the C64 color modes, I called it chunky graphics as an homage to its wide pixel format. The pixel’s are chunky due to the 2x1 ratio and not being square. Let’s dig into the details.

After finishing the basic version of the cat animation, I wanted to improve the frame speed. This meant converting from BASIC to machine code. My first thought was to do the conversion with MCODER II. I dropped that idea, deciding to focus on a custom z80 Assembly version. Ergo, cat written in assembly or Fast Cat is, well, a faster version and a bit more.

The holiday's provided me a nice break to enjoy writing code. During that time, I revisited my digital rain program. For ZX81 Rain, I cleaned up the colors and added a little randomness to where the drops start. Nothing super exciting, but the overall effect is much nicer and looked good in both black/white and color on the ZX81.

It’s been awhile since I talked about coding on my site. I’m still using a custom Perl CMS—although the group I worked with has long since disbanded. In any case, I’ve generally used a more basic editor on my site. Although I’d love to someday integrate something more complex, the simplicity has made it easy for me to maintain my blog. But, that doesn’t mean I can’t make it better.

Reading some old programming books from the eighties, I saw that the ZX81 had an ABS command that made me think I could improve my FizzBuzz program. It was late and my mind mixed that command with a modulus one, which the ZX81 doesn’t have. In any case, it offered me an excuse to fix the latency introduced by printing numbers.

I had this idea the other day. One of the problems I’ve had with the ZX81 is printing numbers, which is pretty slow. Due to this, many of my games avoided printing them. delaying showing score until after play has ended. My idea was to try to find a way to speed that up. Not only did I find a way, I decided to implement it in an older game of mine: E.T.

With any new year comes a unique set of challenges. For 2023, that includes a number of external pressures that will shape the year to come. From managing inflation, a burgeoning recession, and controlling what you can, the year is looking to be one filled with both struggle and opportunity. Facing that head on, I signed up for a 50K that I ran last week. A picture from that run now sets the tone of my site.

A recent post in a Facebook BASIC group of a cat animation. A couple of other members converted it to their BASIC code of choice. Mine being the ZX81, I promptly worked on a version for it. I created a mostly full screen version, which tends to show how slow the ZX81 really was. In any case, it was quite a fun little exercise.

I missed the Dec 26 deadline for submitting, but did get a star working on the ZX81. My attempt isn’t spectacular, but it does work. I recommend checking out the other entries for Vintage Christmas Star Challenge.

I’ve been on a retro computing binge lately and was recently watching one on programming on what it was like to program in the 80’s. Having lived and programmed during that time, I know full well what that was like. But the narrator was showing off an Apple ][+, a computer I didn’t own. Although I programmed on an Apple ][ in high school, my memory of it is vague at best. But what was really interesting was what he was programming: a snake game. Being something I’d never tried myself, I thought now would be as good time as any.

My frist isometric test was with a static background. Although that works well, it limits the size of the playfield. Thus, I decided to expand the playfield and scroll it around the player instead. It ended up being a lot more complex than I expected.

Looking at various ideas for retro style games, something I’ve been wanting to try has been isometric graphics. I have a pretty good hand on tile based graphics now and wondered if I could do something similar with an isometric set. Hunkering down, here is how my testing is going.

Okay, after finishing my BASIC program version of Mandelbrot Sets, I decided I needed more speed. I wasn’t sure if I could write a version in assembly. My concern was the floating point math. After a good amount of research, and trial and error, I finally got a version working. This is my story.