Not a lot of time for programming this month, but I did get around to adding coins to my running game. Funny how little things take time to hack about. I’m not completely happy with it, but it works. Run 3 ML does give a whole new meaning to infinite runner.
Well, hard to believe we are turning the corner on March and heading into April. Spring is edging its way in and it is time to get outside and work in the yard. This made me want to kick my ZX81 program to the curb, but it didn’t feel right. So, I bundled up my current progress on Run.
For some time now, I’ve wanted to build a running type game. The kind where there is a single key to press and releasing it makes you take an action. There are lots of variations on this theme, and it seemed like something fun to try. Idea in hand, I began by building out a rough look for the game.
Wandering through Mecabricks the other day, I ran across a fun pair of Mini-Katana’s by Shipmaster. Digging deeper, I also discovered his excellent Katana. Both models really appealed to me. Given my recent binge watching of Forged in Fire, both made for excellent subjects to render. As is usual for me, I promptly saved the models and fired up Blender.
Over the last month, I’ve been doing some housekeeping on my website. I’ve had a few lingering issues to take care of. Unsurprisingly, this led me down a few different paths. From simple fixes to big ones, I’ve made a few subtle changes that impact the feel of my site. Hinted at in my change log, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the adjustments made thus far.
Having spent spent my time with physical LEGO builds lately, my render output has dropped quite a bit. Getting around to visiting Mecabricks again, I ran across a nicely designed model by Furbysims of a Chalet. Since it lacked a render, I thought to myself, “I can add one!” So I did.
I haven’t had much time for programming the last few months. To get back into things, I decided to take an old BASIC program of mine and rewrite it. Thinking about what to convert, my mind immediately went to Enlarger. It was a rather slow animation demo that could use an update.
January has rolled around and it felt fitting to update my blog’s title screen image for the New Year. I was fortunate enough to get away to warmer areas and was able to capture this picture. It is my mood of late, looking out towards the horizon. My goal is to make this blog relaxing and open, a refreshing place to come and enjoy life for a bit. Perhaps a lot of what I share is looking back with my retro work. But there is that mystical quality to it all. If anything, I can relax with a drink each time I visit my site. Hope you can as well.
For years, Water Bug II has been an interesting game for me. I was so excited when completing the first version, that I wanted to build another one with ten more boards. The funny thing is, the two games look a lot alike. In fact, if you weren’t paying attention, I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought you were playing the same game. Let’s dig deeper on both the similarities and the differences.
For most of the day, I’ve been thinking about my Water Bug game as I never really gave it a proper write-up. Finally got around to playing it again, I was surprised to find elements in that I thought were unique to Water Bug II are actually in this version. That made me want to walk through each board, understanding better what I had done, what worked, and what didn’t. Let’s dive right in.
Like many teenagers in the early eighties, I was playing video games on my Atari VCS. Yars’ Revenge was a popular purchase, and I spent many hours dodging that stupid missile and trying to take down the shields of the Qotile. It then should come at no surprise that I tried to recreate that game at 13. My attempt on the ZX81 didn’t look horrible, but it sure played bad. Let’s see how much.
My original plan was to create an z80 assembler version of Moon Lander. But with the trailer release for the next Matrix movie, I found myself revisiting another program. Built entirely in machine language, Z80 Digital Rain expands on my previous version with a splash of color. Let’s dive deeper.
Last month, I shared an old moon landing program I wrote back in the early 80s. Right after that, I decided to give it a bit of a face lift, updating the visuals without changing the game play. Moon Lander v2 is my updated game, yet still the same BASIC code under hood.
When I first started programming, one of the games we would play on the old teletype machines was a simple moon lander game. The premise is you would use your thrusters to softly land on the moon. Moon Lander was my take of that program a few years later.
As a young teenager, I often wrote programs that I would integrate into other play. In this case, I had probably watched War Games again. The idea of a computer talking to you made for some fun fantasy play. Comp Control a little pretend play where my lowly ZX81 mimicked a much more sophisticated world. I’m sure I was running around my room thinking up some crazy way to save the world.
While watching a review for the new M1 iMac, they ran the typical Blender test as a benchmark. That wasn’t overly surprising, but the reviewer did say something that peaked my interest. Apparently, the latest version of Blender now supported Apple Silicon. Tucking that tidbit away at the time, I got around to downloading LTS 2.93 today and giving it a whirl.
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.