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Blaze (Re-redux) Part 2
In my last Blaze-related post, I focused on improving performance without disturbing the structure too much. Asynchronous scrolling, dispatch tables, and a handful of other optimisations gave us a smoother, more responsive game. That worked – perhaps a little too well. Once the performance issues were out of the way,…
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Good Morning, Ataru
In the beginning… there was dust. Apes. Magnificent, wretched apes. Screaming at bones. At each other. At the void itself. Then, it appears. Silent. Black. Incomprehensible. A rectangle so perfect it could only be wrong. It does not speak. It does not need to. The apes touch it. And something……
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Blaze (Re-Redux)
I’ve been somewhat busy working on the next module for Ataru over the past few weeks, so I decided to take a break. I have been writing inordinate amounts of Z80 assembly language, and a crazy thought possessed me: what if I picked up Blaze’s train wreck of a source…
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Thus Spake Ataru
When I showed Ataru playing At Doom’s Gate to my wife, she thought I had built some sort of advanced ultrasonic pest repellent. I died a little inside. Apparently, in her hierarchy of priorities, preventing neighbourhood dogs from pooping in front of our house ranks slightly above coaxing a custom-built…
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Ataru (Reboot)
A few years ago, in the middle of a fairly severe burnout, I tried to motivate myself the way a sensible adult would: by living on YouTube. I had caught the BenEater bug and decided that what I really needed in my life was a breadboard Z80 computer. It worked.…
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Legend of ESPer Tetris
Sometimes you stare at the mountain of dev boards on your desk and realise that none of them actually play Tetris. This is how bad ideas are born. I could have grabbed a phone, installed one of the thousand clones, and moved on with my life. Or pulled out my…
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Pixardis Web IDE
AliExpress regret, compilers, WebAssembly, and educational mayhem disguised as a VM. It Started with Garbage Before the compiler, before the VM, there was just… bad hardware. Sandro (a colleague of mine) bought a pixel display off AliExpress. It wasn’t the worst thing ever (decent hardware, energy-efficient LEDs) but you couldn’t…
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Tiny Hero
A couple of years ago (in 2022, looking at the date on the presentation), I was tasked with developing some material to raise awareness of computer science – data structures, algorithms, state machines… that kind of thing. This is less of a problem when the audience is mature, but what…
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Updated Links
At some point, the original links to Blaze and World Warrior expired, so I’m creating this post to provide new ones. If you’re unfamiliar, Blaze was my take on a Sonic-style platformer for the Amiga, while World Warrior, which started as just a working title, was my attempt at a Street Fighter-inspired…
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Asteroids
I recently embarked on a journey to recreate the classic arcade game, Asteroids, using Rust, with the intention of deploying it on the web through WebAssembly. The Game For those who may not be familiar, Asteroids, originally released in the late 1970s, is a space-themed shooter game. In the game,…