Posts

Posted on

After-show after shock :)

It’s been a few days since Saturday. I’m still a little worse for wear, as I’m not really a great traveller these days.. but my heads settled a bit for commenting etc 🙂

Anyway – Howard kindly offered to take both of us down the long stretch from his home town, picking me and the kitchen sink (metaphorically – the actual thing is still firmly attatched) on the long way down to the Retroshow.

I don’t think I quite calculated the distance there – but I believe it was something in the region of at least 160-200 miles! Ouch!

A great journey down – a nice smooth drive – and only a quick coffee (in my case) break … and we got there a pretty reasonable time – just before 10 when the show opened.

The venue itself is a nice comfortable sized place. People who’ve only been to big glitzy shows like Manchester may have been shocked, but to Howard and myself who had visited the Wetherby and Bolton Norther SAM and Spectrum Show – and Bobby Brenchley’s shows in Gloucester – the venue was a familiar sort of size.

A great spread of stall holders out – some great machines in the flesh as it where. Gordon had made a great start on the table for ourselves – with his SAM altready in place… and some great Screen Plotters advertised on the wall, that he’s made for SAM + Spectrum, and also for CPC, C64 and others…. I’ll add a buy link for them when I have one as they’re worth the pittance he’s asking!

We soon added both mine and Howards Sam to the collection.. which did leave the table rather packed – but gave some people who had not seen even one SAM before – a chance to be very spoiled 🙂

On the left, My own SAM – with a couple of familiar characters decorating the wrist rest [my trinity sticking up as you can see! You might also notice the keyboard + interface.], Howards SAM on the middle screen – running Stratosphere [www.samcoupe.com] and some belting music from my little speakers and the Quazar Soundcard [also from www.samcoupe.com] …. Gordon’s machine towards the wall with Lemmings running… 🙂

A bit more later… got to add some piccies and more – so a bit of an update tonight 🙂

Posted on

Thank you!

There’s a number of people I am grateful to for support while i’ve been working on this… and they’re all getting their turn in the scrolly – so I’ll leave that for then 🙂

However I’m particular humbled by the great work by Gordon Wallis – who’s been working hard on producing some really excellent work on the graphical side.

Not to mention being very good at QC! 🙂

Some of Gordon’s work may not appear in the release version … but they will certainly be used for further projects in the planning stages 🙂

Likewise – there’s a number of more talented coders who’ve helped point me in the right direction with some issues – but particularly helpful has been the very patient Balor … thanks for putting up with me so far! 🙂

And thanks to other Entropy members who’ve contributed in

Right – back to getting stuff together…!

Posted on

Giving credit where it’s due

If you’ve landed at this page because of the retro show please remember that it’s a joint project between other the members of entropy and not just yours truly.

There’s other people who have contributed to this and I’ll give them all credit for that hard work

Posted on

As I mentioned earlier…

Was given this link the other day … but it’s a shock hearing me speaking to Matthew 🙂

This was at the Retro show in Manchester a couple of months back .. was great to see Matthew finally – and interesting to hear some of the background to JSW.

Posted on

Phew!

Play Expo yesterday… and a chance to listen to a certain well-known Matthew Smith talking about a couple of slightly-well-known games.

And a quick word or two after as well!

Rather pleased to say the least 🙂

Was also nice to hear that when people realised I was involved with a well known SAM game – they mentioned saying it was one of the best none-Spectrum versions 🙂

And on an honestly-not-related note – nice to see that some Manic Miner / JSW fans are liking the look of almost-finished project 🙂

I feel like a months worth of coffee in one go!

Time to get mining through the code again later!!!

Posted on

So….

WordPress…. hmmm… not used to this yet.

I briefly tried TuskFish – which is quite a nice microCMS system – ideal for somethings – but it wasn’t quite right for me.

I tried to switch to ImpressCMS – which is still a great system – but to be honest, I was having issues set up. I may still go back to that yet…

But in the end i’ve got to wordpress for now…

Let’s see how it goes.

Posted on

Platform games….

On my sabatical from Z80 based systems I was doing a lot of fun* things with CMSs. So using Tumblr really feels like both: a) a refreshing change b) a crippling change

So – I’m thinking… do I try and install a CMS again?

Honest answer – I’m not sure. I’ve used some systems – and even contributed in one way or the other with them. And even though I can appreciate their positive aspects – there’s always the concern about security.

At the end of the day – there’s a lot of naughty and not nice people out there. Ok, I appreciate there are some well meaning hacker types who will advise developers of where they’ve gone wrong… but there’s also not-so-nice types who delight in being unpleasant. And at the end of the day – whatever size project you’re supporting – there’s always that risk that some not-well-meaning type will make life just too hard for a projects team.

Putting all that aside – I’m still considering it. There’s one or two smaller projects I rather like the look of – and there’s the obligitory over sized projects like WordPress… but as I said – security is my concern. And stability.

Knowing which CMS platform to go for is harder than deciding where to place what type of platform tile in a room or series of rooms, that’s for certain!

Oh fun fun fun. Let’s get back to some code and graphics fixes instead while I ponder on all this!

Hugs + Kisses

*Fun is a term that I would use both in an accurate – and a very satirical vein. Projects, unfortunately, involve people. People can be very nice, very helpful, and good fun to go on camping trips with. Or they can be complete *******  who go behind peoples back, steal servers, rip off code with no creditation, go on a hate and smear campaign – and basically be complete and utter…. well not nice people. Come to think of it – that’s probably the same in all communities sadly.

PS: Edited a naughty word!

Posted on

Updates

Well flu did really mess me up recently. Only just getting back into my stride again….

However – before my breathing system got replaced with a mixture of superglue and sawdust – work was moving along rather well on level one of the game.

Indeed – it appears that I only really need to add some corrected sprites (slightly mislined in the grabbing process), some conveyor belts moving the right direction (but why can’t I confuse people and have the pointing the wrong way? :)) and a couple of key blocks.

Otherwise it’s looking pretty good.

The good thing is – that the work on level 1 will also rather help with level 2 somewhat – so as soon as my fixes are done in the next few days (hopefully!) then I can finally get 2 underway.

Also managed to get a nice shiny new font installed…. and realised that if I want – I could even go for a multi-colour approach. I’ll have to test that though to see what it looks like…

I have been toying with a few miner (ho ho) changes to the finished names of the game and levels – not set in stone (ho ho) yet – but we’ll see very soon!

Anyway – back to the vics, and early night – and perhaps more code tomorrow again!