The Inner Workings Of A Coders Brain
Posts tagged Retro
Review Of Old Games
05 years
So, I found a video on YouTube of one of my really old Amiga games and it inspired me to work on making some pages about some of these projects, what the challenges were and anything else that comes to mind during the development. The particular game in question was one of my earlier ports of my Twinz game to the Amiga, but was a version I thought for sure I had lost the source code for. At some point during it’s Aminet presence, it was pulled and played. The website android4fun.net is extremely popular among the players around the world to acquire the modded android games or applications.
As I started looking at some of my Discography lists, it came to my attention that I was actually missing a lot of different projects, including all of my current App Store apps, so I figure it would be a great time to start working on some of this, plus it will be a great trip down memory lane about the good old days!!
My Game Development on Amiga was fairly slim, I made a good couple of dozen unfinished games, and spent most of my time focussing on smaller routines. In the beginning, development was mostly in AMOS & AMOSPro. I then upgraded to SAS/C and worked on a few unfinished projects there, and at the end I was doing some porting work using StormC with my good friend Paul.
Over the next few weeks, I will dig through my old archives and see if I can get any of these old games and projects running. I know I have a few screenshots for some of the bigger projects, but it will be extremely interesting to pull out some of the *really* old and bad stuff! Stay tuned!!
Latest Addition To My Commodore Family!
114 years
My new Commodore plus/4, in excellent condition and fully working. Even has the original warranty, leaflets and factory stickers on it!
While at the local flea market this weekend I picked up a nice little addition to my family of Commodore computers, a commodore plus/4 in excellent condition. I even had to go out and buy a small portable TV so I could use it, as I couldn’t find my Commodore video cable anywhere, and of course none of the local electronic stores even knew what a 262 degree male DIN plug was hehe 🙂 Amateurs 🙂
The plus/4 was released after the C64. and didn’t live up to its older brother for many different reasons. While it had more memory access and some tools built into the ROM, it lacked many of the things that the C64 used for games (sprite abilities and that sweet SID sound) and so it never really took off in those areas. It did feature the first issue of what would eventually come to be the Amiga keyboard, with a much more comfortable typing experience than the C64 keys.
Still, it’s a great and welcomed piece to my collection 🙂
A Couple more pictures:
Using MorphOS Again For the First Time In Years!
014 years
Finally getting somewhere 🙂
In the last week or so, I have been convinced to un-box my Pegasos II motherboard and boot it up to have a play around with it. It has been at least 3 or 4 years since I last even looked at the board, let alone turned it on. I got the board when I was employed with Epic Interactive, as I ported several games to MorphOS/Mac/Linux at the same time. At that time, I was using MorphOS 1.4 which was very buggy and not very intuitive. While it was nice to be able to run all of my old Amiga apps again, the instability of the OS made it a very troubling task. I still remember the nightmares I had trying to get various ports to build correctly without crashing the system, or editing code changes. Good old days 🙂
After playing around with the Open Firmware (which I am quite sure is horribly out of date) I was able to figure out how to boot the Peg from the CD, and install the OS to the hard drive. It took me a little while to get used to where the different settings were, then I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t see the HD, until I realiszed it wasn’t in RDB mode. After that, slapped on a few Amiga partitions and bingo, off it went.
My experience in the short time I have played with the OS is that it is much nicer and cleaner than it used to be. It has come a long way with the new Ambient and other tools. I will take a full play with it and even get it online in the next few days to see just what is out there and available for it. I was very happy to see that they finally included a TCP stack as standard that didn’t have to be registered by itself to use fully. As much as I loved Miami (and did pay for it back in the days of the Amiga), I don’t have my keys anymore and wasn’t able to get Nordic to re-issue them to me.
As much as I would like to start making games for MorphOS again, im not sure if I want to pay the $111 euros to get a license key for something I won’t use all that often, and still not even sure if it’s something thats worth developing for. Based on the price alone, which is a little bit less than buying the new Windows 7 operating system upgrade, i’m sure that there are many people who are still only using the 30 minute restricted version. I have a few games that could be ported, but they will have to wait for a while.
If any MorphOS developers have any free keys they want to give away, feel free to throw one this way 🙂
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