Jason kelk - Part 3

Run-up to Replay

October 24th, 2011 by Jason

Replay is on its way and I’m all excited… and slightly panicky since I’ve got about ten days to get the game I’m planning to release finished and “organise” myself. In fact I probably shouldn’t be wasting time with a blog post at this point! The game is coming along fairly nicely and the code is pretty much complete barring a couple of cosmetic details and one last minute feature I need to bolt in, but the mad rush is going to be designing and wedging all the level data in – fortunately I’ve got this week off work, so I’ll be drinking tea in industrial quantities and running Doctor Who DVDs in the background with the volume cranked up until it’s (hopefully) done.

I’ve already put a couple of days into getting everything ready for the event (including testing the newly-arrived DivIDE with the Oldschool Gaming Spectrum +2) although I did take last Friday off because that nice Harold Camping said the end of the world was coming… again. He’s such a joker isn’t he! The irony is that his own staff didn’t get the day off for the rapture and subsequent destruction of the world whilst I did! That’s a win for me even if I’m not entirely sure at what level.

Tags: DivIDE, panic, Replay 2011, Spectrum +2
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Digging around

September 15th, 2011 by Jason

Okay, so I’ve been relatively busy lately (so “forgot” to blog) and one of the things I did was tootle down to Kent to see family and friends and a garage of my old stuff. So, along with taking some bits and pieces back with me, I also took a few pictures and this post might be just a tad photo heavy…

This is an ATonce board, which is a PC AT emulator for the Amiga 500 and 500 Plus. It boasts a startling 7.2MHz of raw 80286 power with CGA, EGA and mono VGA graphics goodness. Yeah, it’s basically a 286 PC on a board that uses the Amiga as I/O, I think it cost me about a tenner because the stock was being cleared, but I never actually got around to installing the thing into an A500.

The way the prices on eBay are going, anyone’d think the C64GS was rare… or is it just me with three knocking about? Well, there’s more than three but I only found the board for a fourth machine and suspect that the fifth might be in our loft here somewhere and there could be more (six VIC 20s turned up, twice as many as I remember owning). One of these machines is not like the others though, because…

…although we didn’t finish the work, a friend and I started converting one C64GS into a C64. The two points of interest, a six pin serial connection and a keyboard connector added to the motherboard that wouldn’t normally be there, are marked in red and this is the unit that came back with me and starred in this video loading from one of the TIB DD-001 drives that made their way to Leeds in February.

Ah, my (t)rusty old Compunet modem. I never got to use the service itself, but Sean Connolly and I used to trade work files back and forth – we’d do it on Sundays because the phone calls were cheaper! Ah, those were the days when you got 1200 baud one way and 75 the other, so user-to-user transfers had to go at the lower speed.

A Camputers Lynx… there isn’t much I can actually say about this beastie, I got it untested from a charity shop without any leads or PSU and have never got around to actually firing it up. I previously found a dead spider inside when I opened it, though.

This is a wafer drive for the C64 (similar to the Sinclair Microdrive) that connects to the cassette port. This particular unit kept eating the boot wafer so it never actually worked, but that’s not really surprising for something that cost a fiver at a computer show I suppose…

This graffiti is on a wall by Sainsburys in Canterbury… yes Pac, we do indeed miss you – come back! [Sob!]

And finally, here’s the Amiga 1200 with 4Mb of RAM in it’s trapdoor and a battery-backed clock that stunned me by still working after all these years! Since getting it up to Leeds, I’ve replaced the 500Mb 2.5″ hard disk with a 2Gb CF card, ordered the cheap and cheerful PCMCIA to CF converter which can be seen poking out of the side (with a 32Mb FAT16 formatted card so I can quickly swap data back and forth between Amiga and PC), registered the excellent WHDLoad and possibly installed the odd game or two… I’ll even put the top half of the case back on eventually!

Tags: Amiga 1200, ATOnce, C64, C64GS, Camputers Lynx, Compact Flash, Compunet, modem, wafer drive
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Homebrew Coding Weekend 2

July 23rd, 2011 by Jason

So where have I been recently…? Well, along with pretty much finishing Edge Grinder on the C64 (of which more in the near future) I did spend last weekend in Manchester, at the Lass O’ Gowrie pub for In Da 80s and in particular the Homebrew Coding Weekend 2. The main event was pretty much a sequel to Console Combat from a couple of years back, so it was another chance to meet at the Lass and play video games for a weekend; some people didn’t quite make it to the end, a bleary-eyed SirClive told me a tale of Saturday night clubbing at a place that kicked out at 7am so a few souls were “recovering” on Sunday morning!

The Coding Weekend was a great opportunity to actually meet other people writing code for 8-bits (and indeed 16-bits since there was a SNES prototype on show), put a couple of faces to online names and chat at length about ideas, demonstrate prototypes or even nearly complete games, that sort of thing. Cramming all of the programmers attending into the snug was something of a push but Jonathan Cauldwell and David Hughes were there demonstrating their latest Spectrum games, I was waving a nearly finished Edge Grinder around (quite literally, I had to hold my old Acer laptop at shoulder height so people could see the screen), Tom Walker had several releases over a raft of formats for people to see including a sequel to Hard Hat Harry on the BBC, Kees Van Oss flew over from the Netherlands with several Acorn Atom conversions of Retro Software titles and Mark “GroovyBee” Ball brought his trusty 7800 to demo several games that he assured us weren’t Photoshopped. Some industrious hardware hackers had bolted a SID into an Acorn Atom and at one point “borrowed” a replacement 8580 from a C64C that had been sprayed green and attached to the pub wall!

A couple of industry veterans including Stephen Robertson, Jim Bagley and Paul Hughes were present and Andy Walker, who coded Super Pipeline 2 and Cad-Cam Warrior for the C64 as the head honcho of Taskset and developed coin-op The Pit which inspired Namco’s Dig Dug, was interrogated in the nicest of ways by Paul Drury; I got the chance for a quick chat later on and Andy seemed to be a really nice chap, genuinely and happily surprised that people were interested in what he and everyone else had produced during the 1980s.

I’d like to say a quick “thank you” to everyone behind the event for putting so much effort into what was a great weekend and, if you’ve read this and are lamenting the fact that you missed out, the fantastic news is that there’s more in the pipeline; although it’s been re-branded as the Homebrew Gaming Weekend, the next event will be at Lass over the first weekend of December and, because the focus is on homebrew all the way across the board, we’ll be getting more space – anyone with an interest should consider going regardless of if they’re coders, graphics artists, musicians, hardware hackers or gamers.

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