No Time To Play

Back when I first tried making a roguelike, Javascript wasn’t anyone’s first choice of language for a game. In all honesty, that was in the dark ages before Firefox. Nowadays, the various browsers sport much more functionality (and compatibility), so it’s no surprise that more JS roguelikes are being developed. As I’m trying to make one again, I figured it would be a good idea to see what’s out there. Two titles in particular have given me food for thought.

(continue reading…)

While my recent game Buzz Grid was very well received, virtually everybody complained about having to use WASD instead of the cursor keys. All my attempts to explain that it was a technical limitation fell on deaf ears. That’s natural; people need solutions, not explanations. But until recently, I couldn’t think of any way to add special key support in a portable manner without either:

• making the code much more complicated or
• making the game depend on some external library.

(continue reading…)

We interrupt our regular program to let you know that Ramus has been updated. The new version has two changes:

• A bug was fixed whereas the the starting fragment was not being parsed for templates when initially displayed.
• Smooth scrolling has been added, based on this ITnewb tutorial.

The latter may still need some fine-tuning, but I cleaned up the most egregious idiocies in the code, and in any event it’s better than without the effect. Enjoy!

I’ve wasted the past week getting back into an older hobby of mine, namely retrocomputing (and -gaming).

So far I found:

• a BASIC compiler for the ZX Spectrum, a more convenient alternative to the z88dk cross-compiler. Not that I plan to do any development for the good old Speccy. (Insert shifty eyes here.)

• a modern, open source 8-bit console, roughly comparable to the Nintendo Entertainment System, except simpler and more powerful. In a genius move, they designed it to use the same controllers, which are plentiful due to a thriving NES clone market.

• a publisher selling new games for old machines, and I mean on casette tape, boxed and everything. What are you going to play them on? Why, an original micro, of course!

Then again, that’s about all you can do with a Spectrum, whereas a Commodore 64 can accomodate modern hardware and a modern operating system, and actually serve web pages. Which doesn’t cease to amaze me, pointless as it may be.

Why bother with these ancient, ridiculously underpowered machines? Aside from the nostalgia factor, I think any modern software developer has much to learn from the sheer variety and quality of available titles. Nowadays, we have millions of times more resources, yet all too often we don’t know what to do with them. And there’s too much waste in the world as it is.

(Illustration: Computer Museum: assorted microcomputers, by cmnit; CC-BY-SA)

Retro diversions by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.