I’m happy to (re?) introduce long-time friends Darren Morton, Brian Schultz, and Si Lewis as bloggers here. This is in an attempt to start putting together an audio services (recording mainly) business, and to document a broader array of nerdy projects. See also the new about page.
The lovely community of folks over at KBMOD.com have a regular feature in which they describe their Bro Caves, which are the dark, comfy rooms they set up their gaming PCs in. More importantly than the rooms though, are the specs of their actual PCs. Which all blow mine out of the water. Thus, this post won’t make it onto their site, but I have been doing some finishing touches on the suitcase PC lately, and I think I can finally say — tentatively as usual — it’s finished. So here’s an attempt at writing something in the same spirit.
So here’s one of those projects that sort of randomly materializes while rummaging through old stuff in the attic. I was looking for an enclosure to build a sort of “multi FX analog stompbox” for my guitar rig, when I found an old broken Atari 2600 in all its faux-wood-trimmed glory. Immediately the wheels started turning and I began taking it apart to see how much room was in there. Turns out there’s quite a bit of space, so I took to fitting a Line6 power supply PCB I’d recently scored on eBay into the bottom, and fitting the guts of a TU-2 tuner pedal, A/B switch, tremolo, and tube screamer clone into the top. Never has the Milwaukee rotary tool seen so much action.
Reading a recent article on Kotaku about the amazing programmer Tim Sweeny made me start reminiscing about some of the games I wrote on the Commodore 64 in my younger days. It would be a huge understatement to say that it’s regretful that all of those floppy disks containing thousands of boy-hours of programming work were lost many years ago — actually, think “boy losing his teddy bear”. One of those disks contained (and may still contain, probably in a landfill) a game written entirely in BASIC called The Maze. The original Maze may be lost, but watching the video of Sweeny’s ZZT — which I really want to play now — reminded me that there is one game that is still around: a QuickBasic port of The Maze that I wrote in college in an attempt to relive my childhood programming days. The Maze for QB retained a lot of the same features like a level editor, enemies that chased you, sound effects, save points, and a 30-room-based layout. I don’t think I’ve shared this game with anyone before, so I thought it might be fun to put out there for someone to try. (Eh, who am I kidding?) To this day, writing a decent video game, big or small, is still one of my life goals. This is not that game. :)
So here it is:
I haven’t written a personal-ish post in a while, and I’ve had more and more glimmers of inspiration lately (offset by deeper dives into senility), so I thought I might blog about some recent and upcoming projects.