Spindley Q Frog @SpindleyQ@gamemaking.social

#introductions
I'm Jeremy! I am interested in weird videogames and retrocomputing.

I founded glorioustrainwrecks.com, a community focussed on creating a positive and accessible place for anyone who wants to make games.

I host the Fringe Game History Podcast, where I interview folks about the early days of weird, personal game dev communities and creators.

I wrote Neut Tower, a puzzle game created entirely on an actual-hardware 286 MS-DOS PC, which I am currently porting to the Apple II.

was googling around a bit and stumbled upon a forum thread that I started in 2006 entitled "Why do I have an insatiable hunger for terrible Myst clones?" so I guess I've just always been like this http://mirrors.glorioustrainwrecks.com/gamersquarter/viewtopic.php?t=1029

Playing through Riven for the first time and it’s so good I want to play through all the terrible Myst knockoffs of the 90s

oh SHIT there's an open-source 6502 in-circuit emulator you can build yourself for $50?! With this I could basically control actual hardware the same I way I control GSplus! https://github.com/hoglet67/AtomBusMon/wiki

now I _really_ wish I had an Apple IIe

I recorded a rambling 15-minute demo and explanation of my Honeylisp project, if anyone is interested in seeing all the pieces put together in video form. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9TG1G0l3xY #fennel #retrocomputing #gamedev

I've been thinking of doing development streams but I kind of wanted a "what the hell are you even doing" introduction video out there first.

Beginning to suspect I have substantially increased my daytime water intake by switching to a water bottle with a lid that is really satisfying to pop open

it's basically just a fidget toy that is unambiguously OK to unconsciously put in my mouth

Really wish I still had an Apple IIe so I could see what the colours looked like, the IIgs definitely does some creative interpretation

It runs on actual hardware too!

I wrote a map editor!

So Neut Tower has a couple of elements that use colour to indicate their state, and it turns out on the Apple II, the dot pattern for red and the dot pattern for green are identical, so anyone hypothetically playing on a monochrome monitor would not be able to tell them apart.

Spent a few minutes tinkering with alternate designs before realizing that this obviously means I really ought to add a colourblind mode to MS-DOS Neut Tower

Is Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door the first game in which Mario canonically gets email spam

messing with my tile editor and had a moment where I was like "this would be SO much cleaner and shorter if I wrote it in an imgui style"

spent an evening implementing love-imgui integration into lite. it was awkward and had some issues, but I made it work. Then I realized that love-imgui doesn't really expose the pieces you need to implement your own widgets.

this evening, wrote my own tiny imgui with just the pieces I need. ~50 loc. Works great.

definitely getting close to totally giving up on my weird hacked GSPlus fork in favour of trying to integrate with MAME instead, which supposedly has first-class Lua scripting support now

I mean who doesn't want to just fuckin' embed an assembler directly inside MAME

Got a very primitive version of hot code reload up and running in an emulator! I had to, uh, patch the emulator a little, to work around some bugs / weird behaviour caused by my chosen debugging interface being basically abandoned. But it works!

o, what a pitiful shame that we are stuck with Javascript as the lingua franca of the web, all of its many dangerous warts and pitfalls an indelible stain on the platform

now to take a big sip of coffee as I ponder the timeless beauty of the Unix way, with its elegant lingua franca, shell scripts

tempted to implement full-tile copy/paste to start messing with animations, but I save the tiles to a JSON file so it's pretty trivial to just literally copy/paste the text in there

Implemented in-editor colour preview, which seems to match the fake NTSC artifact colour logic used by the IIgs, if not the exact palette. Fun to scribble around and watch greens and purples appear from nothing.

hmm, nope, I miscounted; it's just my editor adding a byte at the end sometimes. I went in and deleted it by hand and now it's behaving itself

NTSC artifact colour is kind of unpleasant to design around! I thought 16 EGA colours was tough but 6 colours and also you can't draw even numbers of coloured pixels unless you have black on one side and white on the other and also you need at least two pixels in a row to make white... that is tougher

apparently I have matching off-by-one bugs in my tile drawing code and in my tile editor, because there are two extra bytes in every tile and it's throwing off my tile lookup routine :/