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.

I just hit publish on a blog post I've had sitting around since December about Spellcaster, a lost programming language for teaching for the Apple II and Commodore 64 https://blog.information-superhighway.net/spellcaster

oh shit Reality on the Norm is twenty years old this year, Jesus Christ https://realityonthenorm.info/index.php

TIL Captain Mostly, the creator of such inscrutable MS-Paint AGS classics as "Richard Longhurst and the Box That Ate Time" and "Nihilism", went on to do design work on some Spongebob Wii games and is still in the Games Industry

Poking around in eXoDOS and played Blue Ice for the first time in a couple decades. Look at this fucking game! You grab the sun from the sky and put it in your inventory!

I have run through my KansasFest presentation twice tonight and it is maybe a couple minutes long but it will work. Phewww. There's pretty much nothing I could bear to cut at this point, and much that it pains me to have left out.

Overhauling my too-long KansasFest presentation to cut to the chase much faster for the third time

Man, organizing your thoughts for clear communication is hard

Inside you there are two wolves. Also inside you there is a goat and a cabbage. The boat inside you can only hold two things at once. How do you get everything across the river inside you without the wolves eating the goat or the goat eating the cabbage?

Just added a very simple version of this to the custom presentation software I wrote for my KansasFest talk and it's great, 10/10 would recommend this exist

Does any mainstream presentation software have features that help a presenter stay on track to deliver a talk within a given time frame? Like, some kind of speedrun-type indicator that tells you "whoops, spent longer on that slide than I expected, will have to pick up the pace a bit over here"

If not, why on Earth not

TIL about the "Symbols for Legacy Computing" Unicode block in Unicode 13
🯅 🯆 🯇 🯈
🯁🯂🯃🮲🮳
🯰🯱🯲🯳🯴🯵🯶🯷🯸🯹

just did the first runthrough of my kansasfest talk and it took 50 minutes

It needs to be 25 minutes so there is time for questions

😬

how did I not hear about this until now!! oh my god!!

what the fuck John Linnell has a new solo album for the first time in over twenty years and it's all in LATIN what the FUCK

A little while ago I bought a used electric guitar set, with amp and pedal. The pedal had a problem and it was WAY too noisy to use. Today I figured out that it was just a cold solder joint on the input jack, reflowed it, and now it's awesome?? It feels so good to fix shit

You can buy the CANYON⚡️MID shirt now if you want https://www.spreadshirt.ca/shop/user/spindleyq/

Had an extremely good t-shirt idea this morning

Poking around my old computer backups and I found my corpus of shareware readme files! Long ago, I wanted to extract registration mailing addresses from them and then plot shareware games on a map. Turns out this involves a ton of tedious manual work, but maybe there's a shittier incomplete version I could manage now with some dumb regexes and nice tooling.

I've discovered there's a Sega Genesis port of Cryo's Dune and they ported the AdLib soundtrack to the YM2612 and it just sounds WRONG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCFlmbVhqN4

I did it! I can officially swap between Honeylisp projects. Neu] [ower builds a disk image and uploads to MAME with the improved 8-Bitsy project model.

There is _SO_ much un-abstracted duplicate code right now, it's a real mess, but the important thing is that I can now seamlessly demo both of them in my presentation :)

Aaallllmost at the point where Honeylisp can build 8-Bitsy OR Neu] [ower without having to kill the editor and switch git branches