Tessera

More experimenting with Claude, I got it to add an mcp server to the emulator then hooked it up to my "disassemble Guardian" project. It's done a great job of filling in some of the missing gaps 😄 Next step, I want to see if it can learn how to play Guardian...

More work with Claude eventually resulted in disc loading working, so I was finally able to see if Apache Canyon would run on it.... It looks much better in the browser, for some reason I can't get OBS to capture nicely from the browser

I have a running Electron emulator 😀 Claude eventually got there, after going off and looking at Stardot threads, Elkulator source code and the Electron FPGA project! @0xc0de.bsky.social, at one point it even mentioned Electroniq The CPU is also passing all of Thomas Harte's 6502 tests

Yet another retro project started (must try finishing 1 at some point!) While on holiday I didn't have my laptop so I thought I would test Claude via my phone browser. I've been working with it to try and create (yet another!) Electron emulator. Its an interesting exercise, I'm leaving it entirely..

It's a lovely sunny day, summer seems to have arrived at last so what better way to spend it than to start dipping my toes into the world of 8bit game disassembly 😅 Guardian on the Acorn Electron was one of my favourites back in the day, so I'm going to (hopefully!) find out how it works...

Ran "Apache Canyon Deluxe" on a real Elk tonight to confirm the SWRAM detection code was working and also to see how if I really had as much "spare" CPU time available as the emulators were indicating. It looks like I have 1/3 of a screen of CPU spare in the worst (most busy) case so plenty of....

"If I had a pound for every time I've messed up Electron SWRAM bank selection latching I'd be a very wealthy man" 😅 Memo to self, your vsync polling needs to be in main memory, not SWRAM....

When you're moving some "old" code to run from SWRAM and while testing it crashes, when you then check your code and find that it was writing to ROM to simplify the logic in some cases - that's the moment I've just experienced 🤦‍♂️

@wokingperegrines.bsky.social , I think at least one of the eggs has hatched. I've not seen anything yet but you can definitely hear small peregrine noises 😄

@wokingperegrines.bsky.social I really hope I'm wrong but something doesn't look right with the nest, it looks like the female is upside down?

New "toy" arriving tomorrow, it's distantly related to my Acorn Electron and I'm going to use it to revisit my late 80s early 90s computing experience. Can you guess what it is? Clue #1 it has a proper keyboard

Snuggsy187@snuggsy187.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I'm still not sure what magic @snuggsy187.bsky.social worked to get the Electron's 1MHz 6502 to do this much work every 50th of a second! An incredible achievement, super addictive and a showcase for what is possible in a resource restricted environment. 👍

CHUCKULUS for the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro.... Download or play in browser: github.com/Snuggsy187/C... Coffee (no milk) welcome: ko-fi.com/snuggsy187

Play tested the new version of Apache Canyon up to a score of +200k on the real Elk tonight with no issues. I've also let the new demo mode test it on some emulated hardware, also with no issues so I think its time to release it :) V1.5 available here: github.com/rasto68/apac...

github.com

Really enjoying reading this at the moment, some fascinating insights into such an important time and the amazing team whose work touches all our lives. It's also helped me regain some retro coding mojo :)

How about Apache Canyon running on 6 different emulated hardware configurations ?

Time for a little stress testing

I've just watched my Apache Canyon "AI" play through to level 7 and beat the boss alien! A hi-score of 28150 too. I've got 16 bytes free to try and make it even better...

Rob Stone @rasto1968.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Making no progress on Astoraid, so I went back to Apache Canyon and got it building with the @0xc0de.bsky.social toolchain. Max65 helped me find 110 free bytes so I've added an attract/demo mode. It's not quite finished, but a new version coming soon. Its interesting watching your game play itself 😁

@snuggsy187.bsky.social , Chuckulous is proving a hit at ABUG 😀

Rob Stone @rasto1968.bsky.social · 9mo ago

If any data engineers with Databricks experience and an interest in AI are following me, then the company I work for are looking for someone like you 😄 Please DM me if interested.

Some beta testing on a new eagerly awaited Elk game this morning and this afternoon spending some time on Astoraid. Play area is 64 x 64 sectors containing 32 asteroids, but you don't know where they are to start with. The "scan" screen lets you find them :) Asteroids contain different things...

Some more "trying things out" 😀 The dev environment now has stars and the scan screen shows the locations of things. Plan is to get some of the gameplay elements tested out and then start porting the code over to 6502.

A day off work, so a little "fun" work instead :) Getting various plotting routines working in the dev mode and decided to go for a retro TV look ;) I've also worked on some more gameplay stuff including a map/scanner screen mock up that might make it in next. Oh and say hello to one of the aliens.

Another first for me - particle systems :) I wanted to see what the player jets would look like with particles instead of cycling sprites so used my dev system to try particles out. This is displaying a maximum of 16 particles at a time, I like the effect but wonder if it will be possible in 6502..

"Astoraid" but not running on an emulator/real hardware. I've created a mini dev environment using JavaScript + an HTML Canvas that lets me try things out much more quickly than writing lots of 6502. I have a library of routines that mimic the real hardware so the code is close to what it will be...

Great day at the ABUG south meet yesterday, nice to meet @colinhoad.com and to experience a game loading from a real tape! Lots of great chats and I even managed a bit of coding on Astoraid. Looking forward to the next one now.

Phew :) Algorithm for horizontal sprite clipping finally worked out in my JavaScript dev environment. Right side clipping was easy but for some reason my brain refused to co-operate for the left side clip and it took far too much head scratching. Next up vertical clipping which should be "easy"....

An afternoon of retro coding using JavaScript... 🤔 Working out the clipped sprite plotting was putting me off making progress so I decided to poc it using JavaScript and a canvas element. Not finished yet but it's certainly easier than trying to work it out in 6502 😄