Haven't had this in a few decades. #pepsi #pepsicrystal

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It's fascinating to think that this car was once brand new & fresh off a factory floor. Probably in Detroit.

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Let's Play Ultima 1! Part 1: Getting Started

Never finished it though I've played it many times.

Hello and welcome. I've finally decided to play through Ultima 1 from beginning to end. I've decided that I will not use a walk through or any other hints or cheats found on the web. I will try to use my wits and the provided manual to figure this stuff out. I'm playing the DOS version which I bought over on Good Old Games.

A little history. The first time I played Ultima 1 was back in the mid 80s. I had several friends who played it and a technique was to grill each other at school the day after an intense night of gaming. We'd let each other know any secrets we found or how to solve a quest if it proved to hard to figure out by our selves. Those were fun days of gaming.

One may wonder why I'm starting on Ultima 1 instead of Akalabeth  (or Ultima 0). A number of years ago I played Akalabeth on an Apple II emulator and recorded the process to be uploaded to YouTube.

After going through that I found it hard to actually want to play the game again. I might give it a go if/after I finish Ultima 1. There is now a C64 version of it out now and I'm thinking about giving that a go. We'll have to see.

Mr. Mister - Kyrie

Used to hate this song!

Ah, Kyrie by Mr. Mister. This song was on power rotation on Atlanta radio stations back in 1985. They played it so much that I actually was sick of it and it took many years before I was able listen to it again.

The lyrics "Kýrie, eléison" mean either "Lord have mercy" or "Christ have mercy" in Greek and according to composer Richard Page the song was basically a prayer. Think about it.  "Kýrie, eléison down this road that I must travel. Kýrie, eléison through the darkeness in the night."

It's funny, now I quite enjoy the song and will freely listen to it whenever I hear it.

As far as living in the 80s when this song came out it reminds me of the early years I had my Commodore 64 and playing games like "Bruce Lee", "Spy Hunter" or "Raid on Bungling Bay". It also reminds me of road trips from Conyers to the malls in Atlanta with my friend Tracy.

I rate this song highly.

Controller Woes

Curse you analogue controller!

Wow, it's been a few weeks since I last posted anything here. I should remedy that.

I think I will.

Let's talk programming.

When we last talked I'd been working on a Zelda-like for Linux and I'd made a bit of progress. One of the things I was testing was the ability to use a controller.

SDL2 makes it fairly simple to hook a controller up to your computer, find it and use it and I did tests that did just that. Using the left analogue stick I made a sprite move around the screen. This worked well for both horizontal and verticle moves. But there was a problem.