#PPP Day 83 - TUMS

PPP stands for "Personal Picture Project" and is something I started doing in October of 2017 when I was informed my mom's chemo therapy had stopped working and the end we'd been putting off was near.

I did PPP for 82 days and it was nothing but an activity to get my mind off the dire situation at the time.

My mom passed away February 16th, 2018. Ten days before my birthday. I was heart broken.

I miss my mom and I was looking back at my old pictures. I liked them. I liked the process.

So, I've decided to pick up the daily habit more to honor her memory than to take my mind off of her loss.

Tums? I've some stomach issues lately.

Well, Well, Well...

I had used this blog to cross-post Instagram photos in a kind of fire and forget way and it seems its gone awry.

For one the images aren't even showing up.

Also, it seems to have quit around January of 2020. Back when this, errr, unforgettable year started.

Self driving cars can't come fast enough!

So pretty but made me sick(er).

The self driving car, for me, can’t arrive fast enough!

Let me explain.

I live in Billings, MT. On the weekend of April 1st 2016 (actually March 31st) I drove to Missoula Montana to visit some friends and do some hiking. I hadn’t been in that neck of the woods in almost 11 years. It was long overdue. During the drive out there I had developed a cough that persisted the duration of the drive.

I remember thinking, “why am I coughing so much? What strange disease do I have?”

I finally arrived at Missoula and met up with one of my friends. We went to Pizza Hut where we both used to work in the early to mid 90s. We marveled at how much the place had changed. We ordered food and reminisced about the old days and all the silly/stupid/fun stuff we used to do. During this time my cough went away and, in the back of my mind, I thought that maybe I had kicked what was making me cough.

Et Tu Facebook...Apparently My Page Is For Those 21 And Older

Yeah, so I should have used a white font with a black stroke.

So, I have a Facebook Page and I like to try and get people to like my page if not for the quirky and slightly strange sense of humor I have. The world needs more people like that. Of course that page supports a YouTube gaming channel that I seem to totally ignore even though I got partnered with Maker Studio. I think if I participated more that I'd probably make some descent money doing the YouTube thing.

Anyway, so I decide I'm going to promote my page by spending a few hard earned sheckles on some advertising. I go through the process of setting up some advertising. I've had other pages where I've used boosts and advertising to good success in driving traffic to my page. I thought I'd do it for this one too.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 5 Catching Up

So, I took a couple days off from my Commodore 64 BASIC dungeon crawl to take breather from the project, a little breather, and to work out how I was going to handle the movement and other factors that are needed to make a dungeon crawl.

In my attempt to "save memory" I decided to use a one dimensional array to store my room data and, even worse, I stored strings instead of integers in my array. Something like:

10 DIM RM$(100)

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 4 A Brief Interlude

Welcome to video four in the series. This is getting to be an enjoyable series for me!

As I get deeper into this project I wanted to take a few moments and fix a variable that I may have problems with in the future. This project is reminding me of the many pitfalls I had on my BASIC game projects when I was in high school. The most noticable to me is the fact that I didn't plan out the projects that well. So, as a result, I'd either work my self into a corner and have to start the project over and better planned or I'd have to implement a feature poorly because I didn't think it out well enough. There were also times I'd get so fed up with a project I'd abandon it. I find that is the case here.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 3 Character Creation And Bug Hunts

Ah, the third video in a series of videos where I uses the Commodore 64 to create a simple text dungeon crawl. Of course I'm using C64 BASIC.  This video is a bit long and I think it clocks in at over 30 minutes but that was not on purpose.

When I'm doing these videos I'm programming something off the top of my head. This is not the proper way to do things as you would usually do a lot of planning. This was, however, how I used to do projects, well most projects, back when I was in high school. It was any wonder I got any of them completed.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 2 We Have A Title Screen

Welcome back, this is the second in a series of videos where I program the commodore 64.  I am currently programming a game.  The game is a text based dungeon diving adventure game.

In this video I went ahead and implemented my rudimentary state machine for the game.  The first state is the title screen.  So I've gone ahead and implemented the title screen.  The game is working pretty well right now.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 1 Initialize the Game

OK so I decided to start programming a Commodore 64 video game. In my last programming video I'd made a Christmas candle it was written in Commodore 64 BASIC.  I enjoyed this process very much and the urge to do another project has started to tempt me.  I had been watching various you two videos of other people's programming projects and several of them had done a simple dungeon crawl.  So I figured that should be my next project.

Bring Back the Arcades of Yore!

Where all the cool kids hung out.

I miss the video game arcades of the early 80s. More importantly I feel sorry for people who were PacMan skillz. Odds are they'd hand your ass to you with their better than uber PacMan skillz.
born too late to experience such places. Arcades were great. They were the social hang outs for us nerds and introverts. Instead of being a jocular football player we could be "cyber" athletes of a sort. Of course there were a handful of nerd girls who'd hang out at the arcades so if you weren't too shy you might be able to woo them with your awesome

Arcades were an awesome experience. They were usually under lit in order to make the games and artwork stand out. The sounds was a cacophony of beeps, bloops and the battling music of attract screens. The only modern equivalent I can give is walking in to a Las Vegas casino and listening to the siren songs of the electronic gambling machines. A lot of times there was the steady flow of Top 40 music coming from speakers embedded in the ceilings of these places. You might just make out the tunes of a favorite song above the din of the machines.

I Played Risk And I Lost...But I Loved It!

I didn't win.

Last Sunday I pulled a six hour game of Risk with some friends. Actually it was Lord of the Rings Risk but that's not important. It marked the first time in a very long time that I actually got to sit down and play the game. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. I'd like to do it more often.

One of the things that I noticed was how frustrating it gets when you are trying to take over a country just to gain a Risk card. On many occasion you'd have a stack of five armies  and were going against a single army. You could roll three sixes but it seemed like the defender was always rolling sixes too. In Risk the tie goes to the defender. It's maddening to have a large stack of armies whittled down to a couple due to (apparently) bad dice rolls. You'd swear those things were rigged.

The game overall was fun and I really enjoyed myself. Next time I intend to win and not come in second place.

Resurrecting A Macintosh Quadra 605

Quadra 605

A while back I inherited an old Macintosh Quadra 605 from my uncle. He was in the process of moving so he needed to get rid of it and another old Mac. More on the other Mac in another post. I was a little leery of taking it as it was sitting on the floor, upside down in his closet when his basement flooded some earlier time. Looking at the machine you could see a bit of water damage so I thought the thing was shot and almost passed on it. I'm glad I didn't.

The Macintosh Quadra 605 is a damn cool machine in my opinion. First off it has the stylish "pizza box" design that I liked back in the early 90s. It is a cool form factor and I really, really wish it had never gone away. Unfortunately the desktop paradigm went the way of the dodo and the massive tower became the norm. I really never got that. The CPU in the Quadra 605 is the Motorola 68LC040 and it's clocked at 25MHz. The 68LC040 is a "l"ow "c"ost version of the 68040. What makes it low cost is the fact that it doesn't have a Floating Point Unit (FPU). It comes with 4MB of RAM but is expandable up to 36MB officially. It is possible to expand it up to 132MB. Video memory was 512kB but was expandable up to 1MB. All in all it's a nice little computer.

Game Update 2: Heaven And Earth

What a world!

Another update on the programming my game. I've achieved my milestone of implementing a map using the Mappy map maker and the associated files. As a result I've had to change my development environment because I was having problems linking the mappy files to my project. Apparently with the gcc compiler on windows I needed to compile it to an "object file" and link it to my project as such. The problem is mapping the %PATH% variables properly so I had access to the Allegro header files. On Windows it's a pain in the ass. Seems like it's much easier to do from Linux.

So, from the image you can see my little program has a map (with my hasty, thus crappy artwork) that can be scrolled using the keyboard arrow keys. I feel good getting to this point however, I've been this far along in other programming projects and lost interest. So, the next hurdle will be to implement a sprite that is controllable by the mouse and that can react to collision tiles on the map (as well as eventual collision sprites that represent mobs.  Eventually.  We'll see if I can cross that line.

Game Update 1: The Blue Screen Of Life!

It's not much but it's a start!

I figure that since I made a huge proclamation of making my own CRPG I should start updating on how it's going.  I mean really, come on, right?

So. Since I made my epic blog post I've worked on the game for a couple days now. Some of that time has been story related stuff and some of that time was getting Code::Blocks, Allegro 5 and Windows all to play nice. I finally got Code::Blocks, Allegro 5 and Windows all to play nice. Wasn't that hard. This is a good thing since when I start making the Linux version I'll most likely use Code::Blocks to develop the game.

Of course, the reward for my hard work is a window filled with blue.  That's okay though because it shows me that everything is working well together.

Make It So...Please?

Apparently even celebrities like Patrick Stewart and William Shatner cannot get good service from likes of Time Warner Cable.

I'm often dubious of the large cable conglomerates in the United States. They often jack up prices with no additions of service and we lag behind the rest of the world in terms of acceptable broadband speeds.

Almost Banned Jurassic Park Blooper Video

A number of years ago I put up this video of a blooper in Jurassic Park on YouTube and it's become very popular. I think people love to find Easter eggs and bloopers in their favorite movies. It makes watching them over again fun.

Universal

This video almost didn't make it. Early in 2012 I got a DMCA take down notice from Universal regarding this clip. If you do watch the video you'll notice that the amount of footage I use is less than 3 seconds and there is no audio from the movie. Also the fact that it's of lower resolution, doesn't give away a key plot point and I'm providing commentary over the video is a clear indicator of Fair Use.

Fortunately I was able to argue against the take down notice from Universal and get the video reinstated. I have to give Universal kudos for agreeing with the fact that the clip I use is Fair Use.