#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.

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.

New Amiga Game

I didn't get much done program wise and worked a bit on my movie I don't have much to show.

However!

There is a new Amiga game that has just come out and it's free to download. Dan Wood over at kookytech.net gives a bit of a review.

Enjoy.

Good Ol' Buck Rogers Who Was In The 25th Century

Could have been so much better.

I own the box set to Buck Rogers and the 25th Century. I used to watch this show religiously as I did
with anything with the slightest hint of science fiction that came on television. Some shows were bad and my 11-12 year old mind new it at the time. Some shows were bad and it took the sobering effects of time to realize how bad they were. Buck Rogers was one of the latter.

One of the things I used to love about those shows and movies were the lasers and laser like effects. They were bright, vivid and cool in my mind and I used to devote a ton of time trying to figure out how they did them. That meant visiting the library many times over.

Amiga BASIC

Spent hours watching these demos.

One of the cool things about my Amiga 1000 when I got it was that it included Amiga BASIC and a number of demo programs. When I first got the computer one of the first things I did was to fire up BASIC and watch the demos. I would eventually try my hand at programming after a bit. This was before I bought any games for the machine.

Getting used to Amiga BASIC took a bit of time as I was used to 8-bit Commodore BASIC and the reliance on line numbers. Also, I was a horrible spaghetti programmer and made judicious use of the GOTO command. It took a bit of time to grow out of that. The other thing I needed to get used to was the fact that there was a bunch more memory to do stuff in. Making big programs was, at least a bit, more feasible. I did take advantage of that.

First Encounter With The Rubik's Cube

Rubik's Cube is still a fantastic toy.

One of the coolest things about the 80s is the pop culture that permeated everything. And one of the strongest pop culture icons of the 80s is the Rubik's Cube. Right now, as I type this, I'm looking at two Rubik's Cubes that I own. They are originals that were bought in the early 80s. Probably 1982 or 1983. When I hold them in my hand and really "feel" the weight and texture of them I can transport myself back to those days when I first held one in my hands and was fascinated by it.

Like any decade the 80s can be divided up into sections. There is the early section where a lot of what makes up the decade is defined by the decade before it. For example, in the 80s there are several songs that are considered 80s songs but were released in the late 70s. There is the middle section where the decade can stand on it's own as a decade. It is what it is. This is usually a very short time in the mid decade. One or two years at best. Then, there is the late section where the decade starts changing and starts defining what the next decade will start out as. The Rubik's Cube is an indicator of that.

My Own Battlestar Galactica Fan Series

Except newer and cooler!

People who know me may be surprised that I had once plotted out two seasons of a Battlestar Galactica series. I was recently going through a bunch of my old stuff and found several notebooks of notes and drawings that outlined the series and some rough treatments for several scripts.

The show was to be a continuation of the original 1978 series. I did this back around 1993. Right in the middle of what I consider to be a pinnacle decade for science fiction television programming. I was even trying to figure out how I would put such a thing together because the best that I had available to me was a super 8 mm film camera, access to MCAT, a public access channel, and a strong desire to save my shekels to buy a brand new Amiga Video Toaster set up. Sure, I could have done it. It would have been a giant fan film.

6 Things Star Trek Should Do To Make Me Watch It Again

To boldly go back to where we once were.

I've watched the new Star Trek trailer off and on over the last several months, well, at least since they released it, and I just saw it again. I can honestly admit to myself that I'm sad where Star Trek is going anymore.

Like many people I was genuinely excited when I heard about the so called reboot of the series. I was anxious to see Star Trek set back in the era of The Original Series (TOS). Of course the first movie came out and I enjoyed it on a superficial level but it was, for a lack of a better analogy, like eating too much candy. Sure, it's good and tasty but after a while your body wants something a bit healthier. And, in this case, healthy meant something more cerebral.

The Simpler Days of Star Wars

When we didn't know much about Star Wars

Long time ago in the late 70s after the Star Wars phenomenon had hit us I was able to get the following poster through a Burger Kings/Coca Cola promotion and I remember spending many hours just looking at it and taking in the details.

This was in the time between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back came out and there was not a lot of information on the Universe of Star Wars. This was a time when Darth Vader was a bad guy straight and simple who had killed Luke's dad. Darth Vader was simply his name and not a Title.
Those days were interesting and especially so for my 9 to 10 year old self.

I often think about and sometimes talk about paradigm shifts or Copernicus moments. When one day something is a certain way and has been for as long as people can remember and within a moment the world changes in a very real and perceptible way. Suddenly things are different. Sometimes they happen overnight but usually it’s within a year to a year and a half. In my lifetime I've gone through three of them that I can think of.

Back in 1984...

With all the stuff going on over the new Ghostbusters reboot/remake I got to thinking back...

In June of 1984 Ghostbusters was released upon the United States. I was 16 and had joined Police Explorers a bit after that as a result of a classmate who was also in Police Explorers and had asked me to join.

Of course Ghostbusters was a hit and a phenomenon so, when October rolled around a local haunted house needed someone to direct traffic at their super popular (and Ghostbuster themed) haunted house. I didn't have a uniform yet so they gave me a pair of white gloves and I had to hangout with a uniformed Explorer. Our Explorer group did this to raise money for our organization.

The haunted house played the Ghostbusters theme over and over. It was on non-stop repeat and, for a while, I grew to hate that song. It took a long while before I could listen to it again.

As the night went on and the Ghostbuster's theme played for it's umpteenth time I'd gotten into the groove of directing traffic. Probably was subconsciously grooving to the song too as some sort of Pavlovian response to the music. A car pulls up and rolls down a window. A guy who looked like he had just rolled off the set of Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo looked at me, white gloves and all, and asked me if I was some sort of white Micheal Jackson. I thought about it for a moment and replied, "yes, I think I am," which was unusual for a shy guy like me. The guys in the car, the other Explorer and I had a good laugh about it and then he continued on his way.

It's a funny story and I often think fondly back at it because now it reminds me of some sort of scene in an Adam Sandler 80s themed movie.

Those days were awesome!

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.

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.

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.

I Loved My Amiga 1000...Still Miss It

Amiga 1000

While I'm still trying to figure out what is wrong with my Ultima style game which is using Mappy to create and display the maps I thought I'd take a quick back in time. Well, computing time that is.

Back in the ancient days of micro-computers (the 80s) I broke down and bought my 3rd computer. The year was the beginning of 1987 and the computer was the Amiga 1000. I got my A1000 just before they discontinued them and released the Amigas 500 and 2000. I wasn't too worried about that though as I thought this computer was one of the coolest that I'd ever seen.

What had sold me on the Amiga computer was, aside from Commodore made them (as far as I was concerned they could do no evil back then), going into the game store at the mall. They always had computer hooked up showing demo modes to games. They had the DOS ones, some Macs a few 8-bit micro-computers and, of course, the A1000 and it seems like the had BattleHawks or some other LucasArts game. (They were known as LucasFilm Games back then.)

I blew a cool grand on the computer and, though my dad wasn't too happy about that as he'd rather I bought a car, I was estatic and couldn't wait to try it out. A few paydays later I was able to buy my first couple of games. Defender of the Crown and The Bard's Tale. Soon after that I did get the Amiga version of Silent Service and within the next year Bard's Tale II, Bard's Tale III, Loom, The Secret of Monkey Island and more.

I had friends who played games too but most of them were either still on the 8-bit micros the ones who upgraded usually went with a DOS machine and one or two had the black and white Macs. When I would invite them over to play they were amazed by two things. One, especially for the ones still using 8-bit machines, was the amazing array of colors in the games and the higher resolutions. Two, and this was among several of my DOS using friends, was the fact that I didn't have to make a specialized Autoexec.bat or config.sys file to load up the games. Usually it was double click and icon or boot directly from the game disk.

Unfortunately VGA games started becoming more common so the color and resolution advantage started falling behind. With the advent of Soundblaster cards the music part started falling behind too. And then finally Commodore went bankrupt and the once awesome Amiga was destined to be left in the past. This is unfortunate because the place where Amiga really could have shined was the multimedia driven 90s when it was Windows and Mac and, pretty much, nothing else.

So, for a while there I had the coolest computer ever and all my friends loved to come and check it out and play games. Too bad computers got boring after that.