sparcie

Recently I tried out my Gravis Gamepad on a laptop I’m working on, trying it out on my game (Bob’s Fury) and found that it didn’t work at all. At first I thought the gamepad itself was at fault but when I set up other software for a quick test I realised that my code…

One bug I’ve had with Bob’s Fury that has been difficult to resolve has been related to keyboard control. Under specific conditions under emulation and on the book 8088 the keys would ‘stick’ and the player would be stuck moving, shooting or jumping. They aren’t actually physically stuck, just stuck in software. The cause being…

Late last year I got a comment on one of my videos suggesting I could add Hercules graphics to my game project. It sounded like an interesting idea so I started considering how I would go about it. Hercules graphics isn’t that hard to program for, the main issue with adding support for it is…

It has been quite a long time since I’ve posted anything at all here, more than a year in fact! I hadn’t intended for my blog to go into hiatus, but into hiatus it went. There’s quite a few different reasons for this, many new things taking up alot of my time such as a…

In the last part of this series we were still using our old Twinhead Superset 590 for playing MS-DOS games. It was roughly 1996 when Dad went about replacing the now quite old 386sx with a new machine. The machine we got was a Cyrix 6×86 166PR with 16Mb of RAM and Windows 95b. Even…

In part one of my computing history my family got our first computer, a Twinhead Superset 590. We used it for DOS gaming, and I learned to program on it with GWBasic. In this part I get a bit older, go to high school and continue learning more about computing and programming. We were still…

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of reading the computing journey of Retrotech Chris in his book of Nostaligia, which you can find on his site here. It was an interesting read about how he became interested in computing and his journey through to now as a retro computer collector and youtuber. I’ve been documenting parts…

It’s been a little while since my last post, partly because I’ve been quite busy, but also partly because I’ve been putting much of my energy into making youtube videos. I’ve been meaning to write something for the blog, but have been procrastinating because I’m having difficulty with the floppy drive repair I’m attempting. I…

For quite some time I’ve had a very nasty bug in my game, where basically it would lock up whenever a sound was played through any sound device on my microbyte 386sx machine. What made this bug tricky to fix is that it worked perfectly fine on other hardware I had available and on the…

The start of the year is a time when I am usually visiting family, but is also a time for cleaning out old junk and rubbish at work. This year I did a little cleaning out whilst visiting family and found an old 3.25″ floppy drive from our original old PC. Upon returning to work…