Alien Experiment Laboratories

Z88dk Wiki! Yay!

Posted by Chief Experimenter in Information, Journal at 1:39 pm.

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Z88dk now has a documentation wiki!

Flippin’ sweet! :-)

And none other than Alvin Albrecht (he of Z88dk Sprite Pack fame) has the distinction of being the first commenter here, with a very helpful explanation of some of the things I was unsure of. Cheers, ’tis much appreciated!

Blimey. I’d better try to do some work on this thing again now, hadn’t I?

You may not believe it, but…

Posted by Chief Experimenter in Journal at 1:03 pm.

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…there’s been some progress lately.

After quite literally not touching the project for months, I spent a solid few hours getting things knocked into shape to the extent that some code actually exists, builds to a Spectrum .TAP file, and runs without crashing.

All it does right now is initialize a bunch of stuff, including partially drawing the game area. No “Y.S. Megagame” awards as it stands, but a lot of what was done is what I call the “drudge work”, getting the bare essentials pulled together. Think of it as laying the foundations.

It’s hard because at this stage you can’t run it and see any obvious progress. This was always one of the cool things about programming in Sinclair (or any other) BASIC: instant gratification. But that doesn’t always translate into well-written code.

Meanwhile, my biggest weakness in managing these hobbyist projects is already showing itself, namely my tendency to get the “next big idea” while I’m still trying to code the current one. The next big idea in this case is looking like being open source, and written using PyGame, as I want to learn Python. I should try not to think too much about that just yet though!