2010 Winter Warmup

Not sure what I'll be doing this month, but it's the start of the 2010 Winter Warmup. I have no grand plans.

Going to Wisco

I'm heading to Wisconsin for the rest of the month. Not sure what I'm going to take with me or what I'll be able to get done if anything while I'm there. Over the last few days I've been heading in two directions...

One is newton programming. I've got the eMate out. UNNA has a great collection of Newton development tools, documentation and source code that is compiled onto a single HFS image. The NIE (Internet Enabler) pdf from Apple looks promising -- I'd like to write an mpd client for the newton -- but I think I might have to take it to a printer to get a hard-copy. It's too hard for me to digest large PDFs on a computer. Speaking of the Newton docs, I needed to find a pdf reader for OS9 and found Pure Mac, which has lots of versions of lots of things well organized.

The other thing I've been doing is playing many of the ascii games available on SDF, and in general exploring parts of the system I've ignored or overlooked in the past.

robotfindskitten 1.0.1

It might seem odd that you could write this game without implementing the arrow keys. Well I did, and it is. 1.0.1 now supports arrow keys!

rfk-mac68k-1.0.1.hqx
rfk-mac68k-1.0.1.img

robotfindskitten 1.0

Whew...

robotfindskitten-mac68k-1.0.hqx

robotfindskitten-mac68k-1.0.img

The disk image is a bootable 6.0.8 floppy suitable for vMac or BasilliskII.

Mostly I'm happy with it. The source code is included, but you can see the meat of it here if you just want to take a quick look.

There are a few issues. If anyone cares, I can fix them. No one will.

It's pretty fun. The 68k Macs can stand tall once again.

Robotfindskitten Update

Done

1. Movement
2. NKI Placement
3. Random Characters
4. Collision Detection
5. Kitten Detection

To Do

1. Import messages.
2. Display messages.
   
3. Win screen.
   
4. Introduction screen.
5. Color detection / colorize characters.
   
6. Macintosh niceties: icon, 'about', anything else?
   
7. Whatever else I'm forgetting.

Robotfindskitten Detour

It's not done, but I'm very excited about the progress I've made on my newest classic mac development project.

I first found robotfindskitten on my ipod Rockbox install. The game is almost too good to be true. Since then I've discovered that rfk has been ported to many systems, but not the classic Mac. Look at all those retro-systems represented and no 68k Mac.

Obviously all other projects go on hold.

What's interesting about this project to me is, the Macintosh doesn't lend itself to character-based programming as easily as DOS, C64, AppleII (etc) systems do, so I'm having to do a fair amount of extra work to get an ascii game working nicely.

What I've got done... so far I have a good engine (fingers crossed) for dynamically creating a grid based on screen resolution and character widths. A full screen window; leaving the menu bar.

TO DO:

1. Random placement of non-kitten items.
2. Robot movement and collision detection.
3. Import messages.
4. Win screen.
   
5. Introduction screen.
6. Macintosh niceties: icon, 'about', anything else?
   
7. Whatever else I'm forgetting.

MacTCP Programming

I spent several days fighting with MacTCP. I'm working on a full screen app that uses google weather to display current conditions and future conditions. Ultimately I'd like to create an internet "reader" that uses different XML APIs to gather and display info on the compact mac. I don't know how into it I am, but the Google weather will happen. Anyway, I spent many hours banging my head against the wall as I was fighting a not-always-reproducible-bug that was caused by a buffer overflow, incorrect LAN setup and prickly HTTP headers.

That's all sorted out, but I was hopping to at this point to have some simple XML parsing taken care of.

Also, I can't seem to take a screen shot of the full screen app when it's running. I'd like to show what I have. It's not very macintosh application "looking", and I've decided that style is just as important as function, so I'm not sure anyone else is going to ever want to use it. I guess you could say I'm giving into all of my design impulses which doesn't help any one else.