Mastodawn

I remember a poll once that asked 'do you think of yourself as a robot?'
I understood it was a fun 'you might be autistic' type questiion because i had seen similar before and recognised some of the pixels.

I couldn't answer it.

It hadn't said *when*

Walking with purpose i'm a timberwolf mech. My legs go in the direction i'm moving, my torso rotates to track the objective, i don't rotate at my neck.
Driving, i'm a transformer chosing not to stomp traffic today - maybe Prowl, maybe Miirage depending on how much i'd rather be elsewhere.
Coding, i'm a brain in a mainframe.
Manipulating stuff, i'm the robot arm you plugged into the bbc micro at school but with a worn actuator.
Around people i'm a battered C3 protocol droid having a hard time of it.

I explained this to my wife who said it's remarkable how good my protocol droid is that i'm only getting diagnosed at 45.

What robots are you?

#autism #robots #transformers #C3P0 #battletech #mechwarrior #bbcmicro

Mark Moxon 15h ago

Documenting The Sentinel is really growing my collection of disassemblies at https://www.bbcelite.com

Five projects: Elite, Aviator, Revs, Lander, The Sentinel

1,038,891 words of source code commentary

507,016 words of deep dives

All Shakespeare's plays? 835,997 words

Or as the Bard himself may have written, if he were into 6502 assembly:

LDA #&2B
STA temp
EOR #&FF
ORA temp
STA question

I think that works? 😀

#retrocomputing #bbcmicro #c64 #8bit

Mark Moxon's Software Archaeology

Reverse engineering, code disassemblies and a healthy dose of retrocomputing nostalgia

Mark Moxon 2d ago

Time for some more deep dives into The Sentinel, Geoff Crammond's epic #BBCMicro game!

Batch #6 is now ready: 3 new articles about screen buffers, panning, scrolling and dithering

https://thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives

Batch #7 (drawing the landscape) coming soon

Enjoy!

#retrocomputing #c64 #8bit

Index of all deep dive articles - The Sentinel on the BBC Micro

Index of all deep dive articles about The Sentinel

Luke Miller Mar 13

Just found this game from 1987 called Virus (or Zarch) for the Acorn Archimedes.

It was made by David Braben and it looks like such a "missing link" between Elite and Frontier: Elite II to me.

The ship design is very original Elite but the solid shapes, the 3D lighting techniques and the pivot to realistic physics all point towards where Braben's interests where going into the 90s.

Super impressive for 1987!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcbfaJ2xz38

#Elite #AcornArchimedes #BBCMicro #Amiga