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

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

Brand new weekend reading: even more deep dives into The Sentinel, Geoff Crammond's #BBCMicro epic

Batch #5 covers the unique equirectangular projection system, drawing filled polygons, the screen mode and more

https://thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives

Batch #6 soon…

Enjoy!

#retrocomputing #c64 #8bit

I'm (slowly!) releasing 50+ deep dives into The Sentinel, Geoff Crammond's epic #BBCMicro game

Batch #4 is now ready: 5 new articles about 3D objects (defining, drawing, managing)

https://thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives

Batch #5 (drawing polygons) coming on Friday

Enjoy!

#retrocomputing #c64 #8bit

Just released: 6 brand new deep dives into The Sentinel on the #BBCMicro and #C64

This is where it gets interesting!

Generating 10,000 3D landscapes; tile data and shapes; enemies and trees; secret codes

https://thesentinel.bbcelite.com/deep_dives#latest

Batch #4 coming soon

Enjoy!

#retrocomputing

This is pretty cool.

It's a visualisation of the internals of The Sentinel on the #BBCMicro.

This is it generating the game landscape for the first level from 1024 pseudo-random numbers.

It’s an animated GIF. If you can’t see the animation, you can see it here:

https://thesentinel.bbcelite.com/images/landscape/generate_landscape_0000_dark.gif

Next week I'll be releasing a deep dive into exactly how this works.

***

A big thanks to Simon Owen, whose excellent repository I forked and enhanced in order to build this visualisation. It's well worth a visit.

https://github.com/simonowen/sentland/

#bbcmicro #retrocomputing #retrogaming #c64 #8bit

DOS on a BBC Micro - GOTEK, Raspberry Pi PiTubeDirect, 1779 Floppy Controller upgrades.

https://makertube.net/w/1AHecXebUz4zxzjuiDDyH7

That time the UK Government tried to turn us all into coders - The BBC Micro

https://makertube.net/w/4iRpHfj64eyeMbsW13fY3Q

LOGO - Obsolete Programming Language #1

https://makertube.net/w/nuT3hXBtwB1C97R6nJ6LQ9