apple II outtake of the day, arrow too strong, rips space-time continuum
the bug was just going off the end of an array, but it "obviously" couldn't happen so stared at the debugger for way longer than I should have until I figured out what was going on
work decided on short notice to take down all the bulletin boards in the hall and replace them with generic ECE propaganda. We at least convinced them to not use AI-generated images.
I had previously filled the boards near my office with hiking pictures so the students would have something interesting to look at while waiting for office hours.
working on CGA/DOS Peasant's Quest inventory (images 50x60 pixels) and wondering if I should make the Apple II version bigger. Currently they are 14x14 to save space
I made 42x49 versions and they do look better.
DOS you are spoiled, you can assume 640k of RAM so if you need 16k for sprites you just malloc(). On Apple Ii you can maybe squeeze it down to 4k and it's like what can I throw out or move around to try to fit this in to the already over-committed 64k. Very different experience
went and added most of the scenes/dialog to the CGA/DOS version of Peasant's Quest. Definitely not the whole game, but can be fun to walk around doing things.
Can't always decide which palette would be best. Cool Ranch? Taco-Seasoning? The horribly monstrosity that King's Quest 1 used?
You can try it yourself on the internet archive here: https://archive.org/details/peasant_202605
use control-A/B/Y to mess with the palette yourself
making a pot of German tea that my wife brought back from her trip.
My German is a bit rusty so it took me a while to puzzle out that that "1 TL / tasse" the TL was probably Teelöffel (tea spoon) and not "TerraLiter", foolish me for expecting metric units
(for those curious, there are 2.029e+41 teaspoons in a terraliter)
eldest kid was running the "collage" station at the school Art Night. Turns out whoever set it up decided that a pile of old National Geographics would be the best magazines to use for this, forgetting they were filled with pictures of dead bodies and nudity.
Needless to say some parents complained after some little kids made some "interesting" collages and eventually the principal came over and the whole thing got permanently shut down.
for those of you who enjoy 6502, the cycle counted intro I posted yesterday has to do a lot of cycle-accurate delays as small as possible. I had found the "bisqwit" resource for this (for NES programming) and it was a treasure trove for these things.
The one I am using that I enjoyed most is this way of delaying 24 cycles in only 4 bytes:
lda #$0A
bpl *-1
Managed to get this 256-byte Apple II demo together for Outline 2026 at the extreme last minute.
It's doing some cycle-counting and mid-screen mode-switching to show lo-res, hi-res, and text on-screen at same time.
You need an Apple IIe as it checks VSYNC. Also getting the effect mostly centered was a pain and it more or less works on Applewin and a real IIe platinum but not in MAME.
