Notices by Spindley Q Frog (spindleyq@mastodon.social), page 8

@jplebreton thank you! NeoPaint did most of the texturing work for me tbh, but I’m pretty happy with how it’s looking

Character portraits! I made the footer taller to accommodate them and also maybe some more text. Then I drew a horse who you will definitely meet in-game at some point. I still haven’t figured out that much about what happens in this game but the horse is in, full-stop.

@vanicpanic I have yet to successfully track down a full install of QNX 2 rather than just a demo disk, but that’d be top of my list for sure

Uhhhhh my map loading code is slightly broken because there appears to be a weird corner case where it’s reading two bytes at the beginning of the file but then it increments the stream by three bytes? Both fread and fgetc are doing this??

Ohhh I’m not specifying the “b” flag in fopen, and the map height happened to be the carriage return character :/

Implemented map resizing at the Jorth console, so I can design spaces that aren’t 100x100. Unexpected side benefit of integrating a live scripting language over the serial port: I don’t have to code a UI for anything in my map editor if I don’t want to. As soon as I implement the word to do the thing, I can just type it into the console.

I also drew a few new tiles.

I implemented map saving and loading in Jorth and MAN was it slow, almost 5 seconds to load a 100x100 tilemap. So I implemented words to bulk read/write and now it’s very fast. (I am streaming off a compact flash disk, it should be!)

I’ve been noticing startup was slow, as all my Jorth source got loaded and compiled, and assumed it was the interpreter’s fault. But now I realize it’s probably actually because I’m doing unbuffered byte-at-a-time reads. Ooops.

from memory:
: 4dup r> r> 2dup r@ -rot rswap r@ -rot >r >r swap ;

Forth achievement unlocked: implemented 4dup (duplicate the top 4 values on the stack in order) without using PICK (copy a value n items from the top of the stack to the top)

It is _so_ terrible and I probably should have just implemented PICK. But it works!

@68kmentat yeah, I should probably just pull out one of the shelves.

SEO spammer: "It's apparent that you have used Adwords marketing to promote your business in the past"

how

how DARE you

@fifonetworks Hope you pulled all your data from your floppies beforehand!

@emptyfortress I definitely want to replace the desk drawer with a proper keyboard tray to free up some work space

@fifonetworks currently disconnected, sadly - needed to boot from the 3.5” and the cable is just plain not long enough to swap the order and still reach the motherboard. Pretty sure it needs a thorough cleaning too, I haven’t had any success reading disks with it.

Finally put together a proper workspace for my 286s; I’d been doing all development keyboard-in-lap with a chair pulled up to the entertainment unit that holds all my consoles. Very happy to have room to work (and store the various boxed PC software I’ve accumulated)!

@ieure hmmmm... This is definitely what I want, but I'm working with an unusual form factor (Toshiba T3100e)... I know it's got an add-on modem in it, wonder if it's a standard ISA connector

@AskChip yeah, I’m using one in my desktop 286, but that bios lets me enter custom geometry. The T3100 bios assumes you have one of the two hard disk configurations it shipped with, so finding a CF card that's an exact match would be... challenging. Plus I'd love to have more space if I can!

@polychrome QBASIC is Very Good and I won't hear otherwise

@jplebreton I could’ve just plugged it into my Raspberry Pi but it would’ve felt wrong

@hellojed my understanding is that a common setup was to have a second video card, using a different video standard so video memory didn’t overlap, to run your IDE / debugger on a second monitor