Recent content on asie's blog
It’s certainly been a while. Let’s take a peek into the Wonderful toolchain . There have not been many major changes or new additions since the last update. As such, this post will act more as a development summary.
Here’s what I’ve been tinkering with for the past two months with the Wonderful toolchain . WonderSwan improvements The main focus of my work in autumn was improving the wswan and wwitch targets. Let’s give the changes a closer look.
Here’s what I’ve been tinkering with for the past three months with the Wonderful toolchain . New tools The highlight of this project update is the introduction of three new tools - some long awaited by users, others long awaited by myself.
As usual, it’s been a while. I haven’t felt the retro homebrew spirit in me as much as I used to over the past eight months, admittedly. There aren’t that many changes this time around, but there have been some (semi-)breaking ones over on the WonderSwan side of things, so I feel they’re worth discussing.
For those unfamiliar, BlocksDS is a fork of the primary Nintendo DS homebrew toolchain 1 . It was created almost two years ago, in March 2023, by AntonioND; I have been involved in the project in a position somewhere between that of a contributor and a co-maintainer. Recent developments have made people uneasy about its future, so I’d like to clarify what’s going to happen from my…
It’s been a while. The last year has not been as hectic as the previous few updates, but I have done some things nonetheless. First of all, I bought a WonderWitch! Despite the cries of my wallet, this will enable me to look into its ecosystem deeper now. … Oh, right. The toolchain! Right. Let’s talk about it.
In the previous project update, I named many issues that I’d like to resolve in the toolchain. In the month of August, motivated in part by some extra time off I had, I managed to tackle a few of them. Let’s talk, first and foremost, about asset processing and ROM linking.
In the year 1999, Bandai announced the MobileWonderGate - a device which allowed connecting a WonderSwan to the Internet thanks to a collaboration with the mobile network NTT DoCoMo. This was primarily used by a selection games to provide downloadable content, as expected for this type of handheld attachment. … Oh, it also came with a web browser supporting a subset of HTML 3.2, tables, GIF…
Back in May 2022, I’ve been reminded of a console that I’ve heard about mostly from its Higan/Ares emulation core. It was 8086-based, an oddity in the console world yet a processor I was already familiar with , as well as one which had a healthy supply of both classic and modern development tools. At the same time, despite selling 3.5 million units, the console did not have a modern…
For a while now, I’ve been involved in the WonderSwan homebrew scene - for those unfamiliar, it’s a handheld consoles which was moderately successful in Japan but failed to launch outside of it. I got to make a demo or two , I got to contribute towards emulator accuracy, I got to write a homebrew toolchain which… honestly is stuck in development hell due to perfe- It was and…
When Tim Sweeney released ZZT in 1991, his idea to encourage new ZZT content was to hold a world creation contest . Over two hundred submissions eventually resulted in the releases of the “Best of ZZT” compilation and the “ZZT’s Revenge” collection in 1992. They also provided an initial hiring pool for the then-new game development company Epic MegaGames. The most…
We have a right to play modded Minecraft without corporate interference. Third party downloads are not worse than AdBlock. While I’d love to just agree, people have gotten used to the status quo of a small portion of Minecraft modding. Time for a history thread, strap in! Note: Originally posted as a microblog thread .
In this article, we’re going to look at the history of creating animated, cinematic experiences in ZZT. Despite the engine’s harsh size limitations - 20 kilobytes per board and about 400 kilobytes per world 1 creators have managed to pull off some amazing stunts, especially in the past few years of ZZT’s renaissance. Let’s go! Warning: This article contains spoilers for a…
When I was riding the waves of IRC as a kid in the mid-00s, I discovered a small community centered around a then-obscure game engine named ZZT. Fifteen years later, I decided to embark on a journey to reconstruct its missing source code. The end result was the Reconstruction of ZZT - a source tree whose build scripts create a ZZT.EXE byte-for-byte identical to the final official release. This…
BuildCraft is one of the few ancient Minecraft mods which has made it through almost 4 years of modding up until the present day, as well as m any changes of the maintainer/developer team. In this post, I’d like to briefly discuss the history of it and my design views. Please note that if you want to read up on the recent history of BuildCraft (1.6.4-1.7.10), you might be better off reading my…
EDIT: If you have issues accessing the site, hard refresh (Shift+F5, Ctrl+F5, Cmd+R, your mileage might vary). Hello! Today, ASCIImator.net has changed hands. After 9.5 years of being owned by karaboz and brutto, I became the new owner.