My personal online sandbox since November 2000. Topics may include programming, retro gaming, or whatever I'm curious about at that moment. Web 1.0 for life.
I've wanted to write a tribute piece to Bust-A-Move for a while. I couldn't come up with the right premise for it. Then I tried Puzzle Bobble and found it was much easier than Bust-A-Move. So I decided to figure out why the only way I know how... by comparing these games stage-by-stage....
This isn't much of a tutorial. It's more like a really long way to motivate myself to start working on a new demo. Step #1: Create a gradient background fill that doesn't look completely awful...
Here are musings on selling out to online casinos, AWS billing errors, and the likely death of physical media... I don't know if I will post more things like this in the future, and thanks for bearing with me this one time.
Look at that, two posts this weekend. Neither of them are very large. This one in particular has been in the back of my mind since I posted a much longer Intellivision article last year. I should do more of these. There are so many Intellivision games that deserve a little attention. Here's a look at the mechanics of the football mini-game in Sharp Shot and speculation on whether they would work…
This is the sixth(!) completely random thing I decided to scan this year. It's all part of an elaborate internal conspiracy to avoid tackling a larger project. I suspect when fall rolls around I'll feel more motivated to work on something substantive. Until then, I hope everyone is enjoying these smaller unsorted things I've been posting. This distraction is a scan of a brochure included with some…
2026 is turning into the year where I post a bunch of unfinished ideas. I will eventually break this streak but not today. Here is a look at how various Pac-Man console ports handled fitting the entire maze on a single screen, and what approaches might work for Super Pac-Man...
I've read some complaining about the Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-order. Or, I've read that there is complaining, I try to avoid comments and social media. I actually have no issues with it at all, here's why...
The internet is so annoying now. Even basic bits of 100% free information are gated behind all varieties of annoyance. I'm going to pushback in a very small way today. Here is an ASCII table with no ads, user tracking, pop-up nagging to subscribe to a newsletter, videos, or any other nonsense...
Sometimes I have a premise for an article that sounds interesting to research but it doesn't pan out. It's about a 50/50 split for why. Either the topic turns out to be way more complicated than I expected, or the answer is trivial and obvious. This is one of those two things and I'm posting it anyway. I think the end result is kind of interesting anyway. In this article I try to figure out if…
I recently learned that the Game Boy Advance version of Doom is based on the Atari Jaguar port. As I recall that was one of the better 1990s console ports of Doom. That's all the excuse I needed to finally try this small screen version...
This is the 25th anniversary of the show. It's probably technically only the 23rd show due to the 2020 one being cancelled and a 2005 one never happening. However they are counting, this is a great accomplishment. Here's what I saw that was new and/or interesting to me...
Despite creating three full demos on the Sega Genesis, I never really understood how planes work. So I wrote a very quick and ugly demo where all planes are drawn and all overlap each other. The end result is something that I can quickly reference when I'm trying to design a new scene...
This was included with a copy Shadow Sorcerer I own but would have been bundled with any other 1992 release. I played Shadow Sorcerer so long ago that I don't remember much about it. I also played most of the 'gold box' games in here with the same disclaimer. My only commentary on this catalog is the prices are substantially higher than they would be in a store, especially the C64/128 versions…
I have a decent collection of the 'gold box' Dungeons and Dragons games. This particular catalog was included with most of the Apple II games I've found. These games are generally very difficult but a good deal in terms of dollars-per-hour. That's about all the commentary I have for these, enjoy...
I finally visited Galloping Ghost on a Saturday a couple weeks ago. I've been making excuses for not going since they opened. My wife had an author event at a microbrewery just a block away. The weather was perfect that day so walking from one to the other was quite nice. The brewery even had a taco truck this particular Saturday. I don't know if I could have asked for a more perfect combination…
I've seen people trying to sell this catalog for $20 on auction sites. It was included free in the thousands of "Gold Box" games sold at the time. I have at least three of these. One is from a game I paid 27 for on clearance, I have the receipt to prove it. This is cool to look at, but not worth $20. Here are some totally free scans of it in a relatively decent resolution...
Here are scans from a 1995 WizardWorks Catalog featuring a mix of budget productivity software and games. I don't know why I thought this was something that needed scanning. I guess it's a small look into the world of knock-off Windows 3.11 software a few months before the Windows 95 launch. That's kind of interesting...
Here's a small catalog of games published by Strategic Simulations (SSI) in 1996, presented with minimal commentary because I'm not familiar with most of these games. At this point SSI was publishing more simulation games than RPGs and those aren't my thing. If that's a genre you like, then there are some pages in here you'll feel all nostalgic about...
Normy's Beach Babe-o-Rama is a somewhat obscure Sega Genesis game starring a character from a midlife crisis comic released when the system itself was experiencing a midlife crisis. It's also similar enough to the TurboGrafx-16 CD game Camp California that I can't help but speculate if there's a connection. In this article I sort of review the game, look at how it was originally received, and…
I have a few old Visual Basic 6 applications that are collecting dust. Although they still run on Windows there isn't a practical way to update them anymore. I had some previous success converting FreeBASIC code to Java with Gemini so I decided to try it again. The results were overall pretty good with only one problem that had to be manually fixed...