Category: Programming
RetroAcción, a Spanish non-profit association dedicated to retro computing studies, has announced a contest to celebrate the Nintendo Game Boy 30th anniversary. From the contest page: “The goal of this contest is to encourage the development of new titles and productions for the Game Boy, so the videogame can be of any genre and complexity and can be programmed in…
Inspired by many previous chess games like David Horne’s ZX81 1K Chess (672 bytes), Olivier Poudade’s BootChess (487 bytes), Óscar Toledo Nanochess (392 bytes) and others, Alex Garcia has released what is probably the smallest chess program ever made, with only 377 bytes! For you to have an idea what that means, this first paragraph alone contains 389 characters! Alex…
Clube MSX, the quarterly Brazilian printed magazine about the MSX line of computers starts this Wednesday, March 20th, to take pre-orders for the fourth issue. The first edition of 2019 is already available for purchase, with a discounted price, at the magazine’s official website. The shipment is planned to start as soon as March 28th. For international orders, please check…
1989 was a big year for me — Nintendo had taken North America by storm and just about everyone I knew had an NES console at home. It was the system that captured our imaginations — I was in grade 3 at the time, and we’d spend our recesses drawing elaborate NES levels (as seen in Nintendo Power), talking incessantly…
Reading the excellent atari8bit.net and Atariteca, I was fascinated with the Atari Accountant, the most expensive software sold for the Atari 8-bit machines. The accountant suite would cost, at the time, US$ 1,500, price you would pay for the General Accounting, Account Receivable, and Inventory Control modules. On top of that, the wealthy user would have to buy an Atari…
As you might know, Jonathan Cauldwell’s Arcade Game Designer (AGD) is a game engine tool that makes easier to develop games for the ZX Spectrum. Although AGD is one of the best game engines around for retro computers, it runs on a ZX Spectrum hence it is constrained by the machine’s limitations. This week, Tony Thompson has announced on the…
Released last December (2018), Retro Virtual Machine 2.0 brings ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC 464 emulation for Windows, Mac and Linux. To set apart from the many other excellent emulators, RVM 2.0 excels with its user interface delivering a faithful “retro” experience packed in a polished GUI. RVM works more like VMWare, Parallels or VirtualBox where you create virtual machines…
Mr. Atari has released the version 2.02 of Atari LiteDOS targeting the Atari 8-bit family of computers. Formerly known as TinyDOS, the new version offers a fully-feature DOS for Atari machines using only 2k of RAM, feeing at least 4k for the user. LiteDOS can read Atari DOS 2.0 2.5 MyDOS and other compatible disks. Also, the file-format of a…
David Taylor has been busy working on Jesse, an interesting project that reminds in Eliza, an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum (Wikipedia). David had contact me send me the following letter about his project, which I reproduce here to help him spread the awareness about…
NESmaker is a recently launched tool allowing you to create NES games without programming experience. The games created with NESmaker can be flashed in cartridges and played in an original NES console. To celebrate the new home brewers using the tool, the The New 8-bit Heroes have launched Byte-off!, a game designed competition. To enter the compo, the contestant has…
