Darren Doyle from Greyfox Books has announced today that his book about the SEGA Mega Drive is available for free as a downloadable PDF. Although this alone is good news for all Mega Drive (and Genesis!) fans, the reason Doyle decided this route is unfortunate, to say it lightly. After publishing “Atari: a Visual History” and “Coin-Op: The Arcade Guide“,…
The 19th edition of MSXDev has started. The competition that began in 2003 has brought to life many high-quality games for the MSX. The 2023 edition will follow the previous year’s “freestyle” approach, where the game can be created for any MSX machine that was ever sold. If you think you will try to create something this year, you have…
Recently I learned about an exciting project that started a couple of years ago: ugBasic. ugBasic is a cross compiler of BASIC dialect specialized in programs that are very efficient by design on various 8-bit platforms built on top of 6502, Z80 and 6809. This is a tall order, but ugBasic seems to pull it off very well. ugBasic comprises…
NOTE: If what I describe in this article applies to other implementations of BASICs that use reserved string space, please leave a comment and let me know. I was in junior high school when I started learning to program BASIC. Initially, this was done by reading a book a classmate had and then writing programs out on paper. We’d then…
During the last MSX users’ meeting in Barcelona, Konamiman has announced a new project that he has been working on for a while: Nestor, a new Z80 cross-assembler. The main objective was to be able to build Nextor without having to use CP/M emulation to run MACRO-80, but since Nestor is a general-purpose Z80 assembler, if can be use for…
It is that time of the year when we all get excited about BASIC, but only if it is restricted to 10 lines of code! And, for the third time, I am honoured to be part of the judging panel! Once again, you can show off all your skill in writing compact BASIC code for the 2023 Basic 10Liner contest,…
The most famous Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer (“CoCo”) easter egg has to be the hidden photo of the CoCo 3 programmers that shows up if you hold down CTRL-ALT while turning the machine on. (Alternatively, you can hold down CTRL-ALT and hit the reset button on the back of the machine to also display it.) I had the pleasure of…
Not long ago, I posted about the development of Angry Birds for the Apple II, including the gameplay video showing it in all its glory! One of the things that most impressed me when I saw Angry Birds was how low-resolution graphics could look so good on a game. It is not the only example of excellent low-res games out…
With my busy life, this is not exactly hot news, and you all might have seen it elsewhere, but I thought it would be nice to write something about it anyways. The Apple Lisa was released 40 years ago, and although it is considered a commercial failure, it paved the way for how you interact with the computer you are…
Although I started out my home computer life with a Commodore VIC-20, I ended up moving to a 64K Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (“CoCo”) mostly because of its Microsoft Extended BASIC. Having built-in commands like PLAY, DRAW, PAINT, LINE and CIRCLE let me do graphics that anyone with an Extended BASIC CoCo could run. On my VIC-20, I had…
