Veggies vs. Undead – A perfect Commodore 64 version of Plants vs. Zombies

Game announcements are not my main focus here in Vintage is the New Old anymore – it is very hard to keep up and there are plenty of other ways to be up to speed with what is new in the retro gaming world, like, for example, Saberman’s YouTube channel, which does a fantastic job showing footage of most (if…

Scene World was prominently featured in the German design magazine PAGE.

Scene World was prominently featured in the 04/2023 issue of the German design magazine PAGE.   featuring logos from Retromantis, Black and JSL made for Scene World Magazine! :) (The text translates as “pixelated till today, the diskmag “Scene World” for C64 fans and coders can be downloaded for fitting hardware at https://sceneworld.org”)

Scene World Podcast Episode #160 – The Crimson Diamond with Julia Minamata

In our new episode we are happy to talk to Julia Minamata. She is the developer of ‘The Crimson Diamond’ – a text parser EGA mystery adventure game to be released soon on Steam! Follow amateur geologist and reluctant detective Nancy Maple to the ghost town of Crimson, Ontario to investigate the discovery of a massive diamond. Sounds like a…

After a “Cease and Desist” letter from SEGA, Grayfox Books releases The Mega Book Collection Digital for free

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“,…

MSXDev 2023 has started

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…

ugBasic – A BASIC compiler for Commodore, … and Atari, …and CoCo, … and …

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…

Some things about strings in Color BASIC

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…

Nestor80 – A new Z80 cross-assembler

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…

2023 Basic 10Liner Contest is On!

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,…

Tandy CoCo 3 CLS 100 easter egg explored

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…