I devoured Racing the Beam last night. It does a great job at getting inside the Atari 3600 platform and explaining how it affected the early games that ran on it. Full of great examples, like Yars Revenge displaying its own code onscreen as a visual effect, to avoid needing a random number generator. Teaches how to analyse screenshots of 3600 games and see how the crazily limited hardware was coaxed into drawing them. Highly recommended, just wish it were twice as long.
(I also enjoyed that the book itself is a nice recursive hack. Its (fairly cheap) printing process didn't allow reproducing the detailed color photos of the games needed for reference. So they printed them on the inside of the dust jacket instead.)
While I just missed out on the heyday of the Atari 3600, I was writing similar games on my 130XE a bit later, mostly limited by having to use slow BASIC. This was probably the first video game I ever wrote, judging by its filename ("VIDIO").
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As I've mentioned before, I still enjoy VIDIO, both its simplicity and gameplay. And the key to its gameplay is that the dot moves fast and the controls are not very precise, making it hard to go thru a given hole in the wall. And the controls are not very precise because of a limitation of the platform. The BASIC program can only sample the joystick position occasionally, and so there's little fine control. So, Racing the Beam has helped me realize that the platform made this game what it is.
BTW, here's the code to VIDIO. (more)
I think I've never mentioned here that I've been microblogging for some time on identi.ca (also sent to twitter). That has been preventing me from writing some of the more banal sorts of blog posts, for good or ill.
I've just added a sidebar to my blog that holds my most recent dents. With ikiwiki, doing so was very quick and easy!
I've spent the last few days working on pristine-tar and running successive tests of it against every tarball in the Debian source archive.
Took some going (and for a few very unusual .gz files, sorta some cheating) but I've finally reached 100% coverage. It works for every file I have available to throw at it. 1.00 time.
This week I've been feeling wound up and constrained. Thought I was going to be sick and miss this, but it cleared up overnight and me and some tamales made it to Roan Mountain in time for lunch and a long afternoon hike.
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There was snow here just five days ago, so no sign of spring yet on top of the Mountain, but still a warm gorgeous day. Sunburn!
Finding power and internet to post to a blog while hiking for half a year up the Appalachian Trail doesn't seem like a very likely combination, but nowadays some people manage it in various ways.
I've read and enjoyed three or four books about AT thru-hikes, but blogs are a more immediate, interactive medium. I've been following with interest a group who came down with food poisoning as they hiked along the Holston Mtn. ridge in my "backyard" and look forward to reading about others as they pass by.
So, I'm aggregating all such blogs I can find for the 2009 season on a page I call Planet A.T.. It's a nice way to read these contrasting accounts juxtaposed together in real time.
One includes cell phone photos and fairly frequent updates of a hiker who's already reached Damascus; another is frequently updated by Blackberry by a guy I could well have crossed paths with on Roan this week; another has more infrequent, interesting long essays by a hiker who has just reached Tennesee; another is a teacher sending educational videos home to his school. There's even an 86 year old who I understand is the oldest person to hike the whole trail -- and is doing it again.
I thought I'd only find a few blogs, but I've now added over a hundred! So maybe one in ten of all thru-hikers this year have a blog. And the number of bloggers will presumably dwindle toward twenty-five before they reach the end in Maine.