Projects unrelated to AGI or SCI:
- A VIC 20 emulator written in Java to run on desktop and Android. This currently doesn't have sound but the rest works quite well. I sometimes play old VIC 20 games on my phone using this.
- Building a VIC chip (MOS 6561) test board on a large breadboard. This is to experiment with some of the lower level behaviour of the video chip used in the VIC 20. I've got five of these video chips. Had an idea about mixing the video output of three of these together to see what would happen.
- Reversing the schematic of the VIC 20's video chip from photos of the silicon.
- Building a 4-bit home brew computer. I have all the components; just haven't put it all together yet.
- Participating in the annual Javascript 13K game contest (js13kames). I've entered it twice. This year I'm thinking about submitting a graphic adventure game. Will be a challenge.
I thought I'd give an update on what I've been working on over the past 18 months. It has been a bit of the above. I spent quite a bit of time mid last year, through to the end of August, working on those 6561 VIC chip experiments, then I think I switched to the 2017 js13kgames contest like I've been doing most years in August/September over the past five (actually, last year it was a small graphic adventure game that I submitted, but unfortunately it was very small because I ran out of time, as I normally do with the competition. What I might do is build on the small Javascript engine I built for the 2017 competition and enter another graphic adventure in next year's js13kgames. I spent most of the time writing the engine and not enough time for the game).
http://js13kgames.com/entries/down-the-drainThen after September 2017, I think I was working on item three in the list above, i.e. reverse engineering the logic of the 6561 video chip using the die shot photos. That must have kept be busy until about March this year. It's one of the projects that I've probably spent the most time on over the past 3 years. Then I got distracted by the Oric Atmos home computer, which I'd never really looked at before. I'd always been interested in it, but for some reason I started taking a closer look in March and started working on an emulator, which I'd mostly finished a couple of months after that. I was then busy for a while on a crusade to get die shot photos taken of the custom chip used in the Oric Atmos. I bought a few and sent them to a lab. The photos came back and that caused a bit of a stir in the Oric community. After that I learnt of the existence of a rare home computer called the Polycorp Poly 1, which had been built in New Zealand during the early 1980s. This caught my eye because I grew up in New Zealand but had never heard of this, even though it was supposedly used in schools. I spent quite some time studying the schematic and decided I was going to build an emulator for that computer as well. This effort began with emulating the M6809 CPU, which I've pretty much finished now. This is what I've been most recently working on. Along the way I also discovered that the Vectrex home computer runs on a 6809 cpu, which is now another machine on my list to emulate.
Incidentally, the TRS 80 CoCo 3 runs on a 6809 CPU and has a few AGI games available for it.
A couple of months ago I entered the js13kgames contest again. I was reasonably pleased with my effort. It had a few bugs in it, but I thought it wasn't too bad if you avoided those. Not sure if anyone else thought it was good. I think the kamikaze method of destroying the enemies might have put a few people off, or perhaps it was confusing to know what to do. The idea is to find a few miner machines to bring online then use those machines as a buffer/lifeline so that you can kamikaze a miner into the enemies. I managed to finish playing the game through to its end in just over an hour.
https://js13kgames.com/entries/astro-minersNow I'm thinking about taking another look at the C# AGI Interpreter, but it will probably be in parallel with the emulators I'm working on.
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