I’ve been having a rake through my hard drives recently to clean them up a bit.

It’s quite scary the amount of junk I have just sitting about, as well as how many duplicates of the same things that are not just on separate hard drives, but are usually on the same hard drive in different folders named “backup” and “stuff” and so on… though when I used to backup my code to CD, I’d just label them “Backup 25” and so on - making that just as useless!

Anyway, I’ve found some useful little code snippets that I’ll be sticking up here under the Tutorials & Guides category.

Some of them are a bit cleaner and more usable than others, whereas some need a bit of explanation as to what on earth is going on.

One of them is really clean and is in effect a fully working example in it’s own right, so I’ve already put this up - A Simple C State Machine. It’s pretty obvious what it’s doing, but sometimes you just need a bit of a poke in the right direction to remember how things should be laid out, etc… so I’m posting it up as a reminder to myself, and to anyone else that may find it useful! You can find it here: Simple C State Machine Gist

Right, back to sifting through this mess…

Yesterday morning, I got my Gameduino in the post. Not bad considering it was shipped on the 31st May from over in California.

I won’t be able to have a good look into it for a few days to a week yet, but I did boot it up and have a fiddle with the pre-loaded Asteroids game, which led me to the conclusion that this thing’s going to be fun to play with! Looks pretty much like a nice little 8bit console type thing, and looking forward to doing a nice little game for it.

So, I’m adding it onto The Quest.

Speaking of which, I haven’t had much time to fiddle with Core 24 on the Pandora. Nor fiddle with my engine in general.

Work stuff has been progressing nicely, I’d say, but it’s been eating up a lot of time, as it’s rather critical to get things right first time - or at least before anyone actually starts using it properly. So lots of extra work and thinking to ensure it all gels together properly.

I’m also currently collecting development environments for my hardware at the moment, anyway.. the older and newer machines are relatively easy to get compilers for, but it’s some of the ones in the middle - Dreamcast and Saturn in particular - which are a bit painful to find. I have messed with KalistOS before for the Dreamcast, so I’ll probably use that again - assuming I can find it. I also haven’t seen the Playstation compiler I used for quite a while either, and I imagine that’s going to be a right pain to find as well. At any rate, part of the reason for The Quest is to accumulate all these development bits and bobs in one place ( assuming they are pure homebrew and not leaked naughtiness of course! no badness here! ) so that I can remember where they are, if nothing else.

I’ve also still got some unfilled pages hanging around here that I’ve still to fix!

Oh well.. they’ll all get done at some point…

I’ve now added a fair chunk of my game and hardware collection up in Randomness and The Collection.

I like collecting stuff.

This sort of put me on track to start The Quest as well.

What is The Quest, you say?

Well, originally it was just create and run a Hello World on the hardware of everything I get my mitts on - but having done that on most of what I have already, it gets a bit boring, and nothing much else tends to come from it. Instead, The Quest is going to turn into producing at least one unique game on every console and computer I have.

Makes sense, I am a games programmer, and I like fiddling with things!

That’s not all there is to The Quest though! I shall also document the process - setting up toolchains and so forth as need be ( though if I need to circumvent any certain hardware features, I won’t be documenting that particular process.. it’s sad that we have to do this at times, but I certainly won’t help prop the door open to nefarious people sneaking in and abusing such power. )

I still have all my notes from the original Quest so hopefully the links and stuff are still valid for me to re-grab everything and carry on for some of the older and stranger machines that I posses.

For now, The Quest currently revolves around the Pandora, and a little game named Core 24.