Stephen Scott

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Snow in Dubai!

on December 31, 2004

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Using Beebasm for BBC Basic games programming (Mac & Windows)

In August 2021, I released Androidz Redux , a remastered version of my 1994 game Androidz . This process started a year ago, with a couple of days spent playing around with the original code, far away from a real BBC computer. The original game was published in a magazine called Acorn Computing, and has been available to play online for a number of years now. Because I wrote the game on an actual BBC Micro, I used what tools I had at the time, namely some graph paper to create the graphics, and the computer itself to do the actual coding. This is a world away from the tools we now have at our disposal. Fully rounded IDE's such as Visual Studio Code (my current favourite) make it an awful lot easier to program games. Even editors such as Notepad++ offers some ability to edit BBC Basic code. One of the difficulties with editing old games on modern systems is ensuring that you are able to ensure that the BASIC code is properly tokenised before running on an emulator/system, and indee...

Polymer Picker v1.10 released

Polymer Picker v1.10 introduces a new adversary - Jellyfish Polymer Picker v1.10 has been formally released. The original v1.00 has been replaced with the newer one, so you don't need to amend any URLs to play the latest edition. Making this game has been quite the journey these last 2 years. The recent additions to the game were performed over the spring and summer of 2023, and represent what I consider to be final additions to the game, to enhance the level of gameplay to something a little more challenging. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I have enjoyed creating it, and thanks to members of the Stardot community for their invaluable assistance in making this possible.

Polymer Picker, and why 8-bit programming matters to me

Late last year, I released a BBC Micro game, Polymer Picker . Realising that 2022 marked the centenary of the BBC, as well as the 40th anniversary of the release of the BBC computer (which was designated as one of the BBC's 100 Objects ), I wanted to work on something that related to the BBC's mission of being able to 'educate, inform and entertain' . So what better way than to release a game for the BBC computer, that in a sense, fulfils those values? But, with video games being so widely available, and playable on all kinds of devices, why did I decide to create my own game for such a niche platform? Video games are big business. They have been for a number of years. In May 2023, it was reported that Nintendo's latest edition of The Legend of Zelda sold in excess of 10 million copies in three days . However, there remains sustained interest in video games from yesteryear. Children who grew up in the 8-bit computer revolution are now into their 40s and 50s, and...

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(c) Stephen Scott. All opinions are mine. E&OE.