sassquad.com updated

I finally managed to finish FTPing the new design to sassquad.com, due to persistent connectivity problems here. Not been a good week for internet generally, with apparent downtime on TMNet's international gateway (one mention of a landslide in Hong Kong or something). Things appear to be okay now.

This problem may have also stopped me from being able to access www.bbc.co.uk. All this week, I've had some strange message telling me that my country code was unknown. I normally listen to BBC7's recordings of classic comedies, which has really helped me to retain my sanity. I'm now a new fan of Just a Minute, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and Round The Horne.

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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

Blogger for Word and DirectNIC

Now I can use Word to make blogger.com postings. This post was done using it. Glad to see that my office installation of Word works properly with it. I think now that my personal website has settled down nicely. The only major downtime for which I had to make workarounds was DirectNIC ’s hosting of one of my work sites. Hurricane Katrina brought New Orleans practically underwater, taking down some of their infrastructure. I did say things were coming back to normal, which is somewhat optimistic, as the Mayor of New Orleans has ordered everybody to leave the city, as it is in no habitable condition. In fact, DirectNIC have been keeping their servers on with diesel generators, and some of their team have been holed up in the building during the whole event. Their blog has been reported widely in the media, since apart from their postings, they have had photos, and live camera feeds showing how things really are from the center of the city. Btw, I’ve moved the worksite back to them now, f

Blue Meanie - a most vicious puzzle game

I sporadically make visits to the BBC Micro games archive , and have a quick blast through some arcade smashes of the past, and lesser known titles. Hidden amongst the catalogue are some real gems. Mike Goldberg's Blue Meanie is one of them. Anyone familiar with the BBC Micro games scene may know the name of Mike Goldberg. An artist and illustrator, he created many pieces of artwork for various magazines during the 80s and early 90s. He has a distinctive style, and is very obsessed with cats. These artistic talents were evident in the games he had published commercially (notably, under the MRM brand - he was one of the M's), as well as within the pages of computer magazines. Most of his work was featured in The Micro User , or Let's Compute! , then dubbed the world's first computer comic. This latter period - from 1989 to 1991 - saw Goldberg produce games for typing in from the pages of the magazine. These games became more and more advanced in design and execut

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