Please please if you have played any of my games and enjoyed them in the past. Consider donating by clicking on the Buy Me A Coffee in the sidebar. It is a paypal link - If you need a Nochex link please get in touch or let me know here and I will be able to set that up too.

I am coding again at the moment and I’m going to save the email addresses of the people who donate and they will be able to see what I’m working on first, before anyone else.

The game itself could possibly be donation-ware, and if that is the case I will consider any donations to be pre-orders. LOL

I don’t mean to sound like I have a little black storm-cloud over my head but at the moment I really do have.

The example tune from the ZX Spectrum 48K manual works without any alteration, apart from the removal of line numbers of course.

Here is the code and example for anyone who is interested…

Strict

' create audio sample

Local sample:TAudioSample=CreateAudioSample( 41,11025,SF_MONO8 )
For Local k=0 to 41
        sample.samples[k]=Sin(k*360/42)*120+120
Next

Global beepsound:TSound=LoadSound( sample,True )
Global beepchannel:TChannel

' Spectrum BEEP function
' note: program is halted while a BEEP is playing

Function BEEP (length:Float,note:Float)

	Local rate:Float=2^(note/12)
	beepchannel=PlaySound(beepsound)
	SetChannelRate(beepchannel,rate)

	Delay length*1000 ' wait for our note to finish
	StopChannel(beepchannel)

End Function

'an example tune from the ZX Spectrum 48K BASIC Manual

Print "Frere Gustav"
BEEP 1,0
BEEP 1,2
BEEP .5,3
BEEP .5,2
BEEP 1,0
BEEP 1,0
BEEP 1,2
BEEP .5,3
BEEP.5,2
BEEP 1,0
BEEP 1,3
BEEP 1,5
BEEP 2,7
BEEP 1,3
BEEP 1,5
BEEP 2,7
BEEP .75,7
BEEP .25,8
BEEP .5,7
BEEP .5,5
BEEP .5,3
BEEP.5,2
BEEP 1,0
BEEP .75,7
BEEP .25,8
BEEP .5,7
BEEP .5,5
BEEP .5,3
BEEP .5,2
BEEP 1,0
BEEP 1,0
BEEP 1,-5
BEEP 2,0
BEEP 1,0
BEEP 1,-5
BEEP 2,0

It’s very simple but it does the job and even halts your program until the sound is finished just like on the real machine.

Probably next is making a function for the music like in Manic Miner etc that plays (seemingly) without stopping the gameplay. I guess some kind of “BEEP queue” would do the trick.

I don’t think I have the grey matter to put together my own colour clash routine but thanks to Trashman on the RetroRemakes forums I know it’s possible - his BMax engine is very impressive and I can’t wait to see the resulting game that comes from it.

I’ve had a play with it now and didn’t notice straight away that it was rotatable. I was well chuffed I can tell you when it suddenly twisted in my hand when I was adjusting the viewing angle on my desk and I realised that it could be put into portrait mode as well as landscape.

Of course as you can see the first thing I did was give MAME a little try (once I had told my video card drivers to rotate the image on the screen) and play with a few of the games that look a bit on the strange side when played on a normal landscape aspect screen, with those huge black bars to the left and right.

Galaga and Frogger and Scramble etc suddenly get a whole new least of life. It’s really great.

I’ve wanted a twisty monitor for years and now I have one {does a happy dance}. Many thanks to the person who decided to get rid of this. I guess it was a business and they had dozens of them which they have replaced now with spanking new ones. It has a TCO’99 sticker on it so it’s definitely getting on a bit but it works a charm and I’m a happy bunny.

Now if only I can somehow get a eMac (donations plz) or some other OsX machine that will run OpenGL I will be in tech heaven and get back into coding in a big way. The Mac would not be connected to the net so there would be no distractions.

The internet is a blessing and a curse (as Adrian Monk would say) and as much as I love it dearly it does tend to be a time sink and just drains away the hours of your life. LOL

I hope it went to a good home. They said the super drive (dvd/cd drive?) was knackered but that wouldn’t have mattered a jot to me, and who needs em with networking and pen drives anyway these days?

Ah wells it was a nice dream there for a few minutes.

I wish this iMac G3 had hardware opengl graphics, it’s the only thing holding me back on the mac coding. Can compile on it but can’t test the results which is a bit of a bummer.

Freecycle is great and if you are not a member you should search for your local group on there, they are set up for pretty much every major/minor city in the world.

Yummy. It is very caffeinated too with lots of coffee beans and cups of coffee all around the site. I feel very much at home here now, even more so than before.

I hope you like the new look - Hopefully this Wordpress install will be a lot easier to maintain and keep track of. Can you believe that e107 wasn’t even telling me if I had any comments, I had to plough through the posts looking for them and it ended up with some spam messages knocking around.

Hopefully too this new fresh start here will motivate me a little into maybe making some new content. 2008 is a month in already and I’ve not done a single line of coding.

I partially blame my shiny new PSP that I got from my wife for Christmas - I’ve finally been playing Cave Story (years after everyone else) and enjoying it very much.

Buy me a coffee from the sidebar and let’s hope the coding juices kick in again.

Does anyone still care about TCKSOFT or shouldn’t I bother? LOL

Don’t know why but I’m in a very sombre mood this evening, and for a little while.

Anyway, I will bugger off again before I depress you - enjoy the rest of the holidays!

I wondered why I had never got a single donation for all my games.

I just figured that everyone hates me. LOL. Please show me I’m wrong.

The button is working now thanks to a different plugin to replace the knackered one.

EDIT (Feb 2008): As I’ve moved onto Wordpress, the donate button has changed again and I hope you will all decide to buy me a cup of coffee to help me code.

It’s good to see after all the months of the machine not being anywhere and rarer than a hen’s tooth it’s available here and there… Wii in stock at Amazon!

We are playing Big Brain Academy at the moment - cheap and nasty, but fun, and hopefully getting the kids to actually think a little.

Hopefully next news will have more to do with remake coding.

Many thanks to Guy, it wouldn’t be compiled for Os X without you.

After having a few Mac guys test it it seems to work so… Enjoy!

But… now what? I’m not sure what to do and seem to have fell on my face, remaking wise.

Does anyone have any ideas for a fun and simple game I can get my coding teeth into for a little while until I find something else that I want to do…?

A playable fun little game to make to fill in the game until I decide my next project?