SJM Remakes

Virgin Racing

2012-01-06T12:16:00.000Z

My son trying to work out if anyone would spot him giving the car a quick spin. To be honest, Timo Glock shouldn’t have left the keys in the ignition :)

Pit Babes

2012-01-06T12:06:00.000Z

After an exciting drive up the M1 to Coventry I was presented with the sight of a couple of girls who knew everything about motor sport....

Last exam

2012-01-06T12:00:00.000Z

I’ve just completed the final amateur radio exam. This was a tricky exam but well worth the effort. My new call sign is M0ZQR, so give me a shout on 2m if you’re able.

mountain biking on tarmac

2011-04-18T12:19:00.000+01:00

Whilst enjoying a bit of mountain biking at the weekend, I decided to film a short section of tarmac downhill. The previous week I saw a similar video on youTube but the cyclist crashed spectacularly at the bottom of the hill. I filmed my video using a rubbish phone camera so the resolution isn’t very good. It got a bit extreme near the bottom of the hill as I was riding with just one hand on the handlebars and concerned that vehicles may have been coming from behind or in the middle of the road coming at me… Fortunately I managed to complete the ride without any incidents.

DevWeek 2011

2011-03-18T14:04:00.000Z

Just back from DevWeek. Three days of quality speakers this time round. Now to put everything I've learnt in to practice. Here are a couple of pictures from the keynote and an excellent session by Ingo Rammer.

This picture was taken from level four of the Barbican. Those stairs are a killer when you start at level -1 !

London wouldn't be London without someone squeezing in another tower block.

Please note that these images were taken on a rather nasty phone camera. Images of London and other places taken by me with a quality camera can be seen here: My Flicker Images

Games for 2011?

2011-01-05T08:49:00.001Z

Well here we are in 2011. I’d like to say I have big plans for writing some retro games this year but I bet I won’t have much in the way of free time. For years now I’ve been wanting to rewrite Virgin Atlantic Challenge, the game I wrote for the Spectrum at least 25 years ago. I’d like to do it with proper 3D models but that looks to be a beast of a project. More likely is my “Dave the dog” game which I started writing in Delphi. I wasn’t happy with the structure of the classes so I may start again but use XNA and the .net framework. Starting again won’t be as bad as it sounds as a lot of the code I wrote already exists in XNA so no extra work to be done there. The map data and graphics already exist so they too can just slot in. I’d like to get a small demo up and running to get some feedback. Only time will tell how it pans out, so watch this space.

You’ve got no history.......

2011-01-05T08:34:00.001Z

New years day was spent recovering from the night before. What better place to do this than by watching my local football team play in sub-zero conditions. My local team is Harlow Town who regularly get beaten by Enfield. This year we held them to a 2-2 draw so hopefully next time we’ll beat them.

New years eve down the pub

2011-01-05T08:28:00.000Z

New years eve outside the White Horse in Newport (in Essex not Wales). It didn’t take long for me to realise that the camera on my phone was not up to the job. Must take a proper camera next year.

Cold day at work

2010-12-20T09:18:00.001Z

So snow has arrived in the south-east. Why is it that so many drivers don’t have a clue how to drive in these conditions? It was a balmy -11 on my way into work this morning. Lots of snow in the car park, so lots of handbrake turn practice to be had :)

Extreme driving

2010-12-17T08:50:00.003Z

Another year almost gone so time to make another New Year's resolution. A good one for next year is to put more petrol in the car and not to drive on fumes. A few days ago I drove about 5 miles with my car telling me I had no fuel left. Live live on the edge....

Dodgy haircut

2010-10-27T14:35:00.001+01:00

Could this be the new signing for the Grosvenor football team?

The tri-band is up

2010-10-03T15:26:00.002+01:00

Saturday saw the full installation of my tri-band V-2000 vertical antenna. I’m hoping that some hefty Rawl bolts and Loctite will keep the antenna vertical and secure. The brackets are galvanised T&Ks and the short mast has a good wall thickness to reduce the chances of bending etc. It’s connected by thirteen meters of military spec coax to reduce losses.

Here are a couple of pictures to show it in its full glory.

2010-08-26T08:48:00.007+01:00

Doing my bit to help in the fight against AIDS in Africa.

Time to do some Delphi programming

2010-07-15T10:26:00.000+01:00

I thought my luck was in as I’d been asked to update a Delphi application. Unfortunately the area I need to change was written by a colleague (VB). To my amazement there are numerous layers of abstraction just to read some settings from the registry. I’m sure he planned this deliberately just to brighten up my day. I’m sure he’s smiling at the thought of me banging my head on the desk trying to decipher pages of code just so I can add one small feature.

2010-06-10T15:16:00.001+01:00

Writing 16bit code with Borland's c++ builder !! What have I done to deserve this.....

2010-06-08T16:16:00.001+01:00

One of my photographs has been used in an updated iPhone application. Check it out here:http://www.schmap.com/?m=iphone#uid=london&sid=shopping_markets&p=56307&i=56307_132 Note that it's the one by "Ian Munro" and not RetroCoder :)

2010-06-06T20:25:00.004+01:00

After a few months of hard work I've managed to pass the second amateur radio exam. I also got 100% in this one !

I'm the one on the left Vince, the one with lots of hair :)

One of my London photos has been short-listed

2010-05-11T10:53:00.001+01:00

I’ve just had one of my photographs short-listed for the next addition of the Schmap London Guide(http://www.schmap.com/). I find out on May 14th if it’ll be used. Checkout my recent London snaps here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22697919@N05/

Me and my Amateur Radio certificate

2010-05-04T10:18:00.001+01:00

Picture of me collecting my Amateur Radio certificate: http://www.g0mwt.org.uk/training/photos/p-found.htm

Another year gone

2010-04-23T18:37:00.001+01:00

Well, I’ve been a bit slack when it comes to writing on my blog. A year has gone past and I’ve been very busy but with the day job and not the fun stuff. All my projects have been put on hold and I only found a little bit of time to create a new website. I have big plans but will struggle to fit it all in. With the release of dot net 4 and Visual Studio 2010 I’m currently waiting for the new release of the XNA framework. I plan to use this as my development environment as it fits in with my paid work. As much as I enjoy using Delphi, I just don’t use it at work anymore and find it difficult to continually swap between this and C#. If you haven’t visited my new website yet then pop along and take a look. It’s still work-in-progress so some of the features don’t work yet. I’ll be adding items as I get time, some of which may well be Silverlight. I will also try to get some more blog entries finished before the end of the month. These will outline what I plan for the last two quarters of the year.

A week at London

2009-03-17T14:18:00.000Z

Too much to do at home and at work so no time to work on my games. The next few months look to be even busier so I don’t expect to get much work done on my “Dave the Dog” game. I have been able to fix the code so I can now walk between multiple screens. I had to add extra data to the XML document to handle the different entry points as Dave moves between screens. On the plus side, my company has just employed a graphic artist so I’ll have to ask him if he’ll be interested in drawing a few graphics for me. Next week I’ll be at Dev Week in London. If your going then may be I’ll see you there. The short train journey into London should give me time to plan the next stage of the game. I’m thinking of writing the code to collect, drop and use items. These items will be placed “randomly” so I’ll need to plan how I’m going to do this and how to keep track of the items as I drop or use them.

Dave throws a bone !

2008-11-07T09:40:00.000Z

I'm now spending most of my time developing C# applications so I haven't had much free time to work on my "Dave" game. Shown below is the latest video showing how far the game has developed. I hit a few problems with the collision detection mainly due to the diagonal movement of the "grannies". I decided to just let them move in the more normal left, right and up, down style. I had always thought that in the finished game they would probably not just stay in the current screen but actually walk around the whole map, going into the shops and houses etc. This more linear movement should work better and also allows me to get on with the rest of the game rather than hitting my head on the desk due to diagonal collision problems. The areas that Dave can walk are defined by rectangles and you will see in the video that Dave can walk up to the door. The code just checks that Dave is in (or is moving into) one of the defined rectangles. In the debug mode the rectangles are drawn on the screen which allows me to check that all is as it should be. The last thing that I have added it to allow Dave to throw bones at people (well he is a dog). This works quite nicely but has brought to my attention a small problem that I need to address. At the moment the collision detection is based on the bottom of the bones rectangle in relationship to the other sprites. It should be based on the initial position of Dave's feet (ie, it needs an off set value). It shouldn't be too hard to fix this as long as I can find some time to do it. The next job will be to enable the exits so that I can write the flip screen code. I will probably then look to add the collectable objects and maybe some street furniture and general obstacles. The movement of the sprites in the video isn't very smooth due to my capture program. in "real" life, they move very nicely, even when the screen is windowed rather than full screen.

Attack of the grannies !

2008-10-01T09:06:00.001+01:00

Having found a few spare minutes, I've been able to work on a couple of key features of my Dave the Dog game. I've started defining the game map as an XML document. This file defines the areas of each screen that Dave and the citizens of Dave's town can walk around. It also defines which citizens appear on each screen and their starting location and direction. There is also loads of other details that are yet to be implemented. To show the current state of the game I've put together another short video. It may seem that the game is running a little slow but I turned down the speed so that my screen capture program did a better job of capturing the animation. You will also be able to see that I haven't implemented collision detection or z-ordering. These will be worked on when I next get a bit of time. For now, enjoy the site of Dave trying to avoid those annoying grannies.

What a great summer !

2008-09-11T10:01:00.001+01:00

Work has been a bit busy recently so Dave the Dog has not really progressed much further. In the few spare minutes before work I've been able to design the XML that describes Dave's village. I have added a couple of simple screen descriptions so that I can work on the next major area which is the code that will import the data and create a screen and all its elements. These elements define the exit points and the areas that Dave and the other villagers can walk. Any objects that can be collected or interacted with are also held in this XML. I wasn't going to use XML but it makes life so much easier to add extra data as my ideas change. This file will only be loaded when the game starts so there will be no performance problems once the XML is read in and screen objects created. As Dave leaves a screen the code just gets the next appropriate block of pre processed data from the list. It's this screen manager and list code that I'm working on at the moment. I hope that over the next few weeks I'll be able to walk between a couple of screens and be restricted to areas of the screen defined by the XML.

I feel a lot fresher after my summer holiday. For a change I didn't spend anytime thinking about programming. Instead I went kayaking on the sea and photographed steam trains and waterfalls. Unfortunately the English summer also showed why most people go abroad for their holidays. Shown below is a picture of Sidmouth (Devon) in the middle of August. Please note that I did not go out in a kayak whilst the weather was doing this.

Into the world of Dave

2008-07-24T14:59:00.000+01:00

Coding has taken a bit of a back seat whilst I worked on some graphics. I needed to produce something to code against so that I can check the animation etc. Shown below is a mocked-up screen showing what has been produced so far. Now that I have produced some sprites I need to get back to writing the code. Hopefully I'll have another short video soon of Dave walking about his town (need to think up a good name for it).

Dave the Dog lives...

2008-07-09T08:15:00.001+01:00

I've been a bit quiet recently as the day job has sapped all my time. To make matters worse I got a virus that was so bad I had to format my drive and re-install Windows ! I lost some code as well as time which was depressing. To try to cheer myself up I had a quick look at my "Dave the dog" game and even found time to create a short video of the basics. I resized the "granny" sprite as the last post showed her a little too small (or was Dave too big?). Anyway, this video shows Dave walking about under the control of the keyboard and the granny is controlled by the computer. If I'd captured more video you would have seen that she bounces off the sides of the screen and changes direction. [NB: This video has now been removed. See the more up to date video in a more recent blog entry.] Currently this is written in Delphi but I am very tempted to produce an XNA version using C#. I may well develop both simultaneously just to see if I can fry my brain. From now on I'll be storing my code in different places so that if I get another virus I won't loose my data.

Its Dave the dog

2008-06-06T08:49:00.000+01:00

A few months ago a private joke amongst my family and friends got me thinking about a game I started for the Amstrad over 20 years ago. It was based on a dog walking around a town doing jobs etc. This reawakening of a distant memory has inspired me to start it again but this time for the PC. Once its completed I'd like to write it for the Amstrad and Spectrum computers. The main character is called "Dave the dog". He is based on the dog that appears in the first (and possibly the second) Jack the nipper game.

By using my game library code I quickly got Dave controllable and a mad granny bouncing off the edges of the screen. I have created a map of locations and have a reasonably good idea for the story line. I just need some help with the graphics and plenty of time to get it done. I'll post more screenshots as I progress.

Cavern Fighter 2 is on hold for the moment as I was finding it difficult to get motivated with it. I'll revisit the code in the future.

DevWeek 2008

2008-03-20T10:11:00.001Z

I've recently got back from this years DevWeek held in London (www.devweek.com). This event was biased towards Microsoft products so wasn't really relevant to any Delphi programmers. Obviously as most of it was .net related I guess you could implement some of the technology using Delphi for .net. Now that I'm back at work and no longer have the "fun" of standing on a train as it meanders its way in to Liverpool street station, I can get back to some fun stuff. Over the next few weeks I'll have less spare time as new work projects will take up all my time. The company I work for will be concentrating their efforts using the new MS products. So it'll be less Delphi and more C# along with Silverlight and AJAX. All interesting stuff but I'll still be looking at my games as a break from managed code.

The Explosion Editor

2008-02-22T11:59:00.000Z

I have put together a quick and dirty utility that allows me to design the path that a particle will follow during an explosion. Its all pretty much point-and-click and quickly produces the numbers that I can paste into my game. This is why I'm a fan of Delphi, it makes producing applications like this so quick and easy. Shown below is the editor, just in case you are interested in what it looks like.

2008-02-21T09:49:00.001Z

After a short break I've started work on Cavern Fighter 2 again. I have just finished work on the explosion classes that will allow me to create some interesting effects. In the last game almost every explosion consisted of a single sprite cycling through 8 frames to simulate a fireball. This time I wanted more control to be able to change the explosion depending on what had been destroyed. To achieve this I have developed a set of classes that make up my "Explosion Manager". All I need to do is make a simple call into this class and pass in the ID of the explosion and the starting X and Y location. The manager then creates an explosion based on the ID. Each explosion will consist of multiple burning particles to create some spectacular effects. Each particle will follow a predefined path allowing them to create distinctive patterns. What I need to do now is to create a separate utility to enable me to design and test these patterns.

The next big job will be to combine the weapon classes and the explosion classes with the (not yet written) collision detection. Once this is done that will be the core of the game completed.

2008-01-15T10:30:00.001Z

A Happy New Year to you all. I've not done much in the way of Blogging recently as I've just been way too busy. So here is my first Blog of 2008. Shown below is a screenshot of my Cavern Fighter 2 game. Its based on my Game Library and so far its developing smoothly. Although this image is static it does show many important elements of the game. The background is being scrolled and the background items were placed as described by the data from the level designer. The two fuel dumps are animated and the ship is controllable by the user. A laser blast has been fired which will soon fade. The shot can be animated and have a gravitational pull applied to it. The weapon class defines the quantity of shots that can be fired simultaneously, the distance the shot will travel and the damage it can impart. All of this make for an almost playable game. Next on the to-do list is the Explosion classes. I want different items to explode in different ways. After that I will implement some collision detection and put together a wrap around demo so that people can try it out. I can then start to add the other elements that need to be displayed such as lives, health, selected weapon etc. The final parts of the development work will then be the in game "shop" which allows you to upgrade your ship, the splash screens and anything else I've left out. By then I hope to have found someone to help me out with the graphics so that it will have a more "professional" look about it. For now I'll let you look at the image whilst you wait for the next instalment.

Map editor almost finished

2007-10-30T08:41:00.000Z

The map editor is now almost done. I just need to sort out how to save all the levels in one big block of data (XML). At the moment it just handles one level although the code is in place to deal with as many as I can design. I also need to add an export function so that the data can be created in a format suitable for my game. I could use the editor's XML but I don't want my game to have to know how to handle XML and a custom data format would be smaller and more secure.

The next job will be to design some decent graphics ! As you can see from the screen dump, there aren't many graphics at the moment and they don't look too inspiring. If anyone want to help out with designing some tiles, please contact me.

Cavern Fighter 2 - Map Editor

2007-10-16T12:36:00.000+01:00

I've recently started work on a map editor for my new game (Cavern Fighter 2). Some of the game code has been completed but I have now got to a stage where I need some test data to display the cave walls. The old map editor did its job well enough but after designing hundreds of screens it soon highlighted some shortcomings. I decided to rectify those problems by designing a new editor from scratch. This application also makes good use of my "Games Library" and has helped me to add some extra functionality to it. Shown below is a screen shot of the editor. It still needs a little more work but its much nicer to use.

I've now added a Sprite Pool Class

2007-08-31T15:10:00.000+01:00

I have added the Animated Base Sprite class that now allows sprites to be created with built in functionality for handling animation. I have also created a new batch class that holds two lists of item. This batch allows me to create a "pool" of sprites held in what I call the "Dead List". A simple call to the batch transfers a "Dead" sprite to the "Live List". Any sprite on the Live List will be rendered. Once a sprite on the Live List is no longer needed another call will transfer it back to the Dead List ready for reuse. I am using some custom written Double Linked Lists to achieve this functionality. This will have speed gains over the built in Delphi TList class. The code below shows how I add three sprites to the SpritePool's Dead List. A single call to "Pool.Acquire" will move a sprite from the Dead List and place it on the Live List. The SpritePool Live List is then passed to the Graphics Device where the sprite is rendered. The SpritePool will be used where large volumes of sprites may need to be used in a hurry. A good example could be an explosion made up of many sprites. By creating a pool before the game play starts, there won't be an slow down when multiple explosions are required. Additional code could be added so that if the Pool ran out of "Dead" sprites, new ones could be created on-the-fly. Obviously we don't want this to happen so some careful calculations should be performed to optimise the size of the Pool.

Any comments ?

The implementation

procedure TForm1.btnListTestClick (Sender : TObject) ;
var
GraphicDev : TGraphicsDevice ;
Content : TVisualContent ;

Pool : TSpritePool ;

begin
GraphicDev := TGraphicsDevice.Create (800, 600, bs24) ;
Content := TVisualContent.Create ('Images') ;
Content.LoadImageContent ;

Pool := TSpritePool.Create ;

Pool.AddToDeadList (TTestSprite.Create (Content.GetImage ('Pic1'), 90, 90, 2)) ;
Pool.AddToDeadList (TTestSprite.Create (Content.GetImage ('Pic2'), 100, 100, 5)) ;
Pool.AddToDeadList (TTestSprite.Create (Content.GetImage ('Pic3'), 110, 110, 3)) ;

Pool.Acquire ;

GraphicDev.DrawSpritePool (Pool.LiveList) ;

GraphicDev.Flip ;

Pool.Update ;
end ;

A Test Sprite Class

2007-08-23T17:26:00.001+01:00

To make my test sprite code a bit clearer I thought I should also show the sprite class so that you can see how the settings are used. Notice that my sprite class derives from "BaseSprite". I will soon be adding an "AnimatedSprite" class that will provide base functionality to animate an image.

The declaration

TTestSprite = class (TBaseSprite)
public
constructor Create (theSurface : PSDL_Surface ;
XPos : integer ;
YPos : integer ;
ZPos : cardinal) ;

procedure Update ; override ;
end ;

The implementation

constructor TTestSprite.Create (theSurface : PSDL_Surface ;
XPos : integer ;
YPos : integer ;
ZPos : cardinal) ;
begin
inherited Create ;
ImageSurface := theSurface ;

ImageLocationRect.x := XPos ;
ImageLocationRect.y := YPos ;

ZOrder := ZPos ;

ImageDisplayRect.w := 81 ;
ImageDisplayRect.h := 90 ;
ImageDisplayRect.x := 0 ;
ImageDisplayRect.y := 0 ;
end ;

procedure TTestSprite.Update ;
begin
end ;

My game library works !

2007-08-22T16:39:00.000+01:00

I quickly put together a test and shown below is all that is required to display three sprites on the screen (As shown above).

All the code does is create an SDL rendering surface with dimensions of 800x600 with 24 bits per pixel. All the graphical content in the "Images" directory is loaded. I then create three sprite and load them into a batch handler. I then sort the batch so that the sprite will be rendered using their z-order. I then render the sprites by passing the batch to the graphics device and finally flip the buffer to show the results. The graphics device will also accept single sprites as well as a batch list and there are several other options now shown in this example. And finally, before anyone asks, I haven't shown any code that calls "free" on the objects I have created. Any comments ?

The Code

procedure TForm1.btnSpriteTestClick (Sender : TObject) ;
var
GraphicDev : TGraphicsDevice ;
Content : TVisualContent ;
spr1 : TTestSprite ;
spr2 : TTestSprite ;
spr3 : TTestSprite ;
Batch : TSpriteBatch ;

begin
GraphicDev := TGraphicsDevice.Create (800, 600, bs24) ;

Content := TVisualContent.Create ('Images') ;
Content.LoadImageContent ;

spr1 := TTestSprite.Create (Content.GetImage ('Pic1'), 90, 90, 2) ;
spr2 := TTestSprite.Create (Content.GetImage ('Pic2'), 100, 100, 5) ;
spr3 := TTestSprite.Create (Content.GetImage ('Pic3'), 110, 110, 3) ;

Batch := TSpriteBatch.Create ;
Batch.Add (spr1) ;
Batch.Add (spr2) ;
Batch.Add (spr3) ;

Batch.Sort ;

GraphicDev.DrawSpriteBatch (Batch.SpriteList) ;

GraphicDev.Flip ;
end ;

Sun, Sea and Cider

2007-08-21T16:34:00.001+01:00

Well I'm back from two weeks in sunny Somerset / Devon. Whilst under the influence of sun, sea and cider I spent many a hour designing a set of classes for my next Delphi game. I wanted to produce a library that would make it easy to get a 2D sprite based game working with minimal coding. I also wanted a library that could be reused so that I didn't have to re-invent the wheel all the time. Having spent some time with the XNA content pipeline I have based my set of classes around this concept. I've based the classes around SDL and now have 6 classes that handle audio and visual content and the bliting of individual or batches of sprites. So far I'm very happy with the design as its very OO making it very flexible. It should be easy to add OpenGL support in the future so its reasonably future proof. Over the next few days I will start to put together the basic code of my new game so that I can tweak the library and get a demo up and running.

Cavern Fighter runs under Vista

2007-07-13T11:50:00.000+01:00

Whilst taking a quick break for a well earned cup of coffee, I loaded up my first remake, Cavern Fighter, into a Vista VM. As far as I can tell it works fine although there was a little bit of flicker with the graphics. I have put that down to the fact I was running it in a virtual machine. If anyone has had any problems with Cavern Fighter running under Vista then please let me know. If there are any issues I'm more than happy to fix them. If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about then visit the download section of my website and grab a copy of the PC remake of the ZX Spectrum game, Cavern Fighter.

SJM Remakes Website: http://www10.brinkster.com/ismunro/main.aspx

SJM Remakes

2007-07-12T12:01:00.000+01:00

Well, everyone else is doing it so why not me? Here is the first entry of the SJM Remakes Blog. As this should be easier and quicker to update than my main website, expect to see more retro ramblings appear here more frequently.