The difficulty with colored Oric graphics is to give the impression that the stuff is "organic" while in practice everything is aligned on a multiple of 6 pixels so attribute color changes work. And even then... iterations are required to get them all working fine!

My latest #retrocomputing stuff has been kind of draining, so I unwound by messing around with #pico8 and porting over a cute little a-life program I've had since I was a kid. Got to do some sleazy tricks while building it too; happy with the results. bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/05/16/s...

Also of note: given the quirks of the Lapine numbering system in Watership Down, we may legitimately gloss the name of culture hero El-Ahrairah as "The Prince With, Like, Five Enemies"

YouTube has a little scrolling thing at the top regarding the topics that The Algorithm has decided you need to see. And, you know, it's hard to argue with this one. I'd probably give a good long look at a Watership Down 4X.

How old school Tape Loading worked. lemmings.info/how-tape-loa...

Took about a year, but I finished my cross-stitch tribute to the class Amiga Deluxe Paint King Tut. It’s 180x200 stitches, about 34,000 non-black tiny thread X’s 🙂 #NerdStitch

Went a little abstract with my #retrocomputing stuff this week; I've been playing with computers lately more in the Altair lineage than the ones that really made it into the classic retro era, and that meant I was looking at the pre-6502, pre-Z80 CPUs. bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/05/02/c...

A wholesome story for nerds: On Saturday, I was signing books at a local bookstore for Independent Bookstore Day. The store had a signing-palooza with new authors every hour; toward the end of my hour, a woman came up and asked what my book was about. "Dictionaries," I said, and she lit up. 1/n

Messing around a little with a Spectrum 48 in emulation, to try to do things with it the way an actual use might have in the early 1980s

Tonight I wrapped up my drafts for writing up my latest retrocoding blog project and it is about TEN THOUSAND WORDS comparing four intentionally corner-cutting implementations of a 21st century algorithm I dunno what my next project is going to be but I DO know that it's going to be REAL dumb.

I've finalized the #gbadev guide/landing page I was asking about a few weeks ago. It's no place to end a journey, but starting there should get you to several places you can continue. bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/platform-gui...

It's finished! The Sentinel, Geoff Crammond's epic game, is now fully documented. * 41,902 lines of lovingly annotated source code * 51 deep dives (116,240 words) * Buildable repository * 100% handcrafted AI-free content * 7 months’ work thesentinel.bbcelite.com #retrocomputing #C64 #BBCMicro

Share your favorite Extremely 70s Sci-Fi Movie game covers here. I'll go second, with the BASIC Programming cartridge for the Atari 2600. I of course always dress like this when programming

Decided to start a project I've been considering for a few years now. I wrote the Megadrive sound driver for Tim and Geoff Follin when we worked at Malibu Interactive. The source code was lost when the office closed; we were literally locked out and could only get our belongings under supervision.

Hey #retrocoding folks; I'm looking to put together a quick landing page for #gba development that will get people to the actual hubs and proper lists of maintained devkit projects etc. Any places I should know about besides gbadev.org and maybe gbadev.net?

I've released a new version of my 6502 assembler "Ophis", mostly with some quality-of-life syntax extensions. github.com/michaelcmart... #retrocomputing #6502assembly #c64

"Author of System's Twilight fan game makes a Zachlike adventure for NES that you have to compile yourself for now with the toolchain I used for my own latest NES project" is about as directly targeted at me as it is possible to be, holy cats

The GBA can work with 1,024 sprite tiles at a time. These are 8x8 graphic "chunks" that all sprites are made out of. If you're not careful, it's easy to blow through this. Take these blue puzzle frames. One frame is made out of 16 tiles. If each frame had its own tiles, that would be 256 used up.

I got a new toy. I also tried to accomplish things with it, and it stands as a good testament to why when you want to remember The Good Old Days Of Computing, you should probably have them start no earlier than say 1991. bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/03/14/p...

TIL that the NES "blacker than black" palette entry 0d is not just blacker than black, but imitates a sync pulse that can cause TVs and scalers/capture devices to lose sync. What's more, The Immortal on NES used it to gain 1 more shade of grey. I've yet to be able to run it.

Vornmath 0.4 is out. The big important feature is color handling: basic parsing, conversions, mixing, and fallback. Also: new normalizes, polar complex and vector creation, new interpolations, and table-based construction of vectors and matrices. github.com/DUznanski/vo...

I don't know why I felt it was import for me to implement RLE graphics decoding in BASIC on a ZX81 today, but here it is: #RetroComputing #zx81 #basic

I've finished with this cycle of messing with #retrocomputing renderings of pushbutton game boards, and there's been some fun results with it. One of them is for a complete display for the #c64, relying on sprite multiplexing to get 33 sprites out of the system's 8 to serve as the buttons' shadows.

This is a fun question because C64 BASIC was sufficiently weak that doing ANYTHING required a lot of table-based, memory-mapped I/O with big binary blobs and as long as you're doing that you might as well bring in a few machine code accelerators with it Sinclair offered more of the system directly.

One of the nice things about being a #retrocomputing dilettante is that I end up compiling a pretty solid list of toolchains and exploratory articles across a really wide range of hardware. Here's where I keep them: bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/platform-gui...

More #retrocomputing stuff, this time with a bit of a broader view. I've messed around with a lot of old computers and consoles at this point and I tried to organize their various approaches to accelerated 2D graphics. bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/02/14/s...

Feeling an unholy temptation to actually learn the old DOS memory managers like XMS and EMM386 well enough to actually use them

More #retrocomputing stuff; I did as deep a dive as you can take into sprites on the #C64 without actually having to rely on explicit cycle-counting synchronization. bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/02/21/s...

Post a favorite game that got a 75 or less on Metacritic I thought this would be a tough challenge. Oh my goodness, it wasn't. Coilworks's "Cloudbuilt" was a touchstone for me through the entire back half of the 2010s. www.metacritic.com/game/cloudbu...

#retrocomputing stuff. I've been trying to get as much power out of the old 1981 TMS9918A graphics chip in the #ColecoVision, #TI-99/4A, and original #MSX. I get two colors per 8x1 slab of pixels, and I can get most a very nice pushbutton graphic with drop shadows as long as it's off-center...

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college (inc. grad school) The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Compilers and Program Analysis 20th Century European Intellectual History Medieval Italy Abstract Algebra

Meanwhile, in #retrocoding stuff, my work on the blog lately has returned around the #TI99/4A, a very strange old system that cast an very long shadow (out at least to the SNES and Genesis). bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/01/24/t... This is deeper in the weeds than I usually share here... 1/

I don't suppose any of you can recommend a good layman's treatment on classical reception? I'm not really trained in this stuff but it's been observed more than once that I often prefer historiography to history, and this seems of a piece with that

This is not helping me figure out the grammar stuff for Visible Zorker. (Steve Meretzky writing ZIL documentation circa 1989. "Stu" is Stu Galley.)

Gary Larson: In my cartoon I invented Cow Tools as a cautionary tale Cows: At long last, we have created the Cow Tools from classic newspaper comic Cow Tools

the 'conspiracies are actually real' rpg was very common in the 1990s but I think it's considerably harder to do today because conspiracy beliefs (and the attendant, inevitable anti-semitism) are an obviously malignant political force

Game: Hyper Princess Pitch (2011, Windows) TAS Author: Tseralith Source: tasvideos.org/2529M

Python and R as this generation's BASIC and LOGO has quite a bit to recommend it, frankly. Excel is how most people will program computers these days but I lean towards thinking it's a meaningfully separate skill from more traditional script-and-function programming.

Going through old boxes of my stuff at my parents' house. Found an old Alpha Centauri tech tree poster.

Looking through my blog stats at the end of the year, and it's funny to me that while a few posts got flash mobs of readers this year, this incredibly dry post about writing custom logging functions on a 1985-era GUI system is my most consistent draw bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2022/07/24/c...

Some #retrocomputing nonsense; I've been doing some minor homebrewing for the Sega Master System to see what I can get its graphics system to do. It's been a journey! There's a lot more power here than I'm used to for 8-bit systems. bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2025/12/06/s...

Very excited to share my greatest overreaction to Twitch's VOD disaster from February this year. This IBM LTO tape storage system was donated to my work, and I spent a few months on and off getting it back into working shape and figuring out how to connect it to my PC. I'm now the proud new owner!

M is for MAUD who was swept out to sea N is for NEVILLE who died of bnuuy

I grew up with the Atari 2600, the NES, and the Genesis, and never really got to take a look at the Sega Master System. Sega's first 8-bit console was essentially a stripped-down ColecoVision, but they REALLY stepped up for their 1985 hardware update... bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2025/11/08/t...

The finest thing about Cow Tools is that the reason it was an initial failure is also the *precise* reason it has eventually become immortal