Where Have I Been?

[AMSDOS]

Still been around the Traps on the Internet, only discovered that CPCWiki was running a couple of days ago, before that I thought it had closed down along with The CPC Zone Forums!   

About the only thing I've been doing Amstrad related is getting my Website up and running again. Had to do a backup of it last year when Yahoo decided to Close GeoCities and make people pay to have Advertisements on their website! The good news is it's more visible to the world now and I've linked it to the Ring of CPCs, plus it's easily connected from the Turbo Pascal stuff on the CPCWiki. Bad News - my old address which I submitted to some well known bods (which have since removed them) has ended up on other Websites with Links. An Internet Search (using your favourite Search Engine) has placed those sites before my current one! Sadly the site is still the way it was years back and time hasn't allowed me to fix the fix I'm in at the moment!   

[Gryzor]

Welcome back mate!

The wiki has been going from strength to strength, besides some hickups and a domain change. But it's nice to see you back

What you describe does happen when your page stays dormant for too long... oh well. But you can also add a link to the wiki's Links list!

Again, welcome

[AMSDOS]

Hehe, thanks Mate! 

Actually Geocities was pretty good, and it's closure was going to hit anyone who had a site with them (unless you were willing to pay to keep it as a Yahoo Site!).

It's just been too long, I was just earlier going through some Amstrad Stuff I was doing back in 2008, forgot about that work-in-progress game.

As a mental note I need to setup my Superdisk drive on my old computer, boot that machine with a DOS disk I've got, rigg up that Startup disk so the Superdisk will activate on startup, I can probably actually use my other Startup (from my really old Laptop) to get those Superdisk Drivers and transfer them onto the disk I need (save accessing the faulty hard disk too much). Once that's going, get all the stuff I want off that computer (not a lot, mainly programming, CPC Related & some Documents I had stored on it).

[arnoldemu]

Hehe, thanks Mate! 

Actually Geocities was pretty good, and it's closure was going to hit anyone who had a site with them (unless you were willing to pay to keep it as a Yahoo Site!).

It's just been too long, I was just earlier going through some Amstrad Stuff I was doing back in 2008, forgot about that work-in-progress game.

Finish it and release it. Go on!

As a mental note I need to setup my Superdisk drive on my old computer, boot that machine with a DOS disk I've got, rigg up that Startup disk so the Superdisk will activate on startup, I can probably actually use my other Startup (from my really old Laptop) to get those Superdisk Drivers and transfer them onto the disk I need (save accessing the faulty hard disk too much). Once that's going, get all the stuff I want off that computer (not a lot, mainly programming, CPC Related & some Documents I had stored on it).

great.

Your documents and files are useful, especially your turbo pascal stuff.

[robcfg]

Do you have the parallel version of the SuperDisk?


In that case you can get the drive out of the case and connect it to the ide cable on your PC. Windows will see it straight away and you won't need any drivers.

[AMSDOS]

arnoldemu wrote:

Finish it and release it. Go on!

It's Nothing special    Certainally not in your league of programming. Supposed to be a souped up version of a 10 Liner from ACU. The program needs some ideas, at the moment the only thing I can think of is some delays to slow the game down in the early levels til eventually there's nothing slowing it down. I wanna make the game harder by having this alien attack if it gets past you - bit like an Atari 7800 game Planet Smashers where the aliens are zapping the force field to the Earth if you don't destroy them. Perhaps a bit more complicated than the game already on my website!     
great.

Your documents and files are useful, especially your turbo pascal stuff.

I'm even more intriegued to see someone wrote a book for the Amstrad version of Turbo Pascal (must be worth a mint to buy it now!).

[AMSDOS]

robcfg wrote:

Do you have the parallel version of the SuperDisk?


In that case you can get the drive out of the case and connect it to the ide cable on your PC. Windows will see it straight away and you won't need any drivers.

Actually setup my Superdisk so it could just run as it is on my new computer! But I do have an Internal one somewhere! Ah the Hardware! 

[Gryzor]

Superdisk... the 120MB floppies? One of those quite got me started in the retro community: back in 1995 I would carry one with me to the university labs, fill a couple of disks with ROMs/images (Arcade, ST, CPC) and bring them back home... those were the 33.3kbps days

[AMSDOS]

Gryzor wrote:

Superdisk... the 120MB floppies? One of those quite got me started in the retro community: back in 1995 I would carry one with me to the university labs, fill a couple of disks with ROMs/images (Arcade, ST, CPC) and bring them back home... those were the 33.3kbps days

Yeah it's been rather handy at times when I've really needed it. Just had me thinking that I should get out my old 386 which Hard Disk died on me a year or so back and put NO$CPC on it. It doesn't run very fast (16Mhz) and only has B&W VGA Screen - can be connected to a colour monitor though. Just a pity it doesn't have CD-ROM on it - or maybe just rid up the Pentium with Caprice32 working from Disk - has CD-ROM so could Burn software on it, and write to Disk or Superdisk, whatever I've got on those Superdisks now should go on CD - keep those disks at free of space for writing stuff to.

Once I've rescued (I hope) that Pascal stuff, I'll post it in here. Unfortunately I was holding a bit of it because it wasn't returning CP/M v2.2 the way it would look prior to running the program (mainly Borders and Ink Colours - think I was resetting it to the standard BASIC colours - Blue with Yellow Text!). I did write a routine to get the CP/M Screen colours and reset them once the program finished - Mode is easy since CP/M looks best on a 80x25 Text Screen.

[arnoldemu]

Once I've rescued (I hope) that Pascal stuff, I'll post it in here. Unfortunately I was holding a bit of it because it wasn't returning CP/M v2.2 the way it would look prior to running the program (mainly Borders and Ink Colours - think I was resetting it to the standard BASIC colours - Blue with Yellow Text!). I did write a routine to get the CP/M Screen colours and reset them once the program finished - Mode is easy since CP/M looks best on a 80x25 Text Screen.

Well I think it would be useful to also have Pascal as another language that could be used to program on the CPC, and your extra libraries and knowledge are a massive help here.

I've recently been using z88dk compiler (runs on PC) and the cpcrslib to write a game. Would be good if Pascal could also be used like this for those who are more familiar with this language.

[AMSDOS]

Wouldn't be in the same league as something like Z88DK, I remember simply downloading that Mariano the Dragon, think the person who wrote that said it was nothing!    I've compiled a Turbo Pascal 3 game (originally done on an IBM PC), which should work no sweat on the 8bit equivalent (simply changing the text based characters around) - text based Pacman clone. Got another old Turbo Pascal 3 game somewhere which is PC orientated, that one somewhat tricker because it redefined graphical characters for a CGA Text Mode (apparantely not easy to do since later Video Cards, EGA?, VGA allowed a standard procedure to redefine Text Characters), shouldn't be too difficult to replace that with Amstrad equivalents using Symbol - via the firmware or in Write Control Characters. The game itself is a Donkey Kong clone.

I made my own little Library extension (in addition to the Turbo Pascal one) which makes it possible to make programs quite comparable to Locomotive BASIC, naturally Turbo Pascal handles M/C and has that advantage of being able to produce faster Arrays. The Inline M/C could theorically be used to make something look more commercially driven, and I've got some good examples of it, I've had some trouble trying to incorporate something like a Space Storm II into it!    Unfortunately I had to put that into the too-hard basket! 

If I remember correctly Mariano the Dragon is perhaps in the relms of Space Froggy from that Sprites Alive, quite impressive I thought given their products of High-Level Language. Space Froggy I think was written in a Lanugage directed for the Sprites Alive Compiler as opposed to some of the other program examples included with Sprites Alive which are RSX driven in BASIC and weren't Compilable.

[AMSDOS]

Certainally some positives could come from using TP - access to existing TP stuff which was reworked (by myself) to work in TP3. Can also connect some of those clear assembly routines in with that other stuff!