Darren Coles

@0xC0DE6502 Interestingly you could do the reverse and duplicate the colours 0-7 in 8-16 and use the top 2 bits across the whole screen

Clever trick on the Acorn Electron. Never saw it before (or perhaps I forgot). This is Palace of Magic 2016. MODE2, with a nice centered viewport and HIDDEN DATA all around it. Done by making colours 8..15 black and encoding your data in the lower 6 bits of each hidden byte

@0xC0DE6502 That's pretty clever. Never saw any games that managed to hide it in this way

@0xC0DE6502 Is the source code available for the beeb version or are you working with the binaries?

@0xC0DE6502 Excellent work as always. Want even aware of this game but the original was one of my favourite electron games

First (glitchy) attempt at getting Citadel 2 (BBC Micro) working on the Acorn Electron 🤪

@davepl1968 Ended up clearing down the current directory ... Which for a Windows service was the windows directory or the system32 directory... Ouch!!!

@davepl1968 I managed to trash a couple of servers and had to stay at work overnight to rebuild them after I used a global variable to hold what was supposed to be a temporary working directory that got cleared down afterwards. Somewhere else in the code the variable got cleared and so it

Ever overwrite your entire operating system because you specified the wrong device address? I just did... Was trying to copy RT_11 from an RL02 drive to a RA60 drive. But I got my CSRs (device addresses) wrong and copied to my BSD drive by mistake. Now it boots RT-11, which is fun, but... Good thing I have a backup :-)

@0xC0DE6502 That looks beautiful.. Great work!

Acorn Electron 3D wireframe experiments. Now with back-face culling which looks better and is also faster. Testing cubes and Cobras at different scales. Warning: coding this stuff is highly addictive

@0xC0DE6502 Looks great

You knew the Cobra was coming, because it has to be done! I managed to squeeze out 1 more bit of precision, making the object less jittery. Also, the line drawing is using OR-plotting instead of EOR-plotting at the moment. Next up: back-face culling / hidden line removal

@0xC0DE6502 @ArnoldLabour My experience is this stuff is mainly from the 16 bit era though so what worked well for 68000 may not apply so easily

@0xC0DE6502 @ArnoldLabour There's also a technique of storing the points of each surface in a specific order so you can compare the z and y values after rotation to determine which way it is facing but I tended to go with storing a face normal coordinate and rotated it alongside the face coordinates

@0xC0DE6502 Gotta love some 3d vector cube

Always wanted to dabble with some real (not precalculated) 3D wireframe shenanigans on my Acorn Electron. Here's my first experiment: the obligatory spinning cube 🤣

@MuseumCommodore If you have any respect for your Amiga then it has no use whatsoever

What is this? Commodore Amiga legends should have no problem explaining what this is for.

@MuseumCommodore R-type, golden axe, space harrier, star wars, operation wolf

If I opened an arcade today the 5 games it must have are: 1. Gauntlet 2. Bubble Bobble 3. Golden Axe 4. Rampage 5. Dragons Lair (no coins needed) What would be your 5 arcade games?

@0xC0DE6502 This got me thinking. I wonder why pokes weren't a big thing on the beeb and electron. The electron magazines were still publishing type in listings for games and utilities long after the spectrum mags but pokes were a big thing on the speccy but I don't remember them on the elk

I created a CRACKME for the Acorn Electron. With some neat tricks, like traps for all known emulators. The challenge is to crack the protection code on a real Electron, using no modern tools. Unfortunately, while playing the hacker myself, I managed to crack it pretty quickly 🤣

@0xC0DE6502 Thanks for posting this.. look forward to taking a look 👍

Disassembly (+ comments) of tape protection of Repton (Acorn Electron). Interesting protection measures. Hidden data in tape block headers is my favourite trick github.com/0xC0DE6502/tap…

@0xC0DE6502 I'd love to see that. As you know these things are a fascination for me

I'm sure this has been done before, but I'm having fun disassembling the protection in Repton for the Acorn Electron. I may publish a commented disassembly later. There is fake code, many undocumented NOPs, hidden BRK handler, decryption, hidden data in tape header blocks, & more

@0xC0DE6502 @rpwbrowne Yep much more useful than the flashing ones

@AmiExpressBBS @rpwbrowne Even half-bright colours (like the Speccy) would have been useful

Revisiting one of my older demos for the Acorn Electron. Creatively called "MODE2 Demo". Fixed an issue that made it glitch every so often. Runs flawlessly in Electroniq (and on a real Electron of course). If someone says the Elk is slow and lacking colours, show them this 😎

@rpwbrowne @0xC0DE6502 It's a shame they didn't come up with a better idea for the colours 8-15 in mode 2 but apart from that it seems pretty standard for the time

@0xC0DE6502 It's just like the BBC the palette was BLOODY AWFUL

@0xC0DE6502 Some of the spectrum games that used custom loaders used to place the loader code within the memory area that was being loaded so the loading would overwrite any changes you had made to the loader to try and bypass it... Quite sneaky

Being curious how game devs made custom tape loaders back in the day, I disassembled the tape loader of Way of the Exploding Fist (Acorn Electron). It loads "encrypted" continuous streams, which are still made up of blocks so you can rewind & retry github.com/0xC0DE6502/cus…

@0xC0DE6502 Very clever