DAD.PRG - making BombBloke

Let's talk about how fucking badass lemon&lime sprite editor is. Because I'm fucking proud of it. And it's only just beginning. It exports a fucktonne of formats. - Atari ST — Degas, NeoChrome and DPaint IFF, bundled into a real FAT12 .st. - Amiga — proper OCS/ECS IFF in a hand-rolled AmigaDOS OFS .adf - Amstrad CPC — Mode 0 screen + OCP .WIN + a palette-setting BASIC loader on an AMSDOS .dsk you can RUN. - C64 — Koala multicolour with per-cell colour reduction, on a CBM-DOS .d64 with real track/sector chains. - ZX Spectrum — a true .SCR with attribute handling, wrapped in a .TAP with a hand-tokenised autorun BASIC loader. - Atari 8-bit — four GTIA modes, each as a raw screen, a self-displaying .XEX, and a self-booting .ATR with a custom boot loader and an ANTIC display list hand-assembled in 6502. Palettes and constraints match the real fucking hardware. Spectrum colour clash. C64 colour regions. Atari mode budgets. If a frame breaks the rules you can jump straight to it. This shit is fucking amazing. You can draw your fucking sprite, download a disk image and throw that fucker right into your real machine or your emulator and it will fucking work. Put that in your motherfucking pipe and smoke it.

@maraka77i Yeah I might do that another England match night. I was a tiny bit disappointed at lack of STe magic. There isn’t even any sideways scrolling ffs!

@dad_prg US Gold version on the other hand was actually quite good.

So this is the worst football game ever made. The codemasters classic, Italy 1990, on the Atari ST, where every match ended 12-0 at least. A rip off even at budget bargain bin prices. Enjoy the music (I thought you'd enjoy that more than the awful chip tune).

@exQUIZitely Just avoid em-dashes and saying "you're absolutely right"!

@dad_prg I have the same issue - sometimes people say I'm an AI just because I can put together 2 sentences with a little bit of zest. Weird world.

I often think about why games from the 80s and 90s hold such deep emotional power for me, while most titles after the early 2000s feel mostly forgettable. It's not one single factor, but a mix of them. First, nostalgia naturally filters our memories - we cherish the best parts of the past and downplay the rest. This happens with movies, music, and more. Second, those older games existed in a quieter world. With few TV channels, no internet, no smartphones, and no social media, they offered genuine escape. Their simple graphics forced your imagination to fill in the gaps, creating a personal, almost magical experience - like diving into a great book. You read about them in magazines, built anticipation, then bought the physical copy. That ritual made them special. Third, today's gaming is a massive corporate industry driven by microtransactions, endless content, and addictive loops. We're bombarded by streaming, constant connectivity, and AI-generated noise, with more games available than ever on platforms like Steam or Roblox (or whatever else I am forgetting now). Our brains simply can't form the same deep bonds considering all the overload. Ask me about any pre-2000 game and I can talk for hours about what it meant to me. Ask about anything newer, and I usually draw a blank. How about you? What time was the most formative for you - and do you feel similar about the moder era or gaming?

@exQUIZitely Oh fuck I just re-read that line and it sounds like ChatGPT wrote it. I'm a human, honest!

@dad_prg "Games were made by people who loved games rather than people doing it to pay the rent. Crunch wasn't punishment, it was a bunch of lads together doing crazy shit and bonding in chaos." THIS! 1000 times THIS.

@rhayadercompute Never seen it before but for some reason it really reminds me of Mouse Trap (some might know it as Mouse Quest).

Frak BBC, Was this the best platformer on the BBC ? #acorn

I need to look around tbh. I’m not as familiar with Amstrad twitter as I am with Atari ST Twitter, but I figure if I post interesting Amstrad stuff they’ll come and say hi. Certainly that’s how it goes in Atari world. Looking forward to getting back to that stuff and doing some more Amstrad Basic videos (did one a while back trying to figure out how to make music).

@dad_prg @VirtualJames if you know of any amstrad accounts let me know and i will add them to the list 😉

@VirtualJames @dad_prg I have created an #amstradcpc list on twitter hopefully i can add more accounts and make it a little easier to find more amstrad content on here 😍😍😍😍now let's see if i can find another cpc game you might not have heard of 😉💪💪💪

@polroc @CPCGAMINGDEMOS I played it a tonne as a kid, basically my first gaming memory, so I rib it from a place of fondness, just noting that the machine could do more.

@CPCGAMINGDEMOS @dad_prg Oh Mummy was already cult back on its day! 😁

I’m this old. Any Amstrad users among my motley crew of followers? Thought it might be fun to add my other childhood computer to the mix. Cracking little machine though I’m not sure Amstrad showcased it brilliantly with Oh Mummy and Animal, Mineral or Vegetable.

@CPCGAMINGDEMOS I’ll be doing more Amstrad bits as it’s a machine I have a lot of love for, slightly higher effort stuff hopefully, but this was a bit of testing the water. Glad you approve :)

💪💪💪💪💪💪❤️❤️❤️❤️🚀🚀🚀🚀

@exQUIZitely True, but they gave it a damn good try.

@dad_prg MicroProse was the king of manuals though... that's one area where Lucasfilm could not touch them :)

"Splendid shooting. You're an expert gunner!" Battlehawks 1942 (1988) is an early WWII naval air combat flight simulator developed by Lucasfilm Games (designed by Lawrence Holland who later also created X-Wing and TIE Fighter). Set in the Pacific theatre, it lets you fly as either an American or Japanese pilot in four historical operations. You engage in carrier-based dogfights, torpedo and dive-bombing runs, and escort missions using planes like the F4F Wildcat, SBD Dauntless, A6M Zero, and Val. What made Battlehawks 1942 great were its gorgeous (for its time!) graphics, and a strong emphasis on historical accuracy. It was so good that two more sequels followed, in what became a truly legendary WWII air combat trilogy. The sequels were: Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain (1989), now focused on the European theatre with more/better campaigns and RAF/Luftwaffe dogfights. Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (1991), the final chapter, focusing on the final years of WWII (1943 - 1945) with experimental German jets and a dynamic campaign.

@ChiefAgenteer A wise man. Absolute banger of a game. You may be interested in @randomcodingdud who is making a remake for modern PCs.

@dad_prg PowerMonger for life.

Some people preferred Populous, but I preferred PowerMonger (or Warmonger as Bullfrog wanted to call it but were denied by EA). Did you prefer it to Populous? I love the visuals and clever things like chopping trees down making it more rainy, running out of wood eventually, the villagers going about their daily lives, it's just a really good chill game.

@RaceSimCentral It’s more accurate than you might expect. I’ve driven on a few real F1 tracks over the years and obviously layouts changed but the bits that haven’t match up surprisingly well.

Just how accurate were the tracks in Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix? Here's a side by side comparison between F1GP (Amiga version) and real-life. The real lap has been adjusted to match speed only. #simracing #retrogaming #f1 #senna #monza

Off topic I know but is anyone else finding the recent update to @plex with the new UI painfully slow and crashy?

@dhh Honestly one of my all time favourites. Played the demo on ST Format 25 to death and later played the Amiga version a tonne. Sensible were so so good.

In my mind's eye, this game looked very different. But in my mind's ear, it sounded exactly like this. Funny how 35 year-old memories come back to us. I loved this era of Amiga gaming.

@maraka77i Definitely getting some hints on what to cover here. Seems we need some Paradroid. The Spy Who Loved Me was definitely one I wanted but with a limited budget I didn’t get it, but it looked cool as fuck.

@dad_prg Paradroid 90 aswell. When this was published, I didn't even know the original Paradroid existed. But oh boy, we played tons of this! And Torvak! And The Spy Who Loved Me! I think Lost Soul ended up in, er, being lost, even if a rolling demo was archived some years ago.

This was the peak of the Atari ST. Which was your favourite game out of *deep breath*: Spindizzy Worlds James Pond Shadow Of The Beast Paradroid 90 Gettysburg Voodoo Nightmare Turrican Dragon Breed Spiderman Strider 2 Ranx Flipit & Magnose The Spy Who Loved Me Chuck Yeager's AFT Torvak UN Squadron Pick N Pile Spellbound Atomic Robokid Bat Legend Of Faerghail M1 Tank Platoon The Light Corridor Blitzkrieg Fire & Forget 2 Back To The Gold Age Lost Soul Badlands Pete That is, to use a technical term, a fuckload of games.

@TommiSairo I imagine a few C64 enthusiasts will be nodding their heads in agreement

@dad_prg Out of that lot: Paradroid '90, no question about it