Okay, a couple new things…
One, after all the excitement and talk of the latest expansion for World of Warcraft, I decided to renew my subscription after over four years just to play a bit. I have two and a half expansions of material to enjoy before I even buy the latest one, so it’s slow going but fun! You can criticize Blizzard on a lot of things, but they are damn good at making a fun game.
All of that doesn’t mean the CRPG has dropped off, far from it! I needed something to get through the myriad of frustrating bugs in my battlemap generator system. I decided I didn’t want to risk testing the code in the game itself, but instead write a prototype to create the maps so I could observe how they looked. After a LOT of assembler debugging to find video over-writes and other problems, it’s done and working well! This will allow me to test different graphics combinations, and add new ones as needed, to keep the maps looking fresh and interesting. Here’s a small sampling of some:
Lastly, I had a very unexpected and welcome gift come my way…
When I was at Fest West 18′ a few months back, we had a contest and the prize I won was a TIPI sidecar controller. I graciously turned it down and took an alternate gift because I am using my Peripheral expansion system and the sidecar isn’t advantageous for it.
So the creator of the TIPI system contacted me a week ago to say he’d finished the PEB card version of it, and he was going to send me the card! I had to purchase my own Raspberry PI unit and associated components (power supply, Micro SDHC card) but that was not expensive or difficult on Amazon.
After figuring out how to put it together and get it in, I discovered it’s a fantastic device. I am able to access the “file system” from my local PC laptop and can quickly and easily copy TI files from there right to the drive. This allows for VERY fast turn-around in testing the game on the hardware, and it’s a perfect replacement for the drive system, given that the disk controllers are getting scarce, and these days, you WANT some compatibility with modern devices.
You can find all the information on TIPI you need right here!