The random ramblings of a French programmer living in Norway...
2024
  Keyboard handling (2)
Sun 18th February 2024   

Arrows and space bar are sufficient for most games, but sometimes you need to access the complete keyboard.

In this article we expand on the earlier project by adding support for the entire keyboard while keeping the possibility to check multiple simultaneous key-presses.

2023
  Flood Fill
Sat 4th November 2023   
Today we will see how to convert a complicated algorithm from BASIC to C, then to 6502 assembler, and the optimization process involved.

It all started when Goyo asked in September 2021 if anyone had a fast floodfill routine to share.

2022
  Efficient rasterization
Wed 2nd February 2022   
I was writing an article about how to create an efficient Flood Fill routine on the Oric, but then I realized that many of the optimizations were generic and could be part of a dedicated article about how to write efficient rasterization code.

2021
  Joysticks
Sat 2nd January 2021   
Many of the 80ies micro computers had dedicated connectors for joystick controllers, but unfortunately the Oric were not one of these.

As a result, joystick interfaces appeared on the market as accessories you could buy, but unfortunately they had all to be programmed differently, and as a result most games don't support any joystick interface, or only some very specific models.

2020
  Keyboard handling (1)
Sat 22nd August 2020   

When people decide to make a game on the Oric, on of the first issue they stumble upon is how to deal with keyboard input.

There are many different ways, some are simple but only allow to check for one key at a time, while some other allow to test for multiple key presses.


  Dungeon Master intro
Wed 20th May 2020   
In 1996 I released a small prototype of what could be Dungeon Master on the Oric.

People being people, they kept bugging me about when I would finish it, so 24 years later I decided to take a look at it.

  Optimizing Buggy Boy (2)
Wed 13th May 2020   
Now that the final scroller is finally running at an acceptable speed, the second most pressing issue is the Mandelbrot fractal part.

Optimizing a scroller is just a matter of finding a fast way to copy things around, but optimizing a fractal is much more complicated due to the limitations of the 6502 processor regarding doing mathematics.

  Overlay Memory
Sun 10th May 2020   
A commonly misunderstood element of Oric computers is the actual memory layout and amount: Does the Oric has 48KB or RAM, as the Atmos label says, or 64KB as claims the Oric Nova 64?

The actual truth is somewhat in-between!

2018
  Optimizing Buggy Boy (1)
Thu 15th November 2018   
On the weekend of 2-3 November 2018 the Demosplash party was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

There are not many demo parties in the USA, and even less of these showing Oric demos running on the actual Oric hardware specially with a Cumulus device!

  Performance Profiling
Sun 11th November 2018   
A few weeks ago NekoNoNiaow asked on the Defence Force forums if there was any profiling tools available for Oric programs "aside from the reliable but quite basic OSDK clock() function".

I had already worked on the topic, but no actual official release came out of it: Time to fix that!

  The hidden cost of making videos
Tue 4th September 2018   
Earlier this year, I was told that it would be "kind of cool" if I did some videos to show how I developed my Oric and Atari projects, instead of just writing blog posts and forum updates.

The first real test was in February when I did a few hours of live streaming during the Global Game Jam 2018.

  Global Game Jam 2018
Tue 6th February 2018   
Like in 2015 and 2016, I spent the last weekend of January at the Global Game Jam.

In total, about 8600 games have been worked on by more than 42000 persons across 108 countries.



2015
  Charsets
Thu 17th September 2015   
If there is one thing that can make a game look like it was professionally produced, it's definitely using a different character set than the one provided by the system.

Let's take a look at some existing games to show what I mean.

  Preprocessor abuses
Sat 15th August 2015   
Here comes the first article about tips and tricks that can be used to make your Oric development easier and faster.

Choosing an assembler

Originally the Oric C development kit was using FRASM to assemble the 6502 code generated by the C compiler front-end.

One of the first changes we did when starting the OSDK was to use instead a real 6502 macro-assembler with an extended set of features, and ultimately we choose XA because it supported most of the C compiler preprocessor directives.

  osdk-dot-org
Fri 27th February 2015   

osdk.org

While doing some maintenance on the Defence Force infrastructure, I realized that the osdk.org domain name was now available.

Few minutes later it was registered, and a couple of hours later there was working DNS and redirect information.

2014
  New site
Sat 22nd February 2014   

Web 2.0?

For now about 13 years the OSDK has been a version 0 point something despite having been used to create quite a significant amount of software.