The random ramblings of a French programmer living in Norway...
2020
  Shifter Distortions
Sun 18th October 2020   
A few days ago, I saw on Twitter an interesting link to an article from Mark Wrobel explaining how the classic horizontal distortion effect was done on the Amiga computer using the copper, complete with some source code and pictures to explain it all.

  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.


  Mind Bender
Sat 15th August 2020   
Size coding is an interesting challenge: After spending a day at work using a computer that counts memory in gigabytes and storage in terabytes, it's refreshing to go back to basics.

Back in the days, people HAD to write compact and efficient code, simply because the hardware would not allow for anything else.

These days it's more like an intellectual puzzle game, which I find deeply satisfying.

  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!

  Croissants!
Sat 14th March 2020   
As an expatriate, you may be perfectly happy in your adoptive country, but there are things you never quite forget.

For me, as a French person living in Norway, Croissants are one of these thing!

  Freeboot revisited
Sat 18th January 2020   
Once upon a time I had to sell my Oric to buy an Atari ST.

Unfortunately I barely managed to get enough money to get myself a Singled Sided floppy drive model, which quickly proved to be an issue since most people were swapping around double sided floppy disks.

To solve the issue, I bought an external Double Sided Cumana floppy drive, which allowed me to access all these floppies... but not boot on them!


Enters the FreeBoot!

  Half a Life in Video Games
Sat 4th January 2020   
Time flies.

We just entered 2020, and since I started working at Adeline Software in January 1995, it means I've been working in the Video Game Industry for 25 years, without a single interruption... and since I'll be celebrating my 50th birthday this year, it also means I've spent half of my life doing it.