26/07/01 Nexus is a Win32 application which allows 2 playstations to connect over the internet or LAN. It's actually not been tested as yet so it only works in theory :). Hopefully I'll get some feedback on whether it works or not, then I'll correct any problems with it and release a library so link-able games can be written for it. The playstation packet code is pretty much the same as that used in the Cyclone library, although with a PC connection it's possible to transfer more data each frame. At the moment up to 32 bytes of data can be transferred each frame. Bear in mind though that transferring packets is quite slow, so the less data sent the better. You can download the test version here. If you want to help me test it drop me a mail.
31/01/01 Tinytim is a compression utility allowing files and data to be compressed on the PC and yaroze. It contains a PC executable, tiny.exe, and yaroze library, libtiny.a. Tinytim uses the public domain zlib compression library, and plain huffman code for compression and decompression. For more information download it here (source included).
26/07/01 I've
not worked on LoM for a while, and I don't know if/when I'll be going back to
it. I did work on it a fair bit after the demo, but you wouldn't know it to look
at it. If you want to check it out you can download it here.
02/09/00 After a er short
break I'm back into my Lands of Midnight (LoM) project. So what have I done so
far? Well I've written the routines to draw the graphics and text drawing.
They're not entirely brilliant and I'll have to go over them again and re-write
ones I'm not happy with.
Anyway I've created a demo of what I've done so
far, which will give you an idea of what LoM will look like. The demo allows you
to move a couple of lords across the land of Midnight, it doesn't get much more
exciting than that. About the only thing that is interesting is that if you've
two ahem yaroze playstations you can link them up and move the two lords around
the same map at the same time. The demo is available here.
09/01/00 I've decided to create a game based loosely (but not that
loosely) on the Spectrum game Lords of Midnight. I chose this game for three
main reasons:
I've a great interest in ancient warfare and the idea of
commanding armies of foot and horse and conquering opposing forces and
strongholds appeals to me.
I've already written a version of LoM for the
Amiga, in assembler and admittedly very badly. So I thought I'd put things to
rights in this version. It wasn't particularly faithful to the original, as I
added elements into the game which I thought would improve it (and some of them
even did). Since then I've had more ideas of how to make the game more enjoyable
and immersive for the player(s) involved.
Being totally useless at creating
sprites and drawing in general, basing the game around LoM and using it's high
tech visuals :-) is far easier than creating a new game from scratch.
Okay,
so that's a brief outline of my intentions, I'll give details of what I intend
to include in the game as soon as I can get the time to start working on it.
Stay t00ned.
The idea behind Cyclone is to
provide a means of transmitting data between PC and playstation whilst a yaroze
application is running. By using the serial connection between the two, the
yaroze application sends commands to the Cyclone file server running on the PC,
instructing it either to send down file data to the playstation, or to store
data the playstation is sending to it in a PC file. A library of functions is
provided, based around the standard UNIX type calls, which yaroze applications
use to communicate with Cyclone. Additional functions are provided which allow
applications to get a PC directory listing, change directory, change file
attributes, etc.
Cyclone and it's library also provide another useful
feature, the ability to transfer data packets between two playstations each game
frame. This allows link-able yaroze games to be written. A link to another
playstation can be created either directly, using a link cable, or via a PC
modem connection.
The Cyclone file server, the gcc and CodeWarrior
libraries, all of documentation, and the playstation library source are
available in the file cyclo20a.zip