Michael R. Cook

Arcade Games: Source Code Collection

Not long after getting my first PC in 1994, I started to explore emulators. I don’t remember exactly which was the first, maybe it was NES or SNES, but before the 1990’s was over I’d amassed quite a large collection of emulators. These days I rarely play a game that wasn’t released in the 20th century!

I was always intrigued how these old games were made. Almost all were written in Assembly language and over the years I collected together a list of links to dissasemblies for various games. Some are long gone, some moved to different URLs, and others unfortunately completely vanished from the web.

Although there are some efforts to gather video game source code/disassemblies in one place, such as the Video Game Preservation project, it’s still difficult and time consuming to find many of these disassembly projects.

Rather than let my own list rot away on my hard drive, I’m sharing it here for anyone else who is interested in this kind of thing. Continue reading...

Reverse engineering ZX Spectrum (Z80) games

The home computer was born in the early 1980’s and in England this came in the shape of the ZX Spectrum. Along with it came the birth of the British video game industry. Although I had a ZX81 the year before, it was the ZX Spectrum I received as an xmas gift in 1983 that got me hooked on games, in particular the classic Manic Miner; a simple, addictive, and deceptively difficult platformer.

A year and a half ago I found the Skoolkit disassembly toolkit and one of the examples was the disassembled source code for Manic Miner. As I’d recently started learning to program in C, I thought it’d be a great learning experience to port this classic Z80 game to the C language. After some months I had a working version of Manic Miner written in C and using SDL2.

Porting Manic Miner was a lot of fun and it’d given me a greater understanding of how these early assembly games were written. It had also piqued my interest for how these old Z80 games are disassembled so I decided to give it a go myself.

There are many speccy games to choose from such as Chuckie Egg or the classic Knight Lore, but for this article I decided to take a look at Jetpac developed by Ultimate Play the Game and released in 1983. Continue reading...

TimeWarrior 1.0.0 - A golang time tracker

After barely programming in Go these past two years I really wanted to get back into using the language, and figured a good starter project would be to port my Ruby time tracker to Go. So a few weeks back I started rewriting that old CLI application in Go, and have now released TimeWarrior 1.1.0 on Github.

TimeWarrior is a CLI based time tracking application used to record timeslips for your freelance and personal projects. Timeslips for a project are stored in their own project data files, with each timeslip saved as a valid JSON string.

Project and Task names are given as CamelCase; separated by a period. You would start a new timeslip like this:

$ tw s MyProject.SomeTask

You can pause and resume a timeslip at any time (the p and r shortcuts are available), and once work on a task is complete, you can mark it as done:

$ tw d "Some nice description of the work"

It’s also possible to adjust the time you’ve currently worked on a pending timeslip with the adjust command:

$ tw adjust 10m

I recommend you visit the Github repository which has full installation and usage instructions.

At the moment you will need to build the executable yourself, but hopefully I’ll have ready-made downloads for Windows and macOS soon, once I’ve run some tests on a Windows machine!

Please note that there’s currently no reporting functionality. I have a simple old script for my own needs, which I’ll eventually look into adding to the app.

If you’re impatient and you’d like to implement a report command yourself, please feel free to submit a PR!

How to Install Go ncurses on Mac OS X

If you’ve been trying to use the goncurses library in your Go project, but kept encountering various ncurses related errors - such as missing .pc files (ncurses.pc, form.pc, menu.pc, panel.pc) - then this post may help you get your Mac OS X, ncurses and golang installation running smoothly.

A couple of weekends ago I decided that porting the classic UMoria game could teach me alot about Go. It all went swimmingly well - if somewhat boring at times - and finally last night I was able to get the code to compile without errors, Woot! But when trying to install goncurses I kept getting ncurses errors. Boo!

I’d experimented a little with goncurses a couple of months back and somehow go it working - for the life of me I don’t now remember how. It was fun making my little @ character run around the screen, but when I updated to Go 1.5, I’d reset my golang dev environment, which included deleting old sources.

After several hours down the rabbit hole, I finally figured out what the issue was, and as I’m sure others have encountered these same problems, I wanted to share the solution here. Continue reading...

Pagination with Roda, Sequel and will_paginate

Anyone who’s used Ruby on Rails has likely needed to implement pagination, and for that you probably used WillPaginate. Although it’s been possible to use WillPaginate with Sequel for some time now, we’ve only just seen the first Roda GEM released. After some experiementation, it turns out adding pagination to our Roda app is actually pretty easy.

Requirements

We’ll be building on top of my Roda Blog tutorial so if you don’t already have an application to try this with then you should take a look at that first. Continue reading...

Sitemaps with the Roda Framework

There can be a number of reasons for wanting to add sitemap to your site, but perhaps the most important is for Google - and other search engines (SE’s) of course! From an SEO viewpoint Google expects your site to have a sitemap and thankfully, this is very easy to do with Ruby websites.

In this short tutorial we’ll be implementing an automated sitemap for a site built with the Roda framework. I’ll be building on top of my previous Roda Blog tutorial, which you might find useful to look over before continuing. Continue reading...

When to enable Roda's `head` plugin

After launching my new blog - built with the Roda framework - I was pretty chuffed with how things turned out. Sure, there’s still a few minor niggles, but for the most part, everything is working well.

Then a couple of weeks back an issue turned up on Google groups about how Roda was returning a 404 on empty responses. This got me thinking on what the headers of my site look like, so I booted up the terminal and made a curl request... Continue reading...

Up and Going in Roda: A Simple Ruby Blog

In my last article we built a simple Roda website, which let us deliver some rather static pages. We’ll build on that work by implementing some basic blogging features such as User accounts and Posts.

Note: as this article was posted in April 2015 I can not guarantee it will still work with the latest versions Roda.

We’ll be using a PostgreSQL database, the defacto DB of many Rubyist, which we’ll interact with using Sequel, an excellent ORM by Jeremy Evans, who is also the developer behind Roda. Continue reading...

Up and Going in Roda: Static Ruby Websites

Recently I started experimenting with the Roda framework to build web applications but as there are not many tutorials, or blog posts in general, about Roda, I thought I’d share my experiences here. Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing a number of articles on using Roda but rather than having to duplicate lots of setup code I think it’ll be easier to have a base app to work from. So, in the next two articles I’ll be building an extremely simple blog using Roda, Postgres, and the Sequel ORM. For this first part we’ll deliver static content, leaving User accounts and posts for part two. Continue reading...

Sequel ORM: scope for associated records

I’m currently experimenting with building a web application using Sinatra and the Sequel ORM, and as is often required in database driven applications, I need to pull a bunch of records yet exclude those that don’t have any associated records in a one_to_many relationship (has_many in Rails parlance).

Imagine we are building a blog platform where we can have Post’s that get assigned to a Category (many_to_one). When listing our available categories we don’t want to be showing any that haven’t any posts assigned. I wasn’t able to gleam anything specific about doing this from the Sequel documentation, so after a prolonged hair-pulling session I came to the following solution. Continue reading...

Padrino Blog Tutorial using Postgres & DataMapper

Recently I’ve been wanting to experiment building websites with Ruby, but without using Rails. I’ve built a few small Sinatra applications, but I really miss having those basic MVC tools that Rails provides. It’s amazing how much easier things are when you have some nice routing and controller helpers. This led me to trying out Padrino, and I have to say it’s looking quite interesting.

Although the Padrino website does have a build-your-own-blog tutorial, it is using ActiveRecord and the HAML view template language. It’s not that I dislike either of these, but I did want try some other tools, such as DataMapper and straight up ERB for the views. As I couldn’t find any good tutorials out there I decided to use that Padrino tutorial as inspiration for my own post. Hopefully you will find it useful.

I will be borrowing heavily from the original Blog Tutorial, so if you’re happy enough using ActiveRecord and HAML, then please do go read that.

Okay, enough of the introductions, let’s get stuck in. Continue reading...