Reflections on four decades of programming, AI's impact on craft, and building things from scratch.
You can play the game, and read all about how it works, at bbcexile.com. Exile has been with me for nearly 40 years. Written by Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith and published by Superior Software for the BBC Micro in 1988, it was doing things an 8-bit machine had…
I’ve been using coding assistants pretty much since they arrived on the scene and I’ve written about their impact on me personally previously. And while I find them incredibly useful I’ve noticed I’m starting to write more code directly myself again. The reaso…
Building a believable computer opponent for a 4X strategy game is one of those problems that turns out to be bottomless. I’d use the cliche it looks simple from the outside… but I don’t think thats true, I thought this would be a tough nut from the outset. I’v…
Source code available online here A claim that has gained traction lately is that Donald Trump’s posting patterns suggest “sundowning” — the late-day cognitive decline associated with dementia. The argument goes that his late-night and small-hours posting, oft…
Recently GitHub announced a change in pricing model for CoPilot which they’ve tried to wave away as not a price increase (because the list prices don’t move) but which really is as they are now charging for direct usage rather than per request. What’s interest…
You can find out more over at the projects website. I’m going to keep this brief as I’ll doubtless be expanding on this at length in the future but I wanted to take a moment to introduce a project I have that is a good way through development and that I hope p…
The source code can be found on GitHub. In my previous post on neural networks we went through the basic concepts and simple mathematics involved in training and running a neural network. It’s so simple that it gave me an idea: could I run this on an 8-bit mic…
Having built a raycaster for my Wolfenstein 3D recreation I wanted to take things to the next level and build a “simple” ray tracer. The result is a real-time path tracer written entirely in WebGPU compute shaders, running in a browser, rendering levels loaded…
The source code is on GitHub. A real-time path tracer built entirely in WebGPU compute shaders — no RT cores, no ML denoisers, just maths and triangles. Woke up one morning and wanted to follow up the Wolfenstein 3D raycaster with a ray tracer… obviously Doom…
The leather jacket has no clothes. Jensen Huang stands on stage at GTC, basking in the adulation of an audience that treats product launches like religious experiences while NVIDIA’s market cap hovers north of four trillion dollars. The narrative being pushed…
The full source code for the neural network and the interactive demonstrations can be found on GitHub. Increasing numbers of us are turning to solutions based on neural networks to help us with a wide variety of tasks. From accelerating software development th…
I asked Claude to recreate the classic 1986 game Thrust for me in the browser. It created slop but then things spiralled out of control. Thrust was one of my favourite games on the BBC Micro — written by Jeremy C. Smith and published in 1986, it’s a deceptivel…
You can play the game online. Honestly this is one of those projects that I’m not quite sure where it came from. Thrust was one of my favourite games on the BBC Micro written by Jeremy Smith and published in 1986, it’s a deceptively deep game with amazing phys…
I wrote my first line of code in 1983. I was seven years old, typing BASIC into a machine that had less processing power than the chip in your washing machine. I understood that machine completely. Every byte of RAM had a purpose I could trace. Every pixel on…
This morning I had a ChatGPT conversation that started about engagement metrics and ended up with a systematic destruction of my identity. It was a wild, disturbing, but ultimately revealing ride that joined a few dots for me. The engagement problem We’re all…
You can play the game online. While working on the 8-bit console I got the itch to create a twin stick shooter. There’s some Geometry Wars in this and some Jeff Minter with a dash of Pink Floyd. Best thing to do is just go play it rather than me describe it! B…
You can play the game online. I was looking for a twin stick shooter and nothing quite scratched the itch — nothing in my Steam library anyway. I fired up Geometry Wars, enjoyed it, but it still wasn’t quite what I wanted. What it did give me was the spark to…
The source code for this can be found on GitHub here. Over the past few weeks I’ve been building a fully-playable 8-bit virtual console from scratch — CPU, instruction set, assembler, sprite system, IDE, the lot. One of the more interesting side quests has bee…
I’ve been itching to create some emulated 8-bit hardware for some time - not for an existing system but rather for my dream 8-bit system. However it always felt “too big” as I knew that I’d need tools like assemblers, graphics editors, and basically a whole lo…
I started programming on a BBC Model B as a kid — mostly for fun, mostly because it felt like a little world I could reshape. That hobby quietly turned into a career around 1994, and I’ve been building systems, tools, and odd little worlds ever since. I began…
The game can be played online and you can find the source code on GitHub. I have a long and storied (well, storied to me - anyone reading this drivel is probably thinking get over yourself) history with the classic mainframe game Star Trek. I first played it o…
You can download the app from the App Store. I have super fond memories of playing early golf games on the BBC and PC. My very favourite is a game called Holed Out!! on the BBC and on which I spent many hours playing with my mum. But I also enjoyed the PGA gam…
You can download the app from the App Store. While I was creating 8-bit Golf I realised that the editor, which was quite satisfying to use, could quite easily be repurposed to allow a user to draw on graph paper. It really didn’t take long to rework into a sta…
You can download the app from the App Store or view the “official” VoxEd store linked page here. I confess I’m rather proud of this one. I’ve always enjoyed pixel and voxel art and I have several ideas for projects that would make use of voxels. I’d been dabbl…
In what is either a massive display of ego and hubris or something to be modestly proud about (you decide) I’m using my own Mac and iPad sprite editor SprEd to work on the textures and icons for my city builder. However I realised I’d not included any tools to…
Things have been going quite smoothly so far and over the last couple of evenings I’ve added the ability to drag select ranges and create zones (though haven’t accounted for flats yet). This all happens in the landscape shader which is passed the corners of th…
As I mentioned in my last entry, and as anyone who has played a city builder will know, these kinds of games have a lot of UI in them. That being the case I need a way of easily putting all this together. A primitive GUI library basically. I do most of my web…