iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 2h

In other news: smooth(er) map transitions. (Yes I am doing all the things at once... Badly.)

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 9h

I found a new way to break the emulator:

Windows NT 3.1 "Welcome" screen running in my hacky 386 emulator.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 08/10/2026

So, I had some ideas and thought I had the tools to implement them... Kinda worked out, but at least I have a better idea of what I need to do next...

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 07/10/2026

This setup has been sitting on my desk for months now and... ... It still doesn't do anything useful. (I blame STM32)

KeebDeck Basic with a Pico connected over I2C. It's a bit dusty because I ended up doing all the other things instead of getting it to do something.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 04/10/2026

When you're adding code for translating text, but can only write one language: 🪞

RPG dialogue box with a character called "Placeholder" asking "Is this a question?" with options of "No" and "Yes"... except each word is spelled backwards.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 03/10/2026

It does actually do the thing... Apart from the screen being too small. (I need to stop making comments about things 😆)

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 03/10/2026

I did say it would be silly, didn't I?

Pimoroni Presto with some SeaBIOS output on the screen because someone put a PC emulator on it.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 02/10/2026

It's fun that this happens when I plug in random RP2350 devices 😆. That or they boot into Windows 95... (In this case the @pimoroni.com Presto... Which I don't think I've run the PC emulator on. That would be silly...)

Pimoroni Presto on the menu for Command & Conquer: Red Alert. The cursor is stuck in the top left because I don't have the qwst pad plugged in and have a bug apparently.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 02/10/2026

Me trying to return to my RPG:

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 30/09/2026

Well I finally got the RTC working (which was the thing I was trying to do), so now I can move on to other things... (Stamp builds may be broken though. Hmm.)

Windows 95 clock showing 2:53, which is nearly the right time.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 26/09/2026

Now there's a computer on my computer. (Kinda overkill using an entire PC emulator to check if the PSRAM works, but I still had it open...)

Windows 95 running in my "average computer emulator" on the previously shown board.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 25/09/2026

Oh no, I put 32blit on it... After I figured out the pins...

32blit hardware test utility. It has a rainbow background and displays the status of various inputs.

The hardware being tested: an "RP2350B Computer"

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 24/09/2026

Hmm, let's pull some hardware out of the pile... It's... Another RP2350 "computer" 😆

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 12/09/2026

...and everyone was eaten by a dragon... 😆

Carcassonne Dragon & Fairy expansion. This is expansion #3 and we now have 1-4...

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 06/08/2026

Asking the difficult questions.

A dialogue box overlay asking "Are you sure?". There are "yes"/"no" buttons.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 05/08/2026

Accidental feature: you can talk to the party members following you and because scripts are tied to maps, you can easily have them say different things depending on where you are. 🤔 (Oh, and I added party members that follow you around)

RPG screenshot with the player character standing next to two other characters that are following them around. A prompt is displayed to talk to "Pink".

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 04/08/2026

Finished building the Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth-class), Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator and Microbe Obliterator... Sooo now I'm all out of Lego again.

Lego WALL-E, MO and EVE. Except I used their full names in the post...

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 28/07/2026

More stuff wired up and uh, doing some stress testing.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 28/07/2026

...and I just found a less common one while digging that out.

A slightly newer pi in a blue pibow. With pirate minifigures on top.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 28/07/2026

@pimoroni.com birthday seems like a good opportunity to bring out the original pibow (with rev1 pi inside)

Two pirate minifigures standing either side of a Raspberry Pi model B in a rainbow pibow case.

There's a rainbow benchy in the background, along with a Pico LiPo 2 XL W and the bottom of some BadgeWare just about visible.

Top view of the pi to make its oldness more visible. (There are no mounting holes and the USB fuses are present)

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 27/07/2026

Finding some paths and making a mess of the screen with debug info.

Screenshot of RPG overworld map with an overlay of a lot of coloured lines. There are red lines for collision areas, yellow ones for directions you can't move between two tiles, cyan ones showing the calculated path and a green line between the player and the destination.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 26/07/2026

Plenty of other options for hardware though... (Though most are missing one thing or another)

Solder Party RP2350 stamp XL in a carrier running Red Alert. There's a second SD card slot connected because pin conflict reasons.

It's sitting on top of an Adafruit Fruit Jam, which can almost run the game... If you don't have any USB devices connected when it's loading.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 26/07/2026

Porting a game to all the things is great... Until you need to make sure that they all still work. Hmm. (The @pimoroni.com Pico plus 2/ VGA base combo is still pretty good though)

Red Alert score screen for the first scenario.

The Pimoroni Pico plus 2W in a VGA demo base that is running the game. As this has WiFi, you could play multiplayer on it.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 24/07/2026

Might as well post a closer look at the silliness of this:

Modified PicoVision from more of a side view and with the Pico 2 removed. From this angle it's more obvious that the old Pico W is still there and that I made a bit of a mess.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 23/07/2026

Uh, thought I'd fixed it but... I'm not sure what happened here. (All this because I'm trying to test a USB patch...)

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 22/07/2026

I guess since this got attention, I should introduce my debugging assistant:

A pinky-purpley coloured dinosaur balanced on top of a monitor. There is a project called "RPG2" open in a Visual Studio Code window.

The dinosaur's very important job is to make me feel slightly better when everything is broken.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 22/07/2026

Super-advanced item list 😆

A large item list with two items called "stuff" and "thing".

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 22/07/2026

To prove that it actually works, here's my demo running nearly twice as fast:

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 22/07/2026

I got a little distracted yesterday and committed some more crimes against a @pimoroni.com board... So here's a "Pico2Vision":

Pimoroni PicoVision with a Pico 2 connected on top of the usual Pico W.

The Pico W has been "disabled" by cutting the track for the reset button and shorting RUN to ground.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 21/07/2026

We interrupt this posting to bring you a dinosaur with a fancy hat.

A green dinosaur plushie with what appears to be an orange top hat with hexagonal holes.

(It's actually a 3D-printed spool adapter that I got the dimensions slightly wrong for...)

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 20/07/2026

More partying... now scripts can remove party members and check who's in it. (So there's technically a way for scripts to track progression, if that progress is someone joining/leaving the party 🤔)

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 20/07/2026

Time for a party... menu. A little basic as there's no battle system, so no levels/stats. (Though I started trying to do the items menu, then realised this would be easier to do first)

A big menu listing two party members, the second one isn't shown on the map yet...

There is also a lot of empty space.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 19/07/2026

I ended up with a file extension of ".disc" for the "dialogue scripts" in my new(ish) RPG engine. Because of that, the script that starts the game is called "startup.disc" and it keeps reminding me of this:

Game Boy player start-up disc for the GameCube.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 16/07/2026

It got slightly less lonely.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 16/07/2026

The temptation to make a working version of this... 🤔 (Must not... start... another... thing...)

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 15/07/2026

"Hmm I need more characters to test the dialogue system..." Or, I could just mess with the hue of the one placeholder so far. 😆

The original very green placeholder elf character portrait. She has pale green hair and a darker green shirt. (One of the main characters from a previous RPG project)

A definitely entirely new pink themed character.

This time she is blue with... pink eyes?

This last one is more yellow-y, with green eyes... and definitely a distinct character again.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 15/07/2026

You could almost make a game with this. A very peaceful, lonely game... But uh... progress?

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 14/07/2026

Guess who accidentally teleported to 0,0 and is stuck outside of the map. 😆 (At least there isn't any progress to lose)

Character sprite standing at the top-left edge of the map, in the ocean.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 13/07/2026

The part when you try to put everything together is always when all the little bugs appear... Anyway this works now so that's one of the "big tasks" done.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 11/07/2026

The next part of the puzzle is asking questions... Now if I connect this to my map "triggers" and add an "enter map" command I might be able to get back to building stuff... 🤔 (Alternatively I might get overwhelmed with artwork/design problems, who knows...)

Dialogue box now has the text of "Test question" and three buttons at the bottom labelled "Option 1" to "Option 3". Theoretically selecting different options does different things.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 10/07/2026

Aha, the thing I've been working on for the last couple of weeks is starting to actually do something! (Though still doesn't look very exciting)

Screenshot with a dialogue box open, the text is "This message is from a script!".

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 07/07/2026

Hmm, I still haven't finished any of the "big changes" but there is something resembling a menu now. (Most of the buttons don't do anything yet though... and it only works with the mouse)

Another screenshot of the unnamed RPG I've been working on. There is a small menu in the top right corner with "Party", "Items", "Load Game", "Save Game", "Exit Game" and "Close" buttons.

The only one that does anything is the "Close" button.

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 06/07/2026

Hmm, I left the filament in the dryer overnight but it's still a bit... fishy...

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 05/07/2026

It's a frog. (A bit hairier than expected though)

A 3D printed frog in six colours still sitting go the print bed. There are filament strings everywhere...

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Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 04/07/2026

When you forgot to update the firmware before upgrading the printer 🤦 (Apparently having nothing connected to the board is less fatal that not having the board connected...)