iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 20h

Seems my desktop is haunted... Volume control is randomly changing. 👻

000

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 22h

Looking at my RPG notes they range from "detailed list of steps to fix something" to "make look better". 🤔

000

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

(It's extremely optimistic of me to think that I'll ever need this code, but I can only think "I'm doing this wrong" so many times...)

000

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.

100

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 😆)

020

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.

120

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

If anyone asks I didn't spend all afternoon playing solitaire.

010

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.

130

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

I definitely didn't update the character sprite for that.

000

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

Me trying to return to my RPG:

100

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

Usually I spend hours moving pixels fast, but now I am spending hours moving pixels slowly. (Or, I have ended up making more sprites...)

000

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.

000

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 29/09/2026

Hmm, looks like updating the pico-sdk allows me to delete a pile of code.

001

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 28/09/2026

Hopefully this doesn't take too long as I also have more ideas for my RPG. (Which is also still open. I just don't close things apparently 😆)

110

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 27/09/2026

Predictably I have now found emulator bugs to fix... 🤔

110

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.

010

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"

100

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

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

121

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 16/09/2026

Oh no, the malware I installed doesn't support my OS! ... wait.

030

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...

030

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 05/09/2026

Oh no I had a thought and lost a month again!

000

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.

000

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".

000

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

Obviously this is a bug, but the bigger problem is that the setting currently has no ghost-related lore... and creating more writing work is significantly worse than creating more programming work 😆

011

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

Finally get moving characters other than the player working... and they immediately walked straight through the player. 🤦 (Already fixed the reverse of this, but as most of the games doesn't actually know where the player is, they might as well be a ghost...)

100

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...

020

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 03/08/2026

If I ever figure out some character designs for this RPG, I'm gonna do so many palette swaps. 😆 (Technically I already have with the placeholder, but...)

000

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 03/08/2026

Fun to wake up to a pull request to one of your most obscure projects 🤔 (They say at nearly lunch time)

010

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 02/08/2026

@gadgetoid.com I read that as "comical gradients" and was wondering what was so funny for a moment there 😆

010

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 02/08/2026

@robinwinghood.bsky.social True, but you can see some awkward sliding in that little video.

000

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 01/08/2026

... or when I try and do a thing, but then I find I have to add another thing and fix a third thing first. (On a related note, I probably shouldn't have made the path finder do diagonals when the sprites can't face diagonally)

110

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 01/08/2026

RE: fosstodon.org/@Daft_Freak/116998542… This is also a video of me trying to decide on what to work on next 😆

110

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 31/07/2026

Using SDL3's accelerated palette conversion with some hacks helps quite a bit, but there are still problems... (It's fun that displaying a 640x400 256 colour image is hard now)

010

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 31/07/2026

May have got slightly distracted trying to run Red Alert on a Pi Zero... which is surprisingly hard. (Just using my existing SDL2 build maxed out the CPU even when running from the console)

120

Reposted by Charlie Birks

RobinwingHood @robinwinghood.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

And here at the end of my first Artfight, I can say I made my goal of 6 attacks, enough to fill my account homepage! #artfight #artfight2026 #myart #OCart

162

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 29/07/2026

(Said as if they don't have a massive list of other things to do)

000

Charlie Birks @charlie.daft.games · 29/07/2026

Well, I fixed my path finder to not assume my characters are ghosts... Now I just need to handle moving things that aren't the player.

100

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

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

000

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.

021

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)

2294

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.

100

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

Old RPG -> Old RTS -> Isometric sims thingy -> new RPG. Each time with an entirely different map structure... (I've probably mentioned the RTS even less than the old RPG. 🤷 I'm sure the curious can dig it up)

000

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

I've now copied/ported the same path finding code from my old RPG to my new one... through two other things in the middle... I'm going to need a path finder to trace the history of the path finder at this rate. 😆

100

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

Not so fun when your one pair of shoes is still wet the day after... (I had to dig out my "work" shoes, haven't needed those for a while)

000

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.

110

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.

141

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

I guess going out and getting drenched in rain is a nice change.

120

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

Hmm, "I need to move a sprite from a script" has turned into a massive project... but I think I'm finding the path forward. (That was a bad joke...)

010

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.

120