iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It's taken a full seven hours to get photos and videos off my iPhone. To top it off, it won't let me bulk delete files from explorer like it would before. Never had a single problem in the past, and the only thing that's changed is the IOS version. Raging!

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Are there any decent Atari STE emulators out there? Something WinUAE equivalent in terms of accuracy and functionality (debugger/memory inspector etc.).

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I'd love it if Nu-Commodore managed to scrape together enough info to make the AAA/Hombre Amiga and release it as an actual product. We get that final glory moment that was denied. Are there enough solid designs out there though? Or would we have to frog-DNA bits so much that it changes?

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Tough one. Way of the Exploding Fist was the start of my beat 'em up journey, but I'm not sure it "defined" me. I'll just say Final Fight and call it a day. That game still resonates with me to this day.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

So, I've completely broken down the loader and ripped it into more manageable sections. A few tweaks and it's now workable as both a READ and WRITE loader to a 6128 3" disc. I'll upload the source code to my site once I've done a few more tests and thought of a daft name for it.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Found a (sort of) hardware loader on CPCWiki, but it's read only and not very clear on how to use it. I think it can be made to write too, but scouring FDC data sheets for correct read/write bit combos is a pain in the willy.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Was wondering why I couldn't load stuff in from disk without a crash, then I realised my program starts at &0100 and overwrites all the firmware. Anyone know of any custom disk loaders for the Amstrad 6128? I don't think Rob Northen made 8-bit versions.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Have to re-write my background restore routine to work in reverse becasue it can't handle overlapping sprites at the moment. Four attempts later and I think I have it (in theory), but it's been a brain melt trying to retain popping bytes while going backwards.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I used to love Bewitched as a kid, but watching it again I can't help but notice what a prick Darren is to Samantha. Love the 60s vibe, but maybe not that part of it.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Spent the morning playing Revenge of Shinobi. It's still sublime! So well thought out, and has bags of atmosphere and challenge. It was going to be my next Amiga port project before I got put off developing for the system. Had all the sprites and drum sounds ripped and ready to go.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Nothing will make me play a game or watch a film faster than someone saying "It's shit. Don't even bother". I've bought Megadrive and Amiga games with <40% scores, and enjoyed every panned film released in the last year. Always see for yourself.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Having a Mandela effect moment. I remember one of the cast's names on the Back to the Future poster having a white line box around it. I'm sure it was Crispin Glover, but can't find any evidence. I had that poster above my bed in the 80s, so I know it well. Weird!

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Watched an AI fan film of Reeve Superman visiting his Mum. You can still tell it's AI. The colours are inky, and the mouths don't move right. However, the textures and facial nuances are getting scarily good. Almost convincing. Emotional tugs like this nearly make you forget that it's evil.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I'm sticking to my rule of "Don't show anything until it's 80% complete". Final Fight was showcased way too early in development, and that was a bad move. Even then there are no guarantees. Renegades was pretty much done bar some music & polish, but all it took was one thing to scupper it. Beware!

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Playing a few Megadrive games as a palate cleanser, and you forget what a powerhouse machine it was! So much cool hardware, sprites, layers, colours, and sound channels. It's almost the perfect console, and that post-1991 games library is incredible!

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I miss when websites had actual single-screen pages and weren't just a bloated, never ending downward scroll. Trying to navigate them like a social media feed is excruciating.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

More CPC progress. Fixed an ISR bug which was popping flipped bits back to the spritesheet, and I've started to get the main player control system almost up and running. Next step is getting the platform mechanics in. Lots of tile checking at the feet/head, but thankfully only for the player.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Finally deleted my Facebook. I feel weirdly disconnected now, because it was ok for things like mates' gigs and quick messages to people. The amount of racial/transphobic incitement and adverts allowed there was shocking though, so good riddance to that shite.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Forgot that actual double buffering needs two of everything. Two screen locations, two sets of code for calculating positions (one really, but poked), two lists of background repair data, etc. Xor is earning its dinner today.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

When someone says the word "Arcade", what are the games that first come to your mind? For me its: Star Wars Marble Madness Phoenix Operation Wolf Indiana Jones & TTOD Vigilante Karate Champ Final Fight Street Fighter II Tekken There's a ton of others too, but I think that's the prime cut.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Managed to convert my Spectrum sprite arranger to the Amstrad. Took about a week to sort all the various hardware calls, but it's working fine now. Not too much to re-write since the Speccy was working in two byte chunks for interleaved mask & image, and that works for how Amstrad's data is sorted.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Spent 20 minutes of my morning reconfiguring FB Purity to hide the adverts & hate scum that are popping up again. This seems to be a trend whereby you're burdened with extra steps just to get to "barely usable". Should really ditch FB. Every second post is racists lobbing laugh emojis at adverts.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Two bytes to show 8 screen pixels on the Amstrad just shows why most games were a bit sluggish (double the work of the Speccy). IIRC the Sugar Z80 CPU was 4MHz compared to the Clive 3.5Mhz, but it probably needed to be 5 (like Master System) for the grunt of screen drawing. No beeper either. :(

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

There are fewer bands who have been in my life as long as ZZ Top, so hearing about drummer Frank Beard's death is devastating. Especially after losing Dusty so recently. Una Hombre left. :(

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Not even started coding gameplay yet and already this is looking to be much easier than a beat 'em up. Like, oh i don't need to flip those 16x16 enemy sprites which only have 2 frames of animation. Level maps might be big though, and I've never tried ones that go up and down as well as left/right.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Looking at my tilemap code today. Normally I'd take a byte table of tile numbers and convert it to a word table of bitmap addresses, but I don't need it to be fast for flip screen. Will save space just doing the calculation on the fly at the cost of maybe half a second when a new screen renders.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Digging in my Amstrad folder and found my old attempt at Final Fight from 2018. Sadly, it doesn't assemble, but IIIRC it was playable (although slow as shit and flickery as hell!). Terrible coding, but all the sprites were re-drawn by hand. Doubt it'll ever get finished though.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Did some poking around with the WinApe debugger and most of the cool games that have a mid-screen mode change don't use another memory range for the split unless it scrolls. What a relief! Was a total faff. Means I'll have to double buffer the whole range including HUD panel, but that's ok.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

This screen split is turning out to be a royal pain in the arse. Half the problem is that there's only a couple of examples out there (literally 2), and they either don't work or are too complicated to make sense of. Kudos to Amstrad for actually fixing this in the + machines (if a little late).

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

So this is coming along nicely. Managed a split screen with palette and mode changes. Doing it all from the ISR feels weird though, because it's a lot of waiting for things to sync. Need to try different memory regions next which means fucking with CRTC screen heights.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Making smol progress on the Amstrad. Changing the colour of a few raster lines is fun, but using a bunch of nops to wait for a screenpos seems wasteful. Also, I'm so used to using HALT one time on the Speccy, but Amstrad has six interrupts. Changing CRTC registers should be...interesting.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

A day of setup later and I'm all set to go with the Amstrad. First thing I need to do is split the screen into Mode 0 and Mode 1 sections, and while I've done this before, I'm having trouble remembering how. No help from plus features, sadly. Just good old 6128. The adventure begins!

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Not one for moping. Spectrum project is dead (or indefinitely shelved), so on to my Amstrad project while Z80 is still fresh in my brain. Been champing at the bit to start this, and it should go smoothly given the nicer hardware and less demanding gameplay which isn't a resource hungry beat 'em up.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Well, that's it. I've officially run out of things to try in order to stabilise the game speed. Music still gets knocked slightly out of sync, and I just don't know what to do. I'll need to decide whether to continue or not, because I'm wiped out after literally hundreds of failed attempts.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Looks like I'll need that attribute table after all as one of the levels activity requires it. It's still a lot of bytes just set to 0, so will perhaps need to write an RLE type compressor with offsets to where specially coloured tiles are in the map

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

So I have just enough room for an attribute table, but they'll take up disk space, and I'll have to write a tool to edit the bytes. Any colour added would be minimal anyway, so Is the result worth the graft? I don't get the hate for monochrome anyway. It's atmospheric, and better than garish clash.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Having a rare boozy night in Glasgow this evening with an old mate at the city's premier stinky man pub, the Solid Rock Cafe. Will be nice to talk shop about Boss pedals rather than bits and bytes. Just my luck it's going to be pissing it down when i need to get the bus.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

It's amazing what damage a tiny missing comma can do. Was chasing my tail wondering why the game was crashing at a certain point in a spawner, but yeah. Also, fuck IM 1 hijacking IY! It was messing with my key reading routine during a disk swap. 😠

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Had bother with the disk system again. Calling DOS INITIALISE wiped all the potential caches, which included the unused ones that I had data in. Fixed it, but what a faff! Wondering if I can just trash +3DOS and use a custom loader to get more memory? Do I even need the +3 then? Decisions.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Starting to feel like a real game now that the spawners are making baddies in waves. Timer is also working, but just wraps when it hits 0. Will need to sort the issue with the SFX locking up the main loop soon. It's barely noticeable, but the music stutter gives it away. Some DMA would be nice.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Need to be careful what I'm listening to when I'm writing music, because it undoubtedly ends up as a big influence in that moment. Had the first three Hammerfall albums on repeat the last few days, but those tunes are pure cheddar and something similar would suit a game perfectly.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

The He-Man film has some amazing stuff in it, but the comedy needs toned down by at least 75%. Some glorious moments ruined by the incessant need to do a joke skit after almost every line in the script. Could either be bad writing or notes from Mattel, but it became tiresome. Great action though!

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I don't know what a bin is doing down there either. Made some good progress lately. A few compromises were unavoidable, but just about everything else made it in. Just one or two technical head-scratchers left and the rest of the music to write.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

I put on the Amiga Dune OST while I was working the other day, and it was an ethereal experience! So many memories flooding back, and some of the tracks are still in my head days later. The late, great Stéphane Picq made a masterpiece.

youtu.be

[Amiga] Dune - Soundtrack

YouTube video by Back to the Roots

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Disk swap solved. Had to page in Bank 7 and call DOS INITIALISE again to refresh everything before re-trying. The manual wasn't very clear on what was specifically happening with these calls, so it was hard to gauge given the context.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

That was a nice read. I wonder what the sprite masking technique was? Don't think Xoring on a 1-Bit screen would work? I'm sure I chucked it through the disassembler not long ago, and IIRC the sprites had interleaved masks but weren't zigzagged.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

There's a few YouTube clones around, but this looks the most promising. Given the copyright bullshit on YT, alternative sites are sorely needed. There's hardly any old computer content on there, so may be good to set up for Internet: Phase 2.

kamtape.com

KamTape - Share Your World.

Share your videos with friends and family

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Have to completely rewrite my spawner as it takes up too much space. Check spawn variable Check screen number Make enemy1 at X/Y/Z in mode 7 Make enemy4 at X/Y/Z in mode 4 Make enemy3 at X/Y/Z in mode 6 inc spawn var Repeat about 15 times. A small loop and loadable table of values seems the way.

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Prototron @prototron.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Got an extra 1.3k by moving tables into another bank. They're used for drawing energy bars when someone gets hit, so not needed every frame. So, my two other main issues are: -Small CPU choke when a sound effect plays -Occasional speed up when enemies wander off screen -Disk swap Getting there!

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