29th September 2004
Good thing I didn't promise regular updates. :-)
That's not to say I've been sitting around doing nothing; on the contrary, there has been a lot of activity. First, and least interesting, the site has been reimplented in CSS. Can I just say that CSS is one of the worst things ever? Reimplementing in CSS seemed like a good idea at the time, but ended up being one of the most frustrating activities I've ever partaken in. All my site needs is two simple things: to be able to replace some text with an image, and put a custom border around the main body of the page. And of course, CSS not only doesn't natively support either of these two simple things, but the 'hacks' required to make it work are as you would expect hacks to be: buggy and non-portable. After a serious amount of screaming and hair-pulling, I finally got something which works on the 3 main browsers: IE, Opera and Firefox. If it doesn't happen to work on your browser, then all I can do is apologise for the monkeys that developed CSS.
While I'm on a roll, I'll whinge a little about AS too. AS is the assembler I use for all my NGPC coding. God knows, it has its quirks, but recently I actually hit a ridiculous restriction. It seems that you can only define a certain number of symbols, and I was unfortunate enough to hit that limit. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, however, as the reason I hit the symbol limit was because each time Dizzy was built, it was rebuilding the media (graphics, palettes, level data, objects, text, etc.) as well as the code. This forced me to rethink the structure, where the media is prebuilt into its own binary, then just attached to the end of the ROM and vectored into. This was a fair bit of work as there were many places in the code was referencing symbols in the media. But the restructure had the following benefits: immensely reduced build times, reduced symbol usage (and therefore avoiding AS falling on its arse) and introducing the possibility of simply replacing the media to produce an entirely different Dizzy adventure!
Of course, there was been a lot of other work on Dizzy too: several new rooms added, background animation, 'inventory full' screen, and possibly the most important thing: Dizzy's standing backflip animation! You know, it's amazing that the lack of backflip in Crystal Kingdom Dizzy was one of the most-complained-about things in that game. Anyway, the most recent version of Dizzy is now available in the NGPC section for your perusal.
While you're in there, you might also notice a new addition: Trailblazer. Anyone who had an 8-bit computer will remember this game. I loved it, and always thought it would work well on the NGPC, especially linked up for a two-player game. So at one point when CSS was driving me insane and I had had enough, I knocked together a little demo to see if I could make the road effect work. And I did. And you can download the ROM and see it too.