Overworld Map For The Game Dragon Half On PC-Engine

It took forever, and isn't perfect (one day I may sit down and remove all the move counters, characters, and such from it), but I put together a full overworld map for the eccentric Dragon Half board game/RPG for PC Engine Super CD.

Harbinger Monthly - Mid-1990s Anime Disk Magazine.

 Going through the pile of 3.25 floppies I have lying around, I stumbled across this guy from 1994. Like the label says, the disk contains Issue 12 of Harbinger Monthly, which was an anime-dedicated diskmag that I had ordered when in high school. Unfortunately, I couldn't get much of it to run after installation:

 

 Really tho, the software part of it was just fancy curation; the meat was all in files that could be pried open with a text editor. On each disk was a series of articles that included reviews, release dates and plot synopses for various anime series.

It also included video game tricks, codes, and ratings for various anime-styled games as well as grainy screencaps of various cartoons. It even had a pretty cool soundtrack, in the form of module-formatted tracks that would play in the background. It also included quirky rantings from the curator, who called himself KarNage (who you can see talking about Vampire Hunter D  and Bubble Gum Crisis in these archived 20 year old anime group threads).

Just a little, awkward piece of pre-Web 1.0 filesharing I had lying around I wanted to put out there.

Some (Sad) Photos From When I Sold My Retro Video Game Collection.

In the summer of 2013, I completely relocated from Austin, Texas to Portland, Oregon. In the process I gave away and/or sold the majority of my possessions. Amongst said possessions was my retro game collection I'd been acquiring/holding onto since the mid-1990s. According to the timestamp on the phone pics; I took in the games on August 16, 2013. And the above is only part of it. Sorting through it all required all of the available counter-space at the North Austin Game Over videogames location.

It included sytems, games, and accessories for SNES, Genesis, Turbografx-16, Atari 2600 (with 150+ games), Sega Master System, Gameboy, and TI-99/4A (with games, controllers, and text-to-speech synthesizer). I'd already sold my NES with games and accessories directly to a friend earlier that month. It's really difficult to decide whether this or selling my record collection hurt worse. But hey, a fresh start, and emulators are getting fancier all the time.

Procedural Room And Corridor Dungeon Generation For Roguelike Games.

Over at the blog of Bob Nystrom (author of Game Programming Patterns) he has an article discussing the finer points of randomized dungeon generation. He covers stuff that has frustrated me before in roguelikes, namely the randomization placing objects or even the protagonist in rooms with no exits, effectively ending the game. He also covers balancing corridors (like, hallways and such) with rooms to create more dynamic dungeons. It also gets under the hood of randomized dungeon generation, comparing and contrasting various generators. The article includes several active examples that generate completely random dungeons every time you click to illustrate the points. Really cool stuff.

Magazine Article About Controlling A Model Train Set With A TRS-80

 

In my recent jaunts to Portland's outlet warehouse stores  I wound up with a stack of old model railroad magazines from the 1960s through the 1980s... because of course I did. Flipping through them, they are detail-intensive and super esoteric, which means they're perfect for this blog. Unfortunately, I cannot even try to care enough about model railroading to this degree. However, this article "Computerization Of The Great Southern" in the March 1983 issue of Model Railroader caught my eye because it intersected with 1980s retro-computing, which *is* something I give half a crap about.

The article features Lorell Joiner (who apparently died in 2007) discussing the computerization of his Great Southern Railroad model. As you can see from the photo, the equipment involved is a TRS-80 computer. Apparently the Great Southern was kind of a legendary big deal in the model railroad world, and certainly looks like no joke:

The article doesn't go into any of the program code or anything, but does detail the engineering aspect of it using those awesome programming flowcharts that used to be all over computer programming books from the 1980s.