Purpen Blog

What is it with hatred towards any kind of change of design on a website. Take this weeks rollout of the new design on facebook, development of a site, even a social network is an on going thing. The developers see the things going on at the server side and investigate what is causing the problem. Some decide to fix the problem there and then, some if they have 400million users like facebook think its a lot easier to roll the changes out all at once, due to the fact that rolling out small updates would probably mean some people have it and some don’t.

Not everyone seems to think this way. They would prefer a site to go stale and lame and slow. Or at least that’s what it seems. Take my game, I changed the menu system around and moved a few options off the headers. Why? Well it really reduced the amount of hits on the database just from the header. The header was being used in everything displayed, so any reduction in hits would have had an amazing effect on speed.

I’m not seeing facebooks cpu load or logs and none of the complainers are either, they see them and they act upon them, with 400million users saving a few cpu cycles here and there is enough to make a significant difference to the speed and efficiency of the whole site.

Personally I like change, I like learning new things, and if a site doesn’t get updated on a regular basis I consider it dead, I’m sure a lot of other people think the same way, if there are no updates then the owners are giving up on the site, that’s how it works I think.

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I’m still going through my 8bit gaming phase. Its made me think. All the new mobile phone games that are appearing today, maybe some of the developers for these should go through an 8bit renaissance too, there are a ton of excellent games that came out of that time. Some forgotten, some not. Some changed the way we thought of games forever onwards. Some where so rubbish they should have taken the developers out and slapped them until they pleaded forgiveness.

These games are just addictive, the graphics on some are simplistic, on some you wonder how they managed to make a game so beautiful with so little memory and only a few pixels and colours available. Simply amazing.

I was never a console guy. I always preferred my computer games to be hack-able, to be able to write my own when I wanted, to play with the code, probably the reason I became a developer myself. I was never up to scratch on graphics and stuff, not my scene, but I see code when I think of it. I can’t explain how it works, but if I decided to write some assembly language I can see the structure in my head. I can type it up and it works first time, I may end up breaking it apart, re-structuring it, but like the extreme programming guys, I like to get that initial code out of my system on up and running and working, even if its not the most beautifully written code in the world.

So my process is simple, I think about how the code should work, I see the vision of the code in my head, I type it up, I move it around, I dry run it in my head, then I begin the debugging process. Then once it is working as I expected, I throw it away and write it again, the way it should have been written, I even draw UML diagrams or flow charts and plan our the code, seeing if there are any optimisations that can be made to make it faster etc. In a High level language I don’t bother much with optimisation as that’s the compilers job although I have looked at the output assembly language to laugh at the way the compiler does these things.

So now you know how I code. I’m hoping to start putting up code and sketches and stuff on the developer blog. Will post more game related stuff here. I’m feeling inspired by all these old games, and old code and drawings I’ve found from my old days. I’ll try and post some of these, but at the moment this is difficult as my scanner isn’t working, and I cannot afford to replace it, as I earn £0 at the moment.

Back to my gaming or as I prefer to call it research into the past, lol.

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Oh well I found out my old Amstrad CPC 464 like I planned, set it up and played for a little while then, pop it and it stopped working. I think it must have blown a fuse or something. It was about 20 years old so it had lasted a long time. I have a box full of tapes with games and the original manual too.

I did manage to find a website with an emulator and got most of my games from various places, then played till the early hours on games I had forgotten about. The Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and C64 had some amazing games on them, it a pity most of them are not ported to the current game consoles, as I’d definitely play them. Although I am playing them on the emulators on my PC. Back to Zynaps now, that high score doesn’t break itself you know.

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Over the weekend I got all nostalgic for the old days, well for MY old days anyway, remembering the Sinclair ZX81, the Spectrum, and getting all nostalgic about my Amstrad Colour CPC464, which I still have and still works by the way.

I did a bit of searching around and found a spectrum emulator, not found an Amstrad version that lets me play tapes into the PC, but the speccy one works like that. I found a tape with a game I started years and years ago, I posted about it on my developer blog, http://www.zeroshadow.com/blog if your interested.

Its opened my eyes to a lot of stuff I did when I was younger, not just the nasty stuff your thinking of you dirty minded sod, but the programming stuff. All that Z80 machine code I wrote, ah them’s was the days.

Will post some pics of my CPC when I get it out of storage, fancy me some Treasure Island Dizzy on an 8bit machine rather than emulated. There is a version available at the codemasters site, I linked to it at the http://www.facebook.com/pages/skintgamer/223507576993?ref=ts skintgamer facebook page, along with a few other retro games and things. You should become a fan, its for everyone that is out to play games but doesn’t want to pay masses of money for them. Its free so what you waiting for.

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Is it just me who is tired of hearing washed up comedians on the old media boxes telling the usual nerd and geek jokes thinking that its funny. What we all should do as people who use the internet and computers on a daily basis is stop visiting them for a day. Stop doing any work for them for a week and teach them that their sad pathetic old media lives depend on the same Geeks and Nerds that they attack and ridicule.

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