Still bubbling away...

Well, it's been a while since I last posted to this blog, so I thought it high time I posted an update. You could be forgiven for thinking that no progress has been made, or indeed that development on the project has ceased. However, you'd be wrong!

Nay my friends, I have been having a veritable code frenzy of Manic Miner-ness. Part of the reason for the massive delay has been due to me making a very serious mistake. Some time ago, a discussion at work about programming languages led me to declare to all that would listen that Forth was, and I quote: "Shit". I then went on a rant about how unreadable it was, and that it was stupid because everything was written 'backwards'.

"Oh" said my colleagues, in a "there-must-be-more-to-life-than-this" type of way.

A few hours later, guilt somewhat got the better of me. I mean, there I was telling everyone how crap Forth was, and the truth was that I actually knew *nothing* about it. I mean, totally and completely bugger all. As a result, I determined I would learn a little bit about the language, just, you know, so I could blast it a bit more and really sound like I knew what I was talking about when I told everyone how crap it was.

Trouble is, it's not rubbish. It's actually amazing. Brilliant. Perhaps the most simple, beautiful language I have ever seen. When I finally got the Interpreted Threaded Code concept, and how code was compiled, I was simply hooked. I simply had to have a go at it. So, I somewhat naively launched into writing my own Forth engine in 9900 assembly (you know, as you do). I even invested in some old books. You'll be glad to know (though not half as glad as me) that the code written so far works, and is very fast. It runs Forth code just fine. I've just got to finish the command line interpreter and fully test all the words and it will be maybe 98% finished (just block commands to finish).

So, that's the reason for the delay. I spent days and days coding my Forth engine, and totally left Manic Miner to languish. A poor show.

Accept, it's not really a poor show is it? One of the cool things about coding in your own time is that you get to work on the things you want to work on when you want to work on them. Coding up the graphics for Manic Miner was such a large job, including coding up my own sprite editor and animator, that it sapped my energy and enthusiasm for while, only to be replaced with Forth.

A few weeks ago, I decided to revisit the code I had done for Manic Miner to 'remind' myself of how it all worked, only to find that there wasn't really any code at all - just lots of data, so I thought I would spend an evening or two putting some code together to test my data. You know, as you do... That was probably over a month ago, and an awful lot of progress has been made. In the next few posts I'll summarise where I am with the code so far. Stay tuned!