So my main PC that I do all my video editing, programming and anything more complex than talking rubbish on Discord died. Totally dead. How it died is a story for this video and involved me, a new NVMe SSD and a screwdriver. It wasn’t too bad because I’d been looking for an excuse to…
Early computers weren’t powerful enough to draw full-screen moving graphics, so they had to use clever tricks. Let’s explore how Nintendo’s techniques for creating tile-based games on the NES can be applied to modern hardware. Using these methods, I built a scrolling tilemap system for the Agon Light using C programming.
In this video I look at how you can program the Agon Light to display bitmap images using C. I go through how to convert a PNG image into an RGB2222 format bitmap image, and then use the C library functions to load that into the Agon Light, and the VDP commands necessary to display…
I’m learning how to program the Agon Light, and as a project thought it’d be fun to try and program two of the classic Windows 3.11 screensavers – Mystify and Starfield Simulation. My aim is not to simply program the Agon Light by cloning the Windows 3.11 screensavers, but to learn how to program the…
Easter eggs are usually hidden inside our games and software, but did you know there are some hidden inside the tools and languages used to make that software? Come with me on a fun Easter diversion while we eat our bodyweight in chocolate, and look at six programming Easter Eggs. Some of these are from…
Let’s celebrate #piday in this appropriately short video by writing some #python programs to calculate Pi. The first method uses something called the Gauss-Legendre method. It works by iteratively refining an approximation of Pi, generating the answer digit by digit. When writing code to calculate Pi we run into issues trying to store the calculated…
Dive into the exciting world of DIY hardware hacking. Join in as I explore joystick integration, keyboard inputs, and serial debugging using the versatile Agon Light platform. Delve into the technical intricacies of GPIO pins, assembly language programming, and C compiler usage for low-level development. Discover the power of computational thinking, boolean logic, and UART…
Today, we’re diving into the world of cellular automata. A digital playground of sorts where simple rules lead to astonishing complexity. where order can arise from chaos and collapse back into chaos just as quickly. First we have a look at One Dimensional Cellular Automata which were originally conceived by John Von Neumann in the…
Instead of bashing away in BASIC, it’s possible to do some coding in C on the Agon Light. Let’s find out how in this introduction to an ongoing series where I figure out the Agon hardware and work on a game. I have no idea what game I want to make, and I’m not entirely…