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…
It’s the Easter holidays and I’ve got two weeks off work. Amongst highly exciting things like weeding the garden and waiting for a new washing machine to be delivered, I’m doing some programming. After spending a bit too long remembering how my own code works, I managed to create a simple starfield that looks quite…
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…
I’m working on getting a joystick port working on my Agon Light. They don’t come with joystick ports, but there is a set of GPIO pins that can be read through assembly. Here’s my setup, the Agon Light is in the white box, my trusty PowerPlay Cruiser joystick from the 90s is plugged into a…
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…
In preparation for my next video I’ve been tidying up some cellular automata code I wrote. There’s some good old Conway’s Life, some 1D CAs that make pretty patterns, and one I recently discovered called Wire World. Now, since I can’t just make a thing without fiddling about, an afternoon of “can I write Conway’s…
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…
How to write code for the Agon Light (and Console8) using C instead of BASIC, under Linux. It might work with WSL2 in Windows, and it might work on a Mac. By the end of this you’ll end up with a fairly standard Linux C programming environment with a Makefile and all the usual trimmings.…
Hello everyone! Let’s get on with it, shall we? Last year went pretty well, I released 14 videos and towards the end of the year experimented with releasing more than one video a month. I’ll also experiment with some more spontaneous content on here and maybe the odd Short. YouTube seems to like those, and…