Well, I can’t help feeling that if the Pip-Boy was hackable I might have got somewhere. Most of my free time in January was spent with Fallout 3, and I can’t honestly bring myself to regret that.

I haven’t even caught up on the Uzebox development yet, let alone started on the new platforms. Still eleven months to go, though. Plenty of time…

Well, since I was forced to upgrade WordPress for security reasons, I thought I might as well stop by and make a post.

My enthusiasm for all things Cybiko didn’t last in the face of things stepping up at work. I do still hope to do something for them, but I’ve allowed myself to be distracted by other projects, with just as little, or less, progress.

First off I was persuaded to sell my WonderMagic, by someone who was in danger of actually using it, and I used the money to buy some cheapo Portable Media Players (PMPs) from DealExtreme, which may or may not prove hackable.

That was last week’s fad, though.

Now I’ve heard about the Uzebox, and am beginning to get interested in that. It still seems to be in the domain of the electronics hobbyists at the moment, rather than us programmers, but I might have a go at building one anyway.

I must admit, I had never heard of the Cybiko until a recent post on Retro Remakes, but it looks like just the kind of thing I enjoy messing with, a bit like the Pokemon Mini.

I contemplated doing something for the Nintendo DS over my Christmas break. I got the development environment set up, and read around a bit, but in the end I wasn’t really struck by any inspiration. I’m a bit worried that the DS is not restrictive enough for me. I seem to need to some constraints to spark my creativity.

I posted it over on my PC games site. It is quite different visually, and possibly harder because of it.

Maybe if I only had one site I’d update it more often?

Nah.

I wouldn’t really recommend using it on your main PM until a few other people have tested it, though. I’m fairly confident that it won’t overwrite data from other games, but it’s still early days and there could easily be a bug or two lurking.

The old version is still available if you don’t want to risk it.

Incidentally, I decided to share one slot for all my games, given that there are only six (and a bit?) of them. Assuming I ever write anything else for the PM.

The PM saves games to an internal 8k EEPROM, and although quite a bit was known about it, no-one had really managed to use it until now. I still need to figure out how to write to it, but I think the browser has unlocked some of the mysteries for me. There is source included in the zip, but I’ll try to write up something proper before too long.

The other mini-project was the 3×5 font used in the browser (4×6 including the spacing). This allows 24×10 characters on the screen, which is almost a reasonable amount of text. The bin file included with the source contains the 96 characters from space (0×20) through to erm, another space (0×7f), and the source contains some functions to draw them.

This will also mean that there will be a PC version, which wasn’t originally on the cards.

I don’t have a lot of time or energy for my own projects now I’m back in the world of employment, but hopefully I can muster some enthusiasm for this, although it will probably have to wait until after the Retro Remakes competition.