I’m not sure if it’s awesome or terrifying that I’ve been blogging here intermittently for almost twenty years now.
My first post is appropriately precious since I mention how it’s hosted on tripod.com and how I’m concerned about turning it into a news site? Dunno. It was a long time ago.
I’ve recounted the strange history of this site before and not a whole lot has happened since then. My previous post was 2015 and I have several drafts of stuff I’ve never finished. Looking at some of those they’re so hideously out of date that they’ll probably just stay in the drafts folder forever.
At one point I had the tagline of this site as “still around for some reason” and it was more than just a smartass phrase – most of the people I know who blogged and had blogs have long since moved on. Some to other forms of social media, some to nothing in particular. Yet I just kept this site going. It’s not expensive to host or anything, like $5 a month or some crap (though I think that might be $10 a month – whatever it’s still not much) and I’ve been able to use subsites as test beds for other stuff.
And then in 2017 or so I got the idea to fix up some old games on the iPhone that were killed off in the 32-bitpocalypse but the source was available. It took a long time to do it, both because of the spare time nature of the deal and also because I didn’t know what I was doing. Once I got them working, I thought the whole process was interesting so I wrote an article on here about all the stuff I ran into. The original code drops from John Carmack had these Word documents in them that detailed the process of making them so I figured writing up the process of fixing them was appropriate, and perhaps useful to someone else.
Then I got into the process of adding features and porting other games, mostly id Software titles but a couple of other things as well. I’ve written up the id Software ports here, so I won’t repeat it all here but basically it became my pattern – do project, post code, post video, write article.
At some point I got some mainstream attention from gaming, tech and development sites and the resulting SEO has driven people to this site in decent numbers ever since. Not a ton mind you, probably within the range of rounding errors for major sites, but I get an email or two a week with people asking questions.
But the front page was still this one random post from 2015 with no links to the articles on the ports.
So I decided recently to do a few things – first, I changed the home page to where it shows off some info about me and this work, semi-resume style, and lists out the projects, including the non-id stuff like the Virtual Boy VR emulator and the port of the C++ version of VVVVVV. I tried to make them a little bit slick looking with mockups of the devices and stuff. It kinda worked.
The second thing is I’m going to blog again but probably not write much more in the way of wordy, profound posts. I mean I might write up some stuff like that (this post is starting to get long now that I look at it), but I’ve hit this point where I figure little things are worth writing about too. Stuff like this:
I’ve modified the Quake II and Quake III: Arena ports to more properly handle SDL. For some reason I was reticent to include the code wholesale like most projects do but now I’ve changed my mind and I’ll probably be doing this to the other SDL ports of mine soon.
I wrote to Brendon Chung of Blendo Games and asked for the source code to the Mac port of Thirty Flights of Loving. He sent me the code and I fixed it up (since, last year, the Mac had its own 32-bitpocalypse). I posted the results here.
I contributed to the ioquake3 project by fixing up the Xcode project, which last saw attention in 2013. I’m also looking to help them with other things as time permits.
For no particular reason I added a software rendering target to the Quake II project. Just wanted to see what it would be like to play Quake II on your phone but pretend like you’re running a Pentium 90 with no hardware accelerator card.
I was able to get LatestChatty, the iOS and iPadOS client for the discussion forum at Shacknews, to run on macOS via Catalyst. I don’t have an article for this and outside of the community of people on Shacknews no one is going to care but it was just neat to see that with not a whole ton of effort this iOS app that was more or less started at the dawn of iOS development can come along to the Mac. I’m coordinating with the author to get it on the Mac App Store, which will be neat once Universal Purchases for macOS/iOS apps are in place like they are for iOS/tvOS apps.
Anyway that’s it for now. I have no idea who reads this anymore but in any event here it is.