The olcPixelGameEngine for Retro Platforms Part I

I’m very found of the Atari 8-bit machines and the Atari ST. When I saw the PixelGameEngine (PGE for the rest of this text) i thought why not port it? I started to look at the Atari ST. Using my own 520 STM as a the target machine.

I soon realised that a regular port wouldn’t cut it. My first attempt was to remove a lot of stuff just to get it to compile. The first PGE binary needed a 4 MB machine. Not even close for my 512kB target machine. In the test program all graphics routines is written from scratch and that is because of the bit plane situation, more on that below.

Before we dig deeper let’s look at the hardware.

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Drawing many large sprites with the pixel game engine (AKA achieving parallax with the pge)

please note this article refers to the pixel game engine version 1, version 2 will have support for far more optimal large sprite rendering out of the box, however some of the information here might be interesting to others that follow. especially if wanting to do own manipulation of sprites.

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Dev Log: Laravel Blogging Platform – Starting Out

Laravel is a great framework that makes web development quick, easy and elegant. I’ve been using it for approximately a year at work and absolutely love it! There are plenty of extremely well-made packages to help extend its functionality from better handling of form request data, to implementations of multi-factor authentication.

But I’ve yet to find a package that adds a blog facility to a website. I’m not a fan of pre-packaged blog/CMS platforms such as WordPress and Drupal, so always prefer to roll my own solution. So, why not use my new-found knowledge and appreciation of Laravel to give something back that I’m passionate about?

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