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| Me in real life... |
My Twitter profile describes me as...
"8bit graphician, musician & coder regularly.
PureBasic coder occasionally. Ukulele player and drummer infrequently. Amiga user always!"
This should be accurate, since I wrote it.
To be even more accurate, I pixel graphics mainly on the C64, but have dabbled with other formats. I have composed music on the C64, Atari 8bit, Commodore Plus/4 and Amiga. I indulge my coding ambitions using 6502 on the C64 and PureBasic on Windows based PC's to create demos and games. I play Ukulele and drums and support Pontypool RFC, but for the purposes of this blog, that is not important.
So why this blog?
I realised a while ago that I have been creative on the graphics and music front using computers for a long time. I have been pixelling since the 1980's using C64 software such as CRL's 'The Image System' and OCP's 'Advanced Art Studio. I even dabbled with SID music using the impenetrable 'Ubik's Music'. In the 1990's I used Amiga based software for pixelling (various versions of 'Deluxe Paint'), composing (various versions of MED, OctaMED and Protracker) and coding (AMOS and Blitz Basic 2). Since the 2000's, I have used Windows PC based cross-development software tools to pixel and compose for the formats mentioned above.
However, I have certainly 'lost' a lot of my early things due to corrupt / missing disks and even some later things have gone to binary heaven due to changes of computers / laptops or hard drive corruptions and so on. Even if some of my 'final' files are archived elsewhere by others, lots of my work-in-progress and/or 'work stages' are gone for ever.
Therefore, I started this blog as an archive, mainly for me and also to act as an 'aide-memoire' for how I did things and/or what tools I used. Others may find some of its content useful or interesting... or not. It's only updated when there is something actually produced, released or worth mentioning, so there may sometimes be lengthy periods without posts.
The other reason for me 'archiving' my own materials? I have produced graphical assets for quite a few projects, C64 games in particular, that have never seen the light of day so are not archived anywhere and have never been seen. They exist here just to show that I am actually more active than certain online databases and archives would suggest...
Why Blogger? I can't afford I'm too tight to pay for my own long term hosting or dedicated server and don't have the time to maintain a bespoke website. Blogger may be considered a bit lame maybe, but I know the system well for various reasons and I'm hedging my bets that Google won't be shutting it down in a hurry, at least in the short term, so my archive should be around for a while to aid my seemingly failing memory. At one point, there was actually a bespoke website with a primitive archive on it and some page content *still* hasn't been transferred to Blogger yet, but I will get round to this eventually; this may explain some references that might crop up in blog posts to other pages/releases that don't seem to exist (yet).
In addition, some of the downloads are offered from a dedicated SkyDrive OneDrive Dropbox GoogleDrive linked to this blog for the same hedge-betting reasons as above. I'm kind of an 'open-source' person, so some posts may share source code or the original, editable files that can be loaded into the software in which they were created. If nothing else, that may give you a laugh, but please don't be too harsh on me! I'm a 'continuous learner'. </excuses>
The style/theme/layout of the blog has changed numerous
times, but it's current form is the one that's been in use the longest
and the one that I'm most happy with due to it's simplicity. Over the years, I've had to update various links because of external website changes, or have had to move the downloads between various cloud services. NOTE TO SELF: trust the dates in blog posts only and not any date stamps in file downloads, etc! If you are reading and find anything broken, let me know by filling in the contact form on the right somewhere...
There won't be anything about my personal life here. It's all about the pixel, compose and code.
Enjoy. Maybe.
UPDATE: I've found some old C64 tapes at my parents house that may or may not contain some of my *really* old images that I pixelled in the mid-80's, including submissions to companies like 'Mastertronic'. When I get time and if the tapes work and if I determine what is actually on them and the formats they're in, I'll transfer the files over. NOTE TO SELF: allow years for this... ;)
UPDATE 2: I've managed to resurrect my Amiga 1200 recently so will investigate a way to transfer any previously thought 'lost' files across to my development laptop, including some unfinished AMOS games, some BLITZ BASIC 2 applications and loads of DPIII images and MED/OctaMED/ProTracker modules.
