Not dead, just sleeping (ftagn)

Damn, August already!

I think my last entry pretty much summed up how things were going. The middle of the year is always hectic for me, doubly so with kids now. A lot of things work wise and home wise to look after, and it's the 'farm season' and since taking up some part time work out on the farm, spring and summer are a good chance to get some extra money as well as a workout and some sun.

Now that things are getting quiet again, I turned back to working on the Scramble Project - just like 'back in the day' I can see where things could have been done better, and perhaps smarter, but unlike in the heyday I'm not going to scrap and start over (this is probably the number one reason I never really got much finished back then) rather I'm keeping notes on what I've learned for 'the next one'. And hopefully there will be a next one.. the base Scramble game is going to be a PD release and pretty much follow the coin op gameplay/maps. I'll likely do a MAJOR reworking using all these tidbits for 'Scramble Deluxe' the shareware game.

But all that is pretty much dependent on getting things finished here, and that seems to be a sticking point.. About a month ago my computer packed it in (I've cobbled together a setup that allows me web access and little else for the moment), what I thought was a power surge from a lightning storm (I was out working when it went down) turned out to be the fan finally shuffling off it's mortal coil (and housing) and frying the processor.
This system has been pretty good to me, I hardly realized I'd built it in 2006, It's worked smoothly and like a charm forever... technology has marched on a bit though, and if the damage to it had been more I'd probably be rebuilding a new computer from scratch - however there are still processors available to replace my old one (not many, but the ones that are out there are better and now cheaper than what I had) for a paltry 60 bucks.
Maybe I can nurse another 6 years out of it! At the moment it still does everything I need it to quite well.

Of course the downside is all my work on Scramble was on that machine. I was working through an emulator and testing on the Amiga via AmiExplorer. The bad news is that for the last 2 months of working on it, I'd only transferred executables (boneheaded thing I know, especially when I learned that lesson doing the reverse - working on the Amiga and not sending the files back to the PC). So the Scamble code I have on the Amiga isn't the latest versions - not by a long shot.

Still , things are not 100% lost - time is coming back for these projects and I'm not letting it pass by. The last several days I've fired up the Ami and have been going over the 'core' routines that are tried and true. I'm optimizing, organizing and, more importantly, commenting a lot of these and putting them into a framework where they can be reused with as little effort as possible.

Hopefully this can be used later as the base to build Scramble Deluxe and eventually EVA.