Tag Archives: windows

Freebloks-1.5 for PC available

While I have frequently improved and updated the network compatible Android version of Freebloks, I have always neglected the Windows version. The Android version gained features like player names and the ability to choose the colors to play with. While the Windows and Android version always stayed compatible, the PC version simply did not offer these features to connecting Android devices or when connecting to a dedicated server.

Now Freebloks-1.5 for Windows is available, which lets connecting Android devices use all features and offers the player to choose his colours as well as to choose a name (which is not displayed in the game but on connected Android devices). If you frequently play Freebloks over the Internet, it is recommended to download the new version here:

Chicken Tournament source code on GitHub!

I finally published the source code of my biggest game so far Chicken Tournament, which I created about 10 years ago in C++. Starting in 2002, at the age of 18, it took me 13 month to create the game and a lot of my blood went into the game, and I’m still proud of the result. Over the years many people asked me for the source code or parts of it to study, and I never hesitated showing the code around, but never wanted to actually make it OpenSource.

Now the complete source code of the game (excluding source of the models and the video so far) is available on GitHub and contains the resources, the game logic, libraries and the Microsoft Visual C++ 6 project. Along the source, the DirectX7-SDK is needed to successfully create a binary.

The game is not under development anymore and big changed are unlikely to happen. Please respect my work.

My oldest program

I recently got the first program to work, I can remember writing. I wrote the game in 1996 at the age of 12, on an 8-bit computer with a 10 MHz 8085 processor, that my father built a long time ago. Since it’s a custom and unique machine, the programs ran nowhere else.

There was no assembler or compiler, so I had to write the game in machine code, which wasn’t actually too hard, because the processor only has a very limited command set and even fewer were required to write the text adventure I called lambada.

In 2010 I wrote a 8085 emulator for Windows to make my old games run, which also supports the totally unique hardware of the original machine. That way I was able to run the game on a 2,4 GHz quadcore with a 64 bit Windows 7. 🙂

The game is a simple text adventure game, telling you a story which you can control by key presses. The whole game consists of only 520 bytes of machine code, that I wrote in a hex editor, and about 3kb of text for the rest of the game.

Total Commander 64 bit plugins

Total Commander 8 will be released soon, offering native 64 bit support for Windows. The author kindly asked to recompile the available plugins for 64 bit, offering bounties to plugin developers.

The plugins to encode and decode gif files and avi videos are available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions now, ready for download. While the gif plugin seems to work fine, the avi version is facing the windows codec hell all over again in 64 bit world. On a 32 bit system I recommend the use of the ffdshow-tryouts codec pack, on a 64 bit system I wish you good luck to find working VfW (Video for Windows) codecs for encoding and decoding. 🙂

I should probably rewrite the plugin to use either DirectShow or just wrap ffmpeg…