About
For a course I am taking at Athabasca University, COMP 266 (R3), I needed a subject for a site that was flexible enough to meet the course requirements. Most the game-related ideas I came up with were more of one-of projects that would only meet the needs of part of the criteria. As I am interested in Homebrew Development, I realized that a site about a particular system would be game-related and could be used to meet the needs of the course. The decision to go with the 2600 (instead of the NES which I am developing a RPG on) was simply because the hardware is much easier to explain. In fact, it is simple enough hardware that simulating how the graphics chip works would be easy to do in JavaScript so would be ideal for a unit project.
How I got interested in the 2600 is actually interesting. I had started working on my NES project when I discovered the book "Racing the Beam. 1" This book loosely covered how the hardware worked but was more a focus on the creation of a number of 2600 games. Shortly after reading the book, Ludum Dare had a mini-challenge revolving around de-constructing a game as if it was written for an older system. This challenge was inspired by Halo 2600. This got me thinking about 3D games and if such a thing would be possible on the 2600. After looking at more detail about how exactly the playfields worked, I realized that simple 3D mazes could be created on the 2600 so for the challenge I created a mock-2600 version of my Coffee Quest game. This got me wondering if I could actually do a real 3D maze game for the 2600 so I ended up creating my Maze 3D game.
As this is part of a university course, some stuff that would normally not be here is going to occasionally show up. For instance, in unit 2, I had to clean up a couple of HTML pages. While this would not normally fit with the theme of this site, the pages are located here.
Of course there is more to me than just game development. I am known for my Caturday posts so below is a cat picture. There happens to be an API for finding cat pictures so this is at least partially related to the course. If you don't like the picture, you can request a new one.
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