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Dragón, Tom, Ned y yo en monociclo y Mateo en Bici. Fue un lindo paseo.

VChar64 v0.0.4 released! And thanks to Henning Bekel, VChar64 now supports xlink. Changes since v0.0.2: Added xlink support. For more info: http://henning-bekel.de/xlink/ Added Export As… Export will export the current project with the previous exported values Added Tile support

What was interesting about the Keynote: Brillo: the OS for the IoT… but but but, there were no talks about it, almost no information about it, nothing. Android Studio with C++ support: Finally :) The NDK really needs love, and having an IDE that supports it is great. Hey, even Microsoft is supporting the NDK now in VS2015. Photos is decoupled from Google+ with free unlimited storage: This is great. I’ve been using Picasa since day one and I never used Google+ to store my photos. So basically Photos is the same as Picasa, but with unlimited storage. Offline maps: Yeah Chrome Custom Tabs: Interesting alternative to present 3rd party views with the benefits of both the web and native worlds. What was not-that-interesting about the Keynote: ...

I’m good at software engineering, but in electronics, I’m a newbie. Nonetheless, I find electronics fascinating. Last year I did the first basic tutorials with Arduino, then I played a little bit with Raspberry Pi and CI20 (technically not really electronics). And this year, I built a very simple circuit to connect the RGBI output of my Commodore 128 to VGA… I have been using breadboard, so no soldering, no PCB, or anything like that. ...

Who has time to maintain two personal blogs ? It is even difficult to maintain just one. So what I did was to merge my unicycle (monociclo.com.ar) blog into this one (towp8.com). I divided them in categories: The unicycle blog is using the “unicycle” category. This blog is using the "programming" category. * UPDATE 2025-07-28*: “towp8”

I started to code a unicycle game for the Commodore 64. The first thing that I realized was that I needed an game editor, so I started to code one: VChar64. Today I released v0.0.1 which has basic functionality but the functionality that it has, just work. You can download it from here: Download: https://github.com/ricardoquesada/vchar64 Features: Imports raw, PRG and CharPad file formats Exports to raw and PRG Basic editing functionality: Rotate, Invert, Clear, Shift left/right/up/down Multiplatform: Win, Linux and Mac Screenshot: ...

I stopped developing for the Commodore 64 in 1993. Since then a lot has happened: Back in late 80’s ~beginning of 90’s I did all my coding using the Commodore 128’sMONITOR command That means no text editor, no compiler, no linker. Similar to the debug.com command that used to be in DOS. Since I didn’t use a text editor, I put all my comments in a notepad (I still have that notepad somewhere) I used the Commodore 128’s SPRDEF as the Sprite editor. I used my own character editor called vchar… (later I created a similar one for DOS and Linux) I did some basic graphics using a graphics editor… but I can’t remember which one. I didn’t know any other C64 developer, so I did everything kind of isolated My sources of information wereCommodore Magazine, Tu Micro Commodore and some books. I reversed engineer some games / demos in order to learn tricks. I had a 300 bps modem but I didn’t find any good C64 BBS. I did some cracks for a local company that was “publishing” (AKA pirating) games. In exchange they were providing me games. To put things into perspective it was impossible (I mean IMPOSSIBLE) to get original games in Argentina back then. I knew some basic tricks like how to use more than 8 sprites, how to open the top and bottom borders, some raster effects… but nothing very advanced. I loaded all my programs / games using the disk drive, which was much faster than the datasette, but still very slow I had a fast-loader cartridge to accelerate the disk drive loading times. It also had a rudimentary MONITOR. Although Argentina was using the PAL-N standard I had a NTSC Commodore 128. In Argentina we also had the Argentinean Commodore, called Drean Commodore, which was a PAL-N machine assembled in Argentina And now, in 2015 You have different cross-assemblers like: ACME KickAssembler a more And native assemblers like (the native assemblers were available back then, I simply didn’t know of their existence): Turbo Assembler Many editors like: CharPad (a level editor using characters for Windows. Works with Wine) SpritePad (a sprite editor for Windows. Works with Wine) HermIRES(a PC/Mac/Linux graphics editor) GoatTracker (a music tracker) You even have complete IDEs like: Relaunch64 C64Studio C64 KickAss IDE Cross-crunchers(compressors) like: Exomizer All the existing C64 tricks are documented here (if it is not there, then it doesn’t exist): Codebase64: How to open the side borders Sprite multiplexers 3d effects and much much more Many tutorials. A good place to start is here: Dustlayer All books and magazines from the old days were scanned and are available here: Magazines Books Active community: Lemon64 (English) Commodore Mania (Spanish) An active demo scene: csdb.dk New games… yes people are still releasing new games for the C64, and selling them! RGCD Even recent popular games were ported ( demakes) to the C64: Canabalt( C64nabalt) Super Crate Box(Super Bread Box) Super Hexagon(Micro Hexagon) Cartridges that support loading games from SD memory cards… no more disk drives or datasettes. These cartridges act as fast loaders among other things: Turbo Chamaleon Ultimate 1541 Great Emulators (they emulate everything, including VIC bugs, undocumented opcodes, etc.): VICE (Win/Mac/Linux) CCS64 (Win only) Multi system TVs… (one TV both for PAL and NTSC machines) 220 electronics And probably many other things that I’m forgetting As a reminder, the Commodore 64 was released in 1982!. It is impressive all the things that can be done in a 30+ years old computer! ...

For the past 5 or 6 years, I used iPhones as my default phones. But a few months ago I decided to switch to Android. I tried Android devices before, but never as my default phone. At the beginning I started using a Samsung Galaxy S4 (a 2013 5" device), but later I switch to a Xiaomi MI4 (a 2014 5" device with better specs). Without further ado, this is my feedback: ...

Lo primero que pasó es que en Octubre 2014 fui padre y eso significa, además de tener una enorme felicidad, es que ya no tengo tanto tiempo como antes. Y eso significa que tuve menos tiempo para andar en monociclo y menos tiempo para escribir en el blog. Pero para hacer un resumen, esto es lo que pasó: Fui a Unicon XVII en Canada, y participé en Basket " A", en Hockey “B”, en Muni Downhill “Advanced”, en Muni Uphill, en Muni Cross-Country “Advanced”. Muy muy divertido, en Agosto 2014. Hice el San Francisco Uni Tour en Septiembre 2014. Fui al California Muni Weekend en Los Angeles en Octubre 2014. Y seguí jugando as basket todos los martes en Berkeley. Y traté de hacer Muni una vez por semana, aunque a veces no se podia. Fotos, aca. ...

In Part I I described to how integrated LiquidFun with Cocos2d-x. In this part (part II) I’ll describe how to render the particles using a basic water effect. Part I uses just one glDrawArrays(GL_POINTS, 0, total); to draw the particles. And although that works to draw “particles”, it is not enough to draw “water”. Drawing “water” requires a more complex rendering algorithm, like the one used in this example. And implementing an algorithm similar that one is what this article describes. ...