Sunday 23 September 2018

RetroChallenge 2018/09: Reorganize My Games Pages


Last month my son was home from university. He's pretty good at Javascript, so I got him to help me download Mike Tines Javascript MC-10 emulator from Github and get it up and running from my own file space at the university where I work. He was able to figure out what needed to be tweaked in the code to get it happily running from another net space. I then set to modifying the code to change some modifications Mike had made to the standard MC-10 font. Lots of folks complain about the font. It's pretty quirky, with its square O and narrow 0. Mike didn't like the original G either. But I'm a bit of a purist and I have used some of the quirks to my advantage in games. The square O makes a nice box for example, for use in Sokoban. So I switched the byte codes back to recreate the original font.

Then I set about reorganizing the web page launcher for the code to contain menu listings of my programs. I have over 300 programs now for the MC-10 so I had to figure out a way to break the list into categories. I eventually settled on 4 categories: (1) Classic Basic Games, (2) My Own Original Programs, (3) My Text Adventure Ports (and 2 original adventures), and (4) All My Other Ports.  This meant that each menu could be a more reasonable length. I started editing my web pages so that if you clicked on a picture of the game it will take you to the appropriate Javascript page that will contain a menu listing to the program. I haven't fully completed the process, but I have got the process mostly completed for 2 of my web pages:

My main software Page:

My Text Adventures Page:

My Original Games and Program Ports Page is partially done (not fully checked yet):

So for example if you want to play my recent Atari Adventure game, it is listed at the top of the menu as "Adventure" here:
Just click on the "- Select Cassette -" menu, select "Adventure", and then type RUN and hit ENTER on the main MC-10 screen of the emulator.

Thanks Charlie for your help. Thanks Mike for putting your code up on Github and for letting me host it on my own file space. It's a useful resource for the MC-10 hobby community. I am hoping to integrate the Classic Game page into a course I am working on for the history and philosophy of computing.  Charlie might even trying modifying the code further to autolaunch games directly from a html link.

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