2022

The customary look-back at a year passed, and mix of themes that didn't make it into a blog post. 

As usual, the blog follows an interest which generally last from a few weeks to about a month or two. The year begun with some C64 related matters, then engaging with Amstrad CPC and writing some text with it. More space was taken by detailing my adventures with an electronic kickbike, a hobby which unfortunately took a badly timed hit after having an accident.

Programming, Pictures, etc.

Despite not releasing any programs or games this year (when did that even become granted?), the new version of Multipaint is still under construction and I have hopes of getting it out soon-ish.

Some of the biggest developments are not even intended for release at this point. There's a companion piece to Multipaint, a C64-only editor that should enables sprites, multiplexed sprites, sprites in borders and so on. I have made couple of works that relied on this new program.

Cartoonzone workstage inside Gfxlab

Here I liked exploring the use of both extended and non-extended sprites in the same picture, and finding a fitting context for each.

There's some actual Commodore 64 game goodness coming out too. My reluctance to discuss on-going game projects means it will have to wait, but it's now safe to say it should be complete in 2023.

Then a few examples of C64 PETSCII and bitmap images.

Ego The Living Planet

Above, Ego the Living Planet PETSCII and below Night of the Homeless at the Vammala Party graphics compo. This is a plain hires without sprites.

Asunnottomien Yö

Oh, and one of my older works, Countryside, was printed and exhibited in the Pixeled Years exhibition at the Game Museum in Vapriikki, Tampere, Finland. Some of my other works were included in the rolling slideshow along a bunch of Finnish bitmap C64 art.

Multipaint running on a PC was also displayed opposite to a joystick-driven Advanced Art Studio, to also give an idea to the visitor how the conditions for making images differs. The exhibition, curated by Electric and Duce of Extend, is still running.

The panel discussion at the exhibition, alongside heavy presence and comments at the Zoo'22 demoparty (and an experience in tutoring the platform at a university) did make me reflect on my role as the tool creator. I'm now thinking that the resemblance to a 1980s/1990s paint program is actually a good thing and shouldn't be ruined by trying to add too many features.

Pictures at an exhibition

Talking of Advanced Art Studio, recently I've dug out some of my old C64 floppy disks in the expectation I could find some hilarious BASIC gems and pictures from around 1989-1990. This was helped by SD2IEC SD card reader and JaffyDOS program which allows me to create D64 disk images, using the real 1570 drive as a source.

It turns out the treasure was not as abundant than I had hoped for. The BASIC programs tended to be short and unfinished. It's also tricky to piece together the few machine code and sprite materials which generally don't have any kind of loader built-in.

But there was a nice instant payoff in the form of a couple of graphic artefacts, such as this copy of a cover from a Traveller 2300AD Role Playing Game extension Kafer Dawn.

1990: Traveller 2300AD

I'm fearing that my earliest programs are not present, as my findings looked like they were from a second wave of creativity. Going through dozens of disks, I no longer think there are any significant "lost disks". The floppies back then were mostly reserved for copied games which tended to have priority and I could have overwritten my programs on a whim. The same was even more true for ZX Spectrum tapes, and I have very little or nothing remaining from that era.

I'll return to these in more detail if I get around to examining the BASIC program disk contents.

Interlude

The blog saw slightly more MIDI minded postings recently. It is as if I finally have the kind of setup I envisaged at late 1990s, never mind actually producing something with it. Maybe it is a kind of eternal "garage project".

I have continued to work on a sequencer that combines tracker and piano-roll editing into some kind of fake Atari ST/Amiga sensibility, partially hard-coded to the kind of equipment I happen to have. MIDI only, no VST support. Again, this is unlikely to be released, there is enough such software out in the wild and I don't want to be answerable to this...

Windowman

This project which I've only called Miditracker, and its latest incarnation, Windowman, has obviously been under development before 2022. It has a some sort of genealogy dating back to late 1990s. Now was simply the year when it began to feel more fully formed.

Games

I felt I played less games overall during the year, but looking back it's not true. At the beginning I did complete Control, after which I had a long pause from larger games.

Control

Control was more action-oriented than I expected. Cleverly the confined setting doesn't require so much content creation (I suspect) so the focus is instead on the explosive encounters and modulating this experience almost endlessly through power-ups and weapon variations. The story and the underlying mystery didn't captivate me so much, but the milieu and the relatively banal environment are well done. At some point I simply wanted to be good enough to beat the game.

I still used GeForce Now to stream the game, which was surprisingly doable. But overall I became weary of streaming games. Too random selection of games, the streaming can hiccup and a game can just as well crash remotely as they do locally. After returning to non-streamed games it felt like a breath of fresh air.

Gris

The largest game was Jedi: Fallen Order, which despite some hiccups and crashes could be finished in Linux/Proton. I have to say Linux has come far from Quake and Tux Racing, although in a sense these Proton-games aren't "true" native Linux games. Apparently Proton can run some games better than Linux native versions, though.

Generally, somewhat smaller and just so slightly older games work almost always on Proton without even fiddling anything.

Jedi was a fine game, but surprisingly it wasn't that different from Tomb Raider, or I guess almost any third person action adventure these days. The guy is even explicitly raiding tombs.

Jedi: Fallen Order

Towards the end of the year, I picked up pace and completed Rise of the Tomb Raider, then Gris. The Tomb Raider sequel didn't have the same impact as the 2013 reboot, being mostly more of the same.

Gris was stylish and enjoyable, occasionally utilizing the simplest of 8-bit game mechanics without the frustration and unfairness that often went with the early games.

I also picked up a bunch of cheap games from the Steam sale which is still going on.

For shits and giggles I got Garfield Kart, which I quickly set aside. 

Garfield Kart

Now I'm looking into the Giana Sisters 2D which I bought on the reputation of the DS game it appears to be based on.

However, the rather nice pixel graphics of the DS version have been translated somewhat unevenly into mobile game vector muck. Sometimes it even refers to the Amiga airbrushed cover art, and the music has some of that Amiga twang too. Can't say how the game play differs from the DS version, which I never played, but it does feel a little clunky at times.

At some point I also completed Great Giana Sisters on the C64, something I've not done since the early 1990s I guess.

I have alternatively numbed and irritated my mind by playing battledudes.io, which I might be finally leaving behind together with surviv.io and the like.

Giana Sisters 2D

TV, Books, Film, Star Wars

After getting the Chromecast dongle and discovering streaming apps for Android, we've been watching this and that, opening and closing subscriptions as needed. I've had Netflix subscription quite permanently, occasionally turning Disney+ and HBO Max on/off. 

The apparently final season of Westworld felt more satisfying than seasons 2-3, but I guess there's little to salvage from that concept from now on. 

What else. Stranger Things, Locke and Key, Bridgerton, Emily in Paris, 1899, Manifest, Witcher, Lucifer, Sandman, Raised by Wolves, Discovery of Witches, The Nevers...

Although it looks like this should make me a couch potato, it was achieved by watching one series at a time, 1-2 episodes per evening.

The Doctor in Doctor Who was finally reincarnated. The final hurrah was better than most material from the recent years, but still a far cry from the most glorious seasons. Given the new series has been going for 15 years (sigh), it's not surprising it had to go through a bad patch. Now there's some signs of course-correction, but this isn't usually a very promising artistic direction.

If anything, you'd think Star Wars would be that one pop-culturally over-saturated, over-ripe thing that would better lay down and rest for a while. But I did binge on Star Wars during summer. The expectation of the Kenobi series led me to watch the films in episodic order, up until Kenobi, then after the series I followed with Rogue One, the original trilogy and the sequels. (I left out Solo).

Some of my Star Wars junk

I have to say the prequels felt slightly better than before, whereas my previous assessment of the sequel trilogy as "better than prequels" began to feel doubtful after this proper re-watch. At least the Rise of Skywalker was pretty dire. The film dives into depressing depths through Palpatine's return with a killer fleet, the stupid hyperspace-skipping scene, the Sith dagger plot... Yet strangely the film managed to end on a reasonably high note and cast an arc back to the prequel themes.

Disney+ keeps churning out Star Wars. Mandalorian season 2 wasn't as triumphant as the first one, relying more on cartoonish characters, fan service and pushing the uninteresting Mandalore mythos. Still all in good fun. Book of Boba Fett was enjoyable but tended to derail from its premise and ended up with prequel-style hijinks. I liked Kenobi better, because it was bold enough to take central characters and bring a kind of emotional closure to the Vader/Kenobi interactions the prequel trilogy lacked.

Star Wars: Andor was in some way what I always feared a live action Star Wars series might be like, before any such existed. Talky drama, low on fx and action, 99% planetside... However they managed to make it compelling, mixing genres and ideas not usually seen in Star Wars. What was the Imperial bureaucracy like, mentioned off-hand in the first Star Wars film? What's the world like outside the Skywalker saga and force-users? My main gripe is that as season 2 became a certainty, various plot threads were vaguely non-committal by the end of this first season.

All this re-watching and watching was capped with reading the famous Star Wars "Thrawn trilogy" books. Short verdict: it wasn't that impressive to me. Perhaps you had to be there, a kid in the early 1990s, starving for more Star Wars and buying into the idea this was the "sanctioned, official sequel" to the film trilogy. Bullshit! I do not think these novels would have made a great premise for a film trilogy or TV series.

Otherwise 2022 wasn't a huge year for sci-fi reading, but I did get into Liu Cixin's Thunderball, and lately, Carl Sagan's Contact. At some point I also re-read Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud. Through serendipity, the themes of these books were not that far apart from each other, life careers in science conflict with politics, military and religion.