I'm still experimenting, but one thing I'm very happy with is that now XA supports enums, so it can parse even more complex C data structure, and we have annotations so I can expand pointers and structure and see the content.

Well there are quite a few changes, they are made in branches, so both Nova and Encounter are my primary "guinea pigs" projects because they are complet multi module entries. And the extension comes with changes to XA, Oricutron and the compiler itself to add symbols support. ⤵️

I just sold my 500th "Encounter" game.🎉 Many thanks to the person who bought it on Itch and left an additional $5 tip!🤑

This is dumb: Fable said it needed to kill a process... and that got caught as a dangerous message by its own software harness... 🤪

So the Steam Summer Sales are now finished, time for the ritual numbers disclosure: I sold 19 units of "Encounter" on Steam, 0 on Itch, and I'm now at 499 lifetime sales. Number of reviews stays at 16 I guess my objective of "reach 500 by end of year" should be achievable! 🥰

Still a lot of work to do, but now there's a symbol browser, the emulator video output is capture and has a real time zoomer to inspect, tracing C code "kind of works", and global variables can be expanded (formatting is crap though).

Well, I guess it's as high in the monthly top it will ever be, 4th position is quite good for an Oric demo considering there is basically no Oric demoscene that's going to go and comment on the demo, and since the top is based on popularity... doomed to not go very high!

Work in progress...

I did not survive the Troll's lair adventure... but the modem is working perfectly, so that's that :)

cast yourself as a villain (I have the haircut!)

I think I got a terminal disease!

Interesting, never heard of Fargoal before! Did you play it on Vic20, C64? I see it's even on Steam :) Nethack I did play a bit on the Atari ST... but not online :D

Now, that's just one game: Let's imagine I have two more such small games that sell similarly (that's doable, I'm not even at 500 sales total yet!), that's three times that, and now more people follow and may discover the older games and try them. That's called "long tail sales"

I see many depressed indie developers on social media saying that "it's over", that the time of the easy best seller is long gone. Imo that's a framing problem: Your next game will probably not be a million unit sellers like Mechameleon", but the sales of a small game ads up.⤵️

I don't care about football and did not watch the match yesterday (I was busy trying to setup a Mac mini for a possible Mac version of Encounter), but knowing the result is kind of important for "social life", so I checked and yeah, "AI search" got it wrong, again.🤪

And Encounter is now on sales on Steam as well! Not sure why there was a full day delay between Steam and Itch this year? 🤔 store.steampowered.com/app/3319780/...

I'm not quite sure why, but I had to enter the sales 3 times for them to stick... hopefully this time is the right time, because that's getting annoying! 🤪 Anyway, that makes the game at basically $2.00, my next objective is to reach 500 sales! 😅 defenceforce.itch.io/encounter

Looking very nice with a Oric matching Black and Red case... and fewer risks to fry the thing. Case from: makerworld.com/en/models/28...

Here is all the hardware you need: - Oric - Loci - Raspbery Pico W

They are really trying hard to make me switch to Linux. Radeon drivers auto-updated to a version which is broken on Windows 10, and reverting to the previous version ends up with load library errors and/or OpenCL not found... *sigh*

CyberNova Finally made it into the pouet.net Top of the Month 🥳 www.pouet.net/prod.php?whi...

I brute force converted with Claude a javascript road renderer into 6502 assembler... let's just say that it's not playable without the turbo mode 😇 At least now I have a nice profiler!

Since I had some time before a Gamedev meetup yesterday, I ended up buying a few books which I hope will help me flesh out a proper nice design for my next Oric game 😅

First place, been a while since that happened \o/ Thanks everybody for the support!

Finally uploaded my version 1.0 of my entry for the Nova demoparty. 🥳 Xeron and h0ffman have been doing second place three years in a row, hopefully my entry will not do any worse!

At that rhythm I'll probably not reach 50 reviews before it's time to enjoy my retirement... but every single one of these small positive reviews make me happy. Thanks!

And done optimizing for today. In red is yesterday's first profile before I started digging in the code, and in green it's the results after having seriously hacked in the IRQ handler. About 8.7% improvement, that's not too bad :) (and yes, I've adjusted some demo timings)

With proper feet, it should probably be possible to transform this brick into a an expansion for the Oric with integrated power-brick, volume control, joystick ports, loci, and have the external ports connected to a USB hub.🤔

So I spent a bit of time optimizing the IRQ handler and the Arkos tracker routine, then I ran the profiler before and after, then compared the frame time. Gain is about 5% of frame time :) Oric data science! 😅 Next step, identify and kill the spikes.

Reminds me of that :)