The Brad Hole

You might think, now that I've left Aspyr, that I'm through with porting games to the Mac. Well you'd be wrong!

A gentleman by the name of Everett Kaser has released some shareware puzzle games for Windows that are fairly popular. He's been at it now for going on 19 years, and a few of his games, Sherlock in particular, are very popular. If you like logic puzzles, you might want to check out his website.

But up until now, he hasn't provided much in the way of Mac support. There were a few older ports, but they weren't complete and no longer launch. They're also not Intel-native. As it happens, I've gone ahead and ported them to the Mac. You can find them here.

The graphics and UI are actually hardcoded into the engine, which means that they are very far from what you might call Mac-native. I've talked to him in brief about what needs to happen so we can get menu bars and dialogs that look Mac-like, and hopefully that will bear fruit in the future. As well, he draws the art for most of his games, so don't expect them to be shiny and lickable. ;-)

The engine itself is surprisingly complex. Everett took it upon himself to write an entire virtual CPU and rewrote all his games in this pseudo-assembly language. When it came time to port the games to the Mac, I really only had to deal with one codebase - the "emulator" for his virtual CPU - and all the games more or less worked. I honestly wasn't expecting that level of logic underneath what appeared to be simple, lightweight games. it reminded me a great deal of emulating the CPUs when I worked on MAME, in fact. And it is for this reason that the UI and menus are hard to Mac-ify. All of that is dealt with inside his virtual machine and drawn in there, out of my way, so I can't get anything other than the final bitmap that appears on the screen with the UI already drawn upon it.

You'll also note that the icons are somewhat crude. I simply took the Windows icons and re-used them for the Mac, in their 32x32 glory. I'm no artist, unfortunately, so that's about the extent of it. It's "programmer art" at its finest. ;-)

With all that said, give them a try. I don't get any money if you buy the shareware versions, so I have no financial stake other than I enjoy his games, as does Beth.

Posted by bradman at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This has been a spectacularly bad year for dogs in our family.

Earlier this year, Bernie, the second dog we had growing up, passed away after having led a full (and somewhat exuberant) life. He's one of those dogs that just loved people - and strangers - and would pretty much jump up on anyone who wanted to pet him. He was also a big dog. You've probably known a dog with that type of personality.

More recently, Rolf - one of the dogs Beth picked out and who lived with her parents - died. Like Bernie, he had a full life and his passing was very sad but not unexpected.

That's more than enough for Beth and I, but it doesn't stop there, unfortunately. My brother, who is having what can easily be called a bad year, lost his dog Smokey. Smokey was, unfortunately, in his prime at about 8 or 9 years old. Beth and I had dog-sat him and I'd spent a fair amount of time around him, as have some of my friends. He was a very smart dog, a blue merle Australian Shepherd. Unfortunately, he got sick very quickly and died very suddenly. It was very shocking.

And so we come to yesterday. Our dog, Barney, is 2 years old. As Beth was taking him and Kermit (our other dog) into the same place we were intending to board them over Christmas, Barney had what the vet called a "grand mal seizure", where he fell over, lost control of his bowels and bladder and convulsed for a minute or so. Barney had shown some nervousness and reluctance when being boarded before, so it appears at this time that it's stress-related. Beth took him into the vet immediately afterwords but we don't have the full test results in yet, so we don't know much.

What we do know is that we're sure not going to board him for 2 weeks, and in fact it may be some time before we work up to boarding him again, if ever. It has radically changed our Christmas plans - Beth was going to fly out to San Jose and we were going to take Amtrak all the way to Seattle, with a visit in Portland. That said, we've been able to cancel everything and get our money back, and it's no sweat for me to drive back to Phoenix. Beth's parents have also been able to alter their plans to drive out to Phoenix as well.

One of the downsides of my taking this job at Apple is having to live out here while Beth finishes school back in Phoenix, and she has to juggle that with taking care of the 2 dogs and 2 cats we have at home. It's hard to comprehend anything happening to our pets during any time, but being apart like this, it makes things a lot worse for everyone.

Posted by bradman at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)