Putting on the old walking boots again

Or, in fact, forgetting to put them on. Something I used to do on a semi-regular basis was to wander off for a short hike – usually somewhere within a reasonably easy drive of home, such as the Brecon Beacons or down towards Wiltshire. If I was heading off for the weekend, I’d go somewhere further such as Dartmoor, and if I was off for a little longer I’d likely head towards the Cornish coast or to the Lake District.

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Kitchen sink chaos

I had a few things I needed to get done this weekend, and one thing (or a set of things, time permitting) I particularly wanted to do. That was to export the new draft graphics for Drop Rock as bitmaps, and convert them to RISC OS sprites. That in turn would have allowed me to update the game code in order to try it out with the new (larger) tiles, take some screen grabs and post an update about that.

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Updating Drop Rock part 1 – some background

Back in the early 1990s, one of the games I wrote and sold through Soft Rock Software was called Drop Rock. I’ve recently decided to look at the game and see what I can do to update it and give it a new lease of life on newer RISC OS computers. I’ve also decided to write about the changes as I go, but before embarking on that here’s a little background on the game itself.

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Scrambled egg or not scrambled egg?

That is the breakfast! Back in September, Rick Murray mentioned on his blog that he made some scrambled egg and chips. When I read the post and saw the picture, my immediate thought was (and I commented that) it looked more like a deep omelette (but with no filling) than scrambled egg. I don’t make scrambled egg often, but I decided that next time I did, I would take a photo and put it online for comparison.

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