Monthly Archives: October 2005

Quest I: my Ultima clone on the BBC micro

When I was 17 or so (year 11, 1987), I had spurned my Commodore 64 in favour of a BBC B micro. At the end of year 11, some of the departing year 12s gave me the code to a little project they’d been working on: a clone of Ultima for the Beeb. It was really just the core of such a game: the display routine for moving about the map, obscuring objects out of view (such as behind walls), and showing monsters.

At a time when I should have been out pursuing girls, this caught my imagination (I’d played a LOT of Ultima in my time), so I took the code and expanded it. A friend who was into role playing games wrote a basic story for it. Another friend supplied some music for the title screen.

I re-wrote the main display routine in 6502 assembly language for speed, and added maps, extra characters to talk to, weapons and fighting. “Quest I: The Wrath of Mægenmund” (egads, it sounds like something out of Spinal Tap) wasn’t anything special, and was never finished, but it was pretty cool.

Quest I - Ultima clone for the BBC Micro

It ran in the Beeb’s graphics mode 4, so it was monochrome, 320×256 pixels, I think. It used a lot of loading in and out from the disk, with a main (outdoor) map, and lots of separate maps for dungeons, towns and villages. There was no sound to speak of, but there was a lot to explore. You could buy drinks from bartenders (to gain strength), talk to the villagers, buy weapons and supplies, then go out and fight monsters to get more treasure. The money was measured in pounds, shillings and pence, and the language and fonts of the characters and the interface was a wacky mix of olde English, gothic script and runes.

Quest I - Ultima clone for the BBC Micro

I kept working on it for a couple of years after high school (the Beeb saw me through part of university, until an IBM PC arrived in our house), but it fizzled out in 1990, when other interests overtook it.

Set program access and defaults

Windows 2000/XP’s “Set program access and defaults” appears to treat the defaults as identical for all users, and doesn’t allow non-Admin users to change it. So while it’s happy that I use Outlook 2003 for my email, I can’t convince it that when my kids logon to the same machine, they’ll use the simpler Outlook Express.

RSS icons

RSS (and Atom, etc) feeds haven’t hit the mainstream non-geek community yet, but they seem destined to be the Next Big Thing, with it becoming easier to use in the current version of Firefox and Safari, and the next version of IE.

The Microsoft dudes are pondering how to represent feeds. And of course, inevitably whatever they come up with will eventually become the defacto standard walloping via sheer numbers of users, other established icons such as the Firefox Live Bookmark icon, and the XML and RSS buttons. It would seem that the only thing they all have in common is the orange.

Dave Winer says just use the XML icon. Not that the average person in the street knows what XML (or RSS) is, or what it means, or what it can do for them. (Then again, they may not know what HTTP or HTML are, or what they mean, but they do have an inkling it’s got something to do with web pages.)

XML and RSS markings are established on web sites, but they’re not ideal for new users, for whom an icon might work better. I’m torn between them. But I like the idea of adapting existing ideas, so I’ve come up with a few concepts, using a wider version of the Firefox Live Bookmark icon:

XML — XML

XML — RSS

XML — Hey hey, both XML and RSS. But would it be too distracting, being animated like that?

Is Feed more appropriate? But what about non-English users? Does the graphic actually work? Do people recognise it?

hmmm. More thought required. And as Ed Bott points out, what happens when someone goes and clicks on one of these buttons at the moment is far from ideal. DocType? WTF?

Floppy disks

In case you’d forgotten what 5¼ inch diskettes look like, here’s a reminder.

5.25 inch diskettes

My kids noted: “So they really were floppy!”

I wonder what ever happened to the Xidex company? There seems to be little information on them on the web, but a few ebay sellers are selling unused disks. Verbatim are still around.

Why were the disks out? Today I set up my old BBC micro to see if it still worked, and to ponder putting it on ebay. It did work, but some of the disks reported errors. On closer inspection, some appeared to have mould or some other kind of growth on the magnetic part.

Possibly if I really had to retrieve the data, I could find someone to recover it, but there’s nothing important on them. It does serve as a reminder that every so often you should refresh your vital data from whatever media it’s stored on, onto something new.

Mod chips legal

That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, it’s over: the High Court has ruled that mod chips for video game consoles are legal. All six judges of the High Court held that widely used mod-chips are legal and that playing a game on a consumer’s machine does not constitute an illegal copy.

This effectively clarifies that using mods to get around regional coding is legal — something important to consumers of video games and with clear ramifications for DVDs.

Pirated games, of course, are illegal. But mod chips are a legitimate technology.

Full judgement

Fairfax tries podcasting… almost

Fairfax/The Age has discovered podcasts, with a business and an IT cast. With RSS and everything But ohhhh… WTF is this? It only plays in a player on their web page. The RSS they’ve setup will apparently work with iTunes or iPodder, but you can’t simply save an MP3 off the site.

HINT: A podcast needs to be easily downloadable, not tied to a web page with dodgy streaming, or to podcasting software I don’t have. I should be able to Right Click/Save link as. Subscribing via RSS is all very well, but how do I know if I want to get that involved?

Oh, and Garry Barker’s an interesting writer, but he’s going to have to cast more than a 30 second intro to what his podcast will eventually be about to get me listening regularly. (Or was that just the streaming cutting out after 30 seconds? You see the problem here?!)

Office’s garbled HTML

Brian Jones on why Microsoft Office 2000 (and later) produces such godawful HTML:

Our scenario was that people would start saving “docs” as HTML on their intranet sites and browse them with the browser. We viewed the browser as “electronic paper” that we had to “print” to (i.e. perfect fidelity). We had already got a lot of feedback from our Word97 Internet Assistant add-in that any loss of fidelity when saving as a web page was unacceptable and a “bug”. As it turned out, this usage scenario did not become as common as we thought it would and a zillion conspiracy theories formed about why we “really” did it. Many people assumed that a better approach would have been to save as “clean” HTML even if the result did not look exactly like what the user saw on the screen. We felt that the core office applications (other than FrontPage) were not really meant to be web page authoring tools, so we focused on converting docs to exact replicas in HTML. We didn’t want people losing any functionality when saving to HTML so we had to figure out a way to store everything that could have existed in a binary document as HTML. We thought we were clever creating a bunch of “mso-” css properties that allowed us to roundtrip everything. HTML didn’t take off in the same way we had expected, and today, the main use for Office HTML is for interoperability on the clipboard, though of course the biggest use is within e-mail (WordMail).

None of this explains why Office 2003’s “Filtered HTML” is so riddled with proprietary tags, though. Admittedly, a filtered HTML file is smaller than a roundtrip HTML file out of Word, but it’s still hugely bigger than the type of HTML you’d write from scratch (or in a web page editor such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage), and the source code is unreadable.

To my mind, Filtered HTML should be just that: HTML, filtered in such a way that the basic structure of the document is preserved, but none of the junk that Word (or whatever) stores along with it. Leave that for the roundtrip HTML — though I can’t see the appeal in that either, since if you want to store documents in a viewable form on the great InterWeb, PDF is the way to go. Or just store it in the native Office format for internal use, when you know every user will have the application or a viewer.

Word warning(By the way, when I was trying out the roundtrip HTML the other day, while reloading, Word presented me with a strange warning that it was going to query from some nonsense “Z” table to put data in the document. Bizarro. The test document did quote some SQL, but this would seem to suggest the roundtrip HTML isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.)

Anyway, Brian’s full article is about the progression of the Office formats from binary in the 90s into the XML to be used in the next version. Well worth a read if you want some background on the history, and where they’re going now.

Byebye to an Adobe cash cow

PDFMicrosoft has announced the next version of Office will support PDF creation natively.

Obviously, Adobe has faced competition before from various PDF creation applications, including the DIY method using… what was it, some kind of printer driver to get Postscript, then ps2pdf to get it into PDF? And it’s not as if Adobe has been resting, not enhancing Acrobat with extra functionality.

But this is different: the prime reason people buy Acrobat is to create PDFs from Office documents. And so far the cheapie clone Acrobat products/methods haven’t won much market share, because people trust the name brand PDF creator. But this is Microsoft, and if there’s one thing Microsoft does well, it’s blowing away other companies’ sales.

The Adobe guys must have seen this coming when they opened up the format. Maybe that was a factor in diversifying by buying Macromedia. It’ll be interesting to see their response.