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Category: Retro

Retro-style cassette cover artwork for a Knight’s Tour program on the Amstrad CPC, showing a numbered chessboard, a knight piece, and a glowing path representing the solution across all 64 squares.

Knights Tour – My First Entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Competition

A look at my first entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Liner Competition for the Amstrad CPC: a Knight’s Tour solver written in just 8 lines of Locomotive BASIC. Using Warnsdorff’s heuristic, the program solves a centuries-old chess puzzle in real time while drawing the board, rendering a knight graphic, and displaying each move on screen.

Retro cassette cover artwork for “Pavement Panic” on the Amstrad CPC, showing a pixel character running along a road while surrounded by colourful ghost enemies, styled like a vintage 1980s arcade game.

Pavement Panic – My Second Entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Competition

My second entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Liner Competition is Pavement Panic, a fast-paced ghost-dodging survival game for the Amstrad CPC written in just 10 lines of BASIC. Inspired by simple road-crossing games, it starts gently, then quickly turns chaotic as the ghosts speed up and survival time becomes your score.

Retro cassette cover artwork for “Volt Maze” on the Amstrad CPC, featuring a glowing orange electrified maze, a small green player character, and a red robotic hunter, styled like a classic 1980s home computer game.

Voltmaze – My Third Entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Competition

Voltmaze is my third entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Liner Competition… a procedurally generated maze game for the Amstrad CPC written in just 10 lines of BASIC. Inspired by classic 8-bit design and powered by a stack-driven depth-first search algorithm, it’s a small game with surprisingly sharp teeth… electrified walls, flickering hazards, roaming hunters, and a new maze every level.

A 3D illusion art piece showing two layered pixel-style alien figures, one white and one red, seemingly floating above a grid of rounded blue squares on a black base. The print is laid on a green cutting mat.

PNG2ObjV3 Released, Convert PNGs to 3D Printable OBJ or SVG Files

After years of development, I've released PNG2ObjV3 — a free, open-source tool to convert PNG images into 3D-printable OBJ files or scalable SVGs. It's perfect for retro projects, pixel art, optical illusions, and more. Includes full manual and sample images. Cross-platform, Python-powered.

GB Operator – Preserve Your GameBoy Cartridges

It's 2022, you've a bunch of GameBoy Cartridges gathering dust and you want to transfer them to your favourite emulator and play, or you're a developer wanting to try their software on real hardware. Then the GB Operator is a device you need in your hardware arsenal. We take a look, see what you think.

GreaseWeazle and XCode 12

Those of us who are using Keir Frasers amazing GreaseWeazle on macOS, may run into some issues from today 17th September 2020, if your macOS has updated to XCode 12. This article shows my solution to resolving the issue.

Amstrad CPC Magnum Light Gun

Recently I was asked to provide some information on the Amstrad Magnum Light Gun, and so I fired up the old hardware, loaded up my Assembler and Monitoring Tools and set about reverse engineering this legacy and rare piece of kit.