articles.erkan.se

Smart bomb

The smart bomb is used in most shoot’em’up games as a last resort that when used gives your ship some seconds of invulnerability and clears the screen of every enemy except end level bosses or medium sized enemies. Sometime the smart bomb only kills enemies on a part of the screen.

Save the world syndrome

A lot of shoot’em’up games have a simple story where a world (sometimes earth) is invaded by an alien race. You are the last hope for humanity and need to beat the aliens by flying around in a cool looking ship with impressive weaponry that does not overheat even though you shoot with the guns constantly.

Cool “shoot’em’up” ship

Even though the player most often controls a tiny ship is often designed to look very cool and pack lots of heat. It is almost essential to a shoot’em’up game to have an aggressive looking ship with massive weapons that should be upgradable.

Read the rest of this entry »

From 10 to 1 where 10 is the least amount and 1 is the highest sign of newbie.

10. You fondly remember the Atari 2600 but where born in 1989

9. You think the Commodore CD32 is a rare game console with highly unique games

Read the rest of this entry »

Sprites

A bitmap picture of an object in a 2D game is a sprite. In a platform game the main character is the sprite, in a shoot’em’up game the ship is a sprite. Sprites are small but are sometimes combined to give the illusion of a big character (think of old school end level bosses).

Transparency

Transparency can be seen in some 2D games and is an effect where a layer is put over the top of the graphics objects. This transparent layer shows only some objects that can be raindrops or snow, the rest is transparent. This effect can then give the impression of snow or rain over a landscape.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pixel graphics are an old school technique that where used in video games before game technology became heavily 3D based.

The difference between pixel graphics and modern Photoshop processed graphics are easy to see. Shades and pixels in Photoshop processed graphics are smooth and form a synthetic shape. It is the same phenomenon seen in movies that uses a lot of computer generated graphic effects, things look to clean and to perfect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Running and setting up your own personal server is not difficult to do. But one should keep in mind that there are other aspects involved when setting up a computer intended to run all day, all year round.

A noisy computer can have a serious impact on the peaceful environment your home provides, so the server needs to be quiet. Having your server running every day of the year can have a negative impact on your electricity bill, so the server needs to be energy efficient.

Read the rest of this entry »

My current PC

It is possible to buy a pre made system today that is as good and as cheap as any home assembled PC. But there are always factors that can not be edited when dealing with completed systems. My current PC is in a way my view of the perfect home computer that suits all my needs. From working with web design to surfing the web as I run an internet conference with five partners it fits my needs.

Read the rest of this entry »

I had the opportunity to grow up with computers. During the eighties home computers were something that was not common, today almost everyone in Sweden has a computer and a connection to the net. I take pride in being one of the few who came from the 8-bit computers to the 16-bit wonder machines and then to the PC where we could turn our knowledge we learned from our hobby into something that could give us a job.

This is a chronological list from my first computer to my present.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sprites are small moving graphics that are used in 2D games. Some sprites have reached cult status and are often used as avatars on Internet forums. A sprite can also be used in a design of a webpage, and in many other places.

There are tools that can go through a game file and look for the segment in the file where the sprite data is stored and then save a graphics file containing a dump of the sprites.

Read the rest of this entry »

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII is the text you see on a webpage or in your MS-DOS prompt.

When bandwidth was low ASCII was used to form crude images or headers. Some people worked extra hard in trying to make ASCII images as nice as possible and they became ASCII artists. I am going to show how to write a nice text in ASCII, these techniques can be used to make a nice logon screen on a UNIX system or as a cool piece of graphics on a web template if converted to GIF or PNG.

Read the rest of this entry »

You seem to think all hi end stuff is the latest to brag about when you realize even old stuff had the same dimension and properties as new hardware.

This is a 486 in a very small package. I think a 486 is a great computer. Maybe not so in these days of 1 TB harddrives and 2+ GHz quad-core CPU speeds but back in the day you could do almost anything with a 486 and 8 to 32 MB ram. Linux was no problem to run, it was more important to have lots of memory because otherwise virtual memory would trash your harddrive whenever you ran X. Windows 3.11 ran great on a 486, sadly not Windows 95 which was a huge disappointment on anything else than a Pentium 1 for me at least.

So I should perhaps w Read the rest of this entry »