Welcome on NCoT Tech

I bought a soldering iron for £20 from Amazon.

I build a Z80 based computer from scratch, and it works!

Today’s lesson in curing headaches by banging your head on the wall until they stop involves joysticks and mice.

Drawing sprites on the Spectrum Next, using C.

What better way to wait out the apocalypse than trying to learn a new system.

How to read and write JSON files using Python so that they can be used in your Python programs.

A quick set of notes on how to parse command line arguments properly in Python.

How to write GameBoy Advance (GBA) homebrew using modern tools and systems in 2020.

A short comparison between low level Z80 assembler and high level C

The beating heart of any CPU is the fetch-decode-execute cycle.

Sometimes you have to type out almost identical lines of code, and it’s either time consuming or error prone.

How to efficiently store and execute many small functions, without using a single if statement or switch construct.

To begin, this isn’t technically an emulator, the system I’m trying to model isn’t real.

Day 1 of the #GitHubGameOff jam, where I create a basic platform controller and level builder.

As a challenge I thought I’d try to implement the Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm, and have a play with it.

This week I took part in the One Lone Coder 2019 game jam.

Between the 9th and 16th August 2019 I took part in the Godot Wild Jam #12.

It’s been a long time since I entered a game jam, the last ones being the One Game a Month jams back in 2014.

Last time I explained in detail how the whole system worked.

Game controllers on computers are somewhat irritating to manage compared to a console.

Straight forward instructions on how to rearrange algebraic equations, all wrapped up in a nice free PDF to download.

This is going to be the first part in a continuing series where I try to explain how and why I’m creating my own game engine using C++ and the SDL library.

This post is sponsored by hand coded HTML and CSS.

Back in the mists of history, sometime around the 90s it was quite common for games and demos to display text on the screen.

Making a microcontroller produce graphics is very similar to making an old 8 or 16 bit computer draw images.

The ODroid GO is a handheld console that sells itself as a device that will run emulators of all your favourite 8bit systems.

A week that turns into two, after a trip to hospital following a fire drill.