Oh so many things. The life of a renaissance man is never uneventful.

Item One

First off, I posted a very quick "how to fix your car's mats in 15 minutes for six bucks" tutorial here. MAKE magazine has a "mend it march" promotion, and I thought I'd contribute.

Item Two

Next, I got two more orange books which means I'll have another giveaway. I'll likely give away one right away and keep the extra slack copy in the hopes that I'll eventually have a full set of four to give away. Given that I didn't contribute anything to the black book content or editorial-wise, I'm not holding out hope to receive more copies of that one. We'll see.

Item Three

Next, the green book now has a picture on Amazon. I hope it'll be arriving next week. Fingers crossed.

(note to Drew, fix the picture on the book-page in gamedev)

Item Four

My dramatic reading from the blue book is now available at www.industrybroadcast.com. Be glued to the end of your seat as I regale you with tales of high seas adventure!

Item Five

I've officially released The Code Zone Retro Pack (i.e. all of my old 90's shelfware games that I could still find and for which I recently re-re-retained licenses). While the story of those games are an adventure unto themselves, as you'd expect from any software package that managed to stay in stores for TEN YEARS, getting back to re-compile on my new machine was no picnic. I basically had the following choices. . .

1. Install VC++ 6 (which was the last compiler used to make 'em), recompile the original sources, change up the about-box and credits and such to remove mention of the old publishers, and build a new installer.

2. Modify the StarView app framework (upon which the games are built), which itself hasn't changed in ten years, to work on a newer Visual Studio.

3. Dump the StarView app framework in favor of the OpenOffice Framework (which StarView became after Sun bought 'em out), modify the games to work with it, and recompile.

Seeing the easiest route as number one, as it'd just require changes to batch file names, I set about to installing VC++ 6 on Vista. Upon doing so, Vista popped up a box saying that my compiler was about ten years outta date, it's flagged as an app that doesn't play well with anything after Windows 2000, and that ship just ain't gonna sail.

Glee.

Being sly and wiley, I popped up Virtual PC and built myself a little Virtual Windows 98. VC++ 6 had no problem with it. A little wrestling with batch files and dependencies and all that other stuff that I haven't done in years, and I had a working build-chain again.

Then I dragged the newly-compiled games over to Vista, built a cute little NSIS installer for 'em, and they live again!

Check 'em out here to see 'em in all of their 256-color MIDI-soundtracked glory again!

Item Six

Think Tank is basically done. It's currently shopping for sponsorships, but if I don't get any bites it'll be scattered to the four winds. As a reward for actually reading this far, I'll let you try it out. It's here.

Note that this version is currently site-locked to thecodezone.com, so don't just grab the swf file and slap it up on your own favorite game portal. Once I'm confident that it's in as good a working order as it's gonna get, I'll make a distributable version.

Please please post feedback for the game. It's gonna go viral and once things go viral there's no way to make changes.



Dang, I had a lot going on this week. I need a rest.