Sunday 4 April 2021

Back From the Dead, Take 2!

After almost 9 years away TBA software has returned to life!    This time as a hobby with no grand plans (!) but we are back and hope to contribute something to the RISC OS community.

Yesterday I joined up with Martin to record a history of TBA Software for the ABug community, which will be published on their site in the near future.   It was great fun trying to recall all of the crazy times starting in the early 1990s and thank you to everyone there for making us welcome.

In the background we have been looking at getting the TBA back catalogue published in 26bit form, including one or two previously unreleased/partially-finished titles.    In addition I have been working on getting the TAG games engine, that underpins many of our past titles, to run in 32bit on a RPi 4B.   This is coming along, with Cobalt Seed at the time of writing making it through all the title sequences and into the game, but more pesky status register bugs (and other dodgy code) remain.

On the ABug talk we also fielded questions about use of TAG and the associated game editor Holograph for building new games.   There was a version released back in the mid 1990s as part of our attempt to create a TBA developer community which led to the 3rd party development of Mirror Image.   We will need to go through the documentation in particular to see just how bad it was (!) and decide what needs doing to tidy things up.

Hopefully we will be able to find a new home across more modern social media platforms as this Blogger based site is more than a bit tired.

Happy Easter from Bristol, Pickering, and Singapore!