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I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

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Re: I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

#71
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mov ax, 13h int 10h The two most important lines of asm for any teen trying to emulate their demoscene heroes.

Wow, you triggered a real flood of memories for me. I remember being bored in in an unrelated training course and using debug.com to write 320x240 scrollers with rep movsb. Being a kid I had no internet access at the time so a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and Borland's Turbo C++ documentation was pretty much all the documentation I had. Then later discovering djgpp and protected mode, what a time to be alive!…

I guess it depends on their competency, but something like https://scratch.mit.edu/ is really good for really young kids.

Alternatively if your kids are a bit further along then why not try re-create your childhood experience?

In my case I'd spin up a virtual box with DOS 6 installed and a copy of QBasic, because hacking away at the GORILLA.BAS source code to try make my bananas more explosive was how it all started for me at a very young age.

Point being - QBasic was pretty easy to pick up with little external support.

Hope that helps!

That being said, what has your experience with Python been like? What else have you tried?

Re: I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

#72
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having dealt with font legalities (IANAL) while writing a bare-metal printer driver: rendered characters are not copyrightable. Method of rendering may be, but not final output.

So does a bitmap specifying which pixels to light up count as a rendered character or a method of rendering?

Maybe, but that's definitely not copyrighted by the font maker.

Re: I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

#73
post #52
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mov ax, 13h int 10h The two most important lines of asm for any teen trying to emulate their demoscene heroes.

And don't forget Mode X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X

Warmly remembered & overused for all sorts of reasons!

https://twitter.com/thibaut_barrere/status/13297969809781596...

Re: I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you triggered a real flood of memories for me. I remember being bored in in an unrelated training course and using debug.com to write 320x240 scrollers with rep movsb. Being a kid I had no internet access at the time so a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and Borland's Turbo C++ documentation was pretty much all the documentation I had. Then later discovering djgpp and protected mode, what a time to be alive!…

I guess it depends on their competency, but something like https://scratch.mit.edu/ is really good for really young kids. Alternatively if your kids are a bit further along then why not try re-create your childhood experience? In my case I'd spin up a virtual box with DOS 6 installed and a copy of QBasic, because hacking away at the GORILLA.BAS source code to try make my bananas more explosive was how it all started…

One problem I've found as the expectations of what a computer game or program 'should' look like has exploded. Making a circle move across the screen doesn't hold the same fascination with kids today as it used to. GORILLA.BAS was pretty close to a game that used to cost real money when it first game out.

Back in my day I could look at the very simple game I wrote in a a few hundred lines of Basic and see a path from there to commercial games that came in a box. Today my daughter looks at the simple thing we did in Scratch, then looks at Fornite, and sees no connection between the two.

Re: I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

#75
Nice! Are these shaders or on CPU or manually designed? What I'm building is a combination of webfonts from my old font website I made 11 years ago https://fontsforweb.com and Shadertoy. Basically shaders for fonts. http://fonted.io

Current implementation might look very basic(vertex shader is just a mask for Shadertoy-stolen pixel shaders) but I have work in progress for font-specific vertex shaders that will allow for manipulating font shape curves.

Re: I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

#76
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mov ax, 13h int 10h The two most important lines of asm for any teen trying to emulate their demoscene heroes.

Wow, you triggered a real flood of memories for me. I remember being bored in in an unrelated training course and using debug.com to write 320x240 scrollers with rep movsb. Being a kid I had no internet access at the time so a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and Borland's Turbo C++ documentation was pretty much all the documentation I had. Then later discovering djgpp and protected mode, what a time to be alive!…

I showed a bit of JS and while Scratch did get a bit of the way in explaining concepts, it's simply too inefficient to get anything "serious" done.

What stuck for my older kid (12 now but started with it at 11 or earlier) was Roblox (with it's Studio), he was already playing the game a lot and making levels was fun and to get them beyond the basics one needs to script and even if 3d maths really were above his head (I've explained 2d/3d vectors and angles) the connection to something "real" has really helped him push through most obstacles. He writes horrible code by copying kinda bad tutorials on Youtube but getting things done is fun enough that he just keeps going and lately helping him debug issues I've noticed that he's started to develop the intuition about reasoning about states and the effects code has on it in an async picture.

TL;DR Find the areas your kid might have passion in and if there's a way to mod/play with it with code the sheer fun will help them push through the drudge.

Re: I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

#77
post #62
post #59

Cool that people still keep such stuff! I was part of the demoscene way back in the late 80s-early 90s, and I just clicked randomly on some of these fonts and one of them looked familiar. However I couldn’t tell if it was one that my friend (in our demo group that I’ve long since lost touch with) had made or if I saw it in someone else’s demo... this was not a time where we concerned ourselves with archiving our work…

I'm not sure when exactly scene.org was started, and I experienced the demoscene in the late 90s / early 00s, so a different time than you, but I felt there was quite some effort at archiving. Most demoscene artifacts worth archiving are of course the demos itself, and most of them are published at parties. And pretty much every party of any relevance, including many small ones, pushed their releases on ftp.scene.org…

http://scene.org kinda grew out later in the 90s but I think they took in all the http://hornet.org archives that were the go-to ones before scene.org kinda took over to keep them preserved.

While scene.org has been a solid destination for the past 20 years for more "modern" platforms there has also been hard work in trying to preserve the C64 scene information that in many parts predated scene.org , this can be found on http://csdb.dk

Re: I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

#78
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mov ax, 13h int 10h The two most important lines of asm for any teen trying to emulate their demoscene heroes.

Wow, you triggered a real flood of memories for me. I remember being bored in in an unrelated training course and using debug.com to write 320x240 scrollers with rep movsb. Being a kid I had no internet access at the time so a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and Borland's Turbo C++ documentation was pretty much all the documentation I had. Then later discovering djgpp and protected mode, what a time to be alive!…

GameMaker Studio is excellent for this. It's how I started way back when. It has a built in Sprite editor, and allows you to create object with physics and interactions using a drag-and-drop interface. And there's a ECMAScript based language you can drop down to when they want to go deeper.

Re: I converted my demoscene font collection to PNG and put it on GitHub

#79

Nice! Are these shaders or on CPU or manually designed? What I'm building is a combination of webfonts from my old font website I made 11 years ago https://fontsforweb.com and Shadertoy. Basically shaders for fonts. http://fonted.io Current implementation might look very basic(vertex shader is just a mask for Shadertoy-stolen pixel shaders) but I have work in progress for font-specific vertex shaders that will allow…

> Are these shaders or on CPU or manually designed?

Most likely hand drawn by the individual pixel. Even "computable" effects like antialiasing or dithering are mostly done by hand.

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