invaders VS paddle-game

I hold VileR's work on int10h.org in high esteem, given its exceptional quality. As someone whose initial exposure to computers was through IBM PCs, I find VileR's website to be a treasure trove of IBM PC fonts, BIOS fonts, and related resources.

Inspired by IBM PC games from the 1990s, I aspired to create my own invaders-like game. However hindered by limited access to computers and limited computer programming knowledge, the most I could manage to make were a few text-based adventure games. Although 25 years too late, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I revisited this dream and spent a weekend writing my own Invaders game[1] using HTML5 Canvas.

Initially, I used CanvasRenderingContext2D: fillText() to display text (current score, info screen, etc.). However, dissatisfied with the text rendering quality, I began looking for IBM PC OEM fonts online and came across the Oldschool PC Fonts[2] on int10h.org. I downloaded the font packs from the website, used a Python script to convert them to bitmaps[3] (arrays of integers), and then used the bitmaps to draw text on the canvas, one cell at a time, to get pixel-perfect results!

I eventually switched to a different font pack called Modern DOS[4] developed by Jayvee Enaguas. Nevertheless given how extensive VileR's website is and how convenient the font preview tools[5] on the website are, int10h.org remains as my go-to website whenever I am doing any type of retrocomputing work for fun.

[1] https://susam.net/invaders.html

[2] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/

[3] https://github.com/susam/pcface

[4] https://www.dafont.com/modern-dos.font

[5] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

The entire game is written as a single HTML page, so using the "View Page Source" feature (if available) of your web browser shows the entire source code of this game. The auto-play algorithm is present in the function named autoMove(). It is about 100 lines of code that decides the next move of the player.

Direct link to the autoMove() source code: https://github.com/susam/invaders/blob/0.9.0/invaders.html#L...

I wrote an invaders-style game last year: https://susam.net/invaders.html

It was, in fact, a childhood dream of mine to write a game like this. However, the little GW-BASIC programming I knew and the very limited access to computers I had then was insufficient to write anything more sophisticated than simple text-based input/output programs. Although 25 years too late, writing this little game fulfilled that childhood dream of mine!

An update regarding this thread:

I received a pull request that adds pixelated rendering to the game canvas: https://github.com/susam/invaders/pull/4

I have merged it now. Thank you, everyone, for the discussion regarding retro-style rendering on this thread.

Web Serial API would also mean one could create an Atari-style paddle controller to go with this game, kind of like this project: https://github.com/drohen/paddle-game

Once you get a bit of experience, have a go at building this: https://github.com/drohen/paddle-game it is something I put together in my spare time in a week, you might have fun replicating it.

I have a bunch of notes and the code is available on github. Feel free to ask any questions!

The repo is on github, and I've added a bunch of notes on how it all works. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

I recently completed a one week personal challenge to build something interesting using just a potentiometer and button. I am learning more about the web serial api, and decided to connect these components to a pico, read the values and send it to a web app. I wanted to build something fun and music, so I created this elektroplankton-inspired game at the same time. The code is available, open source, along with the live app. I will update the documentation shortly. The code for the pico is also available, and can be adapted to an arduino or whatever. Considering how easy and fun this was, I'm hopeful that the web serial api is here to stay.

I think that this project could just as easily work with an arduino uno, and of course, the code could easily be adapted. I only have a few final things I need to do in the app before I feel like I can say this is completed and move on to writing a full reflection and possibly a guide on how I did this. The code for the app and the pico is available on github, I will update all the readme and code comments to make it easier to follow along. I'll post a video as well demonstrating it all working.

I created challenge for the Raspberry Pico subreddit to try and build something out of a potentiometer and button. And my idea is summarised in the title of this post. This is the code but as of this post it isn't presented super well, just wanted to finish the proof of concept before creating more structure. I'm using a bunch of nice little utility libraries, and ToneJS. The plan is to connect the app to my custom controller using the Web Serial API.