Sich über fehlendes oder falsches Keming, pardon!, Kerning aufzuregen war gestern! Der neue Shit: Falsch platzierte Versal-Eszetts!

Zumindest vermute ich, dass das jetzt ein Trend ist, weil mir zufällig innerhalb von zwei Tagen gleich zwei Fälle ins Auge gesprungen sind. Einmal auf Twitter:

Und einmal bei der Tagesschau, im launigen Werbebeitrag zum Thema Google-Suchtrends:

Tagesschau vom 10.12.2024

Dann wieder: Ich habe zufällig gerade von merkwürdigen Ligaturen im Custom Font von Twitter gelesen – hat das vielleicht mit der falschen, öhm, Versalierung des Scheiß-ẞ zu tun?

Und im Fall „Fußball“ vs. „Fuẞball“ bei der Tagesschau sieht es nicht hundertprozentig nach einem Versal-Eszett aus, eher wie eine Ersetzung aus einer komplett anderen Schriftart. Ob man in der Tagesschau-Grafik jetzt auch auf Retro-Fonts ohne Sonderzeichen setzt?

Update: Bluesky has entered the chat.

Oder ein komisches ß in der Schrift? Nein, definitiv ein Versal-Eszett.

My little Worms DC Asset Util is more or less complete now. It can import, edit and export custom levels, mountains, landscapes and teams, complete with previews.

Ain’t no mountain synthwave enough

A little knowledge on low-level Amiga tech like blitting, bitmap formats and word alignment sure helped with decoding the last remaining mystery bytes: Oh, these two bytes always contain the bitmap height shifted 6 bits to the left – must be a BLTSIZE expression!

Once the last lingering bugs are squashed, I’ll publish the source somewhere. (It’s already in the page source for now, as an HTML/JavaScript one-filer.) I’ve also put together a documentation page for the various file formats.

Unfortunately this means I now have to continue with the original goal and produce a nice level map, in the hopes that it will be nice enough and in time for inclusion in the upcoming Worms DC 1.5 release end of January. :)

Nice, the new Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge (VC³) is on! This time the challenge isn’t made of festive stars (*) alone, arranged in christmassy patterns, no, there are six different characters to incorporate! \O/+-! for the win!

“Wait, what is this?” In short: A reference image in text form is given, and everyone tries to create a program that ouputs that exact image. Any platform, any language – small, weird, exotic, or bombastic. I might have a go at an Amiga assembly entry again, who knows…

If you’re into mind-boggling size optimization and obscure programming environments, why not join the fun? \O/

• Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge 2024
  All the rules (and prizes!)
• Announcement video
  With a little retrospective on earlier competitions.

Back in October, the news about a 30th anniversary edition of Worms: The Director’s Cut made the rounds, to be released at Gerp 2025. Original developer Andy Davidson will put together a new release on the original platform: Worms DC 1.5 for the Amiga!

(By the way: If you haven’t already, now is a good time to watch the fascinating documentary about the making of Worms a.k.a. Total Wormage.)

Andy Davidson on Twitter

Look at that BlitzBasic code, erm, comments… :)

Being a huge fan of Worms myself, I had to get in on that!

Naturally, the first step to design a custom level for the game is to reverse-engineer the internal file formats and build a custom tool based on the existing level editor, WormPrefs. :)

WormPrefs

Apart from the fun of meddling with obscure binary formats, this was a welcome opportunity to freshen up my JavaScript and HTML foo: Juggling with binary data and UInt8Arrays, file-drop inputs, canvas drawing, classes (gasp!), color and range inputs, etc. And it brought some concrete advantages for other custom level designers, too (I hope):

• Live previews of everything
• Live palette manipulation
• Ability to quickly inspect existing custom level, mountains and landscape files

So here it is, my little Worms DC assets utility. No Node.js, no frameworks, just plain JavaScript (and Simple.css):

Worms DC Assets util

The tool is still work in progress. I need to tackle DIY landscapes at one point, and there are always weird file format issues popping up.

To join the fun, have a look at the dedicated Worms DCHQ Discord server. Keep on wormin’!

Boot hand? Windows? Well, you may call it “boot screen”, but the Amiga’s Kickstart hand was first, so it’s a lame rip-off of the concept to me. :)

Technically, it’s a totally different thing of course. Arguably “boot screen” isn’t even correct, as the actual boot screen would be a butt-ugly text screen, so it’s more of a “wait while loading” screen…

Joking and nitpicking aside – if you have an hour to spare and love replacing boot images as much as I do, check out this lovely video:

• How do you replace the boot screen in every (old) version of Windows?
  YouTube video by BerylRose

It starts off easy, with a plain bitmap stuffed into WIN.COM for Windows 1.0, and gets increasingly tricky when replacing Windows 95’s boot screen without going the easy route of using LOGO.SYS, or hacking ntoskrnl.exe for later Windows editions.

A great watch! And there’s also a detailled write-up.