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.

Bending the latest #WeeklyTeletextArt prompt “Pirates” a bit to do a little Teletext conversion of Unit A’s famous cracktro from 1988:

…because, you know, software pirates are pirates, too. :)

Source code as editor link, reference.

A propos reference: On Twitter @elkmoose pointed me to the reference’s reference, the box art of Ultima V. Nice, I didn’t know that!

Box art scan by Hall of Light

PS: As usual, pixel OCD set in hours after posting and I had to do some adjustments that look 25% better and are 100% invisible to the casual observer… (plus a scrolltext adjustment)

Boring web-dev stuff, yay!

After a little pause of twenty years, I decided to freshen up my favicon foo. All those previews, browser tab headings and search results I’m seeing are giving me the impression that a 16×16-pixel bitmap in an obscure Microsoft file format doesn’t cut it anymore…

What is this, a favicon for ants?

At least on my ancient low-dpi desktop, Google Chrome still uses the 16×16 version in its native resolution, and because low-res is cool, this size shall be the starting point.

After handpixelling three versions for the smaller sizes (16×16, 32×32, 64×64) it turned out that I cannot use the 32 px one. For the browser tab icon, Google Chrome will always load the 32×32 version and squish it down to 16×16 pixels if both versions are referenced.

Well, that was fun. Let’s never touch favicons again until 2044.

Hmm, where does this quote come from? I could swear it was a punchline somewhere; was it Arrested Development or the IT Crowd? Simpsons, maybe?

Anyhoo, it’s finally here: I got my copy of Demoscene – the Amiga renaissance, the latest installment of Éditions64’s glamorous demoscene coffee table books.

Renaissance as in “Amiga demo renaissance”

And we’re in it, with a little feature of Blood Sugar Rises!

It’s a bit weird to be featured with a tongue-in-cheek production, but I’ll take it! In the end, it did win the Revision Amiga demo compo…

Also, the editors understood the assignment (as today’s younglings would put it) and placed it right after Batman Rises, the masterpiece of a demo that was the blueprint for this production. Heh, heh! :)