As I currently can’t be bothered to get my own site up and running (I will eventually, and it’ll have a fancy Flash interface and everything!) this is where I’ll be putting news and stuff. Seeing as this is a first post, it’s probably a good idea to introduce myself.
My name is Nick, a.k.a nickspoon on almost everything. No, my last name isn’t Spoon, but close. I’m 13 years old, which apparently comes as a surprise to many, especially those in the gp32x.com forums, where I spend way too much time. When I’m not in front of my computer reading the gp32x forums, I’m in front of my computer doing something different. I reckon 40% of my life is spent asleep, and 50% in front of a computer. But hey, what else am I meant to do? Socialise? Yeah right.
I do enjoy coding. For the fun of it. Being 13, I can’t be employed as a coder, because the “government” wants me to go to “school”. I’ve learnt QuickBasic, BlitzBasic, Visual Basic, Javascript and C/C++ (sort of, I can’t get my head around all this low-level stuff, malloc and the like). At one point, I decided to try and write something for the GBA, but gave up soon after, as it was overly complicated. Still wanting to get something on a handheld, I bought a GP2X.
Brilliant little gadget. Absolutely superb for emulators and homebrew games, and I much prefer having an unlimited amount of free games than just buying a few commercial ones. OK, it has its flaws (rubbish joystick, interlacing) but I still think it’s great. If you haven’t got one, why not?
Great thing about the GP2X is, it supports SDL. Thus, I can write games and stuff for it. First thing I did for it was an upgrade to a Pong game someone had made, so you could play two-player on one console. Fun for the whole family, eh? Then, I did an EdgeWrite-based program, which didn’t work. After that, I made a little puzzler called MagiJig, which was honestly not very good. What got me slightly more attention was my port of gladiator. Fun game, truly. After that, I ported the Flirt library, and called the player Flashplay. This got a lot of interest, until someone noticed that everything they tried didn’t work, and the library I used had no sound support, and had ceased development. Oops.
I’m now working on something for the GP2X-2006 coding competition, and though it’s fairly obvious I won’t win, or come 2nd or 3rd, I’m going to do it anyway. I’m not allowed to say what it is, though.
So that’s it for an extremely long Hello Blog post.
