I’ve been thinking about future plans of late. I’ve been looking for a little more in the way of intellectual stimulation in recent times and have finally decided that after two decades of wanting to learn assembly language that there is no time like the present. I’ve started working my way through a Udemy course on 6502 Assembly on the Atari. My plans with this are to slowly complete the course over a couple of months and then when I have a good understanding of 6502 assembly to make a little game for the Atari.

Next steps after completing this project will be to do some NES development as the NES also uses the 6502 processor, although a slightly more full featured processor than the 6507 which Atari has. The languages are similar though so it should take only a little more work to get up to speed with 6502 assembly on the NES. As is obvious from some of my recent posts about vintage development software, I do love old software and old hardware of various kinds. This has certainly come to the fore in recent times. However, having said all this, I don’t have any particular burning desire to do game dev for old consoles. Anything I make is more a byproduct of wanting to play with a new programming language.

For those that don’t know, I have two major interests in life. I find the occult fascinating and have done so since I was a young teen. This explains the apps I have a tendency to create. Anything magick related sells well and is very much in line with long held interests that originated with a surprisingly good collection of occult books held by the Wagga library in the late 1980’s. They had multiple Dion Fortune works, along with a couple of books by A.E.Waite. Add to this me acquiring the odd book by Crowley, and Regardie’s Complete Golden Dawn and you will have some idea of the occult influences that were instrumental in shaping my beliefs and interest in the occult. Hundreds of books and several decades later this interest continues unabated.

My other major interest lies in programming. This has dovetailed nicely with my interest in magick. Typically if you have an interest in the occult you are not likely to be the type of person who is technologically adept. There would be few occultists who are also programmers. So I am fairly rare in the combination of these interests. This I guess makes me, probably, the world’s leading developer of occult apps. I certainly seem to have largely cornered this niche market on the App Store.

My interest in programming which stems from the late 90’s has resulted in me learning to program in multiple languages. Visual Basic 5 (Professional Edition) was my first language. This was followed by Delphi (thanks PC Plus for all the development software), a smattering of C, C++, Java, and more recently, Javascript, and of course Swift. As an app developer Swift is now my go to language and pretty much all of the development I now do is in Swift. I did recently purchase a key for the Enterprise Edition of Visual Studio 2022, so that I could fire up a virtual machine and do some VB.net development if the mood took me though.

Anyway, the final project that I would like to work on, and I don’t expect I will get to this until mid way through 2024, is to develop a raycasting engine in Swift. Think of the early 90’s Wolfenstein 3D engine and you will have a good idea of what I plan to build. Once again this is a project that I will be making, just because I can, more than any other reason. It certainly won’t be a threat to any modern FPS engine. I will likely turn it into an app though. At this stage I’m thinking of an educational shooter called Alphabet Blast. The player will shoot various enemies all of which will be emblazoned with various letters of the alphabet as they move through each level. Anytime they kill an enemy with a specific letter they collect that letter. In each level you will have to collect certain letters to make various words. You complete a level successfully by collecting the letters and spelling the required words. Anyway, it’s an idea that I may well expand upon and develop lated next year.