It’s the middle of October, and you may have noticed a distinct lack of Retrochallenge-based posts on this blog. There are two reasons for that.
The first is entirely my own fault. I’m continuing my C64 CRPG project from the last couple of challenges, and I’ve reached a point where I can’t just keep copying Ultima I. I need to figure out the plot of the game, and more ideas of the environments and monsters and character goals. And that was okay; I sat down with some quiet music playing and some incense burning and took some notes and I was getting at least a few ideas – but there wasn’t a whole lot to blog about.
And then fate intervened. Or my hardware intervened, anyway. This is hardly the first project in Retrochallenge history to have been derailed by a hardware failure, but usually it’s the retro hardware that fails. This time it was my primary dev machine, which I need for, like, stuff. And things.
I’ve had hard disks fail before, but this one failed hard and failed fast. So that was exciting. The good news is that everything was backed up, with the weird exception of my Skyrim save games (thanks for nothing, Steam Cloud).
I’d been thinking for a while now that it was time to rebuild and reorganize my computing environment, so this seemed like the right time. Now I’ve got a fresh new SSD for my OS and files and a fresh new spinning disk for music and video. It’s faster, better organized, and at least temporarily light on useless cruft. I only have one version of Visual Studio installed. It feels strange, but also good.
The downside of that approach is that it’s been time-consuming, and I’ve only today gotten to the point where my Retrochallenge project can be compiled and run again. I’ve got a few optimizations and improvements that I made during the first week of October, and a partially written blog post that I had been working on when the HD failed, so hopefully that will get put up soon. So it’s at least vaguely possible that I’ll be able to make some progress during the second half of the month. If nothing else goes wrong…