Michael C. Martin greets you.

Games

• Interactive Fiction is the preferred term for what were once called "Text Adventures". It's still got a quite thriving authorship community, and I've done a bit of work myself, though nothing worth paying that much attention to. The link is to what games I've written (currently all short pieces) and to my reviews for the annual competition.
• The Ur-Quan Masters is a modernization port of the classic space action, adventure, exploration, diplomacy, and God Knows What Else game Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters. Widely hailed as one of the greatest games of all time, it hasn't run on any system since about 1995 or so (it had a port to the ill-fated 3DO from MS-DOS: this is the primary version we're porting to modern OSes, but we've put in a bunch of other stuff since.). Accolade/Infogrames owns the name "Star Control", so the port is going by its subtitle. It's technically alpha right now, but it's still playable. For more information on Star Control than you can possibly imagine, go to the de-facto official Star Control hub page, The Pages of Now and Forever.
• Sable is a 3d space shooter using OpenGL and SDL. It was written as a final project for my graphics class, but it's quite playable and has been enhanced slightly to be more portable and balanced. It was fun to write, and it's a nice little time waster.
• Target Acquired was a space shooter I built from scratch back in 1995 with some friends and acquaintances from high school. I recently used the Simple DirectMedia Library to port it to modern OSes (which, incidentally, has helped a lot when dealing with the Ur-Quan Masters stuff, above). A clean, entertaining, and insanely difficult space shooter. I recommend it to all.
• I wrote a clone of the old "Daleks" game back in 1996 called Scrubots, themed after the Paranoia game by the now-defunct West End Games. This was mostly to teach myself Java, and as a result, the code and interface are both pretty hideous. It is possible that I'll write an SDL port of it at some point in the future.

Programming

I program a lot. Here are some programming tools or essays I've written. These are mostly for ancient machines, because I went on a retrocoding kick back in 2000-2002.

• The P65 Assembler is a retroassembler for the 6502 series of chips written in various scripting languages. The P65-Perl series runs in Perl, and I'm told it's a reasonable example of well-structured Perl code. It's still extreme pain to modify, though, so I switched to Python (which I'd been meaning to learn anyway) when I decided to try to produce a cross-assembler at least as good as the old Amiga DASM assembler. I haven't gotten there yet. This project is pretty back-burner these days, but I hope to get time to play with it again sometime soon.
• My 6502-based programs. Nothing particularly wonderful here, but it may be of some entertainment.
• To HLL and Back in which I discuss how to apply the last 30 years of programming language design to assembly programming on the 6502.
• VControl is a digital input abstraction for the Simple Directmedia Layer. SDL programs have an annoying tendency towards poorly hardcoded input paradigms. VControl offers a simple file-based way to organize input into usable forms. This was originally developed for UQM, above, but the UQM version has mutated beyond recognizability. The base library is still pretty good.
• SVAF is the Simple Vector Array Format. It's a 3D model representation format based loosely on the Lightwave format, but designed to be easily rendered in real-time by OpenGL. Sable uses it for its models.