It's got Pong on it

The more astute visitors to my site (assuming of course that there are visitors, i've never been entirely sure that the counter hits aren't just a figment of a deranged imagination and then worried about whose) will have noticed that my likkle corner of the web has gone through a bit of a revamp! Yes, T.M.R's Workstation has been through a sort of spring clean (do websites have springs?) and in the process has gained new downloads in the Backward Engineering section as well as a new covert art render for the just-released Blok Copy which i'm rather pleased with. In fact, the release of Blok Copy has seen both the Workstation and the main Cosine site being upgraded, although the design of the latter remains the same and just the way it handles things has been updated so that it now handles a couple of browsers that it previously caused to stutter.

So what's this Blok Copy thingy i;ve mentioned a couple of times then? Well, it's a new game from Cosine for, surprisingly to us as well as others it would seem, the Commodore PET - or more specifically, it works on 40 column PETs with 8K of RAM or more. The code (which features some nice touches like PET model detection and vertical blank sync, something of a first for the PET as far as i'm aware) was knocked together by yours truly, the screen layouts by Bizzmo and me and i've managed to wedge what i'll call music in there too, although i'll struggle a bit to stop laughing as i do so. PETs don't have sound out of the box (well, the majority of them don't, some of the later models have a "bell") but there is, so i've read at least, a relatively popular hardware hack that connects to the parallel port and i slapped a crap step time music driver together and got it playing a version of SLL's "End Theme" and some sound effects. All told i'm rather proud of it for a first attempt on a machine with no user-defined graphics and it seems to have gone down well with the playtesters so i have me fingers crossed...