Spoonbill Software News
September 2008
Hi
everyone! There hasn’t been much news lately because I ran short of
inspiration. Not that I haven’t been trying. I tried an accessible version of
Mastermind, the game where you have to guess the secret code of colored pegs,
but the interface just didn’t seem to work and this was put on the shelf. I
then started to look into writing an accessible Ten Pin Bowling game but again I
came up against a brick wall and put this on hold too. I then started writing a
remake of the arcade game Galaxians and then it all got too hard and this has
also been put on the back burner.
BG
Chess Challenge
Then
one of my blind clients contacted me and implored me to have a look at writing
an accessible chess game. He informed me that he’d been surfing the net and
hadn’t come across anything in the way of an accessible chess game. I’d been
putting off doing a chess game because of the complexity of writing a chess
engine to play a reasonable game of chess but I looked back in my records and
found that about a dozen people had also requested an accessible chess game and
so I thought I’d do a bit of research on the Internet. In fact this has been
occupying my time all through the southern winter since June.
Optimistically
I searched the Internet for some chess engine source code written for Delphi, my
development environment. Needless to say, my search proved fruitless. But I did
find some open source code written in C. I spent about two weeks translating
this C code into Object Pascal (the language used by Borland Delphi) but it
ended up so riddled with bugs which I had introduced in the translation process
that although it played a game of chess, it did some very stupid moves even when
the skill level was set to Expert, that I eventually gave up. But I learned lots
about writing a chess engine from this exercise and I searched the Internet
again for literature about writing chess engines and found plenty of this. To
cut a long story short, my chess engine ended up being cobbled together from
various engines I found on the Internet together with a lot of original code by
me using what I had learned from all my reading. The end result was an engine
which played a reasonable game of chess but was not world beating. But it
fulfilled my requirements as a basis to write an accessible chess game. All I
had to do now was to write an accessible interface.
With
a board of 64 squares, this proved a challenge. But with help from my panel of
beta testers and some new faces who were familiar with chess, I think I have
come up with a reasonably playable game. I have also created my first game which
caters for all levels of visual acuity, Blind, Vision Impaired and Sighted,
although the main emphasis is on an accessible game. There are plenty much
better computer chess games for sighted players available on the Internet. But
Blind players especially don’t seem to have a great deal of choice when it
comes to finding an accessible chess game.
Fred's
Puzzle Page
Another addition to the Spoonbill Software website
happened in August. A friend of mine, Fred Pence (who incidentally worked
closely with me on my Lode Runner remake) had written about 34 puzzle and logic
games based on his extensive collection of mechanical puzzles. But he doesn’t
have a website and so he didn’t have any way of letting people know about
them. It was then that I suggested putting them up on the Spoonbill Software
website to catch the eye of any puzzle freak visiting my site. Several people
have requested these games and I think that as the word spreads, more people
should become interested.
Reporting problems and program
bugs
I’ve included this paragraph again because of its
importance. When you report a problem or a program bug, please try to provide as
much information as possible, including your computer setup and which version of
Windows you are using. Then, until we get your
problem sorted, please can I request that all future responses to this email be
appended by using the Reply button. This ensures that all correspondence
regarding your problem remains in the one email. This helps me by encapsulating
all correspondence in the one place and prevents me from having to search
previous emails to refer back to something. Hopefully this should speed up the
resolution of your problem. Thanks.
The Importance of Backup
I know I’ve mentioned this before – several times.
But it still appears to be a problem for some people. I quite often get requests
from former clients to please send the games again because they have had a
computer crash, or they have got a new computer, or they have reformatted their
hard drive, etc. etc. If only they had backed up all their setup files to CD,
DVD or an external hard drive when they received them, there would be no
problem. They could just reload them and reinstall them from the backup. I
can’t stress too strongly how important backup is.
A Blast From The Past – No. 2
This is the second in a series of reminiscences from
the early days of computers.
Trekking down to the University with our punched cards
became a thing of the past when we got our new Batch Terminal. This consisted of
a console screen and keyboard, a punch card reader and a line printer, all
housed in a building several street blocks removed from the Geodetic section where the
keypunch girls were situated. A few of us were taken away from the Geodetic
section to form the new ADP (Automatic Data Processing) section. We were in
charge of running the Batch Terminal which was linked to the Cyber mainframe at
the Main Roads Department at the top of the hill. We had now changed from the
Cyber mainframe at the Uni to the MRD Cyber. Every now and again we would notice
an error in one of the punch cards and we would have to walk the several blocks
back to the Geodetic section to get the card re-punched and then walk back again
to feed it through the card reader. This became very time consuming so we became
expert punch card correctors. Often the error was a single missing zone punch
and we would add this extra punch using a scalpel. This saved an inordinate
amount of time because we could put the cards back through the card reader
almost immediately. Another type of error was too many holes in a column. This
we used to correct by blocking up the unwanted hole using a card chip from our
collection of card chips we had acquired from the keypunch operators. This we
secured in position with a delicately-placed piece of magic tape!
We were very innovative in those early days. We also
used to save the maintenance engineers from having to turn out for trivial
malfunctions in the equipment. But more of that next time!
Ian Humphreys
Spoonbill
Software
Albany,
Western Australia.
