I’ve made a kit of parts in Blender for building marble runs.

There are over two hundred types of track to try out, including slides, ramps, tunnels, spirals, splits and bends. I’ve also built and included variously coloured terrazzo, granite, metallic and transparent materials for a classy looking track.

It’s designed around a basic block size of 4x4x2cm allowing a 2.5cm marble size.

A little demo scene is included.

It’s free - Enjoy! Get it from https://dpt.itch.io/marble-kit

Want to clean a mucky computer or TV screen? Read on.

You will need:

• Some clean warm water
  • e.g. cooled boiled water
• A squirt of dish liquid
• Soft-strong paper towels
  • e.g. a decent quality kitchen paper towel
• A soft, clean microfibre cloth
  • I use the small black screen cloth I received with a MacBook
• A piece of sticky tape, or a sticky clothes roller
• Windex, Windolene or similar glass cleaning spray

Method:

It’s been ten years since I started reverse engineering The Great Escape. I didn’t really intend to start another disassembly project but after trying out SkoolKit’s new tape loading and Z80 simulation magic I found myself with a new one on my hands. This time I’m pulling apart the Spectrum version of Chase H.Q.!

Here’s the current state of the disassembly: https://dpt.github.io/ChaseHQ/ and the related thread on Spectrum Computing: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=117562#p117562

See you in ten years!

I’ve made a few new logo renders:

If you’re bothered, there are downloads over on the logos page.

PrivateEye 3.20 is now available. PrivateEye is a viewer for Sprites, DrawFiles, JPEGs, ArtWorks, GIFs and PNGs. It also has editing features including bitmap effects and rotation. It runs on RISC OS.

Here’s a screenshot of it running in RISC OS 4 via RPCEmu:

Version 3.20 has had quite a few changes. The main thrust of the work has been to reduce the reliance on the Tinct module, that’s used to render alpha channel sprites, and to replace the PDF format user guide with a StrongHelp one. I’ll break the changes down into sections: