Moosepod Software

Czech passes!

2026-06-20T12:42:00-04:00

Czech (a zmachine test story) now passes running on my Apple II ZMachine interpreter Melbor! Still plenty to do for it to be fully useable for playing games, but this is an important milestone because it means the core VM works.

Finished public repo migration

2026-05-09T06:51:00-04:00

I've now gone through and reviewed all 161 of my github repos. Only five of them ended up being worth moving to Tangled.org. The rest were all either private repos or barely started/unfinished repos not worth moving.

The next part of this process is setting up a personal git server and migrating all my private repos to there.

Atari 2600 Workshop

Source files for use with the Atari 2600 workshop I've run a few times.

https://tangled.org/moosepod.com/atari2600-workshop.

Ferrif

A ZCode interpreter written in rust and using egui for the interface

https://tangled.org/moosepod.com/ferrif

Ferrif-ZMachine

The core z-machine functionality used in Ferrif

https://tangled.org/moosepod.com/ferrif-zmachine

Advent of Code

Two years worth of my solutions to Advent of Code.

Migrating to Tangled.org

2026-05-05T06:51:00-04:00

I've been a user of GitHub since 2011. Truthfully most of my usage is for private repo storage but I do have some open source projects there. I'd watched its slow decline over the years but Mitchell Hashimoto's article combined with my general interest in moving back to more control of my data inspired me to start a migration.

I decided to move all my FOSS projects to https://tangled.org/, an interesting project based on ATProto that allows for federated repos. I'm abstractly a big fan of federation and still feel it's one of the best ways to resist the centralization of the internet, so this felt like a no-brainer as an experiment. One of the cool things about tangled is that you can host your own "knot" (forge) that will federate with the broader network. I decided to start simple and just used the main tangled knot for now.

Private repos I'll just move to something I host myself. My task management for solo projects is just org files, and not much of what I work on for fun has a huge CI/CD component, so even a plan old git server should be fine for that purpose.

It will take time to complete but I've started going through and archiving old repos. The first one moved to tangled is https://tangled.org/moosepod.com/atari2600-workshop.

IIGS Toolbox and old Mac Dev

2026-05-03T12:11:00-04:00

Alongside Melbor (whose current ROM usage currently only uses COUT and CROUT ) I've been walking through learning the IIGS toolbox. Taking me back to my teenage days paging through giant volumes of Inside Macintosh while doing Mac dev. That was in Turbo Pascal then Codewarrior C/C++ though, so a bit easier and less verbose than using assembly!

Moosepod.com on Webber

2026-04-25T17:02:00-04:00

Part of the goal of this blog was to have it readable (and ultimately updatable) from my IIGS. And here it is in all its glory, thanks to the Webber web browser.

Project Day at BGS

2026-04-24T17:02:00-04:00

Yesterday I went down to Buffalo Game Space for the day to work on various projects. One of these was finally assembling the BurgerDisk I had kickstarted down in BitHaven's electronics workshop. It had been a while since I soldered but I was pleased that it worked right after powering up! It's not recognizing my 3 1/2" drive daisy chained but that's not critical right now. I'll troubleshoot that next time.

I haven't printed out the enclosure yet but a friend is helping me out there (probably using the 3D printers at BitHaven). Just need to order the filiment.

It was also the Monthly Social night and I had the IIGS set up for people to use. It's fun to watch people use it and be compelled by games from 40 years ago.

Maker's March 2026

2026-04-23T00:00:00-04:00

We do a lot of game jams at Buffalo Game Space. One of the challenges with jams is disruption -- the excitement of the jam and all the new ideas can interfere with completion of your other longer-term projects. So we had the idea to have a month-long event where you pick a milestone for one of your projects and try to complete that milestone over the month.

For my milestone I wanted to get Melbor (my Apple II Z-Code interpreter) to the state where it could run through a simple story file. I had implemented many core parts (such as text printing and various instructions) but hadn't hooked it up to an actual VM.

The event was a definite success for me -- I hit the milestone (though barely) and got a simple story file running on my IIGS. Overall I think it was a success, we had a dozen or so people participating and even people who didn't hit milestones felt like it helped focus their work.