Aart's Blog

Many users of Chess for Android use the combination of an electronic chessboard (Certabo, DGT, or Millennium) and online play, where making moves quickly can make the difference between winning or losing. In the past, I have made improvements that enabled quicker castling and taking en-passant. However, one request for quicker promotions was still pending. When using the electronic chessboard, there were two ways to promote a pawn. One way is to make the move with the pawn first, then use the popup window in the GUI to select the promotion piece, and finally replace the pawn with the piece on the electronic board. The second way is to remove the promoting pawn from the electronic board first, and then place the promotion piece on the board thereafter. Either way registers the promotion correctly, both for regular or minor promotion. However, during rapid games, even this simple procedure may be a bit cumbersome. Therefore I added an extra option to Chess for Android. While s

Certabo launched a limited edition tournament model electronic chess board that celebrates the 10th anniversary of Chess for Android . The graphics were beautifully designed by Bryan Whitby. You can read more about the background in this interview with P ietro Mandurino , the CEO of Certabo (in Italian).

Opening up the top and bottom border is of course a trick any seasoned C64 demo writer knows. But anyone who started with BASIC before switching to 6510 probably remembers how much fun it was to get that extra space for sprites and even some simple graphics. So this posting is not telling anything new to most of you. I am just reminiscing my own youthful awe when I made the switch. The program below shows how to do this. Set up a raster interrupt right before the bottom border start. Then toggle between 24 and 25 lines of text. This tricks the VIC into forgetting to turn on the border. The opened border can be used to display sprites. By manipulating the last address of the VIC page ($3fff by default), you can even get some interesting graphics. For example, Pasi Ojala posted an article Opening the Borders with some truly amazing effects!  Of course, opening up the side borders is the next challenge! ; little demo to open up the border ; for win2c64 by Aart

What do you do when you suddenly have two functional, flying drones again (a Phantom 2 vision+ and a Mavic Pro)? You fly one, of course, and ask your daughter to fly the other one. Then you take "dronies"!

While updating links on my website to content that I also maintain, I had to think of a variant on the title of Tolstoy's brilliant short story: How much Internet Presence does a man need? Donald Knuth writes that he has been a happy man since 1990 , when he no longer had an email address. Would the same apply to webpages? I am not ready to find out yet! https://www.aartbik.com/ https://aartbik.blogspot.com/ https://twitter.com/AartBik https://facebook.com/ajcbik https://www.youtube.com/user/AartBik https://www.linkedin.com/in/aartbik https://amazon.com/author/aartbik https://github.com/aartbik https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Aart+Bik