Archive for May, 2009

Javent

May 23, 2009

I have long been surprised by the fact that it is so difficult to raise events in Java. Adding listeners is easy, but as soon as you want your own event system, you’re out of luck. Through browsing the web I discovered that a commonly used “solution” is to piggy-back on existing Swing and AWT event queues. This isn’t good.

In order to fix this problem, I have started a small project called Javent. The Javent library is tiny (less than 20KiB), and makes event-raising code a lot cleaner. All of you Java developers should give it a try.

Fork

May 20, 2009

Good old DOS games

May 8, 2009

The other day I came across DOS Museum, a website dedicated to the preservation of DOS games. I was instantly reminded of my childhood favourites like Hocus Pocus, Word Rescue, Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit… my eyes are beginning to glaze over already. I still have lots of respect for the old developers who had to optimize the hell out of their games to overcome hardware limitations, unlike modern developers and their GiB large products.

If you are a sad individual that never had the chance to experience pixellated madness, have a look through the catalogues and install a few games in DOSBox, an open source MS-DOS emulator. They are much better than a lot of Flash games!