https://beta.ncot.uk/tags/agon-light/ Recent content in Agon Light on [BETA] NCoT Tech Hugo en-gb Fri, 23 Oct 2026 13:56:58 +0100 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/retro-gamedev-is-hard/ Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:36:56 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/retro-gamedev-is-hard/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I create a tilemap system. #AgonLight #Sprites #RetroComputing #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/game-engine-to-functional-first-game---the-hello-world-of-gamedev/ Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:36:10 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/game-engine-to-functional-first-game---the-hello-world-of-gamedev/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I actually make a game! For once I actually finish something. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/agon-light-joystick-interface---how-not-to-program-hardware/ Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:28:30 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/agon-light-joystick-interface---how-not-to-program-hardware/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I make a joystick work by building a joystick interface for the Agon Light. Then I program it to add it to my game. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-joystick-interface/ Sun, 09 Nov 2025 09:30:06 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-joystick-interface/ I’ve built a joystick interface for my Agon Light, using a PCB I found online. This is an improvement on the last time I did this and just stuck wires in the GPIO ports. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #Electronics https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/axis-aligned-bounding-boxes---collision-detection-without-physics/ Tue, 04 Nov 2025 21:19:21 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/axis-aligned-bounding-boxes---collision-detection-without-physics/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I get thoroughly distracted and accidentally make a Pong style game idea while figuring out how to add collision detection to my game engine. I implement the AABB Axis Aligned Bounding Box algorithm. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/creating-an-entity-component-system-for-my-retro-video-game-engine/ Tue, 14 Oct 2025 09:43:51 +0100 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/creating-an-entity-component-system-for-my-retro-video-game-engine/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at programming a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I throw away a ton of code and replace it with a shiny new Entity Component System. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-debug-printing/ Sat, 04 Oct 2025 14:19:27 +0100 https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-debug-printing/ Here’s how to send text out the Agon Light’s USB port to an attached serial monitor, so it can be used for debug logging. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #Programming https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-c-development/ Fri, 03 Oct 2025 23:02:43 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-c-development/ How to write code for the Agon Light (and Console8) using C instead of BASIC, under Linux. It might work with WSL2 in Windows, and it might work on a Mac. #AgonLight #CProgramming #CPlusPlus #RetroComputing https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/state-machines---how-to-engineer-better-software/ Fri, 03 Oct 2025 20:19:23 +0100 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/state-machines---how-to-engineer-better-software/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I attempt to put the “engineering” back in “software engineer”. Instead of blindly hacking away at my code and hoping for the best, I am now more thoughtfully designing a system. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-roguelike-in-c---part-1/ Mon, 11 Aug 2025 22:24:29 +0100 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-roguelike-in-c---part-1/ Let’s try to write a Roguelike game in C for the Agon Light. This is the first video. I explore how the original Rogue and similar games like Nethack generate their own dungeons, then adapt code that draws mazes so my dungeons are a bit more interesting to explore. #AgonLight #RetroComputing https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/a-retro-game-made-with-21st-century-thinking---gamedev-the-hard-way/ Wed, 11 Jun 2025 22:05:03 +0100 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/a-retro-game-made-with-21st-century-thinking---gamedev-the-hard-way/ In this abridged video, I walk you through the process of building a text adventure game from scratch on the Agon Light. Rather than a deep dive into every line of code, this video focuses on explaining the overall structure and design choices behind the project. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/tilemap-game-engine-development-agon-light-c-programming/ Thu, 24 Oct 2024 14:32:42 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/tilemap-game-engine-development-agon-light-c-programming/ In this video, I’ll show you how I built a tilemap system from scratch in C for the Agon Light, and integrated it into my existing game engine. Getting the physics engine to handle collisions with the tilemap was no easy task, but I’ll walk you through how I made it work. On top of that, I explore some game design, sketching out ideas for where the game is… #AgonLight #CProgramming #Sprites #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-game-the-hard-way-from-scratch-using-c-part-2/ Sat, 07 Sep 2024 18:54:09 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-game-the-hard-way-from-scratch-using-c-part-2/ Join me on a journey as I attempt to write a game for my Agon Light using nothing but raw C programming. In this second episode I figure out how to make a very basic 2D rigid body physics system work. #AgonLight #CProgramming #RetroComputing #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-game-the-hard-way-from-scratch-using-c-part-1/ Sat, 17 Aug 2024 18:00:00 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-game-the-hard-way-from-scratch-using-c-part-1/ Join me on a journey as I attempt to write a game for my Agon Light using nothing but raw C programming. In this first episode I figure out what kind of game to make, look at some shareware games of the past and get a basic game engine working, using nothing but C code – no external game engines or modern development tools. #AgonLight #AtariST #ZXSpectrum #CProgramming https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/gamedev-the-hard-way-doing-it-all-myself/ Wed, 26 Jun 2024 09:39:40 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/gamedev-the-hard-way-doing-it-all-myself/ Writing games is hard enough by itself, requiring a lot of different skills. So how can I make this even harder? How about I do literally everything myself, starting with nothing but a blank source file and write all the code by hand. No game engines or libraries. If I need something, I need to write it myself. And since we’re doing this the hard way, let’s write games for an… #AgonLight #Z80 #RetroComputing #GameDev https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/stealing-the-secrets-of-the-nes-agon-light-tilemaps-in-c/ Mon, 27 May 2024 15:19:47 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/stealing-the-secrets-of-the-nes-agon-light-tilemaps-in-c/ Early computers weren’t powerful enough to draw full-screen moving graphics, so they had to use clever tricks. Let’s explore how Nintendo’s techniques for creating tile-based games on the NES can be applied to modern hardware. Using these methods, I built a scrolling tilemap system for the Agon Light using C programming. #AgonLight #CProgramming #Nintendo #Sprites https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/programming-bitmap-graphics-agon-light-using-c/ Sun, 12 May 2024 08:22:13 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/programming-bitmap-graphics-agon-light-using-c/ The end result is a fairly pretty scrolling text routine that demonstrates how to draw multiple bitmaps to the Agon Light’s display using VDP commands. This builds on my previous Agon Light C Programming video where I explained how the Agon Light’s screen works, and how to draw lines and shapes. #AgonLight #CProgramming #RetroComputing #Graphics https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/programming-windows-screensavers-agon-light-graphics-programming/ Fri, 26 Apr 2024 22:30:02 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/programming-windows-screensavers-agon-light-graphics-programming/ My aim is not to simply program the Agon Light by cloning the Windows 3.11 screensavers, but to learn how to program the Agon Light at all. Ultimately I want to learn how to program games for the Agon Light. #AgonLight #BBCMicro #RetroComputing #Graphics https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-graphics-tests/ Tue, 26 Mar 2024 15:30:06 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-graphics-tests/ It’s the Easter holidays and I’ve got two weeks off work. Amongst highly exciting things like weeding the garden and waiting for a new washing machine to be delivered, I’m doing some programming. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #Graphics https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/learning-how-to-draw-things-on-the-agon-light/ Sat, 02 Mar 2024 15:21:29 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/learning-how-to-draw-things-on-the-agon-light/ I’ve been having a bit of a play around with my Agon Light, trying to come up with some ideas for a future video. I’ve discovered it has quite a nice 320×240 64 colour video mode that has just enough pixels to be interesting. #AgonLight #Python #RetroComputing #AI https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/exploring-hardware-hacks-joystick-integration-keyboard-inputs-and-debugging-with-the-agon-light/ Sat, 24 Feb 2024 15:13:25 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/exploring-hardware-hacks-joystick-integration-keyboard-inputs-and-debugging-with-the-agon-light/ Dive into the exciting world of DIY hardware hacking. Join in as I explore joystick integration, keyboard inputs, and serial debugging using the versatile Agon Light platform. Delve into the technical intricacies of GPIO pins, assembly language programming, and C compiler usage for low-level development. Discover… #AgonLight #AssemblyLanguage #CProgramming #Keyboards https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-joystick-test-1/ Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:54:18 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/agon-light-joystick-test-1/ I’m working on getting a joystick port working on my Agon Light. They don’t come with joystick ports, but there is a set of GPIO pins that can be read through assembly. #AgonLight #RetroComputing https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/agon-light-c-programming-an-introduction/ Sun, 14 Jan 2024 21:15:42 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/agon-light-c-programming-an-introduction/ Instead of bashing away in BASIC, it’s possible to do some coding in C on the Agon Light. Let’s find out how in this introduction to an ongoing series where I figure out the Agon hardware and work on a game. I have no idea what game I want to make, and I’m not entirely sure how to achieve some of the necessary functions, but it’ll be fun figuring it out and I hope… #AgonLight #CProgramming #BASICProgramming #RetroComputing https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/forth-better-than-basic/ Mon, 16 Oct 2023 19:33:40 +0000 https://beta.ncot.uk/videos/forth-better-than-basic/ Let’s look at FORTH, the obscure stack based programming language that nobody seems to use. Or do they? #AgonLight #BBCMicro #Z80 #BASICProgramming