Another year, another RetroChallenge

16 October 2023 (programming retrochallenge retrochallenge2023 retro)

The Hungarian retro-gaming podcast Checkpoint recently did an episode on the HomeLab series of computers from the early 1980's. I've never heard of this Hungarian home computer computer before, and it turns out, there's a good reason for that: these machines never really made it to mass production. There was only a couple hundred of them made, a lot of them built from kits.

Gábor Képes, the guest of the episode, announced a game jam for the HomeLab-2 to spur the creation of new games for the member of the HomeLab family that is most lacking in software. Gábor also has an infectious enthusiasm for the machine, and so I decided I would try my hands at it.

Then, I saw that this year's RetroChallenge would also take place in October, so a perfect opportunity to double-dip: I would do a couple of small games in September to get to know the system, then do a more substantial project in October, finish it by the deadline of the 15th, and then spend the rest of the month retroactively documenting it all for RetroChallenge.

So in the upcoming posts, I will tell a bit about the machine itself; the emulator I had to create to have an easier time devleoping, and the second emulator I wrote for no good reason, really; and the games that I entered to the competition (my first ever assembly projects!).