// FIELD NOTES //

Stories from building it.

The curriculum and the emulator get built in the open, and the building is where the good stories are — a race condition that turns out to be a sheep sliding off a hay bale, a game that can't be won because a jump is one pixel short, a camera that lies. These are the field notes: the bugs, the wrong turns, and what the machine taught back.

AMIGA · 68000

The Sheep That Slid Off the Hay Bale

A forty-year-old race condition, faithfully reproduced.

A sheep drifts off the back of a hay bale, a pixel every nine frames. The cause: two word-reads of the beam position, four cycles apart, disagreeing about what line it is.

Read →

AMIGA · THE CAPTURE RIG

Filming a Race Condition

In which I fail to reproduce my own bug, four nops at a time.

To film the sheep bug, I deleted the three-line fix and pointed the camera. The build refused to misbehave — and finding out why meant sweeping the poll phase one nop at a time.

Read →

THE SHIPPING BAR

The Game That Couldn't Be Won

In which sixteen verified units add up to zero finishable games, and a sheep teaches a robot to demand satisfaction.

After Flock, I audited the other three first games. Two had nothing to win — and Dash, the NES platformer, literally couldn't be finished: the jump was fifteen pixels, the pit sixteen.

Read →