💀👻🎃🦇MOSS 666🦇🎃👻💀

Retrocomputing Maker and Designer in Ontario, Canada. I make stuff without promising a delivery date. I don't do crowdfunding, but I do gratefully accept Patreon and Ko-Fi support for what I do. 

Public Key

npub10wsmpgddr3tl4a5xa4h4mfhape70hree4rjqmx266054dq360u2s9lrxeh

NIP-05 Address

mos_8502@studio8502-ca.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8hgds5xk3c4l676rw6m6a5m7sul8m3uu63eqdn9dd862ksga879gpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qs6lwv6

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

Author Public Key

npub10wsmpgddr3tl4a5xa4h4mfhape70hree4rjqmx266054dq360u2s9lrxeh

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Last Notes

2026-10-28 15:16:56 UTC

No coffee. No nicotine. No will to get off the couch. No point in bothering because I can’t afford more of either until the 30th.
Sorry. No code today. No rants either. Cancelled due to lack of happy brain chemicals.

2026-10-27 05:53:38 UTC

GNOME and KDE sucked long before they were ensloppified. The whole Linux GUI experience STINKS ON ICE. CDE was great, but it never advanced to the age of the browser, let alone the age of the 8K desktop monitor display.
Can you really blame me for wanting to build a better UI? I'm stuck with "slop" anyway, it might as well be good slop, that I verified for function and fitness for purpose?

2026-10-26 17:38:57 UTC

Minority: Mac users.
Minority: Linux users.
Minority of a minority: Disaffected Mac users.
Minority of a minority of a minority: Disaffected Mac users who moved to Linux and want to code like they did on the Mac.
I must be out of my fucking mind.

2026-10-18 02:57:32 UTC

If the purpose of open-source, free software, whatever, is not to enable remixing and kitbashing and weird new uses nobody thought of, and put control over software into the people's hands, then it's not worth a rusty curry fart.
Sorry, not sorry.

2026-10-09 14:08:50 UTC

So that vibe coded Adobe clone suite. Anyone else have no desire to use it but think it’s hilarious that at least one evil corpo is getting screwed over?

2026-10-08 19:48:09 UTC

My wife is watching a webinar about fat acceptance and liberation. I’m supportive of the topic and thesis, but their execution makes me want to OD on ozempic and become a protein influencer.

2026-10-08 11:50:04 UTC

Uncontroversial statement: coffee is good and being up at 0630 kind of sucks.

2026-10-08 11:16:01 UTC

Me personally I’m not a proponent of vibe coding whole apps. It’s too much for the AI to do. I’m finding better results by incrementally implementing testable library code with the AI, and hand coding the actual application and logic and UI. That should surprise nobody, of course hand written code is better - but it’s impressive that the AI can even do that much.

2026-10-08 10:48:02 UTC

So wait a minute. Some people used the slop extruder to make functional clones of the Adobe apps, in rust, MIT licensed, for free, and people are mad about it? They’re literally fucking Adobe in the jack hole and you’re mad about it? You’re defending Adobe now?

2026-09-25 19:33:52 UTC

I have mixed feelings about watching people scramble to try to secure software that isn't "LLM tainted".
I mean, they have every right to a choice in their software, and I think major projects are making a major mistake adopting the tech this early.
But I feel like they're setting themselves up for disappointment when those smaller projects either don't meet requirements or get LLM-tainted.
So it's like, I support them but I don't think they'll succeed, but I hope I'm wrong, kind of mixed feelings?

2026-09-22 20:10:28 UTC

Let’s talk about what AgOS is and is not. It’s been brought to my attention that topic might be better received so let’s go.
Argentum OS is the answer to every gripe and complaint and wished for thing in an OS I’ve ever had. It combines features of my favourite OSes with some ideas of my own and pushes them to the absolute limit, without regard for backward compatibility.

2026-09-11 15:40:15 UTC

I, too, am in mourning. Not for 9/11, I don't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about that. I'm in mourning for what was once an active social life on Mastodon.
Apparently, I can cuss and make crass jokes and generally be myself and that was fine, but touching the scary new tech was a bridge too far and cost me everything -- which only shows that I was being parasocial again, thinking that the people I knew on here felt about me the way I did them. I've got to break that habit, it's worse than smoking.

2026-09-11 15:32:01 UTC

Eventually, all the MBAs and suits will figure out that abusing language models in ways that cause them to bother people will not produce the results they are after, and they'll move on to the next grift.
As always, the 1% of techs with social consciences are left to pick up the pieces and make the best of what's left.

2026-09-06 01:13:50 UTC

Forgive me if I'm not that interested in ethics lessons on copyright from anyone who knows what a kazaa was.

2026-09-06 00:55:07 UTC

So... do you guys really think being 4chan-troll-level relentless arseholes at whoever runs social media for the Internet Archive and Electronic Frontier Foundation is going to lead to any kind of prosocial result?

2026-09-05 20:51:16 UTC

So few screenshots of CDE on the web, it's sad.
This is what "professional" looked like for years.
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/220/406/168/750/826/original/c585c9fa44433c2f.png

2026-09-05 01:31:54 UTC

I fuckin' hate Anthropic. I loathe OpenAI. Google can suck my bollocks from the back. I wish I could watch SpaceXAI get chopped up for scrap. I will laugh as the bubble bursts.
But there's no world where AI disappears. There are too many players in too many countries who aren't doing the hokey-cokey with circle-jerk financing bollocks, but who are actually looking to turn a semi-honest dollar.
Of course the EFF came out in defense of model training. They're hoping to stay relevant in a post-crash world where AI is a commodity sold by 50,000 different outfits.
AliBaba and MoonShot and DeepSeek and Tencent aren't going anyplace, even after the crash.

2026-09-04 01:23:00 UTC

Where working on the kernel was exciting me, working on GUI stuff is boring the pants back onto me.

2026-09-03 00:13:44 UTC

Still waiting for my corporate funding. Where’s my million dollar donation?

2026-08-29 14:08:22 UTC

Fuck's sake.
It's payday. Kind of.
They found some reason or other to reduce my pay by about $600 this month. I'm fucking livid.
I don't expect anyone to help me out this time, but if anyone chooses to I'll be very appreciative.

2026-08-23 01:14:03 UTC

Anyone want to drive up to my neck of the woods to drop thirty bucks on a Commodore filing cabinet?
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/142/168/471/626/925/original/e84967d789068653.png

2026-08-20 12:27:29 UTC

Retro people have a right to know, One ROM (the ROM replacement thing) uses Claude for its firmware dev.
https://github.com/piersfinlayson/one-rom

2026-08-15 21:17:43 UTC

There are some claims that aren’t worth debunking because the ones making them don’t care if it’s true, only that it achieves their ends.

2026-08-15 19:56:40 UTC

I genuinely don’t understand why there aren’t a bunch of new memory companies spinning up. With prices this high you’d think capitalism would serve demand.

2026-08-14 16:26:32 UTC

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@nprofile…vsjg @nprofile…ugpy I’m having this weird dissonance. Like. I don’t buy in to AI as anything more than a curiosity for nerds and an area of academic research. Thats it’s proper place. Somehow there’s this multibillion dollar industry around it that makes no sense to me. This shit is a toy?? Why would you use it for business critical stuff??

2026-08-14 02:02:18 UTC

Shell tab completion (Bash-style) now works a treat.
You will note, 65X-DOS has a pretty decent assortment of little Unix-inspired shell utilities. That's by design.
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/117/091/396/452/468/965/original/c7f110770de2c902.png

2026-08-14 01:28:16 UTC

I feel like nobody hears me when I say that "nobody should be using an agentic LLM for anything serious because the tech is not ready and may never be ready", because they sure seem to infer a lot more love for language models than I actually express.

2026-08-12 23:20:59 UTC

Because I am not getting the attention I feel I deserve, I have elected to cause problems until I do.

2026-08-12 20:30:23 UTC

If the US were any other part of the world, Doctors Without Borders would be vaccinating their children and diagnosing their diabeetus.
#nevent1q…62tj

2026-08-12 14:44:23 UTC

Heh. There's something MS-DOS can't do, AFAIK: Support a compose key.

2026-08-11 23:52:19 UTC

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@nprofile…vsjg Serious question: what can we actually do, as a profession, to deserve the title of "Engineer"?

2026-08-08 21:40:40 UTC

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@nprofile…ggeh I wish I could design a game half as good.

2026-08-08 21:10:56 UTC

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@nprofile…ggeh Five stars out of five game. Top ten on the platform.

2026-08-05 20:18:45 UTC

"So, what, you're saying vibe coding works now?"
Well, no. I wouldn't go that far. For one thing, my tests are all limited to a very small environment with a very big model and a good agent harness, making very small, highly testable programs, and even then it's not perfect. Definitely not ready for serious use.
However, it would be intellectually dishonest for me to say that using the machine hasn't worked for me so far. A much less exalted claim, to be sure. Would it work for you? I have no idea, but I'm going to err on the side of "probably not".

2026-08-03 20:31:13 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl Fuck those guys so much. Fuck them, their families, their friends, fuck them all.

2026-08-03 20:25:54 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl That will have to involve focusing the model on a specific domain -- like, a model specifically for C++, or one just for Rust.

2026-08-03 20:23:36 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl I didn't know Reasonix existed until an hour or so ago, and it has already fundamentally changed my view on the economics of this tech. It does some kind of cache wizardry to cut token usage waaaaaay the fuck down.
Me point is, who the fuck knows what I will learn about tomorrow?

2026-08-03 20:17:30 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl I personally don't think any long-standing project should adopt this tech. It's very much Not Ready™. This is the time for wild west experimentation and working out the bugs, which might lead to it becoming ready for prime time.

2026-08-03 20:16:09 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl I respect NetBSD so goddamned much.

2026-08-03 19:52:53 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl I do bang on a bit, but I'm trying honestly to find a place of peace with all this bollocks.

2026-08-03 19:51:58 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl Did you see "OBSESSION"? That movie fucking rules.

2026-08-03 19:51:37 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl I'm sorry.

2026-08-01 07:20:38 UTC

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@nprofile…ggeh This morning I watched an AI make a realistic video podcast with two "people" talking about an article, using just the article as input.
If it can do that, think about what horrible stuff it can do with the same tech. The mind shudders.

2026-08-01 07:17:34 UTC

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@nprofile…ggeh I thought it was a nice discussion.

2026-07-29 11:49:34 UTC

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@nprofile…ggeh Well, take me for example. I'm working on a ROM for Sentinel 65X. It's got a structured BASIC, a suite of hardware tests, and I'm working on adding a macro assembler. All things that encourage people to code the old fashioned way.

2026-07-29 11:46:58 UTC

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@nprofile…ggeh I have thoughts about only making programs that actually need to exist, being responsible, not trusting neophytes with the tech.

2026-07-29 11:24:28 UTC

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@nprofile…ggeh Finding the middle ground, the "golden path" to use another Dune analogy, is HARD. But it's necessary, because this tech is not going away, and it's getting better at coding all the time.

2026-07-29 10:57:52 UTC

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@nprofile…ggeh Watching now. Will reply here.

2026-07-28 21:56:24 UTC

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Turn the world upside down if you have to. Take whatever you have access to and turn it into something weird and strange and beautiful and unique to you. That's the only real victory we have left to us, and I'll be damned if we're not going to have it.

2026-07-28 21:54:48 UTC

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They want to turn the world into grey-brown sludge and take away art and music and sex and passion and pain. Do your part to spit in their eyes for it by being exactly as weird and standards-defying as you can be.

2026-07-28 21:53:25 UTC

Only you can do the weird shit nobody else will. You have something unique buried inside you. Find it and make it real, because the world needs it.

2026-07-28 21:22:36 UTC

"That's weird." -- famous last words

2026-07-28 00:49:58 UTC

It’s the only way left.
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/994/853/936/972/006/original/c8cb4129990f0afd.jpeg

2026-07-27 20:33:02 UTC

In slop world, you can make whatever you want, but nothing is yours. You can have anything you desire for the asking, but none of it will matter. There's no passion, no pain, no drive, no satisfaction.
All of humanity boiled down to something you can consume, but which lacks all flavour and texture.
In slop world, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy of something else. Everything is uncanny valley, we have Backrooms at home wrong.

2026-07-27 03:38:26 UTC

Gridlocker, my C64 puzzle game, is now permanently reduced in price to just CAD$3.00!
https://studio8502.itch.io/gridlocker

2026-07-27 03:33:39 UTC

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@nprofile…yzy8 I bought a kit to make my own. Really handy. More than I thought it would be.

2026-07-25 16:47:14 UTC

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@nprofile…pt8u @nprofile…kuux Neither would I. I own my own espresso machine.

2026-07-24 20:30:20 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl If we’re going to use a sloperating system, isn’t there some way to better engineer around the flaws? Can we not build things taking into account the flaws in the machine?

2026-07-24 20:20:02 UTC

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I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I have to find something I can live with, that more or less does the job, and doesn’t sting me for cash every five minutes or blare ads into my brain.

2026-07-24 20:16:39 UTC

One of my own core principles is that ethics which cannot be applied to real life are not worth holding.
I don’t have the option of using a slop free OS anymore. That has been taken from me against my will and advice. NetBSD cannot do what I need.
So the principle of “no LLM is acceptable” is DOA. I’m mad about that. I don’t want to live in a word of sloperating systems. I am forced to. My remaining choice is between having some agency over the slop firehose and having none. Both of these options suck. And I’m mad about that too.

2026-07-24 19:10:19 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl As people say, the orphan grinding machine is here and plebs like us ain’t going to be the ones to burn it down.

2026-07-24 19:06:20 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl I’m groping with how to live in a post-slop world where my choices are use slop made by others, use slop made by myself and people I trust, or not be a computer toucher.

2026-07-24 17:23:01 UTC

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@nprofile…8udl I try to tag mine with an “LLM bollocks” content warning.

2026-07-23 22:40:17 UTC

Drugs amuse me. Ever since sentience first evolved on this planet, those afflicted with the condition have sought ways to turn that shit off.

2026-07-23 16:54:58 UTC

I consider Mazes of Malice to be done. Complete. It's as good as it's getting, barring any substantial breaking bugs someone reports.
Yes, software can be "finished" it turns out.

2026-07-22 18:59:05 UTC

If you already bought Mazes of Malice, thank you so much, please enjoy the 1.0 release, which is at no extra cost to you.
If you have not bought it, please at least play the free shareware demo version and let me know if you like it at all -- even feedback without monetary gain is worth having!

2026-07-22 18:43:25 UTC

Mazes of Malice version 1.0 is officially released! And to celebrate, the minimum purchase price has been permanently reduced to CAD$3.00!
https://studio8502.itch.io/mazes-of-malice
#gamedev #c64 #commodore #retrogaming

2026-07-20 20:40:54 UTC

Fun fact: when exposed to hard vacuum, all the gases in your body expand. This is why you shouldn’t hold your breath in space, because your lungs will burst. But that’s not the only gas to worry about: the gases in your intestine will expand too, pushing out the solid and liquid contents explosively.
Hard vacuum makes you shit yourself.

2026-07-20 18:35:33 UTC

Someone should start a rumour that AI causes low testosterone.

2026-07-19 13:27:57 UTC

Fun list of programming languages that compile to C: https://github.com/dbohdan/compilers-targeting-c

2026-07-17 22:34:54 UTC

Okay. So what do we want out of a replacement org for the FSF?

2026-07-17 19:12:13 UTC

I hate to say it guys, but we might have to start over with a whole new OS by a whole new bunch of people to get the thing we wanted from GNU and Linux.

2026-07-16 15:39:59 UTC

Just wait until they find out about the side effects of excess testosterone in a cis male body.

2026-07-15 17:14:03 UTC

Child: “Daddy, why is the sky like pee?”
Father: “Capitalism, son.”

2026-07-15 17:09:30 UTC

The sky looks like a great toilet bowl filled with the urine of a person who hasn’t had a sip of water since 1988.

2026-07-13 21:02:19 UTC

PROTIP: Don't bother learning C operator precedence. Use parentheses and save your brain meats for stuff that matters, like data structures and algorithms.

2026-07-11 02:08:39 UTC

Ah, QNX. What could have been if not for corporate fuckery.
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/898/904/066/856/984/original/58666233754aab0f.png

2026-07-09 16:11:14 UTC

I want smaller, simpler, hand made, purely human created, carefully designed programs made by paid programmers who care about making code last.

2026-07-06 19:28:09 UTC

GNU is Nonces United

2026-07-05 03:04:12 UTC

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What the fuck happened to us? We used to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. We didn't need an ocean of fresh water and an entire nuclear power plant to pretend to do our jobs, we just did them.

2026-07-05 03:01:50 UTC

I like X11. I like Motif. I like the way we used to do shit on Unix. We didn't need 128GB of RAM to run a browser. We didn't need 3D acceleration to run a desktop environment. We weren't afraid of a C compiler, we didn't need an IDE.
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/865/136/244/350/764/original/3cadfb18bd33b8d1.png

2026-07-03 22:54:59 UTC

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Sorry not sorry. You had your chance to make a moral decision and choose to stand with the vulnerable and defend the innocent. You chose to persecute them instead. That makes you evil. There is no forgiveness for you now or ever.

2026-07-03 22:53:13 UTC

I’m just gonna say this: if your peace of mind and sense of belonging requires LGBTQA+ people to be less visible, then you don’t deserve peace of mind or a sense of belonging at all because you’re a shitty person and I hate you.

2026-06-25 16:58:52 UTC

I genuinely miss the days when everything you did on the internet was its own protocol, with a separate client. FTP, Telnet, Gopher, WWW, IRC, Usenet.
Baking everything into the browser has fucked the world.

2026-06-24 16:17:37 UTC

I hate to do this, but I have about $30 to my name right now, my chequing account is in the red, and I'd like to get some groceries. If anyone feels like helping out with that, my Ko-Fi link is https://ko-fi.com/mos_8502 and even a couple bucks helps.

2026-06-22 17:28:47 UTC

I honestly think that those data farms are intended for surveillance rather than LLM usage. There's no profit path for LLMs. The only company who has made a dollar from LLMs is nVidia.
But if you want to be the private contractor that provides the government with compute and capacity to track every person in North America, those data farms are table stakes.
What I can't work out is why they'd bother with that level of surveillance in a society already disinclined to rebellion.

2026-06-22 17:23:18 UTC

In a world where 16GB of RAM costs more than a used car, what are we to do except find ways to do more with less? Smaller operating systems, leaner applications, reduced reliance on computing.

2026-06-18 22:08:32 UTC

This was a good idea that couldn't be executed properly in the 1980s. Stick Android on a device like this (with a touchscreen OLED screen obviously) and you got something people haven't seen 1,000 times before.
https://studio8502.files.fedi.monster/media_attachments/files/116/773/388/628/125/295/original/dbaa6797cfd03f27.png

2026-06-16 09:53:08 UTC

I maintain that going after V-Tech's space would have been smarter. All those edutainment computers suck. Commodore could have made some real inroads there.

2026-06-16 08:16:09 UTC

Well. As moves go, a $500 flip phone is certainly a move.

2026-06-02 19:47:26 UTC

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@nprofile…zut6 Both MorphOS and AROS could easily be ported to run on modern ARM boxes if someone paid for the work.

2026-06-02 19:40:15 UTC

What if Commodore didn’t bother to acquire the Amiga rights, and instead just built something out of modern hardware that ran AmigaOS or MorphOS or AROS?

2026-06-01 20:22:34 UTC

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@nprofile…8cjr My days of not respecting big tech have certainly come to a middle.

2026-05-31 18:35:31 UTC

The real bitch about 7400-series level computers is memory. You can't really make your own core memory, and modern stuff feels like cheating -- if you're going to use a modern SRAM why not just build an RCBus system and run CP/M on it?

2026-05-31 14:19:08 UTC

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@nprofile…8cjr Fuck them if they don’t like it.

2026-05-31 01:12:21 UTC

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Linux was supposed to be for people who liked computers. Now it's just another incarnation of the same capitalist bullshit wearing a penguin costume.

2026-05-31 01:10:13 UTC

God I'm so sick of computer.
Not good computer, I still love my C64s and such. I mean the evil computer I have to use for everything else.

2026-05-27 12:47:43 UTC

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@nprofile…8cjr Context?

2026-05-24 22:50:34 UTC

I'm tired, man. So tired. Mentally exhausted.
Everything sucks today for no good reason. There's nothing bad happening. I have no crisis. There's no proper cause for this malaise.

2026-05-22 16:58:07 UTC

Mazes of Malice, Beta 1 is released!
This version is a functionally complete game. It fixes every known bug, has all the intended features and enemies and functionality, and polishes the control scheme for easier one-handed play. All that remains is any bug fixes that happen to be needed for a full release.
Also, the release model is changing, in preparation for the full release. There is now a free, time-limited shareware demo version, and the full version, which costs CAD$5.00, and includes all future updates at that price.
I hope Mazes of Malice is your new favourite C64 game!
https://studio8502.itch.io/mazes-of-malice
#GameDev #c64 #retrogaming