I am pretty certain the built in font was created from scratch. If it looks similar it is because it is the English language which nobody, not even IBM, owns a copyright on.

I doubt very much this was copied from anywhere.

I'm pretty sure Shawn mentions somewhere he copied the font from his PC's BIOS. It also is pixel-by-pixel identical so is very likely to be the case. (According to the post above, I did not double check).

However a quick Google reveals that in the US typefaces like this were not copyrightable so it is unlikely IBM obtained one. Their actual font "Courier" for example was never copyrighted. The 8x8 BIOS font might have been auto-created by someone simply scaling down a font like that and touching up afterwards... probably was a job of half an hour

Today I rewrote my TINS 2016 entry in JavaScript to be playable on the Web. It's a near one-to-one remake, but with a few small tweaks and additions.

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You can play it in your browser here. I also wrote a small blog post about it here.

I plan on rewriting all of my games in JavaScript soon. I like the convenience of the Web.

Edit
Forgot to mention that the code and assets are all freely available on GitHub.

JavaScript is currently my favorite language. I enjoy how flexible it is to write programs with it, and I like the convenience of being able to very easily share my creations with others (as opposed to making binaries of programs in other languages). It has its limitations though, primarily in speed. It can't match the speeds of C and the likes, but that's to be expected from an interpreted language. Still, it's pretty fast, and it continues to get faster with time.

As far as writing games in JavaScript goes, it's not difficult, but it is a little different. I'm using the canvas API, but I've abstracted it with my own little game-making library called "Momo". It's only for 2D stuff though. For 3D you'd have to look into WebGL.

Yeah, that's screwed me up a few times. You can treat a number as an int using parseInt() though. But despite its flaws, what I love most about JavaScript is that changes are immediately available upon refreshing the page. It's just so convenient.

I'll have to check it out. I've heard a few people rave about it, after all.

Yep, it's supported. It's from ECMAScript 2015.

As for the bitwise operator, I know about it but don't use it. My thinking is that it's slower than using parseInt(). I'll have to run some benchmarks though.

Edit
Apparently bitwise is the fastest.

I was mostly curious about converting a float to an integer, not a string, but that's still good to know. I'll stick with using bitwise operators from now on.

It's no different than things you have to do in C or C++ to get the most speed out of them. You can write most code without thinking too hard about it, but when performance counts you have to start learning the intricacies of the platform to design the fastest program possible. I wouldn't let that scare you off. The dynamic and memory managed nature might offer you a great boost in productivity once you get the hang of the language.

Of course, one option to deal with that for programs that must be blazing fast would be to generate JavaScript for each browser on the server and return the browser-optimized code when the page is requested. That's far too much trouble to be worthwhile for 99.999% of cases, but if you were trying to host a fancy game or something it might make sense. There are already several languages that can be compiled down to JavaScript. Actually, it might even be possible to write your programs in C and have that converted to JavaScript. It just might be fun to get it all setup so that you can do graphics and sound. It has been done before I think.

I suspect that FLOSS browsers in *nix would also have spotty support for mp3 files so I think offering both is the way to go.

OGG is a much better choice. Higher quality and smaller filesize, plus you will usually see support as there are no legal issues with using it. That is probably why there is no support in that case. My Deluxe Pacman 2 game uses OGG files for sound effects and music. EVen at the lowest quality settings for OGG, I find there is very little perceptible difference in quality, but a huge difference in file size.

Audacity is nice for converting (and editing of course) and FREAC is also very nice for converting.

I was leaning more towards Emscripten for Neil since he prefers C. To be fair, I think that JavaScript could be much more productive once you get over the learning curve, but it's still a neat concept to write C and compile that to something that will run in the browser. That said, I've tried now on two Linux boxes to install it and failed both times. I'm not sure how well maintained it is. If there are Windows binaries I imagine those will just work. The project definitely needs to improve its Linux support.

I set my paging to 100 for these threads.