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Saturday, April 14, 2012

A complete waste of time and CPU cycles for a Saturday

A couple of days ago, I started wondering how hard it would be to do the equivalent of sprites with today's systems. I'm talking about the old-school C-64 stuff where you handed it a pattern and coordinates and it just showed up. You didn't have to worry about figuring out how to draw it. The system did that for you.

I've never been much of a bitmapped graphics programmer, so I didn't have any real idea how to go about doing this. All of the fancy WhizBang graphics stuff of the past decade and a half is completely off my radar.

But then it occurred to me: what about just (ab)using CSS? Playing with jQuery in recent times while working on some of my projects showed me just how many attributes there are. There are also new and interesting amusements which can be exploited in the usual band of popular browsers. It's just a matter of plugging it all together.

And so, here is my Saturday afternoon complete waste of time: morbo.

Yes, that's morbo as in the news monster from Futurama.

It isn't exactly flying toasters, but you have to start somewhere.