The fine folks at gotoandplay.it recently interviewed Darron and me about FC64 – what it’s about, how we did it, and what our plans are. Go check it out!

Darron already blogged it: FC64 won Flashforward Film Festival in the Technical Merit category. Ohhh yeah!

I promised i show you the FC64 trailer that was shown at the ceremony, so here it is:

http://codeazur.com.br/stuff/fc64_final/flashforward/

(takes a while to load, i didn’t bother writing a preloader)

The fun part of it is that the trailer is written in 6502 assembly and executed by FC64. Even more fun: FC64 loads the assembly sourcecode at runtime, compiles and executes it. The scrolling arrows are actually lots of custom 8×8 pixel characters, animated by the C64 graphic chips smooth scrolling feature. I used raster interrupts to switch scrolling off in the middle part where the text appears (we don’t want that to scroll).

Ok, i also cheated a bit. Credits go to Andre Michelle: i ripped the Super Mario mod off his fantastic mod player. SID emulation in FC64 is being experimented with at the moment by Martin Wood and Ralph Hauwert, but we don’t have anything stable to show yet. Be patient :)

Did you ever write an image gallery or a game in Flash? Did it bother you to write rather complicated load queues to load lots of small files such as image thumbnails or game assets like tiles? Are you working with big text files and need a reliable way to compress/uncompress them to save valuable bandwidth?

I’m proud to announce FZip, a cute little Actionscript 3 class i’ve been working on together with Max Herkender that enables you to load standard ZIP archives and extract contained files while the archive is still loading.

FZip is released under OSI approved zlib/libpng license.

Sample usage:

public function YourApp() {
   var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest("your.zip");
   var zip:FZip = new FZip();
   zip.addEventListener(FZipEvent.FILE_LOADED, fileCompleteHandler);
   zip.load(request);
}

private function fileCompleteHandler(evt:FZipEvent):void {
   var file:FZipFile = evt.file;
   trace("File loaded: " + file.filename)
   trace("  " + file.sizeCompressed);
   trace("  " + file.sizeUncompressed);
}

Check it out: FZip at côdeazur brasil lab