Over the Christmas of 2022 I downloaded Fabien Sanglard's Book of CP-System. "This is really cool", I thought as I devoured it from cover to cover, "I would really enjoy a book like this that covered the workings of a Commodore 64 game such as Iridis Alpha. It would dive into the way the graphics work, the coding techniques used to make the game so fast, and really just pull the whole thing apart and explain it in gory detail."

Inspired by this idea and the really quite lovely layout Fabien has managed in all of his books I soon became convinced I could write this Iridis Alpha bible. All I had to do was use Fabien's code as a basis and dust off my insanely detailed disassembly of Iridis Alpha from the previous year. (Yes, that's right - I completely disassembled the Iridis Alpha binary over a period of many months and by now had a good handle on most of how the game actually worked.)

Four or five months later the result is Iridis Alpha Theory, a comprehensive anatomy of an old 8-bit game that has been a source of fascination to me since childhood. Is it finished? Not really. I suspect I will always come back to it to add bits here and there and take others away. Is it what I hoped it would be? It's exactly the book I had in my head when I started out. That doesn't mean it's a great book of course, but it's exactly what I pictured.

There is no theory of course. It's just a fun title with a totally nonsensical inspiration:

The book itself is full of pictures and diagrams and code listings. I've tried in most places to explain to the uninitiated-but-interested how the code works and what it is doing, sometimes even down to elucidating the bitwise operations that 6502 assembly language is inevitably full of. Deep down I know I have more to do to make those explanations land properly. Hopefully over time and with the occasional re-reading I'll find ways of making them better.

There are pages and pages of this!

I think I might have caught the Latex bug. It's really quite enjoyable putting together a book with it. Your stupid squibs suddenly seem very important when laid out properly. The write-compile cycle is familiar to me as a coder and I guess I'm persistent enough to power through reams of inscrutable errors. And, oh boy, does Latex like inscrutable error messages. I'm talking to you 'Error:Horizontal HBox Badness 3000'. But if you can get past that, there's a Latex solution for every diagram and table layout you can think of wanting. It's a wonderful tool.

I'm already working on a crazy followup.