deKay’s Blog

Play Asia started selling these recently. They look like a Megadrive variant of the many Famicom “famiclones” out there, but they’re not - they’re officially licenced by Sega! And they’re really cheap too, coming in at under £20. You get 20 games built into the unit, but it also has a cartridge slot to play original (and forthcoming re-released) cartridges. I tested it with quite a few games of varying geographic origin, and aside from the UK version of Street Fighter II SCE crashing, I didn’t have any problems.

Anyway, if you want one, get thee over to Play Asia. They even come in green and blue!

This is Dunny and Woody (wot who rite Spectrum emulators and stuff) at ORSAM a few years ago. It was a Sinclair-based retro geek show. I, uh, went for the food.

It would seem that the Wii Homebrew “scene” has now matured to the point where not only are fully working games, apps and emulators now available, but there’s a modchip-free way of installing them. You stick a hacked Zelda save game on your Wii, load the game, and it crashes allowing some code to run. This installs the amazing “Homebrew Channel” on your Wii.

There are loads of things you can do with it, but, as is my “thing”, the most obvious was to get a Spectrum emulator up and running. FUSE, the emulator I tend to use on my Mac, has a Wii port. So I installed it… Read the rest of this entry »

OK, so I’m having a Geek Day today. Sorry about that. But “Siggi”, from the newsgroup comp.sys.sinclair has done something quite amazing. Whilst the rest of us on the group have often giggled about the possibility of creating a webserver that runs on a Sinclair Spectrum, this guy has gone one better - by creating one for the ZX81.

Amazing. Assuming the thing is still running (and Siggi says it could go down at any time), you can see it in action here. You can also find the original c.s.s. announcement here.

Amazing. You can now play the classic text adventure (or “interactive fiction” as they seem to be called these days) game version of Douglas Adams’ book via an instant messenger client. It uses the Jabber network, but Google Talk is compatible so if you have that (or even just the Google homepage gadget, as shown below) you can play!

Just send a message to “prakbot [at] jabber.org”, and once connected, type !startgame to, uh, well, you can guess.

See here for more information.

Remember dongles? They’re devices that often came with (usually expensive) software. You plugged them into a port on your computer, and the software wouldn’t run without them. It was a stone age anti-piracy device, basically.

Well, lookee what arrived this morning:

That’s right. It’s a dongle! A USB dongle, in fact. Ah, the memories. The hideous memories. Memories of software not recognising you have a dongle plugged in and calling you a pirate. Memories of losing the dongle and being unable to run the software you’ve paid far too much money for. What fun.

So this dongle comes as part of a bit of embroidery design software called DigitiserPro. Sorry DigitizerPro, with a zed. It’s made by a company called Janome, who also make the USB-enabled sewing machine (yes, such a thing exists) it came with.

Now, here’s a problem. We have permission to install this software on all our PCs in the textiles room. Sadly, the dongle says no, since we have but one dongle. I have to ask, however, why does it have a dongle? The only use for the software is to use it with the sewing machine, or to design things on another computer, which are then transferred to the computer the sewing machine. So the sewing machine itself is acting as the copy protection, surely?

And there’s more! The software is awful. And I haven’t even managed to use it yet! The installer froze my machine. Once installed, it rebooted my PC (which is a Big Ol’ Pile Of Badness), and then took an age to load once that was done.

Now I don’t have a particularly slow machine. I’ve got an Athlon64 3200+, with a gig of RAM. Way in excess of the 800MHz PIII/128MB combo recommended. And yes, it does warn you on the splash screen (above) that it may take a while… but ten minutes? It wasn’t a one-off either - I know some programs take a bit longer on first run, but this was the same the second and third time.

And then there was more good news! I minimised the program, and my computer froze. Even to the point where the mouse wouldn’t move, and keypresses made the PC speaker beep. After a few minutes, I regained very, very slow control of Windows, and the Task Manager eventually opened to show DigitizerPro taking up 700-odd MB of my precious, precious RAM and a solid 99% of the CPU cycles.

I’m overjoyed to be in possession of this program. No, I really am.

Lookie what just arrived for me! It’s a “PlayPal” handheld console, officially licenced by Sega and includes 20-odd Game Gear titles.

Not only that, but you can also connect it up to a TV and play them on that!

Update: If you want to buy your own, Play Asia have them in stock for a little over £15.

25 years ago this week, a man named Clive Sinclair unleashed the future into an unsuspecting world. That is, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was released.

The details of the machine and its history have been reported all over the internet already today, so I won’t bother duplicating any of that here. I should, however, point out how much the Spectrum changed my own life.

As MJ Hibbett and The Validators so musically sang, my parents bought me a 48K Spectrum+ in 1984 to “help with my homework”. Of course, I did have a few edutainment titles, and yes, I did use it as a giant expensive calculator on more than one occasion, but once I’d loaded Thru’ The Wall and Maze Chase that came on the guide tape, it was clear that the Spectrum was for gaming.

From little acorns, naturally, grow giant oaks, and here I am now - somewhat addicted to gaming. Tch, eh?

Happy birthday, Speccy!

No, I didn’t sneeze. According to “resident” of #spin (a super top-secret geeky IRC channel, for super top-secret geeks, and me) Tom-Cat:

Galaksija is a Z80 based computer built in ex-Yugoslavia during the best computer years (80’s ).

I have no idea what it is. At all. Anyway, Mr Cat (I’m not really on first name terms with him) has written a Galaksija emulator. For the Spectrum. As you do. I downloaded it, read the Readme (which didn’t really throw much light on, well, anything really), and fired up SPIN, my Spectrum emulator of choice.

Loading the Galaksija emulator gives you a black screen with a command prompt. Having absolutely no clue as to what to do with it, I did exactly what all kids-of-the-80s would do in John Menzies or Tandy. I did this:

OK, so I’m not a fan of the C64 (Spectrums FTW and all that), but this looks most ace. Jason Winters has taken one of them C64-in-a-controller things, added a mini keyboard from a PDA and a screen from a PSone, and bolted them all together to make a mini C64 compatible laptop, complete with joystick port and SD card slot for loading software.

Jason Winters’ Pico-Projects: The Picodore 64 - a Commodore 64 PDA