I got a parcel in the post today. I thought it was going to be some Xbox 360 game and faceplate I won in a competition a few weeks ago, as I wasn’t expecting anything else (besides my 360, of course, but that was coming via UPS not Royal Fail). Anyway, somehow, I managed to guess what it was simply by rattling it. And what was it? This! It was a slightly belated birthday present from my sister. Told you …
About 15 years ago: If you can’t guess, it’s a fuse tester. In the shape (almost) of a Sega Megadrive. It still works too – although I had to replace the battery today.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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+ …
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 …
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
Having fiddled around with WinUAE (an Amiga emulator for Windows) a little this week, I realised that I probably still had a load of stuff I’d like to have another look at, and maybe archive properly, on my old Amiga 1200. It’s been stuck up in the attic, unused for the last 6 or 7 years, and I wasn’t sure it was even going to work. The plan was to get the information off the hard drive using either a …