Tag: retro

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy via IM

  / Leave a comment

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 …

Back to the 80s: Dongle Power!

  / / Leave a comment

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 …

Super Micro Game Gear

  / Leave a comment

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.

Happy Birthday, Mr Spectrum!

  / Leave a comment

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+ …

Galaksija

  / / Leave a comment

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 …

Commodore 64 PDA

  Leave a comment

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

Resurrecting the Amiga

  / Leave a comment

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 …