Category Archives: Games

Nostalgia++

Over on my personal blog I’ve posted about visiting the ACMI “Hits of the 80s” video game exhibit. Well worth a look for any nostalgic geeks in, or passing through, Melbourne.

It’s great to see ACMI’s Games Lab giving computer games some recognition for the important cultural impact they’ve had. While we may never again see something like Space Invaders causing a shortage of coins in Japan, or pop songs written about Pacman, games are a huge industry, and a big influence over popular culture.

PS3 in PAL territories

Sony’s PS3 will be available from March 23rd in PAL territories such as Australia and Europe. The Age reports it’ll retail for A$999 in Australia, and it’ll be the 60Gb hard drive version — the cheaper version won’t be sold. The BBC notes Europeans will also get the more expensive model.

Now, how many people are umming and erring because they want a PS3, but are still officially boycotting Sony because of the rootkit debacle?

Train Simulator 2 arriving soon

For all the geek train nuts out there, it’s been confirmed that Microsoft is working on a second version of Train Simulator. The lead developer, Rick Selby has surfaced with a blog so people can track progress. (I wonder if he knows there’s a Puffing Billy station named after him?) In fact, the official site links to numerous developers’ blogs.

I’ve played both Train Simulator and its main opposition, Trainz… to my mind, Trainz is probably better, and they’ve kept working on their product over the past few years, as TS has been somewhat neglected (and I haven’t had it installed in quite some time partially because it won’t run without Admin privileges).

Games, games, games!

Version 1.0 (eg the non-beta) of Microsoft’s XNA is out (note, it’s another new MS release that is not supported on Vista) — Ars Technica has an interesting article about it, which ponders the homebrew development it might spawn. No, I don’t really want to do Quest for Windows, though I fully intend to give it a try, if I find the time to learn a little C#.

I like this idea: a handheld Linux-based game machine called the GP2X. It plays media, runs MAME, SNES, Megadrive etc emulation and includes an SDK that makes it sound ripe for development of new games. They’re looking for distributors.

Got a spare Xbox controller? Grab a USB adapter off ebay (search for XBox USB, or build it yourself), grab the drivers and use it on your PC. (Doesn’t mean it’ll be any good for Joust on MAME though, with its frenetic flapping).

Oh, for Lego Mindstorms people (and those hoping to design robots to take over the world), Microsoft has released its first Robotics software, compatible with a number of different vendors’ hardware.

Take today’s kids and sit them down in front of some of the classic games of yesteryear. Note their reactions.
First article / Followup article. Obviously it’s just the funny bits, but MY kids don’t react like that. They’ve both got a healthy interest in old games. (Gee, wonder where they got that from.)

Classic videogame ringtones

I’ve switched my ringtone. I wanted something distinctive but not crass and loud. I ended up deciding on the intro theme from Galaga. The text alert tone is the sound from Galaga when you put a coin in.

And it turns out it’s quite easy to do — provided your phone is newer than Josh’s and supports music files (eg MP3, WAV or AAC)… which most from the last couple of years do.

If you run Mame32, it’s got an option to record the sound as you play the game (on the File menu). This saves to a WAV file. Load it up into Sound Recorder and snip away (using Edit / Delete before or after current position). Some other MAME variants may have this feature too.

Some phones will support WAV, but if not (or you want to minimise the file size), convert to MP3 or your preferred format using Bladeenc or any other encoder. Transfer it onto the phone using a cable or IR link, then customise the ringtone and alert sound (on my Nokia it’s via Profile / General / Personalise). Easy!

If you know me in person, please find something else to use, so I know it’s mine going off when I hear it 🙂

Some other classic video game sounds that spring to mind as suitable are the Pacman theme (and dying sound for alerts) and Donkey Kong’s “How high can you jump?” theme (with the jumping barrel sound for the alert).

Nostalgia++

Could this prune iPod’s market share with the power of Nostalgia? Commodore (yes, that Commodore) announces a portable media player. Gawd knows why it’s called “Gravel In Pocket” though. They’re also readying a home media product.

Oh, there’s speculation new iPods aren’t far away.

Meanwhile this guy has built a USB keyboard out of an old Commodore 64.

This is a fun read: Halcyon Days: Interviews with classic games programmers.

Let the games begin

Given my ancient history in dabbling with games development, I’m looking forward to this: XNA Game Studio Express is a Visual C#-based game development environment, which will be free for use on (and for) Windows. To write for XBox-360 it’ll cost you US$99 per year, with professionally-priced versions as well. The beta will be out on August 30th.

I’m hoping it’ll be easy enough for my kids to use too… or, well, at least easy enough for the one who is really interested in computers to try out some programming. And (given time, which admittedly I’m not overburdened with) it might be fun to muck about with.

Who knows, it might lead to a new age of home-grown computer games of the type we saw back in the 1980s, before computers got so hard to program. (Whether any of them will be any good is a fair question.)

Brief stuff

It’s a bit quiet here this week, probably because I’m busy and Josh is away offline somewhere in Gippsland.

Google have announced the Anita Borg scholarship programme is now running in Australia, offering A$5000 scholarships to women studying at undergraduate or postgraduate level in computer science in Australia.

One of the oldest games software houses in the world, let alone Australia, Melbourne House is in trouble, and likely to be sold/offloaded by Atari in the near future.

Another example of where being geek luddite is good: Dans Data on why the latest and greatest X mega-pixel cameras aren’t good value for money. I’m sticking with my 3.1MP Canon A70, thanks — for web and domestic use, it’s great.

Nothing lasts forever. This page logs the deaths of free email services: Free email DeathWatch.

Where did my Security tab go?

Directory securityI’m thoroughly used to the security options on resources (files, directories) that has been around in Windows (XP, 2000, NT) for years.

So it completely threw me when it vanished from the new XP SP2 installation I set up on the secondary PC. I was trying to get Midtown Madness 2 working for non-Admin users, and couldn’t find anywhere a way of making its directory writable to everybody.

The Security properties would only show me some dumb-arse sharing options that related only to sharing across the network. I didn’t want to do that.

“Put the directory in the Shared Folders!” said the help. Uhh yeah, like that’s gonna happen. It’s in smegging C:\Program Files.

I checked the drive format. NTFS; should be fine. I checked it against my other PC, which was showing the security tab for every file system object. Why was this not appearing?

With Jeremy keen to play the game, but me not keen to let him loose on an Admin account (even for a few minutes; it’s not a habit we should be encouraging), I searched MS support. Nothing. I Googled.

Finally I found it… some obscure yet useless setting called “Simple sharing” was turned on. Default if you are in a workgroup, apparently.

Simple sharing is so useless it must be designed for Simpletons. And I can’t understand why the Windows Help and the MS support web site were unable to give me the solution — (at least, until I knew the magic words Simple sharing).

Bloody Microsoft.