Skulltag, it's Doom... but with real networking

During my time at school, before overclocking Celerons and wasting my life on the Internet became the “in” thing, I used to spend quite a lot of time playing Doom. It was, in fact the reason I spent 30 quid on a 10Base2 network card, length of coax cable and learnt all about this stuff called “IPX Networking“.

Me and a friend used to take it in turns to drag our entire PC setup – featuring ‘massive’ 15″ monitors and Cirrus Logic VLB graphics cards – around to the other’s house. Since neither of us could drive, this required a willing parent. And then we’d spend all night playing Doom, followed by Doom 2 when it came out. There was even one night where we clocked the frag counter, just to see what’d happen (it loops back round to zero).

All of that was back in 1994, and over the following years Doom has come out on pretty much everything from your toaster to digital camera. Well, maybe not the toaster, but I bet someone somewhere has tried, probably using an Arduino and Twitter account. I must have bought this damn game more times over the years than anything. (more…)

As reported on the official Llamasoft Blog;

SPACE GIRAFFE now available on major PC gaming portals!

We are happy to announce that the very excellent PC game “Space Giraffe” is now available through the STEAM and DIRECT2DRIVE gaming portals.

With the exception of Doom, Space Giraffe must be the only game I’ve bought more than once. I own the XBox 360 version and also the PC version. For those of you who found the XBox 360 version too colourful and insane, the PC version contains a more mellow setting, over 100 levels and some enhancements over the XBox 360 version.

So if you own the Xbox 360 version, this isn’t just the same thing for the PC. More levels, more fun, more videogame marmite Will you like it or will you hate it? Which side of the fence will it push you onto? Who knows, spend the £14 to find out; I bet you spend more than that on a night out.

You can find the game on Direct2Drive here:

http://www.direct2drive.com/481/7555/product/Buy-Space-Giraffe-Download

You can find it on Steam here:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/27800/

And for the sake of completeness, here’s the XBox 360 version:

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/s/spacegiraffexboxlivearcade/details.page/

And of course you can find it on the Llamasoft website right here.

4D Sports Driving running in DOSBox under MacOS X

I was never one to play racing simulations, the desire to go around and around and around a track like some car-driving robot never appealed to me. I always wanted to go the wrong way and cause mayhem instead.

Once upon a time I discovered the game 4D Sports Driving, and the cutting edge 3D graphics were enough to have me installing it. It didn’t matter that I was crap at driving, this game seemed to just involve driving around cool 3D scenery, jumping the occasional bridge or crashing into concrete blocks.

Then I found the track editor and entire weekends would vanish with me and a friend constructing ever more impossible tracks to play on.

Thanks to the magic of DOSBox, and a website that has 4D Sports Driving for download, I can play it again Once again I can marvel at the cutting edge 3D graphics which seem to make the draw-distance in GTA III look good

My god, what a haul of goodies we managed today! It was like someone knew we were going and got out the goodies ready for us. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to have a second XBox running XBMC in my bedroom, but never thought it worth the £40-odd for a second hand XBox.

Well… how does £10 grab you? No? Well after taking advantage of our technical knowledge and bamboozling the seller we got it for £8. People’s brains fuse if you start prodding their stuff and saying “ahh the labels are intact, it’s not been opened. This one would be ideal”. It also helps if you have a female counterpart

The XBox even works. I’ve had to order a video cable from eBay, and a Modchip is now in the post too. Looks like I’ll be spending a fun hour with my soldering iron again soon. I get to go cross-eyed soldering SMD components again.

I also bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for 20 quid, including two controllers and a light gun. The light gun won’t work on my TV, but this is OK since the NES itself doesn’t seem to work either. It flashes the power light at me. Yes, this means the cart isn’t connecting properly and I need to repair the contacts. I’ve added that to my list. I’ll swap the cartridge slot from a working NES just to make sure the main circuit board isn’t faulty though.

I then bought a couple of books (a Red Dwarf book and a William Gibson), a cheeseburger and managed to block the toilets. Amy bought several of those TV games units that contain an FPGA emulation of an old console and its ROMs. She’s got a Sega Megadrive one that has Sonic the Hedgehog, Columns and other games, and a bizarre Tetris game.

We very nearly bought an Amstrad PCW1512 word processor, but having no money and no desire to carry it across the field stopped us. We also successfully resisted buying another Sega Megadrive, but David did buy a Sega Saturn. There were also many Gameboys for sale and those amusingly illegal “52-in-1″ games carts.

We will return another day looking for games and junk. I think I’ll have to start looking for a bigger house too

Programming other people’s systems is hard. Programming your own apps is easy, you just make them do what you want. The only hard bit is stopping when they’re finished, or continuing when it gets slightly tedious.

I don’t like tedious coding. I’d rather go away and code a code generator, or use Excel and search-and-replace, or anything that’ll solve the problem with the least amount of effort. I’ve got SQL stored procedures that generate C# code from other SQL stored procedures.

I’ve got that urge to write some simple retro-styled games again. I keep getting this idea every so often, but then give up when it comes down to actually writing them. I either can’t decide what to do, or get bored hand crafting yet another sprite library and doing my own implementation of collision detection.

Fortunately them I’ve found three things that’ll make my life easier. LWJGL is the Lightweight Java Gaming Library, which is quite nice. Built on top of this is the Slick 2D game library that removes some of the tedium of moving sprites and handling their collisions. Then, to make it even simpler I found something called SlickSet which is a 2D game engine. It’s got premade collision detection, “actors” and ways of managing lists of things.

It comes with nothing but the Javadoc for documentation, but the examples are fairly simple to follow. I intend on working out my own little sets of documentation, then sticking them up here at some point.

I bought the most excellent Orange Box for my 360 the other day. When Half Life 2 came out I was in the middle of the Lake District with a laptop, so missed out on all the crowbar smacking fun. This box also includes the rather good Portal, a crazy game involving making wormhole-like portals through walls and floors, the aim being to escape each test chamber.

Look what came through my door today…

£20 off eBay.

Now, the important bit. I have no way of loading games into this thing since I lack a tape player. I don’t want to burn CDs of tape images either.

Is there any way I can somehow connect a CompactFlash card to the speccy and load Z80 snapshots into it? I’ve got a “Ram turbo” joystick interface which contains a little connector supposedly for ROM carts.

I can build stuff based on schematic diagrams. I think it’d be great if I could have a little ROM loader that fetches things off a CF card and puts them in the spectrum to play.

Any ideas?

A combination of my laptop, a Z80-TZX converter and then a TZX-wav converter has resulted in this…
The real hardware is way more picky about weird turboloaders than the emulators are.

SKREEEEEE! BIP!

I had a spontaneous eBay the other day. I decided that owning an original Gameboy would be a fun thing to do, so set about trolling eBay for a cheap one. I found one for a fiver but there were other bidders on it, but not to worry I thought I’d have some fun all the same

I put in a bid of £6 about 5 minutes before the end of the bid and waited. There then ensued a small bidding war with me gradually pushing the price up to £18, thinking “sod this” and backing down at the last minute. Oh well, I didn’t get that one, but I did get more money for the seller

Then I found one with a Buy It Now price of £3.99. It was a two-tone red/yellow Gameboy Pocket, and this morning it was forced through my letterbox by the postman, and it plays Tetris and Mario just like Nintendo intended. It’ll do for random gaming on the bog.

Yes, I have a DS and I have Tetris DS, but the thing is, original Tetris is the best version and can’t be beaten. Tetris DS has differences that make it a slightly different experience, requiring different tactics. GB Tetris is just a manic “slot the pieces together quickly until you can’t keep up” game.

Got an appointment to go and look at a new house tomorrow. 3 bedroom semi with garden and usual housey stuff. Hope it’s good, can’t be bothered spending weeks finding somewhere to live, it’s quite tedious.

Yeah, I know it was almost a week ago but I was busy. Here’s a rather good video of what it’s like; just ignore the goon at the end who stands in front of the camera

Hmm, it seems I can’t work out how to embed YouTube videos into Wordpress. The link below should work though.
Wii Bowling

Lost

It’s a bit like the GMail invite system.

Oh, don’t forget the clocks go forwards tonight if you live in the UK.