Saturday, April 28, 2007
I've been spending quite a lot of time playing Test Drive Unlimited on my PSP.To be honest, if it weren't for the custom (hacked) firmwares from Dark_Alex, allowing me to play around with emulators and old PS1 games, I'd probably have pretty much abandoned the PSP by now. Something about the games for the Sony handheld just doesn't hit the spot... they're so... wooden.
Anyways... Test Drive Unlimited sorts that out quite effectively. The controls are still clunky, and the graphics... well... they lack detail compared with PS2, but the draw distance is excellent.
What works well though is the shear scope of the game. A whole Hawiian island to romp around on and behave like an idiot to your heart's content.
When you get bored with challenge races to win points, and money to buy new cars, you can just tear down whatever road you like, find some other human player, and either challenge them to a one on one race, or do like I and some others do... slam into them at full speed and then hoon around like a deranged gibbon on speed, just for the fun of it.
So, if you're a PSP owner, and you play Test Drive Unlimited online.... if you should find some maniac in a bright red Lambourghini Countach slamming into you, head on, at 200mph, check out their player name. Is it Benway68?
That'll be me then :D
Steve 7:12 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, April 19, 2007
This afternoon we took Max and Bailey out for a walk together. This is nothing too noteworthy in itself, except it's the first time we've let them off their leads.I was a little nervous... having visions of them both romping off across the fields and into the sunset.
I needen't have worried. They both stayed within a reasonable distance of us, and loved every moment.
While we were out, we wandered through a small piece of woodland, and me being me... took photos almost every step of the way.
Most of the pics came out fairly mediocre, but one in particular, after an ammount of tinkering, I'm really pleased with.
It looks better when viewed bigger.
Steve 12:38 AM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, April 15, 2007
I went for a wander down the road yesterday, as the photography bug had me firmly in its grasp again.At first glance, Worksop doesn't appear to have too many photogenic locations, but when you get a feel for the character of the place, it's surprising what you can come up with.
So... I went to the derelict Victorian pumping station, and these are just a couple of the better, though not best, shots I took.
The best have been submitted to Fotolia, so if they don't get accepted there, I'll put them on flickr too.
A quick walk along the canal just across the road seemed in order too.
Click the images to see larger versions of the photos.
Steve 10:45 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Having spent several days playing around with many of my newly retrieved from the loft consoles and computers, yesterday it was the turn of my Amiga 1200 tower system.Now there is a story behind this system, and it's quite a long one.
I originally bought the 1200 in 1993, and over the years, gradually expanded it, until its final configuration was was a tower based system with 68060 CPU, 32meg RAM, 5gig HD, CD re-writer, zorro II bus board, IOBlix comms card, Buddha and Catweasle card for HD and PC floppy compatibility.
You couldn't buy a machine like that in the shops, and compared to the Pentium based PCs that were around at the time, it was a real powerhouse.
I used the machine for graphics, music, word processing, games and the internet, on a daily basis, until 2000, when a catastrophic head crash killed the hard drive, and I discovered my OS backup CDs had been corrupted.
Having a pc sitting in the same room, I found I really couldn't be bothered to re-install the entire system from scratch, as with all the expansions involved, and messing around to make the CD drive work... it was just too much hassle. So it's just collected dust in the loft for the best part of 7 years.
So yesterday, I did what I couldn't be bothered to do 7 years ago, and reinstalled the entire Amiga OS 3.1, and grappled for many hours trying to figure out how to make the CD drive work.
The thing is, Amiga's of that time didn't have native CD support. When they were around, CD rom was still a very new technology, and so running one required additional drivers.
Now, finding the CD drivers wasn't the tricky bit.... what was hard was making the OS see the drive itself. The most common method of attaching a CD drive to an Amiga back then was to use a "SCSI Squirrel"... a pcmia card with a scsi interface. The 2nd most common method was to use an IDE interface. Naturally, I had to be flash and use the most powerful, and entirely uncommon method, and use a scsi interface that attached to my ultra expensive 68060 Blizzard accelerator card.
This was all well and good, back in the day, when I had the luxury of an instruction booklet. Do you think I still have the instructions today? I should coco.
After much googling, I didn't find the information I needed to get the job done, but I did see one or two snippets that jogged my memory.
What it came down to was installing the AmiCDFS CD file system... manually. The installer puts it onto your drive, but doesn't put the files in the places required. Thank god for readme's. Then I had to edit the CD mountfile. By default it thinks the CD drive is connected to "scsi.device"... in the case of my machine, I had to edit this to read "1230scsi.device".
Fingers crossed, one reboot, and it worked. Yay!
On the downside, it isn't just the scsi interface instructions that I'm missing. Turns out I no longer have the instructions to many of my games either. Now while that may not be catastrophic in terms of finding the game controls... it's a disaster when you consider that these instructions also contain the passwords used as copy protection by many of the games.
Bollocks!.
I guess when I get my finances sorted, I'll just buy the good ones again on ebay.
Fortunately though, I do have the manuals for two of my three absolute faves... Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix, and Knights Of The Sky.
Steve 5:27 AM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Just finished writing the article for the Nintendo Virtual Boy in my computers and consoles collection section.Labels: consoles
Steve 6:51 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, April 06, 2007
Some video footage of my computer and games console collection.Labels: computers, consoles, video
Steve 1:24 PM [+] (0) comments
Work on the laminate floor was completed a few days ago, and shelf units constructed and promptly filled with consoles and computers.
So, what was once a rather chaotic bedroom is now...
..."The Games Room".
Labels: computers, consoles, photos
Steve 6:11 AM [+] (0) comments
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