Month: September 2009

I missed the Jets game ! There was one hell of a good game on between England and South Africa at the same time and it had 110% of my attention.

I wasn't even fidgeting to not look at the telly while it was on … that's how exciting it was 🙂

good job cutie 🙂

what I love the most is how honest and genuine you are

Meme time 🙂 Or should that be Me Me Meme ?

I’ve been stealing ideas again, this time it’s from my neighbour Cyberkitten. He hasn’t got round to doing his yet though. Right – this one could be a long one, here goes 🙂

A for Allrounder. For the cricket, I’d be able to do everything 🙂 I’d have seasons where I’d open the batting and seasons where I’d be a main bowler, although it always seemed like I’d be good at one and not the other. I could bowl spin as well as swing and seam. For the indoor side, I was most effective keeping wicket. And as long as I stayed reasonably close (and was awake!), I could terrify batsmen with sharp fielding.

B for BBC B. I’ve always been a computer person and it was Acorn’s BBC B Microcomputer which started it all off when I was 5. Learned a lot from this special machine.

C for Cricket. Although I don’t play any more (mebbe next year ?) the cricket still dominates. Hoping that England continue their amazing form (amazing cos it’s a surprise ?) in the ICC Champions Trophy.

D for Dwagons. I like Dragons, of the various mythical beasts out there, these are the most majestic. You don’t mess with dragons. That’s dragons with an R though, Dwagons with a W is for my avatars. I’ve been using Pocket Dragon (link) avatars for quite a few years now. Big shame they’re not still being made.

E for Evil Overlord. Much of my misspent youth was spent going for strategy games. Lots of mental exercise in subjugating those poor defenceless Bit Creatures. I tended to be a bit more Builder though than Evil Overlord.

F for Fragile. I have to admit, I’m rather fragile. I carry various long term disabling injuries from my ankles all the way up to my neck with sore shins, bad knees, groin trouble, back trouble and shoulder trouble in between. Some days are better than others.

G for Gamer Geek. Definitely a Gamer, definitely a Geek 🙂 I take things apart with my eyes without touching them, I can usually figure out how they work before resorting to invasive methods (translation, without taking them apart). Definite engineer (also see N below). I also get quite a bit of fun out of the weekly gaming sessions 🙂

H for Hunter. As my Facebook page says, “Incorrigible Hunter of pizzas, teacakes and muffins.”

I for Injuries. I’m usually carrying at least 2 and there’s usually another that’s waiting in the dark looking to jump out and surprise me.

J for Jokes. Always on the lookout for jokes and for trying to make people laugh, although my humour is more reactive than scripted.

K for Kind. I think I am. I’m not overly generous but I like to help people out where I can.

L for Lonely. No relationship for a while, Facebook helps keep me sane as well as the occasional dabbling in online games. I know some amazing people too, like the Snow Queen, The Boss, Ms Sunshine and the Crazies. But I do miss being able to share things with another person.

M for Music. I suspect that a music addiction has replaced my gaming addiction … When I’m not watching telly I’m almost certainly listening to music 🙂 All sorts, from Enya to Iron Maiden with a lot of pop in there too. Lene Marlin coming up on the iTunes shuffle.

N for Nutter. Note of Warning : Keep Sleepypete away from caffeine. I’ll usually go for the unorthodox solution where I can, purely because the unorthodox is more interesting.

O for Omnivore. I’ll eat anything, although I prefer simple, traditional and doesn’t run away when you chase it with a fork (like Spaghetti).

P for PIZZA !!!!!! (see H)

Q for Quiet. I’ll usually go by a Yorkshire motto : “See all, Hear all, Say nowt.” Quiet people can pick up all sorts of gossip, although my quietness is usually down to struggling to turn rapid thoughts into slower speech.

R for Round. Hey ! Round is a shape too. Perhaps not as good a shape for a person as one more chiselled but it’ll do for me for now.

S for Sweet. This one’s from our Snow Queen 🙂 Usually after I’ve said something related to K above, although it’s rare that my words form an adequate description.

T for Toys. I don’t go out of my way to get all of the latest toys but I definitely appreciate a well crafted toy. That’d be toys in terms of gadgets that fit their function without too much fanfare and without too much awkwardness. Most important with that “awkwardness” bit, as however fancy a toy is, if it’s nasty to use it gets put to one side.

U for Unrelenting. (See Evil Overlord). Could also be used to describe what I can be like when I’m going at a task. Especially a task I’m not too interested in doing so that I can get it out the way quicker.

V for Vampire. When I broke my nose playing cricket, a few weeks later I had an operation to have it straightened so I could breathe better. A side effect of the operation was Vampiric Eyes 🙂 Literally blood red eyes that lasted for a few weeks. You can probably imagine how much fun I had with this, especially as a number of people on the project were rather squeamish 🙂 🙂 🙂

W for Warcraft. Took over my life for rather a long time this did. I think the addiction is fairly well kicked now, hopefully I’ll be able to resist getting the next expansion. I have to say there were a lot of good times with the bad but I’m glad I managed to escape a game that has a tendency to consume and twist those who get too deeply involved with it.

X for eXcitable. Ok, that’s cheating but I don’t play the Xylophone. I can quite happily go hyperactive, especially when there’s caffeine involved 🙂

Y for Young looking. One of my favourite games is Guess The Age. People always guess low 🙂 Will be playing this one again in 6 weeks when I bring in the cakes for my birthday.

Z for Zoom. Live fast, play fast. Run fast too. My bowling wasn’t the quickest but due to building up lots of leg muscles from a paper round, I can run Real Fast. For a short distance and then the coughing, spluttering and wheezing kick in.

So there we have the A to Z 🙂

Yep – I’ve got bored with the new games again and gone back to a few golden oldies 🙂

The three classics are : Freelancer, Master of Orion 2 (no3 was appalling) and Master of Magic. Freelancer is one of the various spiritual successors to the genre creating Elite. Master of Orion 2 (Moo2) is Civ in space, while Master of Magic (MoM) is Civ again but set in 2 worlds with a huge injection of magic. It also gives Civ a tactical layer to join the strategic layer. Civ 4’s a decent game but MoM will be a long time classic due to the magic and the tactical battles.

Freelancer’s fairly recent and Moo2 just got released when Windows 95 came around … Yep – this is RETRO Zone 🙂 MoM on the other hand needs special treatment. It’s a DOS only game (remember those ? so last century) but one of the hardest programs to accommodate on machines of its day. The key problem is memory – it needs 576kbytes of Conventional Ram and 2.7Mb of Expanded Memory. It’s extremely tough to manage that on anything but an ancient DOS machine.

At least, not without additional software help …

What’s the secret ? A little application called Dosbox is the key. It’s a program that creates a computer within a computer. You run it on your Windows desktop and you have a virtual Retro style PC that should handle what you want to throw at it. Magic 🙂 Here’s a link to the home of Dosbox. It pretends to be an old machine, running Dos while emulating the sound and graphics of the day.

That’s not really what I wanted to talk about though today … Elite hit the news this week because it’s just turned 25 years old as a game. It was huge in its day, it did things with the BBC Microcomputer that should really have been impossible. The program itself was less than 22kbytes, the last email I sent was 15kbytes. There’s more memory in the cache of my desktop PC than there was in the whole of the BBC Micro.

I smell an attack of Numbers ?

Elite – 22kbytes.
BBC Micro – 64kbytes on board
Modern Desktop CPU (Athlon X2-3800+) – 64kbytes of Data and Code cache. And there’s two of these … And that’s just the bit on the processor that makes it go fast.
Speed of a BBC Micro 6502 processor – 1MHz
Variance in speed of desktop cpu – well, it’s been hunting between 2001 and 2006MHz.

How about this Master of Magic game ?
Needs 574kB Conventional Ram, 2.7MB Expanded
(problem is getting all the Convention Ram, plus getting Expanded at all in XP)
I had that running originally on a machine with 408MB hard disc hooked up to a 80486 processor going at 66MHz, with 4MB of system memory to play with. Oh, it was a DX too, which meant it had a maths coprocessor. Can’t remember what graphics it had, probably just a 1MB “I can make lines and circles” thing.

My current desktop has on its processor : 4x 64kB Data & Code cache, another 2x 512kB cache. That’s a total of 1.25MB just to make it work properly. The hard discs have around 8MB cache each, or double what was available to the whole machine for the 15 year old box.

The desktop’s memory runs at 200MHz, or 3 times the speed of the 80486 processor. That 200MHz is then multiplied by 10 to get the chip speed. And the ante from the maths coprocessor is well and truly upped by there being two full processors on the chip.

HUGE boost in numbers already. And that’s before you realise that there is more memory for just the graphics board (512MB) than there was on that 15 year old hard disc …

Processor – 66MHz up to 2000MHz
Memory – 4MB system to 2GB system
Hard disc – 408MB to 74+250GB
(the Windows folder footprint on my desktop would take 15 of those 408MB drives …)
Graphics – “I can draw lines” to photo realistic 3d environment

Things have moved on a lot in the past 15 years of me owning PCs. They’re a lot more capable now, although the software has bloated to make them just as responsive (“far less responsive” is more the term when we grapple with work’s PCs). The games takes advantage of the new hardware but …

I’m still playing 15 year old games ! Has nothing significantly better come out in the past few years ? There’s some good (looking forward to Dragon Age), some appalling but there’s no substitute for the excellence in design and simplicity that we used to see in our games.

Long live Moo2, Long live MoM 🙂
And a very big thank you to the open source developers of DosBox for making it possible for us to still enjoy these old classics.

PS It could be much worse for the Retro machine … My laptop beats my 3 year old desktop on everything except hard disc and graphics 🙂

P.S. My email is danyelle6974"at"gmail"dot"com if you do wanna help me out.

Thanks for the reply!

No I emailed them already and got no response.

Been after this for ages. Left comments and requests on various forums/fanpages and you are the only guy who has the disc who has replied!

Is there any chance I can get a copy from you? I'm in the UK and would cover postage. It's not that I don't want to buy it, I'd send the £15 off if I thought they were still selling them. 🙁

It's just for my own listening. I'm no scammer or anything. Used to be an AA fan back when I was a teenager (bought all their albums back then) and picked up my interest in them again last year but I can't find this disc on amazon, ebay or any cd seller at all. 🙁

Hi Danyelle 🙂

I got my copy from Ebay but it looks like Pam Poole isn't selling it there at the moment :-(. However …

Try :
http://www.inspiracy.com/alisha/fanclub/vaults.html
(if that doesn't come up as a link – search Google for "alisha's attic vault" – no1 result)

That site looks a bit old though, so it might be worth giving the Contact Us email a try before sending the £15/£16 to the postal address …

Hey there, Found your blog as I was loking for infor on AA. Do you have Alisha's Attics Vaults as I am a massive fan but can't get hold of a copy. Help?!

Hmm. For it to be speed bumps kinda suggests I'm going over them too fast 🙁

Rain – England just avoided losing a series 7-0 to Australia by winning the final match. Just thought – that means we've had 7 rain free days to get all the games in 🙂

Yey for the new car 🙂 Hope it keeps you rolling for a while 🙂

that's the ticket, blame the speed bumps 😉

I always blame the rain
something must be wet somewhere

I did finally need to get a new(er) car – 2006 for a 1995
moving on up 😉