Category Archives: Games

Console BF3, now with servers to rent!

Yay, they bring the one thing I didn’t like about playing PC Battlefield games to the consoles. I could not care less about what server I play. I just want to squad up with my friends and play a game.

Now, let me play with a keyboard and mouse and I’ll be happy. I’ve had enough of using a crappy controller. Ironically enough, in the PC world apparently most servers have hackers so all platforms have their downsides.

Back to Skyrim then. As I said on Twitter earlier, I feel like a tourist in that game finding new stuff all the time as I wander about.

Reddit PvE Rev 6 Minecraft Server

One of the great things about Minecraft is that you can pack a level into one nice compressed archive. r/Minecraft on Reddit have a number of servers (I think) and this is one of them. You can download that world from here, it’s pveRev6.tar.gz but there are lots of other worlds there to check out too.

I had to fiddle around a bit to get creative mode working. I think I copied the region folder from the tarball into a creative world I created for this purpose. There was probably one or two other steps too but it’s been a while. Figuring out stuff in Minecraft is half the fun isn’t it anyway so go find out yourself 🙂

Happy birthday my rubber keyed friend!

Well, 2012 has turned out to be quite a year for retro computing. The Commodore 64 turned 30 this year, Jack Tramiel died, and the ZX Spectrum is 30 years old too!

I have fond memories of the original 48K ZX Spectrum. Even though it had a tiny rubber keyboard it suited my much younger and smaller hands. I do recall the “Symbol Shift” key got stuck a few times making it hard to type in BASIC code but I guess I opened up the machine and cleaned the keyboard membrane when that happened.

On the off chance you haven’t read it yet there’s a great article on the Sir Clive Sinclair’s machine in the first issue of Retro Gamer that came free with the 100th.

At the time many 8 bit machines used tapes to load their software. Disks were a rare luxury. The loading sounds became so engrained in our minds that even now they’re recognisable and someone created an iOS app that recreates them. (Thanks Conor!)


Or the real thing. It takes a while …

Edit: Conor noticed that google.co.uk has a new Google Doodle for the day that’s in it:

Prince of Persia: the Apple II source

It’s been a good few months for the 8 bit versions of Prince of Persia. Last October saw the release of a C64 version. Yesterday the original source code for the Apple II version was uploaded to github! Read about how Jason Scott recovered that source code from 20 year old disks (similar to what I did recently!)

The game was originally written in assembler so the source code was already out there. How? Machine code is the language a machine understands and assembler is a human representation of that machine code. For example, the machine code “A9 00 8D 20 D0” is actually this more readable assembler: (that inserts the value 0 into the memory location $D020)

LDA #00
STA $D020

The assembler code released yesterday goes one step further. It uses labels, variables and comments. See BOOT.S as a good example. Variables are defined at the top and labels are used throughout making it a lot easier to deal with moving and adding code around. Look for the text “skewtbl” where you’ll find a simple loop that reads in data from memory and inserts it into 2 registers.

:0 ldy sector
 lda skewtbl,y
 sta $3d
 lda sectaddr,y
 beq :1
 sta $27
:rdsect jsr $005c
:1 dec sector
 bne :0

 lda SLOT
 jmp $900

skewtbl hex 00,0d,0b,09,07,05,03,01
 hex 0e,0c,0a,08,06,04,02,0f

sectaddr hex 00,09,00,00,00,00,00,00
 hex 30,31,32,33,34,00,00,00

Jordan Mechner puts it more poetically:

Non-programming analogy: Video game source code is a bit like the sheet music to a piano sonata that’s already been performed and recorded. One might reasonably ask: If you have the recording, what do you need the sheet music for?
You don’t, if all you want is to listen and enjoy the music. But to a pianist performing the piece, or a composer who wants to study it or arrange it for different instruments, the original score is valuable.

Props to this Slashdot post for the extra links. Also worth a look is the development diary of the C64 version and there are videos showing how the game was made back in 1985!

Giants: Citizen Kabuto going cheap!

If you want a humorous FPS and have $2.99 to spare you can’t really get any better than Giants: Citizen Kabuto. It’s 50% off right now as part of an Interplay promotion at GOG.

It’s an old game, released back in the dawn of time (or the year 2000, whichever came first) but it holds up well. There’s very funny dialogue, the graphics were amazing for their time and still look great. Back then you’d be hard pressed to find a machine that could play it well but that’s not a problem with any sort of modern machine.

Go on, go on, go on. It’s lots of fun and I can’t recommend it enough.

I draw something


Ah, so I draw something along with another 34,999,999 people apparently. On the day that the game’s developer, OMGPOP was sold to Zynga.

It seems to be everywhere today. Ryan twittered about it and I downloaded it to see what it was all about, then a few games later I saw a few more people mention it, this time on Facebook. Feels like the rush when Google Plus launched. Hope it doesn’t fizzle out like, errr, Google Plus…

I wonder why it is that I manage to get 10 words in a row right with one opponent while I struggle to get 2-3 with everyone else? Luck of the draw I suppose.

Humbly going Android

The last Humble Bundle added support for Android games and the latest bundle does the same with even more games!

I already had a number of the games on pc and to be honest this bundle isn’t the strongest line up of games ever but I bought it for Swords and Soldiers as it’s a fun game. The others were a nice bonus for me.

Also released recently is their own app for managing downloads. It works well enough but downloads using your phone’s browser and uses the system installer in the same way that the Amazon Appstore does. Unfortunately apk files are left in your download directory after install so clear that out if you need the space.

While on that topic, go into Settings->Applications->Manage Applications and move some of those games to the SD card. Swords and Soldiers and Cogs were both around 150MB each!

Happy gaming!

The JXD A1000 Arrived!

Tweets have been flying around all day as people get their shiny new iPads but the postman delivered something I was looking forward to for a few weeks.

Yes, the JXD A1000 arrived this afternoon. I tried a few games and videos on it and it works quite well! The bundled 720p trailers were a bit jumpy but lower resolution DVD rips were fine.

The GBA games I tried, F-Zero and Rayman Origins (original carts in the attic) played perfectly and it’s a pleasure to play them on a decent screen! The original GBA screen is notoriously dark.

The screen is huge, the sound is loud, controls are great with even a small nipple joystick that works in GBA games.

Not many things to complain about except for the fiddly volume control and how to exit a game or save/load state (press the power button briefly to bring up a small menu).
The instruction manual is written in Chinese which is a bit of a pain too and it’s impossible to charge it from a USB port and play a game/video at the same time. I’m sure you can plug it into a wall socket and it’ll be fine though.

Battery will probably be a problem too as it’s built in. I’m sure I’ll end up taking the thing apart and searching for a replacement when it starts to wear down.

Also, the device includes a couple of games and pictures that I’m quite sure haven’t been licensed…

Still, a great way to play old GBA, NES and SNES in a handheld and cheap too. I was rudely reminded that games back then were a lot harder than games nowadays and my son briefly tried to touch the screen in attempt to use the GUI. No, this isn’t a touch screen device!
It’s on sale at Focalprice where I bought it. Shipping takes a while but it’s cheap and very cheerful.

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