font resizing

Russell listed several css designs and css information pages this morning. This page encouraged me to resize my fonts here a bit. I modified the font family, and took them down 10% in size, which should please IE users somewhat. It still looks fine in Galeon and looks better in Mozilla now that I fixed the font-family. What do you think? Are the fonts still too large?

C64 emulator for the Nokia 7650 is out!

Yes, it’s out! You can finally run your C64 games and demos on your Nokia 7650 or Series 6/7 phone! Here’s the announcement from a few days ago! Unfortunately you have to send the games over in a text/email message, so I’ll have to boot into Windows to copy over my C64 demos. Finger’s crossed that it’ll work!
Hmm.. Must find Stunt Car Racer before I reboot…

Update! Here’s what I tried and my impressions.
I tried two of my demos (and the only ones I can still find on my PC, the rest are on 5.25 disks..), Bits ‘n’ Bobs, and Awareness of Reality.

  1. BnB was my first major demo and was a single-load/multi-part demo made way back in 1992. It ran fairly well! Each part decrunched and executed before going onto the next part. Multiplexed sprites worked flawlessly, although some raster bars flickered in the border. (It’s very hard to get an exact timing on this!)
  2. AOR didn’t work at all unfortunately. This could be because I was ambitious and used strange characters in my disk filenames. It uses a fastloader so it’s doubtful it would load subsequent parts. Even Vice had trouble with that at one stage a few years ago.
  3. Stunt Car Racer worked fairly well. I was even able to redefine the keys and made it around the first track. An ugly problem reared it’s head here though. It’s not possible to press 2 keys at the same time. When I pressed the joystick button down to boost, that worked, but when I pressed 4 or 6 to turn the boost shut itself off. I think that’s a failing of the 7650 though, as the same happens in Java games.
  4. Sound works fine for a while, but then slows down and becomes annoying. I had to turn the sound off when this happened.

As a final note, if you had told me 10 years ago that the demos I was working on would someday work on a handheld phone I’d have laughed at you!
This reminds me that I thought the same thing the first time I saw my demos running in an emulator on a PC – in a window while other applications ran in the background!
Thank you Hannu for doing a great job!

The Oily Americans

A story worth reading for the conspiricy theorists among you!

For more than a half-century, American foreign policy dealing with oil has typically been manipulative and misguided, often both at the same time. The pattern of intrigue has ranged from U.S. officials’ secretly writing tax laws in the 1950s (so the Saudi royal family could collect more money from the sale of its oil and American companies could write off the added payments on their tax returns) to overthrowing a government that showed too much independence in handling its oil sales.