Tag Archives: irishblogs

The demoscene comes to the Wii

Woohoo! Someone in the demoscene has cottoned on to the homebrew efforts on the Wii. ExistenzE is probably the first demo to appear on Nintendo’s Wii Console.

ExistenzE

It’s all thanks to the Twilight Hack which allows developers to run their own unofficial software on the Wii. Basically, the game “Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” has a bug in it and developers took advantage of that to load other software without Nintendo’s blessings. So far a lot of the software released has been technical or not very interesting to your average gamer, but Quake has been ported to the Wii, as has SDLMame (updated download) and other emulators.

I was excited at the prospect of playing Mame games on my Wii until I realised how much it relies on the host CPU. The Wii’s brain isn’t that fast a performer. I wonder how it would handle emulating an arcade machine and throwing sprites and stuff around the screen. Anyone tried SDLMame on it? (Apparently it uses Linux as a host OS to run SDLMame. That’s cool!)

Are ifoods.tv clueless Web 2.0 spammers?

ifoods.tv

Sorry ifoods.tv, just because you’ve been nominated for best Web 2.0 Start up in Europe is no reason to spam members of the Irish blogosphere.

They didn’t even do it very well, leaving Tom Raftery‘s email address in the To: field and attaching a Word .doc file with the text, “Please Find attached press release” in the body of the text. I mean, come on, Web 2.0 my arse. If you had a clue you’d have built up a following on Twitter just like Pat Phelan or Paul Walsh. You would have got us interested in what you do.

Get thee back to Web 0.1

Edit Michele has blogged about them too. Love this quote,

You may have been nominated for an award, but it obviously wasn’t in marketing or email usage based on the rubbish you sent me today and the way you sent it.

Jetpac, as you've never seen it before

This is one for the Speccy fans out there, especially Walter and Conor. Jetpac is a simple shoot em up released by Ultimate Play The Game in 1983 on the ZX Spectrum. Apparently there’s a C64 conversion too but it was never as popular on that platform. In 1988, Ultimate: The Collected Works was released. Pictured on that page is a review from Your Sinclair that looks very familiar. I remember reading that issue. Can’t believe it’s 20 years ago! The first time I played this game was probably at a friend’s house when he bought that compilation.

Here’s the original 1983 game in all it’s glory. Revel in the single colour sprites, and simple but addictive gameplay!

And here’s the Xbox version, called Jetpac Refuelled. Totally mad stuff! Updated graphics but same great gameplay.

If that isn’t enough to wet your appetite, you can now play Jetpac in your browser! Head over to this freeonlinegames page and start refueling that ship! Oh the excitement!

(Yes, yes, it doesn’t seem as good these days. Our expectations of what games do have risen so high that retro gaming really is a niche that appeals to those that grew up with the games. Oh well!)

Edit Yay. Jetpac+3 on c64.org. Must give it a go later!

Twittering by voice on Twitterfone

Twitterfone Pat Phelan launched his new service, Twitterfone to much excitement last night.
Techcrunch had the scoop and as Michael Arrington offered a free account to one of the commenters, he got some interesting responses!

In the third grade, a crazy, spooky looking girl chased me with finger paint, and smeared it on my shirt, cackling like the wicked witch. It left emotional scars (at night I still hear the laughing, and I constantly check the back of shirts Iā€™m wearing in the mirror).

The Twitterfone account would help with the healing.

If you haven’t guessed by the title of this post already, Twitterfone allows you to speak your tweets instead of texting them or typing them on a device. You can hear my Hello World voice tweet as well as read it. I have to admit, I found it harder to articulate a short sentence under the pressure of speaking into a phone than to type it, but that’s just me. My next oral masterpiece will be me saying my own name so Charles doesn’t murder it on the WordPress Podcast next time! šŸ˜‰

The absolutely gorgeous Twitterfone website was created by the talented Sabrina Dent. When Pat first spilled the beans on his newest project he had nothing but good things to say about her!

Macbook Porn

After I destroyed my Apple Macbook I thought I’d never get to put stickers on a Macbook again. Luckily the machine was insured and the replacement Macbook came this morning.

Compared to the previous machine this one is a huge upgrade! The new Macbook has 2GB of RAM, a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 160GB drive and comes with Mac OS X Leopard installed!

Now, where did I put that Ubuntu install disk ..

Taking Woopra for a test drive

John Pozadzides sent me a Woopra invite several weeks ago and I eventually signed up last week so it’s been collecting stats on this website for a while. John did an interview with Cali Lewis of Geekbrief which goes some way into explaining why Woopra is worth checking out. It was after watching that video that I decided to sign up.

Woopra has a neat Java based desktop interface but initially I only used the web interface. That’s not so bad, but it’s static and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the desktop app. I have to confess, I was slow to install the desktop client, simply because I have a “Oh no, Java is too much trouble” switch in my brain from long ago when I attempted to install the JRE. This time it was much easier, thanks to Ubuntu’s repositories.

$ sh woopra_unix.sh
No suitable Java Virtual Machine could be found on your system.
The version of the JVM must be at least 1.6.
Please define INSTALL4J_JAVA_HOME to point to a suitable JVM.
You can also try to delete the JVM cache file /home/donncha/.install4j
$ rm -fr .install4j
$ aptitude install sun-java6-jre
$ sh woopra_unix.sh

After installing the Java runtime, installation of Woopra was simple. I’ve been looking at it now for a few hours and it’s nice. The ticker tape stats at the bottom are a neat touch, especially the up and down markers that give an indication of how your traffic compares with the day before.

Unfortunately I don’t obsess about traffic stats any more. If I did, I would absolutely love this application. If I was targeting a particular keyword and honing the SEO aspects of my site then I would find this Woopra invaluable. Like Google Analytics, I’m confident Woopra will become a useful tool I’ll come back to when it’s needed. It doesn’t even use that many resources. I barely see it ping home for new data and the Java app is reasonably light.

Oh yeah, I haven’t obscured any of the stats in the screenshots. This blog gets several thousand hits a day if you’re interested, although none from Turkmenistan apparently. I guess if I had Woopra running when Turkmenbashi died it may have showed a blip or two of traffic from that region!

How to upgrade Ubuntu

upgrading ubuntu

I hit the Upgrade button and I presume it’s doing it’s thing. The Ubuntu 8.04 ‘Hardy Heron’ Release Notes have just popped up so it’s time to click the “Upgrade” button again. Tom has some great tips for post install configuration.

I’ll be happy if SDLMame, mplayer, UAE and Vice continue to work as normal after the upgrade. Finger’s crossed. It’s getting easier and easier to upgrade Linux distros these days!

Update! Ubuntu Hardy is now installed and it appears to be working fine. There was a problem with SDLMame unfortunately. This dialog appeared at the end of the upgrade:

ubuntu upgrade problem

I didn’t think that would be a problem to fix but then the same dialog appeared saying the “update-manager” had failed to upgrade! Oh no! Anyway, I clicked Close, thinking it was related to the SDLMame problem and then this shocker appeared:

could not upgrade!

Ah crap! It took over a day of downloading packages to get this far. Sheesh. I closed that dialog and then, nothing. The update manager closed too and I was left looking at a blank desktop. Thinking I had nothing to lose, I rebooted and to my joy up popped Ubuntu Hardy!

I reinstalled SDLMame which fixed the problems with that. Everything else works ok and I’m just wondering if I’m missing anything because the upgrade aborted? Who knows. It works. I’m happy.

Did Chinese soldiers really dress as monks in Tibet?

Pat sent me and I presume everyone he knows on Facebook this photo. The story is that Chinese soldiers dressed up as Tibetan monks and caused a riot at a rally. After a quick search it appears this is a photo taken on a movie set. This post has much more detail including the following:

UPDATE – TUES. APRIL 8: The International Campaign for Tibet made a statement via their website that they do not regard this photo as credible evidence of Chinese soldiers disguising themselves as Buddhist monks during unrest in Lhasa last month. They acknowledge that they are in possession of similar images of soldiers carrying monks robes in the Jokhang temple in Lhasa, which were taken during a film shoot in 2001 which involved soldiers appearing as monks.
UPDATE – SUN. APRIL 20: The photo is from the set of "The Touch", starring Michelle Yeoh, shot in Tibet in 2001. This has been confirmed by the films' distribution company, and am waiting to hear about a supporting confirmation from an inside source. Will update soon.

ICT does not regard this photo as credible evidence of Chinese soldiers disguising themselves as Buddhist monks during unrest in Lhasa last month. This image is most likely from a movie set in which soldiers dressed as monks to serve as extras. ICT is in possession of similar images dating from 2001.

Xenon 2 Megablast

Xenon 2 Megablast. If you know this game, you’ll know the soundtrack. This game by The Bitmap Brothers had great title music by “Bomb The Bass”. It was a shoot ’em up released in 1989 although I didn’t play it until years later when I played it on the Atari ST and years later before I’d play it on the Amiga. The Amiga version is widely regarded as the best version and if you look around you can find the adf download fairly easily.

Hand on heart, I have to admit I didn’t like this game much. I love the genre and I’ll happily blast away at Armalyte(C64) or Raiden(Arcade) but Xenon 2 just never did it for me. I do love the soundtrack though!

Here’s a longplay of Xenon 2 in WinUAE. It’s over 48 minutes long but watch a bit of it and you’ll get a taster for the gameplay!

The Bitmap Brothers have created an updated Xenon game, Xenon 2000 but it’s Windows only so I’d love to hear from anyone who has tried it! As luck would have it, someone has created a video of the new game. It’s more a demo than anything else by the looks of things unfortunately.

So, what are your favourite shoot ’em ups? In no particular order mine would probably be:

  1. Armalyte
  2. Syndicate
  3. Raiden
  4. Quake
  5. Half Life

Geometry Wars Galaxies is almost there but it’s too new. I’ll have to wait a few years before I decide if it goes on the list or not!

Close

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