True Lies

First day of a new month and I was invited to spend it, on Exmouth beach, with relatives. The endless sand dunes evoked memories of playing with (and inevitably losing) Action Force/GI Joe and Star Wars figures - Hyena Tank (Cobra H.I.S.S.) and AT-ST attacking a Rebel seashore encampment. The rock pools contained untold terrors that reached their zenith with the advent of 1984's The Bluebottle or Portuguese Man-of-War invasion. This became an infamous urban legend! Out to sea? You'd better ask Police Chief Brody, Quint and Hooper!

The above recollections jolted a childhood faux pas made at Budleigh Salterton. A friend lost his Muton action figure (a repainted Deep Sea Diver with the helmet resculpted to allow for the radar, gun, and eye piece to be stuck on.) after he'd carelessly left it in his bucket. This had become a temporary home for a dying squid! Thankfully, I had a spare Muton (in my toy collection) and the tears soon stopped. A close call.

Although my encounters with sharks have been limited to marine aquariums and a basking shark (face to face whilst boating in Spain). The weekend we were in Hayle, a mako was spotted in St. Ives shadowing a group of children who were undertaking a surfing lesson. The instructor took them to safety because the mako is a predator and is known to attack humans in shallow water.

Successfully bid on the rarest Masters of the Universe exclusive: a ToyFare 2003 Faker MIB. No, I didn't pay an extortionate price. The key is patience and track auctions.

Dream Arcades has announced an official licensing deal with the MAME™ developers to include MAME™ software! Fans of arcade classics will be able to order arcade cabinets (including StarROMS) in time for the holiday gift giving season. If anyone gets stuck for gift ideas, then you know what I want under the tree this year aside from an automatic transmission Mercedes-Benz Convertible!

Within a month or so SCEE will release the much vaunted PSP. This may sport the recent OS update and include the browser out-of-the-box. I'm really looking forward to reviewing the first clutch of software releases.

The audience is listening

Discovering Dolby NR on my parents' Panasonic Direct Drive tape cassette player embarked me on a lifelong sonic odyssey. From vinyl to DAT and SACD to AAC, I've marveled at and treasured the capture of indelible audio recordings. Late 2004 Sony BMG piloted the DualDisc format to test audiences. In 2005 the CD/DVD hybrid goes mainstream with the release of Rebirth from Jennifer Lopez.

MAME fans can grab 0.92 now, but 0.93 will include Aaron's sound system changes for end user testing. Audiophiles rejoice.

Looks like sky multiroom is coming to my Mum's nursing home soon. Mum adores movies and digital satellite will augment the extensive DVD catalogue that I'm currently building.

I'm not particularly averse to confessing my fandom of Dawson's Creek (S1 - 4) and, by extension, Katie Holmes. And Amazon UK is now offering S2 at a sub £20 sweet spot! I'll complete my collection over the coming months.

Shock & Awe

Today I installed Mac OS X 10.3.8 onto my iMac (G4). The fan is quieter (for less CPU-intensive tasks) and the system appears a little more responsive and smoother than the previous update, which is always welcome. As is best practice I performed backup-to-DVD duties and repaired permissions (a legacy of OS X’s Unix heritage) both before and after (there were changes following the update). Forums report that there are issues for some G5 users - excessive fan activity.

Owners of Macally iShock USB game controllers should remove the driver (if installed). The driver is incompatible with 10.3.8 and causes rapid loss of HDD space. According to Brad Oliver iShock is Plug and Play configurable anyway. I've ordered an iShock II for my huge time suck of a hobby MAME.

Aaron Giles has turned his considerable coding skill towards reworking sound cores in MAME. In the future QSound and multi channel speaker output will be supported. JBL feel the love.

The Face

Microsoft's Office for Mac suite continues to exclude Access and Publisher! Publisher is a basic page-layout editor. My budget doesn't stretch to Adobe's InDesign or Quark Xpress. Therefore Pages (part of iWork '05) is a compelling substitute at a very affordable £43.99 (including Keynote 2). I'll post reviews of iLife and iWork soon.

John Williams has started scoring Revenge of the Sith with the legendary London Symphony Orchestra. The score should reflect the rich tonal textures of all the previous installments. Williams' work on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has deservedly been nominated for an Oscar.

MAME celebrates its eighth birthday!

System 16

An arcade game hobbyist since my teens, I'm following, with great interest, the development of MAME (a modular and portable driver oriented architecture). Programmer Aaron Giles, whose resume takes in the sights and sounds of LucasArts and Microsoft, continues to rewrite the Sega driver for MAME. His recent accomplishments warrant technical comparison with THX! Both projects are directed at the preservation of popular entertainment mediums (albeit MAME is a not-for-profit document).

I for one can't wait to replay Sega's Turbo Out Run, Space Harrier and Super Hang On with 100% accuracy in the near future. For further reading may I suggest System 16.

Proper Crimbo

Santa's little software helpers are ever industrious at this time of year! Aspyr's Brad Oliver is beta testing a new patch for Jedi Academy (1.01c). This will improve online game play and finesse the dynamic glow of lightsabers in the Mac port. Dark Forces is my favorite Star Wars licensed game and there's a new mod for Jedi Academy based on the classic FPS.

Those fine folks at Cupertino may be releasing Mac OS X 10.3.7 as soon as tonight. A revised version of OpenGL with updated ATI and nVIDIA graphics drivers is just one of the new attractions!

And Aaron Giles (of JPEGView fame) continues to rewrite the Sega System 16 driver for a future release of MAME.

Time to prepare a DVD-ROM archive for 2004.

All I Want For Christmas

In keeping with the spirit of the upcoming holidays. The following list features all my computer and video game hardware owned to date. Most of which were received as gifts at this time of year!

*Atari VCS 2600
*Binatone Mk6 Game System
*ZX Spectrum 48K
*ZX Spectrum+ (same as above, but with 'improved' keyboard)
*Commodore 64 and 1541 Floppy Disk Drive
*Nintendo Game & Watch (various Mario titles)
*Sega Megadrive (Genesis)
*Atari Lynx II
*Super NES
*Apple Macintosh Performa 5200
*N64
*PSOne
*iMac DV SE
*Sega Dreamcast
*PlayStation 2
*XBOX
*GameCube
*LCD iMac G4
*GBA SP

Over the years I purchased innumerable video games from The Fuse Box. During my teens the store, an independent brick-and-mortar retailer located in Exeter's Sidwell Street, was a treasure trove - Rescue on Fractalus!* and Koronis Rift, displayed on the in-store monitors, held me spellbound - before its untimely closure and the advent of etailing. Somewhere in the attic of our house is a dusty old cardboard box that contains Atari, Commodore and Spectrum games (cartridge, cassette and diskette formats) in their original packaging! I've no idea whether or not my Commodore 64 still works (1992 being the last time it was used) and the first ZX Spectrum was passed on to a younger relative only to meet an untimely demise.

Watching Back to the Future II (1989) I noticed Nintendo's PlayChoice-10 in the Cafe 80's scene (a veritable advertising blitz). To reiterate comments made in a previous post. PlayChoice-10 provided Nintendo with a platform to profit from the lucrative arcade market, and uniquely showcased NES titles including Mega Man 3, Super Mario Bros II and III before their home cartridge launch. PlayChoice-10 existed for 5 to 6 years and was briefly superseded by Nintendo Super System. MAME emulation of PlayChoice-10 is not yet 100% accurate, but all known titles are available including The Goonies.

nVIDIA is to produce a bespoke GeForce GPU for Sony's PS3 after Microsoft allied itself with ATi. Combined with an IBM PowerPC G5 processor and possibly OpenGL, the PS3 shares APIs with Apple! Curious said Alice. In a contractual twist, that inspires literary allusions to the one ring, IBM will power all three next generation consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Can you say NDA?

*Rescue on Fractalus! was the first time I'd ever seen the Apple ][ logo. Little did I know that years later the Apple Macintosh would have a profound impact on my creative life.

The Sega continues...

Over the weekend MAME developers continued to make strides in arcade emulation and added further Sega sweetness to the mix. Also. Atari fans will be delighted to see the inclusion of Exidy's Max-A-Flex, an 8-bit arcade system utilizing licensed Atari 600XL (eXtended Line) home computer hardware.



In 1983 the 600XL (based on the Sweet-16 project started in 1982) was a well-designed, thoroughly debugged machine with an outstanding specification at a reasonable price (the cost of software and peripherals made it a luxury item however). Its stylish and sleek footprint outshone Commodore and Spectrum rivals on retail shelf space. Atari envy was infectious!

It appears that James Cameron will return to mainstream theatre screens with not only The Dive, but also a 3D movie based on Battle Angel Alita (according to The Sunday Times). For a while Winona Ryder was attached to the project if I'm not entirely mistaken!

On Saturday, whilst perusing the shelves of Exeter's MVC store with a friend, we spied the BBC's inaugural DVD release of The Box of Delights (1984). A family drama deserving of classic status. Clearly the gatefold cover art was inspired by New Line's LOTR trilogy.

Maniac Mansion

It's very rare to stumble across an application that is a revelation. Earlier this year MacMAME earned such a distinction - authentic arcade action delivered directly to your desktop - and now ScummVM joins the pantheon!

ScummVM derives its name from 'Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion' and is a 'virtual machine' for several notable graphical point-and-click adventure games. For example LucasArts' The Dig, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. Loading Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis rekindled halcyon memories of my Amiga adventures and the often delayed fourth installment in the movie franchise. Incidentally, the Maniac Mansion property was licensed as a family sitcom (in the US) and ran for several seasons in the early 90's. Did it ever show in the UK?

Both MAME and ScummVM are a Work-In-Progress and available for the majority of popular computer platforms. MacMAME now sports an improved OpenGL driver that fixes VBL sync and aspect ratio correction. Checking anti-aliasing (AKA smoothing) in MacMAME's front-end evokes graphical comparison with Sega's underrated and poorly marketed Dreamcast (NAOMI-based console). Playtime.

Google continues to rollout updates to their email service. Gmail POP3 set-up is a breeze in Entourage 2004 and the added benefits of SSL shouldn't be overlooked. As an avid user of Gmail, I hope that the final release retains this feature. Hotmail announced that support for offline reading and composing would be withdrawn sans subscription. If this happens, then Gmail more than meets my needs.

Time to read the latest developments concerning the Mac OS X 10.3.7 update.

Desktop Arcade

The Atari® Flashback™ Classic Game Console has been announced for the holiday season. My earliest memory of owning a games console was the Atari VCS 2600 (introduced in 1977 and distributed in the UK by Ingersoll Electronics). It was an unwanted holiday gift for a cousin. So, my Uncle graciously gave it to me on my Birthday (mint in box)! This was alongside Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter, which has a connection other than purely nostalgia!

After only a few minutes playing Space Invaders, Frogger and The Empire Strikes Back (you see there was a connection) I was hooked! For the next two decades I owned a Spectrum 48K, Commodore 64, Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) and Dreamcast, Atari Lynx, SNES and N64, PSOne and PStwo, and XBOX.



The thread that binded these machines together was the relentless pursuit to acquire games that were arcade perfect. Sega's Mega Drive produced an excellent conversion of Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. Yet this was a flawed premise in that a conversion, by definition, is anything but (not to diminish the fun that was had). However, the Dreamcast console was based on the NAOMI (New Arcade Operation Machine Idea) PCB that powered Sega’s coin-ops, which culminated in near-definitive releases Crazy Taxi and Dead or Alive 2.



The first time I heard about MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) was from a former coworker (2001). MAME was started in 1996 by Nicola Salmoria as a means of archiving, and by extension preserving, arcade games that would otherwise disappear forever. For example Star Trek (1983), which is a very rare Sega vector game featuring the voices of the principal cast. Also it allows gamers to experience titles that they may never have otherwise played such as the Japanese-only Gaiapolis, replete with gorgeous graphics, and quirky horizontal shooter Parodius and its sequels, both from Konami.



Unlike music or film, arcade hardware is expensive and therefore it’s commercially prohibitive to continue production runs over an extended period of time. As a pleasant side effect, one can play game ROMs (dumped from arcade Printed Circuit Boards using an EPROM reader) under software emulation! The notion of playing the original Gauntlet, After Burner II, Out Run and many others was mouthwatering!



In what can only be described as an act of serendipity, earlier this year I wrote a review of Jedi Academy (for Inside Mac Games) and discovered that Aspyr programmer, and fellow Star Wars fan, Brad Oliver was the author of MacMAME! Subsequently, I downloaded 0.77u2a and my ROM searching odyssey began in earnest.



With the release of 0.87, MacMAME has been extensively rewritten and further optimized to be a better Mac OS X citizen. Sporting many enhancements including preliminary support for Sega's Model 1 PCB (i.e seminal releases Virtua Fighter and Star Wars Arcade) and the removal of legacy code. This release requires Mac OS X 10.2 (or higher).



It is worth noting that the legal ownership of ROM images (for the purpose of backup) may be contingent on possessing the original arcade game. However, it is not clear if it is legal for an individual to have ROM images (even if not for profit) for a game they don't own. Please read legal implications on MAME rom usage from Northwestern University Law School before downloading any roms to ensure legal compliance. Do not ask me how ROMs can be obtained. Some ROM images, such as Atari's, are available for legal purchase here.