Printer and round up

Here is a brief round up of stuff that I've found useful this week before I'll drop a brand new hardware review on you.

Millions of unsold copies of ET Found in a New Mexico landfill.

I didn't actually get Pacman or E.T for the VCS back in the day so the worst I ever played was their dull conversion of  Space Invaders, though not actually bad enough  to bury in the desert like ET was.  I heard the tales that they were buried and thought oh well, we'll never see those again.  30 years later and it looks like some of those rubbish E T carts came to light thanks to a new documentary and a dig at the tip.

MVS Tracker.

As someone who has pissed around with trackers for ages now I'm always amazed how they always seem to crop up for the weirdest of systems.  This is a combined  tracker that will let you compose music for the Sega Megadrive and NeoGeo consoles.  Its PC only at the moment but hasn't really been updated in 8 years, so if you're holding out for a port then you're out of luck.  Its not a bad thing to be honest but if you are serious about wanting  that Megadrive sound and use a daw that can handle VST instruments then VOPM is a pretty good replacement (if a little quiet I find).

Printer Epson SX215

Found this chucked out at work and couldn't quite work out why it was junked.  For starters, I had to replace some inks in it and for once didn't have to spend an arm and a leg to do so.  My realization came when all inks was firmly in and it was time to print something.  All the test pages I printed (two) where horribly chewed up.  I'm pretty sure that's why it was thrown out as the scanner works perfectly. 

 Its a nice printer with an LCD screen and a few slots to take memory cards, so you can print from camera cards to photo paper if you have it.  You'll also need to know that to perform any type of maintenance on it you'll need to press Index sheet and scan together.  Knowing that and that the inks aren't that badly priced (£12 for black and around £!0 for colours with recons going for slightly less), I can recommend this, (so long as I can find out whats causing it to jam).

C@nt, Phlapps and Mutley

Happy Easter everyone, do hope you've been enjoying your day I've spent mine sodding about with Linux mint and getting it to recognise my dongle (fwoo fwoo) so I can use WiFi.  (Short answer, Once I'd found the WEP key underneath the router it went plain sailing  though I was so far away from said router its not really worth it, two bars at best.) I'm at my aunts place in suffolk and Mint is running from an old Dell desktop from about 10 years ago so getting closer isn't really an option, so I'm writing this from the horrible laptop instead

This isn't why I'm here of course, I'm here to tell you all about a kickstarter project that is close to my heart.
Apparentlyone of the test pressings of an abandoned Caustic Window LP have resurfaced in a sale post on Discogs. Its been removed now, but there is a kickstarter made to have it turned into digital files for backers of the kickstarter plan.  Currently if you pledge £10 or about $16.50 you will get a high quality set of digital tracks from the abandoned album. Popular IDM forum WATTM have managed to gain one off licensing rights from Rephlex records so everything is above board and legal.  I'm really tempted to go with this not only because they have upped the original limitation from 500 to unlimited, but the initial target has been reached 5 times over (at time of writing this) so is definitely on.

To be honest a couple of tracks have already popped up on compilations.  Cunt appeared on Trance Europe express 3 along with UZiq's Roy Castle and Phlapps was part of a anti Criminal Justice bill compilation. Like I say I don't have the comp to hand and the books were so shoddily put together that I can't confirm if it was mentioned as unreleased or not (pretty sure they don't mention this, or anything about Caustic Window at all), I don't have the comp that Phlapps came from so can't vouch for it, but Cunt is a pretty tough ass acid track.  Mutley seems to be only known from live sets at the moment (hope its on here) 

Finally xltronic used to have a load of fan mixes of aphex twin tracks about 2004, can remember listening to these via AOL and their shitty Real Audio player waiting for the bastards to buffer (was on dial up til 2009) only a few of these have been surfaced so far (The Celine version of Flim I have only because it was put up on Youtube, but there was mixes of IZUS as well in a similar vein).

A Eulogy for a hero. An Obituary for a nobody

There has been a lot of famous people dying recently some I've absolutely respected and some I've hated with a vengeance.  Here is a brief profile of  some of the recently deceased with varying amounts of deference shown.

Sue Townsend.

She was the authour of  the incredibly tedious Adrian Mole novels, about a kid going through adolescence in the 1980s and suffering an unrequited crush on his classmate Pandora, though he never got anywhere with her IIRC.
There was a much better tv show based on the novels but for most of the point along with William Shatners Tekwar and Steven Alterns Maya series are among the worst things I've ever read.

The BBC made a tv series out of it in the 1980's which you can see here if you really want to.  It has a nice signature tune and opening intro which I had forgotten all about until I'd clicked on it.  That's really all I wanted to say about it.

Peaches Geldof.

I can remember dad coming down to tell my mum that Peaches Geldof had snuffed it in strange circumstances.  She was famous for being someones daughter and if that sounds callous well it is.  I never really liked her all that much. She had a nice body, but ruined it with some crappy tattoos (that daisy chain in particular), and did the whole celebrity thing of giving her kids funny names.  I know I should care more but don't.

Ultimate Warrior.

To be honest, I thought he died a long time ago.  Playground rumour had it that he had aids back in the early 90's and when I heard about him shuffling this mortal coil I was really shocked.  Wrestling was a big deal here in the early 90's and although I've never given a damn about the sport I can remember him from stickers on my maths book.

Frankie Knuckles

Listening to pirate radio in the van when the dj says he will play a Frankie Knuckles track in tribute at the top of the hour. Jokingly I said what is he dead or something...  Turns out he was.  Of all the people here this is the one I was cut up about the most.  His was one of the first house tracks  I heard back when I was a kid in 1988 - 1989 (Baby wants to ride with Jamie Principle), along with Ron Hardy and Larry Levan who I would later learn about, they were where it all began, when house moved out of disco with re edits in gay clubs in the early 80's.

It comes to something when there wasn't any news on this from kiss fm which is semi permanent in the van and common room at work unless I change it to Magic or Heart.  Previously they've reported the death of another old house legend Armando back in 1997 but modern Kiss is all about the rap and the Euro trash, not the real house.  Incidentally none of the mainstream press reported this in their print editions either but we all know their bias towards dance music.

For the final word on this here is veteran DJ Leonard Remix Rroy's eloquent take on the whole thing .

Round up time.

Feeling better this week, last time I wasn't in a good place wishing death and misery on the ignorant and generally being a nasty bastard.  This week I have some round ups of something I've been wanting to do including a bit of Children's Channel news for those of you who are following (relax its nothing that exciting).

Scarfolk 2048.

If you've been living in a hole for the past 84 years you would know that  this is a thing sort of like Flappy Bird but without the inclusion of Super Mario's green pipes.  It is, at its heart, a sliding puzzle kinda like the ones where you have to put all the numbers in order but in this case it starts off empty and adds an extra tile when you move, when two tiles of the same type touch they morph into a higher number.  For instance if 2, 2 tiles touch, they will make a 4 tile.  The aim is to make 2048 and as a tile is added every time you move it becomes increasingly tricky.  When all the spaces are filled and you can't make any more numbers then the game is over.  Like Flappy bird I've already seen 8 bit ports of it including a Master System port a Spectrum version and of course a version for the trusty C64.

My high score is currently 7104. Can you do any better?

Air Assault.

One of the oddest things about reading about Mame development is that sometimes they throw up stuff that you've played but didn't realise was so rare.  Air Assault is a western conversion of  Fire Barrel, for ages it was housed in an egret cabinet in the Trocadero in Leicester Square, before it was shut down and everything sold off.  I can remember that this was a pretty tough game and that they wanted 50p a play when the norm was 30p a credit.  I also had no idea that it was so rare, that it was never dumped or included in mame, not until I read it on Haze's development blog.
Here is a system 16 link with more info and a warning about acid leakage on these types of boards (covers R Type Leo as well as a few others).

Telecat / Telechat.

Where as the previous two items are interesting this isn't so much fun.  Chriddof has posted a video containing audio from an old show from the Children's Channel, I can't place it but thanks to a link from some later posters, it looks familiar.  Especially the ostrich who had a right posh accent in English.

Oh god I remembered that this used to be on in the morning alongside Spoon Obasan and other bizarre anime on Sky.  They had a talking broom and a weedleish cat with his arm in a cast presenting a show.  I'm not sure if it had bizarre idents like False teeth from beyond the stars (it was the very excellent Round The Bend).  But I do have the idea that for some reason the broom caught alight one time making it fucking disturbing viewing, and the posh ostrich (Octavia) squawking away.  Relive your nightmares here in french.


Edit you were supposed to have an article about someones epic work on decapping the chips in a 3DS as a tribute to our lame Nintendogs April Fools but for some reason I just plum forgot about it.  Oh well have at thee with this.