Round up again

 Here is a round up of some old articles and a new scan of stuff. First up is an update on Haiti, of all places.

Haiti.

The current BCSS journal has 10 page exploration of Haiti undertaken by Paul Hoxey and some fellows from the Gibraltar Botanic Garden. It focuses on a new Melocactus from the north of the island along with a discussion on the Opuntia offshoot Consolea in the islands. There is a huge obituary for Terry Smale which I also covered a few months back.

There is a great article on the succulent Malvaceae so all you Baobab fans will certainly get a kick out of this. Me, I haven't read it yet, just flicked through, though it does have the World tree from Maya lore aka the Ceiba along with Sterculia and Brachychiton, both Aussie bottle trees.

Edit, Article read now and it, indeed, rocks.

Amiga disk artwork.

Found this floppy whilst giving my room a clear out. Its in a hard plastic case and can remember getting this from Greytronics in Croydon, when we went to have our disk drive replaced. They had a few of these in a box on a shelf. I think I got relockick downgrader* and this and will scan that if I can find it.

Bombmania if the name doesn't explain it, is a Bomberman clone for the Amiga 1200, can't remember if it was a good PD game or not, just that for some reason it has a scroller for our dear daddy at Irata on the title screen._

 * Found it, it's called Kick 1.3 and is indeed a kickstart rom downgrader for Amiga 500+ through to Amiga 4000 computer line. It has a label and "Boxart" so will add this as an addendum, if I think of it.

Well printer needed ink in order for the scanner to function, which is triply fucked, but after selling a kidney to buy ink, we now have these scanned too.

Tiny Bobble

 There seems to be a new version of Bubble Bobble for Amiga computers out now.

Done by the demo group Abyss, it's a new version not based on a port from the ST. Mostly arcade perfect, it has more colours and added animation than the previous version, but sadly no extra rooms, so if you make it to level 20 without dying you'll not be rewarded. 

To be honest the original Amiga version of this is not bad, got it as a pirate ages ago, for my aunty and it seemed OK. Maybe I was spoiled by having the NES version back in the day (though that doesn't have any secret rooms either.) as that's the version I played the most. 

Its not as if there are any bad ports of Bubble Bobble either. most of the popular systems got a port of the original. With varying degrees of success. Only the Gameboy version is lousy, and that is due to the small screen.  

Rather than give you a review, (my Amiga has been dormant for the past 5 or so years, and haven't played around with Win UAE for about the same time either.), I'll post up a few links to where you can get stuff to play this below.

Anyway you can grab the ADF file from here along with links to Tiny Invaders and Tiny Galaga.

Also fans of fake micro console the Pico8 can play a version too, and that is found here.

Edit. Finally got WinUAE to play this, and from what brief poking its got, its not half bad. Hats off Abyss team.

The Final UnimPORTant

This is the final part of the UnimPORTant series, where we put up hypothetical games that could be ported to systems from another. This time its Commodores well regarded 16 / 32 bit home computer system the Amiga.

Clu Clu land. NES.

This is a weird one, as the name is romanized wrongly. It should be Kuru Kuru land where Kuru Kuru means something that spins, and that is indeed what this game is based on.  You are a small blubbery looking fish that has to avoid the sea urchins and uncover the gold by spinning around poles in a maze.

I would have put this in my home micro round up but I think the Amiga is basically a better fit. Can imagine this being done in something like AMOS or that for the 500. It's not a bad game.

Kickle Cubicle / Meikyuujima.

A favourite NES game from R*Type producers Irem.  More of a block shoving type of game, you have to get all the bags in the allotted time.  Quite a nice little game supposedly produced for the PC Engine but remains unreleased.

Can easily see this for either Amiga 500 or 1200 series of computers.

Oids.

This is some Atari only thrust clone which for some reason was only released for the inferior ST line of computers. A nice port for the Amiga would be nice seeing as we can't have them having all the fun.

Ducktales.

Part of Capcoms Disney line up of platformers.  Would love to see this ported to the Amiga even if it incurs the wrath of the house of mouse.  With gameplay that involves Scrooge McDuck being his greedy bastard self, and rather nice music, including the Moon stage which is what its known for. This along with a few other games such as Megaman are why Capcom could do no wrong back in the day.

So that is it, we'll get back to normal posting now. There isn't much left to say except that I'd love a port of protracker to the old physical keyboard Blackbastard phones. Also as this whole SARS 2 electric boogaloo is going down now, a brief note that there is ten years worth of bollocks masquerading as articles so if you're at a loose end why not have a trawl through.

CBM Calculator vs Sanitary Product

This should have come out last week but our internet was down, so you'll have to read this now instead. We scrapped the PC in question below btw, and picked up another dell, a laptop this time. I'm just a sucker for pain sometimes

Have spent most of the day trying to rebuild an old Dell PC with all the added stupidity
that Dell bakes into every one.  This time they bolted the motherboard to the case so
couldn't do nothing with it.  To cap it all our internet is down and have to slum it
by surfing via the phone. 

We do have a few things from clearing out my aunts old place, and while we have mostly
books brought back and a few old photos and such these two are for the most bizarre.

First up is a Nikini Pocket sanitary towel holder, found along with the second item
its from the 60's I guess. When I got it home I did do a search for it to see if they
were still going and it seems that they aren't.  There is a Museum of Menstruation
dedicated to jam rag paraphenalia and such, though its closed for painters once a month.

My aunt used to be a health visitor so it may be connected with that and such, here are
some photos of it.


Second item is probably my uncles, an odd guy who was Canadian and used to paint. He
worked at the dye factory down near the tip and can remember my aunt picking him up
in her Skoda with me in the back reading.  Its a Commodore calculator, complete with
instruction manual.  CBM started out doing these before their line of computers such
as the PET, VIC 2O and later the C64 and Amiga line before going belly up in 1994.

When my C64 had to be repaired they gave us a commodore branded camera as a thank you
which is pretty cool, would love to see if it was a rebrand or if they really did go
into photographic equipment. Here are some pics of the calc and will when we get a
PC to run the printer, some scans of the manual.

Power Up!

Yesterday I took a trip down to the Science Museum in South Kensington for a long awaited poke around the Power Up! exhibition.  Its a celebration of gaming and game culture through the last 40 years or so of gaming.  Imagine if you will, a bank of old consoles and computers hooked up to televisions, showing off some of their best games and all ready to be played.  This is power up.

Its a brief exhibition for the summer holidays only on for two whole weeks and occurring in 90 minute blocks.  So if you come early, be prepared to kill some time looking around the museum at some of the exhibits, my tip make your way through rocketry to the Imax bit at the back and then upstairs into the memory and humanities bit. There's a tonne of interactive stuff there and some genuinely interesting stuff on the state of who you are, failing that big fuck off rockets.

The Black Arrow the only rocket we built

So what can I see?

As everything is playable, you can make your way down to the back area where all the retro stuff is you'll notice that the first half is mostly themed around genres.  There is a timeline of sorts for Mario, Sonic, Batman and Streetfighter series although in Sonic's case that is mostly a nose dive to mediocracy.  You can relieve being at Boots the Chemist in the early 1990's with a limited play on the original Megadrive Sonic. You can hear grown kids marvelling at how shit the original FIFA was and play the updated versions too.

Me, I got a few retro kicks with some obscure stuff and relieve an old memory of my first ever encounter with Mario in the Index bit of Littlewoods Department store.  Or rather Luigi, as that's what it was (and what I thought it was called) this was the arcade version though with the extra lives dummied out and a re arranged layout pretty sure there's a romhack of this.  Edit yup.

The MAME cabs where the most interesting, with an obscure line up of platformers and puzzlers including Choko from Mitchell Corp, a Shanghai clone against the clock where you have to match pairs before the sides close in and Saboten Bombers a single screen action game like Tumble pop in which you have to clear the screen of enemies without being killed.  Oh and its the only game I know with both cactus as a hero and Huernia flowers as an enemy among other stuff.

The back area was pretty nice, they a load of old consoles with a few playable games in each cases, the Amiga contingent was brought up by James Pond on an Amiga 600, speccy fans were treated to Bombjack form Tekhan and C64 fans could play Toki running from cart.  Amstrad fans had a non playable version of Cybernoid for the 464 which was a shame but still better than the BBC which had basic up and running inviting kids to "code" something.  Atarians of course had a playable ST and the Jaguar with Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000 running (and yes the pad was still a nightmare to play with) in fact it reminds me a lot  of what TXK would become 2 decades later.

Played a load of Super Star Soldier for the PC engine before moving on to what I'd missed on the other side.  Didn't get a go on Taiko no Tatsujin or the rhythm action games sections and passed over the big lan party bits for Bomberman, Worms and Minecraft.  Did have a poke at Mickey Mouse for Master System and a ropey Batman game for PS2.  But spent the remainder playing Mario games for the Wii and Wii U.  Still not convinced the world needed motion controls or a big fuck off tablet to play either on or off screen but am convinced that Yoshi's Woolly World is a thing of loveliness.

Look everything is made of wool, you can collect yarn and unpick the landscape and push things around, its excellent and feels just like a Yoshi game should.  There is no 3DS version sadly but it what there is looks and plays ace so there.

Poking around Mario Galaxy with my first grab at the Wii motion controls, I suspect you'll get used to them  but it didn't grab me like Woolly world did.  We also played New SMB Wii which is more like the DS Mario games, they had (cliche alert) a slippy slidey ice world with a Hammer bro lobbing snowballs and various icicles to dodge.  Did briefly get a penguin suit but then it was time up and had to leave.

Let the games begin.

Final thoughts is this, if there are a family and one or more of you are a gamer you can show your youngsters what you were playing then and how stuff has changed.  Also give them a go on a few old consoles to see how far we have come even play multiplayer I see Mario Kart and Bomberman for some old school fun.

Power up 22nd July - 7th August. £8 to get in Adult and Child tickets available on line and on the door from here.

This is a box a Virtualbox.

Wrapped up and ready to go. Hello readers this is a short musing on virtualbox and Linux in general, its possibly not that helpful but its been keeping me interested for the past few days. 

We've been wanting to explore some old hard disks and as part of a recent Maplins binge have got ourselves a Hard disk / card reader all in one job.  Most of what I have isn't really readable and as I found out dead.  What I did find out reading around that booting some form of Linux could make those drives with missing letters readable.  To be honest I still haven't gotten them read as you will see but so far I'm not all that struck with virtualbox.

If you want to do what I did you'll need the following:

A USB flash drive (mine was 8GB we wanted to put PS2 isos onto it of course that never came to fruition)
A linux live USB creation program.
Some sort of Linus image see top.
Some sort of Linux Image.

And follow the straightforward instructions on the Linux live USB creator.

For our test program and first foray into Linux we trialled 2 tiny linuxes as our target Machine, an old XP beast liberated from work years back would struggle with current popular builds such as Fedora and Ubuntu (incidentally could some distro guys actually come up with Linus Linux or Ubunton with the face of Emma Bunton as desktop wallpaper just to satisfy my stupid sense of humour). 

First up as everthing seemed to be going well we had our download verified (we used Puppy Linux and DSL) and installed.  Our key was created and loaded, we found out we had a portable version of Virtualbox
and our Linux ran from this environment.  So far so good, we decide to boot up our virtual Puppy and see how it goes, except we get to a start up screen that goes nowhere and does nothing.  I'm no good at programming and command line stuff yeah I know Linux is all that even with its windows veneer over it, its still command line at heart.  So we try another distro Damn Small which is smaller than Puppy and thankfully has none of the issues either as we successfully boot it into its GUI and then discover Virtualboxes other dickish thing getting a mouse pointer to work.  If you've ever used WinUAE emulator its a bit like that there is a hotkey to trigger mouse capture (or in WinUAEs case to switch screens) except it captures fuck all and does nothing.  We decide to do the decent thing and burn it to a CD via IMGburn and switch priority at the bootscreen to see it in action.

Our main thoughts on DamnSmall is that it reminds me of Workbench 3.5 not the old school 4 colour Amiga OS, but something from 1998 with all the hacks added to make it 32 colours or so.  PC owners of an age may recall Windows 98 instead (only a lot greyer).  Its rather nice and the mouse works in the live CD just like a boss, I still didn't get my drives to work or be read so will have to read up on that via on line with my current PC.

They had a lot of stuff to look at including Firefox and a few file manager stuffs as well as a cute version of Tetris that looked like it was an exile from Workbench or Win95 and wasn't half bad.  After some tinkering and that we decided to close down and remove the CD. 

We may download Virtualbox proper and try out something more modern like Mint  or obscure such as AROS (which I remember from Amiga Format way back in 98).

Julie Bee2: Amigan

Our second Julie bee special also concerns hardware, but you will be relieved to know that it does not involve wish fulfillment or mocked up phones.

We found a massive box thrown out at work, nothing special just a massive plastic storage tub and thought it would be good to store videos in.  We also decided to clear up our room, and this is where we refound our old Amiga, as well as some old tat for scanning and removal.   The best thing is though its been in the wars it still works.  

We coupled it up to the television and hey presto our HD kicked in, bringing it life.  Though it doesn't seem we have a working joystick we do have a working mouse, so we decided to boot up a few progs and see what we have. 

This is a montage of clips from programs / art that include but are not restricted to..

LSD document disk 49. 
A cracktro for 9 Lives though it crashes after this.
Various old pictures we made in DPaint / P Paint we used a picture viewer called Visage to show them and our digital camera to grab them as clips from our portable Telly.

Bark Bros was a home grown choose your own adventure game involving alien dogs stumbling across a downed space shuttle with Bill Clinton and Al Gore in it and a criminal organisations attempt to steal it.  Written in Wordsworth, Amiga's own equivalent to Word (perfect),  this was the title card, there were a few other documents on the disk written with Blacks Editor.  To be honest this was and still is the best we can do, as we cannot program to save our lives.

Othonna / Fenestraria.  These two succulent clips are from old copies of the BCSS journal though I suspect the Fenestraria is from memory or at least cultivation, those leaves would be buried in habitat.

Leech. Drawn from memory and yes its pretty gross looking with its swamp water filled jar and label.

Cat. Black and white image of my old cat Zoe.

Aphex Twin.  We drew this from the cover art of the Richard D James album.  Face is a little out but that makes it all the more sinister.

Finally theres some more from the LSD Doc disk 49 to finish up.

If  this proves popular then we'll add more images.

Sodding Football.

This could be considered a round up of sorts, we really don't have much of a liking for the "beautiful game" as I find it boring, and besides whenever I watch my token  team (Liverpool) they lose.  To be honest, this antipathy extends to videogames as well.  There must be at least 60 copies of  Fifa Soccer for every man, woman and child in the UK and there are further variants punted out every year.  Whether its hardcore management or five a side, there are millions of the buggers, there are even online variants of Panini Football stickers but with a FIFA edge to them. 

One of these days we will pick up Sensi for Amiga or one of its console variants as it seems closer in ethos for what football should be to me.  I.E  unlicenced and utter nonsense, if I recall correctly they had a granny team as well as various other fabulous sides. 

In fact here is a few games we'd love to see being made under the FIFA licence.  Oh and yeah dig our new site remodel, TBH we've been wanting to do this for ages now.

FIFA Park.

Yeah we know its kinda derivative of FIFA Street but, and this is the big but, it really is nothing like we played
football as kids.  What we want are.

Jumpers for goalposts.
Rush Goalies (they were allowed to come out of goal and be striker and as memory serves we made to feel foolish whenever you tackled them and scored)
 Fat or Geeky kids in defence.  The personal place of choice for the terminally unathletic.
Girls.  Yep sometimes girls played football, often though they'd just watch and talk with their friends.
More than eleven players on each team,  but often much less.

For this to work it'd have to be sort of like Inazuma Eleven, or Nintendo World Cup but not as shit.  Though without the super powers or anything else, just kids playing football in the schoolyard or the Park.

FIFA Soccer Womens Edition.

This incarnation of the popular game is probably the most mundane version of the lot.  A ladies version of the popular football game but with the proper licences from the Womens F.A and that.

To be honest this doesn't stand a hope in hell of being made.  I can't remember the last time I even saw a woman take part in a football game and the people who usually buy FIFA are not really that interested in womens soccer, unless they are particularly fit.  In fact google says that there is a game by American Soccer star Mia Hamm {though her name actually sounds like a cartoon pig} that was devoted to womens soccer, although that was just a crudely rebadged Michael Owens Football.

FIFA ate my hamster.

Actually the idea I'm gravitating to more is this one.  Rockstar ate my Hamster was a pop simulation game, where through constant stunts and pop tracks you tried to gain notoriety for your act and tried not to get yourself killed.  Due to the bad behaviour of footballers nowadays youi could easily replicate this type, but instead of getting killed, the outcome would be dropped from you team or jailed.  Add in some two footed tackles or unnecessary diving on pitch and you would have a winner or at least an interesting IPhone game.

FIFAsona.

This is a version of the above game but much more serious.  It would play out a lot more like the Persona RPGS, which involve strong team mechanics (a team of school kids investigate supernatural occurences, with the focus on team building and such).  I'd love to see a game where you are a new transfer into a made up team, in a lower league club.  Going through the footballing year, working on relationships with your team mates and playing in various cups.  Like Persona you would need to get on with your team, choosing who to hang out with and taking part in training sessions with your team. 

Where as I'd love to see this, even more so if they used a Sensi style overhead view, your average punter wants his RPGs to involve orcs and Goblins, like Skyrim, and not to involve footballers.

 

More hits from the scanulator.

OK this took a while to look for but now we are here we'll present to you the US advert for the CD32 as presented in EGM issue 58.  (We've taken more scans but it seems our monitor has died and what there is is ropey to say the least.)

Is that supposed to be now here or nowhere, we'll go for the latter.

Commodore of course couldn't advertise its wares to save its life, (ironically this is from circa 1994 where Commodore called in the receivers and the sun went down on the good ship Amiga) and this Ad while not that unusual for the time is basically a load of buzzwords and cringing 'street' slang.  At least they didn't resort to selling Vapourware like the Atari Jaguar ads of the same era.  Incidentally this only hung around for one issue only of EGM proving that Commodore really were in trouble then.  

The CD32 was never a success in USA thanks to patent disputes and Commodores bankruptcy, and it really didn't have much impact in Europe, coming just before the PS1 boom.  Most of its games were either souped up Amiga titles with. extended intros and cut scenes or just the regular bad interactive movie games that stank up the early nineties. 

So there you go. The CD32.

Terry vids

Amiga gameplay vid complete with ItaloDisco theme and eyepopping graphics.


C64 level 1 speed run with Jazzy music and a more pleasing colour scheme.

There that should illustrate what that big wall o text I wrote out much better than me struggling to explain everything.

Terry's big adventure.

There are certain games you grew up with, that although no one ever new, you know deep down they would be special.  NES Bubble Bobble, Valkyrie Profile PS1 and Terrys Big Adventure C64.  Picked up from a market stall in Woolwich market for the princely sum of about £2, Terrys Big Adventure was an ace platform game sort of in the style of the Mario games but of course on the C64.  Unlike such blatant clones as Giana Sisters (which was German and riddled with cheap deaths) Terrys was a completely balanced and tough platformer in the vein of Mario. 

A small character that looks like the tenor from the Go Compare adverts, Terry is armed with rocks and his trusty yo-yo to dispatch enemies, in fact later levels would make use of the rocks to dispatch enemies immune to a  good yo-yoing!.  The fact that learning the layout of the levels meant that you could with some skill make it through to the later levels with no problems was all the more wiser for a hamfist like myself.   It was also tough too, learning to duck under enemies and lightning bolts, avoid poison mushrooms and leap on certain bricks to reveal hidden bonus rooms were all part and parcel and while old games were tough Terrys was completely fair.  If you died its because you hadn't learned the layout or misjudged a jump. 

Random events lead me to the fact that there was an Amiga version available, and with some curiosity, download it from Zophars Rom Subdirectory.  And thats when it all went wrong. 
Memories from  C64 days have not been kind, whereas the original C64 game was quite subdued in its colour scheme, the Amiga version has that strange colour pallete that old A500 titles had, making it seem like its escaped from the Playschool set.  The gameplay is still the same however and even now I made it to Level 2 with little loss of life (where I was tragically slaughtered, thanks to poison mushrooms and the push scrolling). 

Musically though, its gone through some changes.  The original C64 theme was pretty jazzy and fitted the mood perfectly, possibly due to the fact the score was done by Allister Brimble, though he's only credited for the Amiga Score. Full Brimble Discography Pdf Heeyar.

The Amiga score doesn't really fit, being a storming Italo disco / Euro style track, which makes you wonder what the original was based on. 

All in all its a missed opportunity and  though still good, is a come down from the excellent C64 game.

WinUAE

Been playing around with this for a week or so. In fact its more like the pure unalloyed joy of Winuae, plus Octamed 5 and a few sound samples and a throwback to the late nineties when I made Dance music just for me. Friday night I called MED night, an excuse to fire up Soundstudio on the Amiga and put some tracks together, in order to emulate my heroes (Largely Derrick May and Juan Atkins but latterly Electro, thanks to Dave Clarkes Electro Boogie X Mixes). Oh and some dub too we never released any of our stuff, although I did give a split tape of Music 2000 Tracks and Amiga hits to a mate. Depressingly none of the tracks convert well when transferring them across to MP3 file format on PC, and we did some corkers (as well as some right old shit).

Sadly WinUAE doesn't make it easy for you, and could really do with taking a leaf out of the Playstation Emulation scene, that relies on plugins for most tasks. There is a big fuck off list of things covering the likes of for various processors, Kickstart roms (Amiga BIOS, display options and Adf Files of old floppy games. Its frighteningly complete and at the same time arcane and obscure heres a list of stuff that I've come across.

Recording.

Getting a video or audio clip of anything is a prime example of the pure unfriendliness of WinUAE, something that is a simple dropdown menu command in Nestopia, actually takes numerous trips to various menus in WinUAE, specifying commands and resolutions and even then your never sure if it'll work. (In fact if it does, it'll run so slowly while doing this you'll wonder why you bothered in the first place). Adding a category to the side bar with a few output options and codecs could alleviate this a lot.

File formats.

Currently all you can run is ADF files which are copies of the Amigas floppy disk format, its the only format that WinUAE recognises and nothing else. Which is a shock because late in the Amigas life most stuff would have been released on CDROM instead of Floppy, and yet its not covered, no iso. or CDROM for you. Another shock is that there is a rival format called IPF international preservation format which covers disks too and yet requires a plugin (which despite following its instructions WinUAE will not recognise). Lastly Amigas use the lha. format to pack files (zip is never used - though lzx is). Look on Aminet and you'll see miles of lha. files without exception, and yet WinUAE relies only on ADF only.

ADF ADF (sorry Earth Defence Force).

The other thing with ADF files its that nothing and I mean nothing will open them or indeed create them save for a few transfer programs. While this isn't actually a problem for WinUAE indeed this is its strength that it can make new ADF files to store programs and files, its certainly needs looking at.

Stuff WinUAE does well.

F12 Program break.

This is probably the best of the lot you can exit the program at any time by pressing F12, to switch disks or generally fiddle with the settings. Remains a genuine feather in its cap and a true modern achievement.

List of stuff.

The big list at the side of WinUAE is not only baffling but counts as one of its most joyful things, finding the quickstart guide and everything else is a breeze because its all labelled correctly. Changing between Amigas and going from the and ancient A1000 to a no less venerable but capable A1200 with 060 processor and 128meg of ram.

Stuff I wish WinUAE did.

Used a folder on the desktop as a harddrive, because while most amigas didn't have them, they were more common during the late phase when Commodore went bankrupt and acutally became an necessity in the end.

Didn't distinguish between chip ram and regular ram, an A500 with 4GB memory, fuck yeah, make it so.

Use samples and stuff already on your desktop. Unlikely, it would take an awful lot of converting to IFF. or Raw format, to make this work.

Watashi mo Konhorio!

Apologies for the bad Japanese intro. If you didn't get it, thats Cornholio's signature line given in this.
Beavis and Butthead Virtual Stupidity Or Beavis & Butthead Virtual Aho Shoukougun as it was known in Japan is probably the most baffling western release I've come across released in the land of the rising sun. Now I love Beavis and Butthead as much as the next guy, but man, is that an obscure license or what. Incredibly from the video above it seems to be fully dubbed in Japanese,
i'd have loved to have sat in on that Voice acting session, maybe it did well on PC for it to find an audience.

In fact its almost as baffling as say a review of Commodore's Amiga 1200 in Japan. Commodore probably fucked up their marketing there as well.

The third license I've also seen is, Peanuts, but everybody loves Charlie Brown and Snoopy so that doesn't count.