Eltham Junk Tour

Its been awhile since I've given you one of these, thanks to the cold weather (would you believe there would be snow in winter!) and few chances to go it alone, there has been little in the way of junk trips untill now.
Normally we give you a round up from somewhere over the river but, this is a tour firmly focused south of the Thames.

First some info, Eltham is one of those places that is inconvenient to get to by bus, I don't drive and it takes two buses to get in even though its relatively close, its just never had the links to the where I live.  Also Eltham is rather humdrum, apart from Poundland and a 99P store there are no real major retailers here just a few of the big supermarket chains, and a really tiny Smiths.  From previous trips there, they did have an Our Price and a really weird corner shop that sold video games as well as the usual stuff.  We remember it sold Jaguar stuff and some SNES things on the side but that has long gone.

It also has a shed load of charity shops which is the focus of our trip.  Our first port of call was the British Hate (Heart) Foundation, with a mix of stuff, mainly charity shop staples such as old Classical and Max Ingraves they also had some new stuff we managed to grab some early Adamski which is always nice to find.

Eltham Palace is possibly theonly reason you'd go to Eltham.

We had a good look in Game and picked up an excellent guide to Nintendo toys running from 1889 to 1980 it covers the pre gaming Nintendo (some arcade releases just scrape in) for £15.  If you want more and can't afford that the excellent beforemario blog is a good place to start.

Our final trip is down to Well hall for a brief look in to the Cats Protection place. Where they had some more neat stuff, including the Orbs remix of Lisa Stansfield and Grooveriders take on Isotoniks Different Strokes, which we happily snapped up (single sided on FFRR fact fans).  Overall it was good trip, and maybe it'll take more than a few years to get me back there again.

Various stuffs

We have been down to my aunts place in suffolk so this is a rather late and very belated issue of King Tibbet.  We've been using her laptop and its rubbish trackpad to contol instead of a good old mouse pointer.  Not good. On the plus side I did sort out her connection issues for her, so now she can use her old PC as well to surf the internets.  OK on with the show.

Ports fulfilled: sort of.

Looks like someone has made a neon parody version of COD. Its called CoD of Duty and can be found here.  It has over the top neon colours, a ridiculous premise, and looks to be a barrel of fish (fun).

PSP Watch.

We picked up Gradius Generations from CEX in Lowestoft for the princely sum of £15. Something I thought remained in Japan along with Twinbee Pack, Parodius pack and the Salamander compilation.  So far we've only looked at it briefly, and not started any of the games, but it looks promising.  It holds Gradius, Gradius II: Gofer no Yabou, Gradius 3, Gradius 4 and Gradius Gaiden.  I'm not sure if its scarce or what but like I said this is something I've never seen outside the Japanese Portable releases in the old Game Focus shop in Goodge Street (now defunct).

Romancing SaGa 3 Gets a Spanish Translation.

For those that Hablo Espanol, there is a patch out for Romancing SaGa 3 on the SNES.  Its by Magno and can be gotten either from Romhacking.net or Magno's page. He's also promised an English Retranslation of the original, which is nice.

Flashcart works.

We finally got our gear together and downloaded the proper firmware for our labelless but entirely legitimate R4i.  Turns out it required the newer non 3DS firmware rather than the old ones.  We may get stuff not released in a billion years here along with any good homebrew, or overpriced Nintendo stuff like Pokemon. 

Currently we are looking for a Tetris the Grandmaster clone for DS that was made and received a cease and desist order from Arika.  A shame as it was by all accounts excellent.

Finally if you like to read and want to know the highlights of MAME development (with a side order of MESS updates thrown in) you can go here to read David Haywoods a year in MAME.  Put aside a comfy chair because this is long.

Round Up Show 2013 edition.

So I had my rotten tooth out.  It wasn't as bad as I imagined, and took all of 20 minutes to do.  They gave us a list of does and don'ts, (don't drink booze, don't lay down till bleeding stops and don't poke the sore area untill bleeding stops).  It feels really weird you can hear the cracking as my dentist removes the tooth and showed the blood covered roots as well as the massive cavity in the top as well. 


Sunday Funday Hacking.
As well as that I have been poking back at the Wisdom tree games more specifically Sunday Funday.  We never touched on Sunday funday at the time but its like nearly all Wisdom Tree games a compilation of woeful crap.  Sunday Funday is a hack of Color Dreams Menace Beach, and sees you battling school bullies and clowns enroute to Sunday School.  Its subpar but not without its moments.

Fish Fall is stuffed with Bible verses and from the text found in rom seems to have an octopus themed boss.
 You grab fish with the palm of your hand and lob them into a basket avoiding other stuff like electric eels and wandering birds.  Its not bad but the fish do not look very fish like, rather they kind of look like condoms, condoms that you can grab with a giant hand and toss into a basket.

The third part is a rubbish Christian rock song by 4Him (and not Foreskin) called The Ride.  It acts as a karaoke and lets you sing along with the lyrics printed on screen.

Why am I telling you all this, because when I loaded the rom up in a Hex Editor, the entire game script was there and replacing some words with swears the game didn't crash once.

Go condom fish.

Sync step to the be R4

We recently found at work a DS flash card.  We wondered what it was, for a good 10 minutes before coming to the conclusion its an R4.  So far we have no luck adding Firmware to it, it came without a MicroSD card and crucially a label on the front to tell us what kind it was, it has Alex Rider Stormbreaker as its proxy ID image (so your DS doesn't reject it out of hand as I've learned).

But that is as far as I've got, crucially my DS (an old DS lite with a janky hinge) is probably old enough for the firmware not to be an issue.  So its probably an idea to shop around for versions of R4 firmware, or just check to see what firmware I have before diving in and upgrading it.

Hells Teeth.

Hello viewers, you find us not so great today.  I have the dilemma of having a wisdom tooth out tomorrow, and to say I'm not looking forward to this at all is a major understatement.  It has been causing trouble for ages but crucially it didn't keep me up at night or was as painful as fuck, just a little discoloured.  Sadly its come to this, and at an emergency appointment on friday they made me a deal I couldn't refuse either they refill it and to be honest wisdom teeth are expendable (hold overs from the time when we were less evolved and had more jaw space for mighty molars) or remove it all together, what with them being a bugger to clean and that we decided on the latter. 

Like I say I haven't looked up purposefully what this operation entails but I trust my dentist on this.

Last PS2 rolls off of the plant in Japan.

In slightly less sad news, it looks like Japan is shutting down production of the PS2,  according to the Grauniad the PS2 is ceasing production after 12 years due to it not being commercially viable.  I've had great times with my own PS2, even going so far as to get a network adaptor and soft mod it with FreeMCBoot.

Crucially they are still making games for PS2 though this is just annual FIFA updates and an expansion pack for FFX1.  We also hear reports that its still popular in second / third world countries so there maybe life yet in the old dog, be interesting to see what India and Brazil software companies make of the PS2.

Market Ting

We recently submitted ourselves to a bit of market research.  They have a few people outside Primark trying to sucker folk in with a quick survey and that and finally we relented.  Its for deodorant and antiperspirants and as we tend to sweat like a pig I guess I'm their perfect demographic.  On the plus side I was paid £5 for my time on the other hand it was absolutely bollocks.  We were asked what products we used by an African lady, (Lynx and Suremen) why we used them (you can pick them up cheap in Wilkos, often on offer) though they didn't ask my favourite, that you can cover the U and R in Suremen to make Semen. 

Their base is situated somewhere above Pizza Hut and we had to take a seat before being asked in by blonde lady go over these questions again whilst she dictated them into a screen recorder on PC.

Back with the African (who is increasingly difficult to understand) who has a room with a projector set up, we get our first inkling of what it is they are pushing. They have a screen with five dots and a hand control and she tells us to look at certain dots but NOT MOVE my head. She then flashes up various displays including one for Mitchum products.  i maybe an oblivious autistic robot but even I could see where this was going, we were going to be asked about Mitchum products. :(

Off to a room with another bird but this time with some specific instructions,  DO NOT look around, keep your face to the wall and stay behind the white line.  Fearing the worst we were told to turn around and pick items from a mocked up display including what you would normally buy.  She then asked us to pick the Mitchum product, which of course took ages, as no one has,
A: ever heard of them 
B: has ever used a Mitchum product possibly due to A and lack of marketing.

Comfortably pleased it was back to the African for more questions and answers and some pack shots of the product (watchword green and ropey) before bringing it out the big guns an ad (naked male torso with a tattooed dumbbell on the underarm) and a revised pack shot with much better packaging that the predominently green stuff we had seen before.  Finally this was done, and I got to sign out and get my 5 quid.  We really hope it works out for Mitchum but as I see it currently its more weird Poundland product than must buy.

PTC Germany

We have been watching this on Eurosport and its been a while since I've commented on anything snooker wise.  So here goes. 

This is the Munich leg of the PTC world ranking snooker league, which throws together the lesser seen of the world snooker players, including a lot of foreign players and dumps them on Eurosport.

So far I've see quite a few interesting results including a few top players go out, including Neil Robertson and Anthony Hamilton.  So far its been entertaining to watch someone like local (now plays for Norway) Kurt Maflin eventually sneaking over the line and owning up to clipping the cue ball whilst cueing.  We also get to see people like Ben Woollaston who are not that well known, though sadly he went out to Graeme Dott. . 

Anyway the final should be on  Eurosport  soon unless its kicked off for something more obscure like fencing or Formula 3000.

Happy New Year

We do not have time for a proper post but will add a picture and add this: a happy new year to all our viewers.

More rubbish to come in 2013