Review: GT Advance 3 Pro Concept Racing (Game Boy Advance)

We’ve been to her majesty’s sisters house in Koga the last weekend which is around 1h from Tokyo and spent a lazy Saturday/Sunday there and mostly played games on the GBA and PS2 of my niece in law which convinced me enough to buy a Gameboy again and so I’ve went to buy a black GBA SP last week. A great yield!

My favorite GBA game of the moment for it is GT3 Advance Pro Concept Racing! This game means a lot of racing fun on the Gameboy! The track design isn’t really 3D but uses mode7 which means it is rather a flat plane with the track on it and several obstacle sprites on it but IMHO looks better than the clumsy graphics of Collin McRae Rally.

Read more

Until the pad buttons smoke!

More Shoot’em’up goodness can be found at Shmups!, a website dedicated to 2D Shooter games with plenty of reviews and information from Katakis on the C64 over Z-Out on Amiga up to Ketsui on Arcade machines! Z-Out wasn’t the best Shooter maybe but Chris Huelsbeck’s music on level 4 and 6 was brilliant! I still like the music of Gunbird a lot!

I’ve bought an Owltech PC-0301 today! That’s an adapter in form of a 5 1/2 inch drive bay insert which offers two ports for connecting Playstation controllers to the PC and use them for a crapload of things. They not only perform well for usual PC games but also worked great on PSX Emu’s and WinVice and WinUAE and MAME32 and… well that where the ones which I’ve tested so far. Gunbird with PSX Analogue Control rocks! Installation was super-easy with plugging to a free USB port and a 3-click-long driver installation from the included CD.

Graphical User Interfaces – When will they be normalized?

I’ve installed SuSE Linux v9.1 a couple of days ago on my now secondary PC and after 2-3 days also managed to get rid of that ugly default KDE desktop look and turned it into a somewhat bearable view.
Honestly when do the interface designers stop smoking strange things and come back to a neat and clear GUI design? The icons of the default KDE were huge (48px) and even looked way to big on my 1280×1024 resolution. The initially chosen color palette can only be described as atrocity and the default wallpaper was of minor quality! When flapping out the kicker menu (that’s basically the same as the windows start menu) again huge icons and text is thrown at you and shine in a multitude of fancy colors with soft edges as if they want to compete with the Teletubbies! Who ever had the idea to introduce 24 bit colored icons: here comes my hand and whips to your face!

Read more

The 8 and 16-Bit Revival lives!

I know what you think! And you are right! I’ve been absent for a while again from here but there are reasons for it. I’m working on a bigger scale personal Flash Project since shortly. As soon as I can tell more about it I will open a Flash category here to post more of Flash things like news about the project, actionscripting tips and code snippets which might be useful!

More and more people becoming something like a Retro-game-developer which is good news! It seems recently even the now young generation loves to play videogames that have an age of 10 years and beyond. Today’s games come with high class super realtime rendered 3D graphics and cinematic atmosphere but still the games from yesterday keep their spirit. I believe the reason for this comes a lot from the fact that the simplified graphic of old games allows more room for one’s own fantasy. While today’s high class 3D games look good while you play them (a decent hardware assumed), classics from the 8 and 16bit era look always good – in a gadget-likewise way.

Read more

Space smugglers hobby room

We’ve been to the Star Wars Science and Art exhibition in Ueno yesterday. It was held in the Basement halls of the National Science Museum and I can tell it was worth the visit!

They had tons of models present which were used in the movies, from the Millenium Falcon and Star Destroyers to AT-AT walkers and the original sized Pod Racers. Also most of the costumes where put on dummies and it was very interesting to see how lo-fi the costumes from the ‘old’ episodes actually are but how real they look in the movies. The space ships were probably the most impressive things there! The 61×76x21 inch model of the Falcon was a good example on how to make a space ship model look authentic, it looked rusty, dirty and had details like laser shot holes in the hull.

Read more

Thing on a spring

… or things in the spring! I got my new rig set up finally! Almost done with installing all the stuff that I need for a convenient usage. This is what came out finally…

CPU: Pentium4 3GHz 800MHz FSB

Motherboard: P4C800-E Deluxe (excellent board!)

Read more

European Vintage Computer Festival

“Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when geeks were geeks and floppies were really floppy.”

European Vintage Computer Festival

Kraftwerk – CCH, Hamburg (28.03.2004)

Part 1:

Four elderly men (black suits, red shirts, black ties / videos in background) perform “The Man-Machine”, “Expo 2000″, “Tour de France 2003″, “Vitamin”, “Tour de France”, “Autobahn”, “The Model”, “Neon Lights”,”Sellafield”, “Radioactivity” and “Trans Europe Express”

… Curtain …

Read more

Hidden Videogame Pr00n

Now this is just hilarious … Accidental Video Game Porn or like you would say ‘don’t let your mother see this!’ An archive of screenshots and animations showing explicit (and all non-intended of course) scenes from various old and new video games. Searching for backdoor demon sex with Zelda or hardcore bestiality orgies with Pikachu? You’ll find it there! I haven’t imagined video games are so full of ambiguous material! The funny thing about it are really the comments to the pictures. And unlike others, the emphasis lies here on ‘accidental’.

Graphical User Interfaces – When will they be substituted?

Though GUIs did not really change over the past 20 years and seem to become a little bit outdated today everybody wonders what will be a better way of communicating with our computers.
Listening to the latest Mac-rumors “Spoken Interface” is expected to be implemented within the next major update of Mac OS X (10.4) in 2005. But is this the way we will control our computers in future? I do not think so. Why? Read this old but interesting article!

Anyway. I always liked the simple and “to the point” design of early Mac OS interfaces.

Daily computer jumble

This was how I’ve felt when I entered the Ginza Apple Store some days ago!

It was like “Hey everything is nice and easy and good” … but in a strangely artificial and rather canting way. I’ve opened my not so bad and somewhat stylish flash portfolio on one of the apples with lamp-screen and went up some floors and when I came back, the apple was set back to it’s screen with boring landscape pictures like it was before. Sounds rather like a bourgeois PC store, doesn’t it?! Let’s watch this again just for a lark (and then this one! ;) !

I feel I rather want to visit the 8-bit Museum and admire some of the old machines! An excellent informed website about obsolete computers with tons of detail, screenshots, photos and extended information that old.computers.com doesn’t provide! Old computer goodness from A like Nintari to T like Hexers Instruments. Unfortunately the site’s text is only in german.

Transpacific Hardwares

It’s about time! We’ve finished a rather big job by now and it’s time for some coddling! I’m still loitering around with my outdated AMD 1.2GHz with yesterdays hardware so I prepared to buy components for assembling a new system. I will go with a Pentium this time, hoping to have not so many hardware probs, freezes and incompatibilities.
After some investigations and review study on several hardware testing sites, I’ve compiled my raw list of selections which includes a new CPU, motherboard, RAM, harddisk and additional stuff like PC case, power supply and CPU cooler. Maybe a new graphics card but that’s not primarily important for now. I came up with these …

Read more