Futurama Returns!

Yes folks, Futurama is back, and it's about time!

I've got to admit that I've always preferred Futurama to The Simpsons, and so I have been eagerly looking forward to the straight-to-dvd release of "Bender's Big Score". Was it worth it?




In a word YES! If this first one is anything to judge by then Futurama is coming back stronger than ever. All the old gang are here, the animation is better than ever, the music is spot on, the script is as good, if not better, than the earlier episodes.

I don't want to give too much of the story away - but I will say that this is a time travel story done as only Futurama can do it.

There is a quite a bit of "fan service" this time round (the trip to the nudist planet springs to mind), and the humour is certainly more adult than before, as well as a few digs at other cartoon series - so far I've spotted references to South Park (Cartman's head in the head museum) and Family Guy (the Family Guy calendar - Twelve laughs a year).

Hopefully the next couple of DVD releases will keep up this high standard.

Blogrush update

Well, a while has passed since my last post on BlogRush. So what has changed? Quite a lot actually. The new BlogRush dashboard is active, some traffic has come my way (although it is still more of a BlogTrickle than a BlogRush), so really I think I'll keep it running as part of my site.

The new dashboard is actually rather nice, and gives plenty of graphs and charts for any statistics freaks that may be reading.

So overall as a free service any additional traffic is a Good Thing, just don't expect to gain hundreds (or even dozens) of additional readers.

The Name Game

Jeff Minter, The Man, The Myth, The Yak. A true legend in the annals of games programming. As far as the games industry in the UK goes, Jeff was there before there was an industry. He is unique in that he has remained untouched by the big business atitude to modern software and still writes games tailored to what he feels a game should be, rather than aiming for market share.

So the following livejournal post about the sales of his latest game on XBox Live Arcade came as a bit of a surprise.

"not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week.

OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga.

We'll shut up trying to do anything new then.

Sorry for even trying." - Jeff Minter, LiveJournal entry, November 2007

I can't say that I'm surprised that Frogger (a straight port of the original game) outsold Space Giraffe. Now before anyone gets on my case about this I'd like to make a couple of things clear.

1 - I like Jeff Minter's games. Always have. Probably always will.

2 - I haven't played Space Giraffe as I don't have an XBox 360, but would really like to, especially if it is anything like as good as Tempest 2000 was. Personally I would much rather play that than Frogger any day of the week.

So why do I think that Frogger would outsell Space Giraffe then?

Easy.

Hands up everyone who has heard of Frogger? Quite a few hands there. In fact, pretty much everyone. OK, now raise your hands if you have heard of Space Giraffe. Not quite as many hands there, much less in fact.

This is the crux of the problem. Frogger is a recognised name. It is available cheaply on XBox Live Arcade and could easily be an impulse purchase. Space Giraffe on the other hand. . . . .

The name doesn't really say a lot about what the game is. It doesn't immediately make you think "gosh, I'd better buy that as it is obviously a Tempest 2000 style game by the legendary Jeff 'Yak' Minter" does it ? Tempest 4000 would sell like hot cakes, I've no doubt about that. Even Jeff Minter presents Space Giraffe would probably do quite well.



Hopefully as time goes on and people discover how great the game is, Space Giraffe's sales will pick up and it will end up as the success that it deserves to be.

Batty Junior - Status Update

Has it really been a week since the last post? My word doesn't time fly when you're having fun?

So how is Batty Junior coming along I pretend to hear you ask?

Not bad is the answer. Slow progress, but not bad.



As you can see, the game is starting to come together. There is still a lot of work to do, but some important milestones have been reached.

• Lives work (so you can loose).
• Level transitions work.
• Scoring (and the high score) works.
• The first few bonus items are working including "bonus lives", "slow mode" and "smash ball".

So what's next? In order of priority:

• Finishing off the bonus items.
• Adding the extra game features (such as indestructable walls, regenerating walls, gravity changer).
• Adding new features (not telling what though)
  
• Adding the enemies.
• Completing the levels.

So as you can see there is plenty to do. I'll be releasing a "beta" release at some point when things are further along.

gOS (Green OS, not Google OS)

A couple of weeks ago Everex released a low cost (sub $200) PC running on Linux. The PCs were on sale at Walmart. Note the past tense here. They sold out within days.

The PCs themselves aren't that highly powered (1.5GHz processor, 80GB hard drive, 512 meg memory) but are certainly more than up to daily word processing and web browsing tasks. The big news was the choice of Linux distro - gOS.

Despite rumours this isn't Google OS - it's Green OS, but unofficially it contains so much integrated Google stuff that it is hard to see it as anything other than Google OS.



Although the PCs are sold out at the moment, developer boards are available which all come with a DVD version of gOS. This includes licensed versions of all codecs needed for MP3 playback, DVD playback and some other stuff too.

gOS is available for download from http://www.thinkgos.com/ as a single live / install CD.

So what is gOS like? First impressions are very nice. The desktop runs on Enlightenment. It looks remarkably MacOS X like, right down to the dock at the bottom of the screen.

gOS detects most wireless cards without problems (seeing as this is based on Ubuntu 7.10 this shouldn't be a surprise) and the hardware support is quite good.

The installer looks very slick - but I did have some problems getting it to install on my laptop. After a few hours (aaargh!) of trying I finally managed to repartition the drive using gOS, reboot, manually install an ext3 file system, go back into the installer, choose a manual install, selected the already existing partitions, and then it worked.

This was certainly not as smooth as it might be.

On the plus side, the installer works fine on an 800x600 screen (unlike some other installers I could mention).

Once it has been installed it boots quickly, launches apps quickly and generally feels snappy even on old hardware. Yes folks, the trusty old HP OmniBook has been rolled out and reinstalled again. This may well be the cause of the HD install problems as the OmniBook hardware is, well, finicky.

The OS itself feels like the best of both worlds in that it is small and fast enough to run on old hardware, but looks and feels very modern indeed. As it is based on Ubuntu there is plenty of software available for it via Synaptic, the system is well documented, in fact, it is difficult to find much to complain about.

I'll have to play some more with it and see if the initial positive impressions hold up.

Arcadia Test 3 released for MacOS X

Pretty much every programmer has a guilty little secret, a game that was abandoned before its time, never to be completed.

This is the story of mine.



Many moons ago (back in 2002 in fact) I started work on my first games remake - which was of Imagine Software's Arcadia, a shoot-em-up from 1982. The game code (and pre-rendered 3d graphics) went quite well - up to the point where Windows 98 ate my hard disk and I learned an important lesson about the need to take regular backups.

In many ways this incident was a turning point for me, as this was what finally persuaded me to try going cold-turkey on Windows and run Linux full time. Initially I wanted to run Linux exclusively for a couple of months to see how it fared compared to Windows.

I never went back.

The only casualty of this switch was Arcadia. The source code that I found was out-dated, the pre-rendered graphics of the later levels was gone, and worst of all Blitz (which I was using to write the game in) didn't run on Linux. But there were rumours of a follow on to Blitz which would run on Windows, MacOS and Linux - Blitz Max.

So I waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

When the pre-release version of Blitz Max became available to buy I pre-ordered it, downloaded the Linux beta and started playing.

Arcadia was the obvious choice to try my hand with, but unfortunately porting the game over was not as simple as expected. So I wrote an (unreleased) Arcadia style game, and used the knowledge from this to update the test 3 code to Linux.



I've always planned to complete Arcadia at some point, but to be honest, I don't think this will ever happen. I've finally updated my site to put Arcadia "on hold" and then realised that all my other games run on MacOS X apart from Arcadia. So tonight I've snuck onto a Mac and knocked out a quick port of the game. I'll be uploading this later on tonight.

The funny thing is that now that I've put it on hold I've got some ideas about what I can do with Arcadia to try and finish it off. I'll have to investigate some freeware raytracing software and see if I can get to grips with it.

This will have to wait until after the first release of Batty Junior.

Dan at Work (the Sunday shift)

Sunday is not my favourite of days to be at work, but here I am.

The problem (for me) with Sundays is that is a fairly quiet day, but technical support can still be required. I've had a few support calls tonight (nothing too taxing though) and have managed to move on with my testing of some .MSI packages ready for rolling out to around 300 users.

I've been playing with the idea of product updates via Active Directory GPOs and have found that they work fairly well. Getting some of the products as MSI packages isn't as easy as it might be, but there are some products available to help convert / create packages.

This should make our security and product updates much easier. I didn't have the opportunity to look at this the last time we had an emergency update which when we upgraded to IE7. This came about when our proxy servers were updated and didn't work with IE6 and lower. That experience proved to me once and for all that trying to update all our users manually is too much work for a small IT department, so when the next batch of security updates came in (with a mid-December deadline for completion) I started looking at alternatives.

Using group policies isn't perfect, but it is certainly a damn site better than visiting each machine individually. I'm off to get some more packages sorted out, ttfn.

RetroVaders 1.30 and Chaos Caverns 1.20 for MacOS X

I've finally managed to get my hands on a Mac to get the MacOS port of RetroVaders updated. This brings the MacOS version up to date with the Linux / Windows releases.

I've also created an up-to-date version of Chaos Caverns for MacOS as well.

Both of these will be appearing on Dan's Remakes sometime in the next 24 hours.

I'd also spotted a small bug in the RetroVaders screenshot code, which I've fixed. I'll be recompiling the Linux and Windows versions of RetroVaders to incorporate the fix (the version number will stay the same though). All being even I'll get that done tomorrow as well.

BBC iPlayer

Here's a slice of personal opinion for you - DRM is what you use when you want to treat your customers like thieves.

The BBC has managed to do this with their launch of the iPlayer. Now for those of us in the UK the iPlayer is a pretty nice app to allow you to download BBC content to watch on your PC (content that your TV license fee has paid for by the way) - sort of a catch-up service.

The problem is that thanks to the BBC using Microsoft's DRM for the video they have effectively ruled out Linux users from using the service. Yes, there will be a web based service (using Adobe Flash presumably) "before Christmas" but as far as high resolution video goes - forget it. For now at least.

The BBC's head of technology has this to say: "We're totally committed to universality, to getting the service out to everyone, and to platform neutrality." And how, exactly does this fit with using a restricted codec? Answer: it doesn't.

Part of the BBC's justification for this has been the number of Linux users: "We have 17.1 million users of bbc.co.uk in the UK and, as far as our server logs can make out, 5 per cent of those [use Macs] and around 400 to 600 are Linux users." As one of the 600 I'm not too sure that their figures are correct.

As it turns out, is the BBC isn't too sure about those figures either: "Alternative analysis that we have run off which performs the measurement in different ways suggests that the potential number of Linux users could range from 0.3% to 0.8% (which, from a total UK bbc.co.uk user base of 12.2m weekly users [source: TNS] could imply a user base between 36,600 and 97,600."

Just think Mr Highfield - that's up to 97,600 viewers you are turning away.

Isn't it a shame that you didn't use an open video codec. You could have supported every platform without any real difficulties. This is what happens when you treat your viewers (who have already paid for the content) like thieves.

Thank you Auntie Beeb.

Wizball Remake released!

Those wonderful people at RetroSpec have just released their remake of the legendary Wizball. 20 months in the making, this is the best remake that I've seen in a long while, and a damn fine game in its own right.



For those of you who haven't played or were too young to have played Wizball when it was released in the late 1980s what's it all about eh?

The plot is some waffle about an evil wizard stealing all the colours from the world, and you as Wizball need to collect the colours and shoot the baddies to bring the colour back. OK, daft plot aside this is a tough horizontally scrolling shoot-em-up. Move around, shoot the baddies and gain power ups, such as the Catelite, which you also use to collect the colours.

The graphics have been scaled up to 640x480 and are smooth with a capital smoo. Mere words cannot describe just how damn good the game looks (the above video comes closer to doing it justice).

Your ears haven't been left out either, the excellent C64 soundtrack has been updated, rerecorded and has become a thing of beauty.

Of course, all this would mean nothing if the game play was wrong. The good news here is that the game plays like a dream. An especially surreal dream maybe, but a dream none the less.

(sorry, left to have another quick go)

Currently only the Windows version has been released, but Mac and Linux ports are due (hopefully) soon, the game does however play using Cedega.

Download from RetroSpec.

Linux (and BSD) on a HP OmniBook XE2 - Part 2

Although I've had Linux working on the old OmniBook, one problem had shown up - that was that the wireless card drops its connection after a couple of minutes. So my quest for the perfect free operating system for this old laptop continues.

FreeBSD has a reputation of good support of wireless cards, so it was with high hopes that I downloaded the latest version PC-BSD and installed it on the laptop.

First impressions weren't promising. The installer doesn't fit on an 800x600 screen, small, unimportant things like confirmation buttons are not visible and can only be accessed by the old "hit and hope" method of hitting tab and pressing enter and hoping that the correct option has been selected. Through a mix of luck and bloody mindedness I got PC-BSD installed.

The graphics card was detected, but showed some corruption once KDE had started up. Sound worked fine. The wireless card on the other hand was absent without leave. After a bit of searching through all the options looking for the configuration program for the card (there wasn't one) I discovered that you need to run a shell command and have the Windows drivers to hand to get the wireless card running.

Although this is nice as a fallback option, really this shouldn't be the default. Linux manages to support the cards natively, why can't BSD?

As a last resort I tried the distribution formerly known as Mandrake - Mandriva. Their latest release is Mandriva 2008, which runs as a live CD but can also be installed to disk. Running the live CD was a slow process as the CD drive isn't that fast on the OmniBook, but once the OS was installed to disk - wow! Colour me impressed - this is really good.

The wireless card was detected without any problems at all - and has remained connected to my wireless network without any problems with dropping the connection. The default desktop looks great, with no graphical corruption (unlike BSD). The onboard sound has been detected and works well. The local network shows up without any issues at all (browse smb:/ through Konqueror to see the local Samba shares).

What is really good is that even on this old laptop the whole thing feels snappy. Apps launch with very little delay. Web pages launch quickly. In fact, there is very little to complain about. I really like Mandriva 2008. It feels like a lot of time has been taken in getting things "just right" and compared to the other distributions this just feels so much better.

The on-screen fonts look better than I would have thought possible, the icon scheme looks slick, the only slight downer is that by default MP3 playback won't work. This is down to licensing issues, but luckily there are third party solutions for this.

All in all, it looks like the perfect Linux for this laptop may turn out to be one of the least likely ones.

Like a Meat Loaf out of Hell

It looks like Meat Loaf may be having some personal "issues" at the moment.

It has been reported that he pulled out of his concert at the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle due to throat problems. Reading the comments (and from some of the later TV news reports) it looks like there may be other issues.

Finishing a concert early due to illness is bad, but forgivable. Walking out after 40 minutes of a sub-par performance with the parting shot of "this is the last f***** show I'll ever do" is more difficult to forgive.

Metro Radio Arena are refusing to give refunds to the Meat Loaf fans (or ex-fans as they may now be) because he performed for over an hour - a fact disputed by some of the audience.

Here's hoping that, unlike that famous Bat out of Hell, he won't be gone when the morning comes, but instead will get himself sorted out and give a proper apology to those who paid money to go and see him.

Naked Pictures of Your Mother

I had a bit of a shock when I checked my email this morning. My wife had an even bigger shock. I'd received a couple of, erm, artistic snapshots of an older woman, along with a message saying how much she was looking forward to seeing me again soon.

????????

Luckily for me (and my marriage) she lives somewhere in the Netherlands, and the accompanying text was in Dutch so my my wife has seen the funny side of it. I'm not too sure if I dare reply to her to let her know that she has got the wrong address as I REALLY don't want to a) embarrass or b) encourage her.

I'm going to have to hope that she doesn't send anything racier as it could certainly put me off my cornflakes.

Really, I was lucky that this was very obviously a mistake (or at the least a scam email), because if the mail had been from someone in the UK then I could have had a very difficult time explaining it!