5 retro games I should have played
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 | Games, Misc, Tech-savvy | 3 Comments
I recently started a list of games that I played for record keeping and nostalgia reasons. Doing so I came across a few games that people used to talk about a lot or that seemed to be important in some way at their time in gaming history.
I tried to pick the top 5 retro games I should have played (High Fidelity anybody?).
1985 Bard’s Tale, The (C64)
I love RPGs (like Eye of the Beholder, Ultima) and I guess The Bard’s Tale series would have let me dive into a great fantasy world that I just missed by a few months of age – at the time I didn’t own a Commodore 64.
1985 Super Mario Bros. (NES)
My fist (non-handheld) Nintendo was a Super Nintendo. I already played Super Mario Land with great enjoyment, and loooved Super Mario World. I missed out on the “original” Super Mario Bros. though (I consider this the original, not the single screen arcade Mario titles).
1986 Metroid (NES)
One of my all time favourite game is Turrican (respectively Turrican 2). Well, this reminds me of Turrican AND I loved the Metroid Prime games on the GameCube.
1985 Elite (C64)
In fact I don’t know much about this one, except that it is some kind of space trading simulation, right? Anyway, one of the first games that everybody talked about and I didn’t have a clue what it was all about, it just seemed to be an unmissable game at the time.
1985 Thexder (PC)
Years after I madly fell in love with Turrican I realised that there used to be a title that reminded my of Turrican. So I guess I would have liked Thexder.
Writing this list I did not realize that almost all games I kinda missed out on were released around 1985. I guess this is due to my increased interests in computers at the time without owning one yet. I got into computing with an Commodore Amiga 500 in 1986 and into “consoling” with a Super Nintendo aka Super Famicon in 1992 (apart from the original GameBoy in 1989).
BTW: This is NOT me, just a fun 80′s picture. I would have never put up a Duck Tales poster (the rest is pretty close 
)
Sunday, August 15th, 2010 | Gadgets, Tech-savvy | 1 Comment
@see Don Hertzfeldt / Bitterfilms
Latest toy: Phillips Streamium NP2500
This replaces my eee pc 901 as a music player. Nice display, appealing design and a remote. Primarily an internet radio, it also connects to UPnP servers (Jehovah!), so there is even more fun in it for me: rearranging my whole mp3 collection to meet UPnP needs (albums, genres, years, … sometimes even completely missing id3 tags) and setting up a proper server. Ah, the fun just never ends …
eclipse shortcuts
Thursday, August 12th, 2010 | IDE, Java, Quirks | 2 Comments
Kids, after a hard day’s labour I Crtl-Alt-S’ed myself into the team sync perspective to commit my stuff. After doing so this conversation happened in our team room today:
What was the shortcut for getting back to the Java perspective again?
Hmm, dunno, hit Ctrl-Shift-L
What’s that?
That’s the shortcut for the shortcuts.
True Story. 
P.S. Technically Ctrl-Alt-S doesn’t mean “switch to the team sync perspective” but “sync with repo” implicating a switch to the team sync perspective.
P.P.S. Don’t tell me to use Ctrl-Shift-F8 – first, it’s not “switch to Java perspective” and second that’s the dumbest non-accessible shortcut ever. I always reassign it to Ctrl-Tab thus being far more convenient IMHO.
P.P.P.S. Yes, I know you can assign a shortcut to the not bound by default Java perspective.
P.P.P.P.S. If you are still reading this you didn’t get the post’s joke. It’s not about the Java perspective at all.
Building the “perfect” PC
Thursday, August 12th, 2010 | Gadgets, Tech-savvy | 5 Comments
I’ve been using a pre assembled Dell desktop PC for almost 6 years now. It is a Pentium 4 with 3.4 GHz. Gosh, I am starting this blog post with the same misleading behaviour I want to rant about later on – the CPU power. Please stop thinking about this as the main leading factor concerning computer systems’ speed.
I would like to sum up all the components I decided to buy. While writing this I haven’t ordered the pieces yet, so this will be in a “draft” status as long as the machine isn’t up and running. The list should help me not to forget what endless review readings revealed and maybe help you my dear reader deciding what’s best for your next computer as well. Please don’t start with “what” you want to buy though, start with the “why”. My old computer still works. I can do all my office needs. Still, I want a new one. Let’s see why I still want a new one:
First, I want a machine that is silent, as in SILENT! I don’t want to listen to my fans rattling and my hard drive scamper over my full and pretty much fragmented partitions. My OS should not give me the feeling of an unstable bloated system that doesn’t accept me as its master, rather dictates IEs or iTunes. Apart from not being noisy why squander power? It feels good to know you’re doing the right thing, maximum power with minimum effort. As if golden rims ever improved a car …
75 GB
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 | Misc, Tech-savvy | No Comments
Ever dl 75 GB of data to play with an emulator? I just did. Crazy times we live in …
Getting out of bed the right way
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 | Gadgets, Games, Misc | No Comments
I think I kinda found the perfect wake up sound – the Monkey Island Theme!
Apart from being a brilliant computer game’s tune it starts with a dingelingding that draws your attention (thus “wake up”) but gives you enough time to hit snooze or get up before the song really kicks in.
From a psychological point of view it is a also a good start into the day because it subconsciously reminds me of childhood memories that draw a faint smile on my face – even though I have to get up… try it yourself here.
May I introduce myself?
Sunday, August 8th, 2010 | Misc | 3 Comments
From now on I will be known as “The Animal”. Well, not literally, the avatar is just something that resembles me quite well in certain situations, tape recording for instance … whrock!!
w00t! Got my Comptroller Shirt – finully!
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 | Music, Reviews, Tech-savvy | 6 Comments
Wifey already told me on the phone that my Comptroller shirt arrived today. (The first one got lost during the postage process…) I asked her to open the package to see whether I could expect something my belly actually fits in. She said: “Yeah, seems to be quite your size, but wait – what is this? There’s a mini CD!” I was like “WHAT? How kewl is that?” I had no idea! The order form didn’t mention a CD when I used it (afaicr), therefore I was surprised big time. Right now I am listening to an interpretation of the C64 classic “Last Ninja 2” – awesome! No really, go get Comptroller‘s stuff, it’s so much fun to listen to his chiptune sounds in the car while your passenger cannot decide whether to escape at the next traffic light or dare ask for a copy
Excerpt from the mini CDs inlay:
Directions to use -
a) Put on your Comptroller t-shirt
b) Activate CD
c) Get pumped!
d) GO GO GO
Brilliant! Thanks Comptroller for making my day 
And thanks Jack for your “protekshun” …
Great Britain at a glance
Sunday, July 25th, 2010 | Misc, Reviews, Sites | 1 Comment
Here are some random impressions from our UK (well, England and Scotland) 2010 summer roadtrip. A few more words about the trip and what we learned from it can be found at Lisa’s blog. Enjoy!
Emulation evolved a lot in the last decade!
Saturday, July 24th, 2010 | Gadgets, Tech-savvy | No Comments
For years I’ve been planning to build myself an arcade video gaming machine. I thought that this would be geeky enough by itself as it used to be a pretty hard task to build a working cabinet let’s say 10 years ago. Recently I started to fiddle with emulators again and the whole idea of building my own machine grew again. This blog post is not about my future cabinet – if I’ll every build one, it’s more like a recommendation to all people interested in emulation and DIY-home arcades.
Just sit in front of your computer an try googleing for kewl emulation front-ends – no really, try it! There are so many of them, a lot are fugly and/or complicated to set up. Suddenly I found HyperSpin in one of those lists – yes, it’s Windoze based, but it seems that despite the fact the whole emulation universe evolved, Windoze is still the better choice for an OS concerning emultation needs. Proof me wrong if you can, I’d rather set up a *nix based machine, but check out this (for my part) yaw dropping front end (final version to be seen @HyperSpin homepage):
After some more googeling I found the next video, and this time I knew that my geekness is far from being complete. What a fricking kewl setup this guy has! Check it out:
The trouble to emulate and provide a great front-end is one thing, you still have to build the cabinet. Thanks to the above videos I now know a place where I can get everything I was ever looking for, Kudos to the guys at HyperSpin, thanks to EQDruid for presenting his great arcade machine and Northcoast Custom Arcades for providing apparently excellent hardware.
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