YaK boogiez
Anyway, after tooling around in a hired ship for a few days, drinking beer and having chips and curry, I came across a rather nice gaff - built around a 200-year-old shepherd's cottage (appropriately enough), but with various outbuildings having been merged with it over time. My workroom, hugely appropriately, used to be a 5-stall cow barn :-). The place is set in some rather nice formal gardens (which I will have to hire a gardener to maintain, since I am no gardener meself and they are rather too nice to just stick a goat on and forget about) - and surrounded by some 6 acres of very nice fields - plenty of room for Flossie to come home, and also to add a goat or two and a few llamas, too :-)
Of course, finding the place was just the start. Then I had to sort out a mortgage, which took ages, with lots of faffing around; then I had to wait while the legal stuff was all sorted, and then I had to wait some more while the present incumbent in turn found a place to go to. I finally got in here only last Monday. Since then the place has been crawling with workdudes doing various bits of necessary spiffing-up, and my furniture only arrived yesterday, thank you so very much bloody British customs, who insisted on delaying my shipment and poking their nose into it for no apparent reason for a week. Jeez. So I finally get to be sitting in front of my computer actually at a desk again and in a position to chill out and do an update. Ironically I only get a few hours to finally enjoy it, since I have to immediately bugger off back to the US for a couple of weeks - Project X has reached supercritical stage and I need to go back there to come up to speed on the latest developments.
Things are looking very cool X-wize, and if you have been reading Next Gen or Edge you may well know a bit more about it than before. The feline entity is slowly but surely emerging from the bag. I am very glad it has finally reached this stage, and you can expect to be hearing a lot more about us in the very near future. Secrecy mode is finally ending, and soon I'll actually be able to show off some of the fruits of our labours over the last year and a half. I don't think you will be disappointed :-)
Other stuff that has occurred in the interim - I bought a new ship (or at least a not-that-used one), a Toyota RAV4 - not quite as sporty as the Red Ship, but considerably more suited to rural life in Wales, where the roads can get a bit iffy in the winter and where all your mates live down shitty tracks; and where you might have to stick a goat in the back on occasion. I also upgraded my computer, so now I have a nice spankin' P-II 300 with all the bells and whistles, and a mighty fine box it is too, and no mistake. Everything in my emulator collection runs at full framerate, with zero exceptions. Llovely.
Speaking of my emulators, if you haven't taken a download of MAME recently, you should definitely do so. MAME is rapidly shaping up to be just about the only coin-op emulator you will ever need. It currently runs over 200 of the old games, including such classics as Star Wars, all the old Williams classics, you name it! the mouse driver on Star Wars needs a bit of a seeing-to - at the moment there is acceleration coded in, which makes control a bit dodgy, I reckon (I know that it is possible to play Star Wars well with a mouse, since I became very proficient at the the excellent Atari ST version many moons ago). I have also been renewing my Robotron addiction, as I am wont to do every few months or so, and attaining considerable proficiency at the little-known sequel to Robotron, Blaster.
There has also been an update to the PC-Engine emulator which allows it to run CD-ROMS (I haven't tried this out yet, but once I have a bit more time I certainly shall, since I anticipate spending a few hours reacquainting myself with the joys of Super Wonder Boy in Monster Land :-). The emulation is so good now that if you turn on Scan Lines mode then for all intents and purposes you are playing a PC-Engine. The lads came round the other weekend and we spent the time getting mildly intoxicated and playing lots of Devil Crash and Alien Crush, just like old times. Cool.
I also bought a UK N64 - since I am going to be living here now it helps if I can buy local games rather than having to import from the US, and besides, my US system was in my shipment, and judging by the amount of time they took, was probably being enjoyed by all the guys at whatever Customs place my stuff came in at. I've been playing Extreme-G, the Wipeout-wannabe from Acclaim for N64. I am not sure it is quite as classy as Wipeout, and the choons certainly aren't anywhere near as good, but the game is good fun and the tracks are interesting, featuring all kinds of weird loops and gravity inversions. It also supports simultaneous play by up to 4 players, which I look forward to checking out when the lads come around again. A great game, but I am still waiting to see what the big N come up with when F-Zero 64 is released...
Well, that's about it for this time - I will do more extensive updating
when I get back from the US and I can really settle in. You
can expect many good things to emerge from the Cow Barn in the future :-)
Occasionally, on those nights when I am chilling out with the aid of my favourite neuromodifiers, I will put on the 24-hour God Squad channel and watch it for a while. Not that I am one of them, hell no; just that for a very large Extreme High Weirdness value fundie Christian telly can't be beat. You get all sorts on there... blokes trying to convince you that evolution never actually happened, and that despite the evidence of the fossil record, mankind and dinosaurs were in fact contemporaneous, and that the reason the dinos aren't around now is that God got pissed off with them and denied them access to the Ark (!), preachers that scream about hellfire and damnation, preachers that strut around on the stage looking like angry roosters, hip preachers with long hair aimed at the yoof market, grannies speaking in tongues and falling over, and of course a heavy emphasis on The Gospel According To Give Us All Your Money. (You also get an awful lot of very bad singing, but hey, put on some choons and watch it with the sound down, it's just as amusing). One of the things they believe in (amongst many weird others, like the guy who claimed that you could actually see the New Jerusalem flying through space on its way to Earth through a telescope) is the Rapture. This event is apparently going to occur when the Head Honcho makes it back to the planet (real soon now - these folk are convinced that good old Mr. Apocalypse is right around the corner). On that day, in a somewhat Heaven's Gate-ish occurrence, they believe that they are all going to be physically beamed up to the Mothership... err... Heaven, there to dwell in glory for the rest of eternity, etc., etc., you know the score. There is actual discussion about the chaos that is apparently going to occur when fundie vehicles suddenly become driverless as the Holy Transporter kicks in.
This is all quite amazing for a UK bloke. For us, religious telly is a few old grannies in a draughty church somewhere singing a few hymns for half an hour on a Sunday night, or dear old Harry Secombe interspersing hymns with gentle platitudes, not this stuff of flying cities, dodgy pseudoscience and Galactic transportation... But I digress. I was talking about the Rapture.
Well, the fundies are still waiting and watching the skies - but I have found my Rapture already. No, I haven't been beamed up to the mothership or anything, I remain fully corporeal and in complete control of my car - but, thanks to Something Wonderful sitting at the other end of a cable from my PC, I have been able to go places and see things that I never could before... and it has me in total thrall. It's wonderful. :-)
During the week I spent at the Top Secret Proving Grounds whilst I came fully up to speed on the latest developments, I did rather well for my curry, too. Let's see... curry the previous Thursday, curry down in Monterey with a mate the weekend before, then curry on Monday, curry on Wednesday and curry again on Thursday. My ringpiece was twitching for days after that lot! Mind you, I did miss my curry this last Thursday - an unfortunate oversight at work meant that I spent some time pissing about trying to get a PC with working comm ports together, and by the time it was done and I got to the curry house - it was *closed*! Akk! Such pain, to enter the establishment and breathe in the lingering aroma of Indian food, only to be cruelly denied at the last moment!
Hey, if those fundies are right, then I guess when the time of mass levitation comes I'll be cast down into the pit - where my personal hell will probably take the form of sitting for eternity alone in my favourite Indian restaurant, with the smell of curry all about me, whilst waiters glide by frequently carrying heaping plates of steaming Vindaloo, garlic naan, those really spicy pappadoms and bottles of Flying Horsie Royal Lager Beer to all the other tables, but somehow they never get around to taking my order... mind you, God might think I'm a nice chap after all, in which case my Heaven would be quite similar, except that I would get an infinite supply of Vindaloo of just the perfect strength, that I could eat and never get quite too full to eat any more; and the Flying Horsie Royal Lager Beer will flow like water, and I'll be able to drink it forever, getting just drunk enough to enjoy it but never so drunk that I can't drink any more; and my pile of pappadoms and my basket of garlic naan will supernaturally replenish themselves continuously and for infinity. All my mates will be there in the curry house with me, and there will be lots of llamas. Amen, and amen!
Apart from spending all my time in impossibly beautiful spaces, I haven't been up to much, really... had mates over to visit the last few weekends, which has been most pleasant; my next-door-neighbour has a new grilf, and they spend a lot of time sat out in the shared yard between my house and theirs, and because of that his dog has gone a bit psycho and territorial, and has started biting people who emerge from my house... hehe... if that carries on I suspect my weekend visitors might not be so frequent :-). Got a copy of Xevious 3D/G on the psx the other day, which is a respectable blast, but I am looking forward to Raystorm and the imminent Star Fox 64 to truly satisfy my kill-things-in-outer-space cravings.
Well, I shall get off and upload this, because I am about to deposit some stuff onto videotape so that I can send it back to my mum in the UK and show her that all this talk of exotic hardware and new graphics paradigms that I have been on about for the last yay many months is more than just hot air and good intentions. Apologiez for net.deadness, but X eats me these daze, and I am lloving every minute of it :-)
Oh yeah - these developments mean that I shall soon be able to name a date for moving my carcass back to West Wales and the lamentably underskritched fur of the Prettiest Sheep in the World... as and when that happens, look for a lot more activity in the Exodus section, as I start to plan my translocation. You might want to start using my new forwarding address, which is not only useful, because I will be able to point it at whichever ISP I end up with in Wales, and thereby achieve some continuity of addressing during the move - it also happens to be the coolest email address on the Net, and I am most obliged to the friendly sysadmin who sorted me out with it. The old address still remains, and will until I depart these shores, but now I may also be contacted via the following, easy to remember and unspeakably cool address:
:-)
I also just got my registered version of Magic Engine... I cannot stress just how cool this is. I spent all morning playing Final Soldier when it arrived in my email. ME is the best emulator ever. And, thanx to Nick England for pointing this out, one of my games is on the PC-Engine and I never even knew about it! Check this out...
Yes, that is Gridrunner (or at least part of it - dunno why the screendump is truncated, it's fine on the screen), running on MagicEngine! It seems that someone wrote a Vic-20 emulator back in 1992, and collected some games together and put them on the Engine... so you can now run a PCE emulator that is itself running a Vic emulator... hehe... nested emulation, gotta llove that :-)
My Flossie t-shirts arrived today! And now that I have verified, as I fully expected, that they came out well and look very cool, I have made the image available off my Area 51 page. Check it out and proudly display your devotion to the Online Ovine!
Just a quick update... and when I upld this I shall also upload the new additions to the Links page that I forgot to last time. Apologies to anyone who was looking for my links to MagicEngine's homepage and pointers to some warez...
Chilling out, revisiting the first Prodigy album, and wondering when they'll get around to releasing the new one... so, what's the gnus? Well, X-wize, let's see - by this time next week we should have beaten the Level One boss, received an extra life, several thousand bonus points, and a massive powerup of the main weapon, and just be entering Level Two :-)
(YaK boogies [see illustration at the top of this page]... everybody is in the place, everybody is in the place, everybody is in the place. let's go! You gotta love techno for the deep and meaningful lyrics :-)
So, new on the site we now have a selection of nice Area 51 t-shirts, being some of the cooler thangs that have fallen out of my X-work. I really like being able to design my own T-shirts rather than have to wear somebody else's logos all the time. It's cool. I particularly like that I can offer them for anyone else to use, just by vectoring people off down a link to a place that specializes in printing them - I always thought doing the odd t-shirt might be fun, but was previously put off by the prospect of having to have them made in bulk, keep stock, you know, all the attendant hassle. And I didn't really want to make money off them, anyway, just share designs that maybe someone else might think are cool - this way, anyone who wants one can get one with a mouse click, and maybe the guy at Mackey gets a few extra orders and maybe some followups. Cool. The Net is cool, that way.
Been playing some new games, too, in the interstices of my time - I particularly like POD, the new racing game for Voodoo accelerator board (oh, and for other configurations too, but all I care about is the Voodoo one), which has gorgeous graphics, smooth racing play, and the prospect of infinite extensibility and multiplayer racing via the Net. I guess the Net is cool in that way, too :-)
I had a visitor from Wales last week - quite a novel experience to have a human around the house for a while, and it prompted me to do something unusual, and actually go out, to Yosemite, away from the keyboard for a whole three days. The weather was beautiful, the waterfalls in fine flow as the Spring melt gets underway, and we had a great time there, at least until the last day. Which brings me to a small advisory section:
I also owe a large debt of thanx to my friend from Wales, who stuck by me throughout the entire proceedings, and whose first experience of driving on the wrong side of the road was therefore to drive my stick-shift 2-seater through twisty roads whilst chasing an ambulance. Jeez. Times like that you find out who your friends really are, iz all.
Stupid self-induced medical trauma notwithstanding, it was nonetheless a great trip. I had no idea the amount of drinking that goes on at Yosemite, having only previously been there for day trips, and therefore not having really considered the prospect of a few beers, given that there was a long drive ahead at the end of the day. But once you've got your tent-cabin, you're set for the night, and the bar does a roaring trade until 10 pm, whereupon the party decamps to various locations and proceeds enthusiastically until the early hours. It's fun. Just remember that a hangover dehydrates you, and quaff plenty of liquid the next morning, iz all. Don't be a dumb ox, like some of us (sheepish grin).
We stayed in a place on the valley floor called Curry Village, which, as you can imagine, appealed to me considerably, giving my prediliction for spicy food of an Indian nature. Notice the following jpg:
That's me being considerably chuffed to find a sign advertising a Curry Dining Pavilion. You'll also note that I am wearing a Camp Curry t-shirt (and my ratty, smelly old llama-wool outer garment, from which I am inseparable, and which probably contributed to the whole heat-exhaustion business).
Of course, this being the good ol' US, the one thing you couldn't get there was a curry of any description. But they have kitchens there, and a hotel, and I was thinking it would be an ideal location for a real Camp Curry, to educate our American friends into the deep pleasures of the Vindaloo... get in a few crack Indian chefs for a couple of weeks, install refrigerated bog-roll holders in the loos, ship in loads of lager... it'd be like a kind of curry boot camp - ship in there as a curry wimp, eating only the tikkas and kormas, and spend a couple of weeks in pleasant surroundings, working your way up to Vindaloo. Advanced students could attempt the transition from Vindaloo to Tindaloo and Phal. I could make guest appearances, lecturing on the correct use of pappadoms and eating an exhibition curry every night. Hehe...
Ghosht would, of course, be banned, out of respect for Flossie. :-)
Somewhere in the midst of all this stuff I turned 35, jeez, I'm getting to be an old fart. Well, no signs of any inclination to give up videogames or falling out of love with beasties or coding or tech, and I'm still a weirdo, so I guess I am immune, so far, to pipe-and-slippers mode. Thank Ghu. My, but being in the biz for getting on for 15 years, you have to cover a lot of ground though... most people, they learn their trade, pick up a few gentle embellishments along the way, spend the time to get to the top of the learning curve, then settle in... in this biz you constantly have to keep running to keep up with the advances in the tech, the learning curve somehow never flattens off... you cover a lot of ground.
And the thing is, you love it... wouldn't have it any other way... this has never happened before, and being a part of it, even just a tiny insignificant part that does nothing more useful than create odd little constructs for people to play with, is amazing. Man, I love this tech. I love being a weirdo coder. And this time next week, I am gonna be in X-related heaven, and I will love that, too. :-)
Got an excellent party to go to at the end of this month, too. I'll be seeing some good friends there. 35 I may be, decrepitude may well be just around the corner, but right now, hey, life is good. And soon [prays fervently to the shades of Boole and Saint Turing] I shall be back in Wales, with Flossie, and excellent missions to undertake on awesome hardware.
Can't be bad.
Hey, I just did my taxes! I thank Ghu for tax software, 'coz this is exactly the kind of thing that I would find a major pain in the ass to do otherwise. I am, and hope to remain, almost entirely clueless about what actually goes on in the US income tax process. They send you the forms, and a big, fat, confusing booklet with it, the kind of thing that you could very easily spend an extremely boring weekend with a calculator and a biro getting right in the unwired world. It's great that I can just load up some software, transfer the data from last year, edit any changes, fill in some numbers off my W2, answer a few idiot-level questions, and then have the forms emerge all nice and neat from the old laser printer. Takes most of the pain out of the whole thing, only takes an hour, and it's nice to be able to put the old iron to a task that is more genuinely useful in the Real World than playing a particularly decent game of Nemesis....
Codewize - I am engaged on some coding that is not particularly graphical, but nevertheless very important to this phase of Project X. As in the case of Do and his crew, these times are bringing closure to certain phases of the X project. Fortunately, the X team leader does not deem it necessary for us to off ourselves after buying new Nikes and covering ourselves in purple triangular shrouds. Indeed, our continued existence in our current containers is necessary for progression to the next stage. We do intend to reach the Higher Level though - but it ain't gonna be no UFO behind Hale-Bopp that takes us there....
Anyway, that's why I haven't updated Wallpaper of the Week recently. Tables of numbers reporting ridiculously short execution times for exotic algorithms may look nice to the geekly eye, but don't sit particularly harmosiously behind yer icons.
When I do a more extensive update, I have reviews of both Blast Corps and Doom for the N64 to add to my reviews page, and some extras for my CD recommendations that I haven't updated for bloody ages. Until then, TTYL...
Things are hotting up a bit in the world of Project X, and I've had precious little time to be human recently... I have n things to do right now, and when I'm not doing those, I am thinking about the n+1 things that I also need to do, but which are of a lower priority from the original n... and there are several layers of X-based priorities before you even begin to get down to normal human things like feeding yourself or going out or being sociable. As a result of this I am afraid I have fallen down somewhat on my comm duties, and I have a huge backlog of email that I just cannot hope to shift. I apologize, and don't mean to seem rude if I don't answer your email immediately, if at all. I always appreciate hearing from people who know of me and my work, particularly when people write out of the blue just to thank me for wearing out their joystick hand over the years - it always cheers me up when I get such a communication. But these days I am knocking off work quite late most nights, and all I'm fit for at the end of the day is a quick beer and then bed, and I can't really face answering a ton of email. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude. Merlin eats me, iz all. And I love it, and the results will be well worth it, you wait and see. You will know extreme bliss when I caress your quivering neurons with my nootropic algorithmic digital-narcotic wares. And that day is getting inexorably closer. There is much excitement amongst the Project X team.
I've basically been in trogloditic mode, and will probably remain so for the next month or two - I have a long-weekend break arranged for the end of May, when I shall be going to an extremely good party; I'm kinda using that to aim for and to justify not really having a life beyond X at the moment. And after that, of course, there's my return to Flossie, planned for later in the year, to which I look forward with inordinate relish. It gives me deep joy to know that before the year is out I shall be reunited with my Ungulate of Choice.
Of course, I have been keeping my hand in with occasional sessions on the emulators and in front of the Nintendo 64 - Turok stands out as a most excellent game indeed, and if you haven't done so already, you really should check out the review on my reviews page. Turok's a Doom-style game with some beautiful graphics and quite the most outstanding use of realtime particle systems I've ever seen, and comes highly recommended. On the emulator scene, the seemingly-unstoppable MAME seems set to eclipse Dave Spicer's Sparcade as the best multi-game coin-op emulator out there. New emulators are popping up more quickly than I can track them - a recent gem is an outstanding Gauntlet/Gauntlet II emulator that is perfect in every respect, apart from having no sound. Gauntlet's a nontrivial emulation, and if you check out the emu, you'll see that the dude done good. Hie thee to my emulator links and go grab some goodiez...
One acronym that's been mentioned a bit around the office recently: T3K.... it could well happen... and if you liked it before, you have no idea how it's gonna ream your neurons on a [censored] architecture running at [censored] MHz... hehe... ain't nothing I can't do on a system like that... hehehe...
We're reaching transition-point. Things are happening which mean that decloaking will be inevitable in the not too distant future, and at last I'll be able to rant and rave to my fullest extent about what's been going on. Yeah, I know it's been a long time in coming, and it's been a lot of hard work for all of us on the X team, and will continue to be so for the next few months... but if I could tell you the specs right here and now, you'd understand exactly why it's gonna be so worth it.
For you, it's gonna mean a gaming and lightsynth experience unlike anything you've ever seen before. N64 included.
For me, it's gonna mean being back in Wales, working on stuff that I am passionately enthusiastic about, on unbelievable hardware that I would never have imagined in my wildest dreams (at least the wild dreams pertaining to hardware, rather than beasties) a few years ago, living not far from a decent pub, and in close proximity to a variety of pleasantly aromatic furry beasties.
Well worth working for, I reckon. Trogloditic mode isn't particularly human, but it gets stuff done :-)
Speaking of curry and lager, I am totally overjoyed that Red Dwarf series 7 is out at long last, and being broadcast back in the UK. Thanks to a co-operative mum over there and a multi-standard VCR over here, I am receiving regular tapes of the new episodes, to my unmitigated delight. I was howling with mirth within the first five minutes of Episode One when Lister is devastated to find out that a spacetime anomaly has wiped out the ship's entire supplies of curry and lager ("Life without curry? That's like Laurel without Hardy... or the Lone Ranger without.. umm.. that Indian bloke!").
Life without curry would indeed be a terrible thing to contemplate. Maybe I should marry a nice Indian girl who would be willing to cook me Vindaloo every night. I can just see my Personals ad now:
Shaggy, goaty-smelling coder seeks Indian female for spicy culinary relationship, possibly marriage. Looks unimportant, age unimportant, but please send photo of curry...
Hehe... so what else is up? Well, I'm off skiing next week, oh delight, sliding down mountains with long things on my hooves, one of my favourite activities! I'll be strapping on my Salomon ski-boots and getting into my very appropriately-named Mountain Goat ski-suit, although not in that order, 'coz that would be well awkward :-).
Finally got around to trimming off some of the dead parts of my website, and gathered my links and downloads into one place; and I have decided to release Llamatron and Revenge as freeware. Coding continues well on the new Thang - I expect to twiddle with Area 51 a bit more tomorrow and quite possibly upload a couple of new images, so watch the skies!
Well, so far it's been an auspicious start to 1997 - and I do believe this is in fact the Chinese Year of the Ox, which, me being me, also feels like it bodes well. There have been a few scorching new updates to some of the best arcade emulators in the last month, including the return to the scene of the greatest emu of all, the Dave Spicer Sparcade. Go over to my Emu page to read all about those goodies, then go do some downloading!
I finally got to play Tempest X3 for the PlayStation - I finally gave in and bought a copy just so I could review it; then, of course, I got a package from John Skrutch at the Company Formerly Known As Atari which had a copy in it about two days later.. Oh well - I gave the dupe to a mate of mine, so at least I know it's not going to waste.
The game is very pretty, sounds great, is appropriately psychedelic, but to a real T2K player it's going to be a bit disappointing. It's still a great game, but there are a couple of things that obtain my horned caprine entity. There's a full review, complete with moany bits and comments, on my reviews page. (To be honest, I am probably being a bit extra-hard on the game, but, well, if anyone has the right to be an opinionated git about the game, it's me. And, of course, the Great Originator Dave Theurer - but since he has left the games biz, I feel like I have kinda inherited Tempest - I care about it deeply, and I want to nurture and protect it, keep it safe from harm... and watch it grow. I don't think I've finished with Tempest yet. Oh my no, not at all... hehe)...
"Project X" is entering a very exciting phase, and we're all buzzed about how things are going at work. Yes, there will be announcements; no, I don't know yet when they will be, but it should be fairly soon. Keep an eye on the Area 51 section of my homepage, because if I let anything slip, that's where it's going to be slipping.
Oh yes - and one other thing I have decided about this year: Exodus.
Apart from that... I had a very nice break over the Xmas hols, went back to the sceptred isle as per usual, got to hang out with my mates, go to Wales, drink lots of beer and eat plenty curry. In fact on the last day I went out for curry with my mates, and the curry house offered me one of the mythical, off-the-menu "stealth curries" which they consider to be too dangerous and won't even admit they exist until you have a proven record of wolfing down the hottest Vindaloos. I had a dark, ominous, seething chicken curry that made my eyes water and my tongue throb. A curry that burns like fire and, amazingly enough, even looks exactly the same, both going in and coming out.
I also went to see my mate Dave Lightsynth up in Bristol, and had one of those proper British nights out that I really miss since I've been here. You know the sort of thing - down the road for a most excellent Vindaloo at the Sheesh Mahal, then lots of lager, further stimulation, and conversation until N o'clock in the morning... Dave's gaff is an interesting place to get smashed in - full of boxes marked VPL and bits of Polhemus trackers, hardware and computers everywhere, even parts of the furniture made out of bits of old computers. Dave is an excellent guy to have inebriated conversations with. This is a guy who has interfaced the Jaguar VLM to a Theremin, for Ghu's sake. Me and Dave and Ian Lightsynth used to have regular such sessions at my old gaff in Wales, so it was most excellent to do so again - it's been a couple of years. Oh well - maybe soon the Welsh sessions will be starting again...
Not that I don't get to have occasional good nights out over here - in fact the other night I met up with some ex-Atarians I hadn't seen for a while and we had a most pleasant evening indeed, consuming a degree of fermented beverages of varying ilks and talking about this and that and the Old Days Back At Atari. There was this guy there I didn't really know, kinda a FOAF, ya grok, and although he was a nice enough guy for sure, well, you know that funny feeling you get when you know someone who's apparently sane but belongs to some cult, or is a Scientologist? Well... this guy was a heretic... I can barely bring myself to say it, but he... he...
He didn't like Roger Waters.
Yes, yes, I know, that's shocking, and the very words look ugly upon the page of your Web browser, but it's true. I tell you, I knew something was up when the conversation happened to veer in the direction of Their Exalted Pinknesses, and he suddenly said something extraordinary: he said that he thought that Pink Floyd were losing their touch when they released The Wall.He thought The Wall "wasn't that great".
Yeah right! And that Eugene Jarvis chap was totally missing his stride when he wrote Robotron. And that Shigeru Miyamoto, he's crap, he is, and Mario 64 sucks!
Now that was scary, being in the same room as someone who actually thought The Wall was crap... but, shock piled on horror, the heretic went on to make the following bizarre allegations:
- The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking is, apparently, crap!
(yeah right! And the Curry Gardens serves rotten Vindaloo and it never rains in Wales!)
- Radio KAOS is "poppy!"
(yeah right! Regular Spice Girl, that Roger Waters is! Yeah! KAOS was *so* mainstream!)
- Amused to Death only has one decent song on it!
(yeah right! And the only good game on the PlayStation is "Viewpoint"! And that Dave Gilmour, he only knows one chord!)
Naturally, I was somewhat taken aback to find out that apparently my Deity has been creating all this crap, poppy music for years and silly me's been enjoying it and thinking it's good! Damn, I hope nobody pops up to tell me that all Eugene Jarvis's games are crap, and I just didn't notice - that would really spoil my day.
Amazingly enough, when pressed, the individual in question revealed that he had arrived at his deep, insightful opinion of Pros and Cons after just the one listening! Silly me, and I thought that there was such a wealth of detail in that album that it took me quite a few listenings before I began to get the most out of it...
Well, after hearing such talk, in mixed company I might add, there was a part of my brain so deeply shocked that all it could do was go and lurk in a darkened recess of my cranium, quivering and thinking about spline curves. Normally I am very tolerant of the strange beliefs of other humans, but to hear someone openly profaning the Name of the Lord thy Rog was too much even for me. I am undertaking a purge to get rid of the nasty taste it's left in my mind - a process that involves frequent listening to His Great Words at an exalted volume, and drinking His Holy Sacrament (beer). If reading this account has sullied your own mind, then I prescribe at least three Floyd albums a night until the unpleasantness passes.
Beware, people! There are some very strange people out there... heretics... heathens... probably meeting in darkened rooms, swearing profane oaths against Roger and Eugene... sacrificing virgin Defender coin-ops on their Altar of Hate and committing unnatural acts with the Floydian inflatable pig to the hellish strains of Country and Western music... dark, soulless people... people who honestly believe that "Mother" is crap, "Comfortably Numb" is crap, "Run Like Hell" is crap... strange, twisted individuals... could be someone you know... could be out to get you...
Take care. Keep a copy of The Wall about your person at all times. Be sure and sing "Comfortably Numb" loudly in the shower. Think good Floydian thoughts, and pray the freaks leave you alone..
Hey, I did tidy up at least the living room today, in between games. I nearly blew up my Hoover! There I was, Hoovering away, when suddenly I could smell... you know... that smell. Burning electrical stuff. Never a good odour to encounter as it usually bodes ill. I switched off the Hoover, and sure enough, there were wisps of smoke coming out of the ventilation slots!
Now, I know my carpet was dirty. I have about as much sense of domesticity as a billy-goat, as anyone who has ever had to use the bogs at my gaff will attest. I rarely Hoover. So there was plenty of dirt on my carpet - I didn't have so much dust-bunnies as dust-cows. Big ones, wandering around and mooing loudly. However, even I would have been amazed that there could be enough dirt to actually blow up my Hoover.
As it turns out, all that was wrong was that I had forgotten to switch mode on the Hoover from "low pile" to "high pile" before I attempted to suck my living-room carpet. Now that's an easy oversight to make, and I reckon there should have been some failsafe device in the Hoover to actually cut out the motor before it started to burn up. Bloody silly piece of design that there isn't. Luckily I stopped my Hoover before actual flames ensued, but it was a close call. Poxy dumb mechanical devices - I hate 'em. I look forward to the day when I can buy some nano dust that I can scatter on my carpet and which will eat my dirt, using it as raw material to reproduce themselves, evolving vast nano civilisations in the interstices of my shagpile whilst simultaneously keeping it spotlessly clean. Hehe...
Oh well, tomorrow I shall have a go at the kitchen. That's gonna take a strong stomach and nerves of steel. There are things in my fridge that would give H.P.Lovecraft pause for thought :-]
I went into the office today, and it's looking increasingly likely that I will be having beans to spill at last pretty soon. Things are coming, as they say, to a climax ;-)... I'm greatly looking forward to the start of next year, because I am ready to kick some serious ass here. You people have no idea what I am going to do to you. I'm going to turn you into a nation of wireheads. You won't want to do anything except gaze at your screens drooling on the carpet and... interfacing.... we are talking serious habit-forming 100% class A pure video narcotics here. Algorithmic ecstasy. A full-frontal digital lobotomy.
heh heh heh.....
So what's new with the shaggy ox-smelling one? Well, coding continues on That Which Cannot Yet Be Named. It bugs me too that I can't talk about it yet, you can be sure; but that period is coming to an end. Expect interesting things to read about at the start of '97. Next year is going to be a Time of Much Coding and Many Miracles. As soon as I can, I shall also start up my "Wallpaper of the Week" section, where you will be able to download psychedelic stills for your Windoze wallpaper from some of the outrageous graphics naughtiness that I have been getting up to. Be warned that you will need 24-bit colour to view them at their best. I tend to be worst-case for anything less. :-)
Also, also... been playing a few new games (see In The Slot)... and got a couple of new emulators and finally uploaded my game packs for download from the emu page, and I've also updated a coupla other areas on the website... Apart from coding and messing with my computers I haven't really been up to much recently. I've been in semi-hermetic mode, lurking in my lair communing with exotic constructs and occasionally breaking off to consume stimulants both chemical and digital. (Coffee and Robotron will get ya wired as fuck). In particular, I have been firing up the Williams Arcade Classics on the PSX and refining my skills at Robotron, in anticipation of the imminent release of "Robotron X" on that system.
Oh, Tempest is now apparently out on the PS and Saturn... I still haven't seen it as nobody at either Interplay or what remains of Atari has seen fit to send me a copy to have a look at, which is kinda weird, considering that it is my game after all. However initial reaction in the newsgroups and in review is good, and ther is no reason why the conversion shouldn't be as cool as the original - maybe more so, with some cool new FX on the PS version. One of these days maybe I will even get to see it.
I've been coding up a lot of HTML too... but nothing you are gonna see :-)... tech examples for the coders who are to follow me down the Path to Great Glory that is our current project.
However it won't be long until I am comfortably enthroned in my Virgin Premium Economy, definitely no smoking seat, within a large metal tube hurtling at unthinkable velocity and altitude above a large body of water, glugging down one gin and tonic after another and making my inebriated way back home to the UK for the Christmas hols. (It's amazing - what would the pioneers of the old West have thought about the fact that we can now travel from San Francisco to London in the space of a few gin and tonics and a good nap?) And I am going to party my tiny brains out, go down the pub an awful lot, visit the Prettiest Sheep in the World, and irritate my digestive tract with a succession of caustic chicken Vindaloos. It'll do me the world of good to get away from the computer for a while, hang out with my mates, get pissed and stoned a lot, play no end of games on my mum's Playstation, and generally chill out and prepare myself mentally for a great deal of groovy coding in the New Year....
Virgin appear to have nicked the name "Grid Runner" for one of their Playstation games. In Europe, they did the decent thing and renamed the game Grid Run, but over here they have used the Llamasoft title (albeit as two separate words). Needless to say the game is nothing at all like proper Gridrunner. Bloody cheek, I reckon.
Tempest 2000 is about to be released by Interplay across the Playstation, Saturn, Mac and PC formats. It's nice to see the game finally reach a mass audience - early reviews seem to be very positive, so I have hopes the game will do well and generate some nice royalties for the Yak. The Playstation version is called Tempest-X, and contains a tweaked-up version of the game using some PSX-only effects and introducing some new dynamic textured webs - but it's still firmly based on T2K and as such should be a most enjoyable blast.
In the meantime, I have updated a couple of areas and added a piece about my recent trip, including some nice pictures from Wales. I'm going to have to do some fossicking around with my local copy of the site, as since I transferred it over to my new SCSI disk, somehow lots of "~1"s have got appended to filenames that shouldn't have them. Hehe....
I've introduced a new section, dedicated to my favourite tech toys, and added a bit of new stuff here and there in the existing sections. I know there are a few snapped links around, I'll do me best to fix them and add new ones RSN. Sorry I have been a bit inactive Webwise of llate, I have just been a lazy git, iz all. And not being able to speak of my passion makes it a bit harder to get enthusiastic about maintaining my stuff. That *will* change. Soon. Watch the skies. Imagine a world without pixels :-)
Back to the top layer of my Zoo!
Anyway, I duly resigned from Atari as soon as I got back from the UK - I could never do that in the middle of a project, you understand; I reluctantly gave back the Pentium they had given me (ohh, I was sad to see it go.. until I got my P166, that is) and left the Bunker for the last time with a somewhat heavy heart..
My parting with Atari was entirely amicable; and indeed there is still a chance that I might do some work for them as a game design consultant on some of the Interactive titles.
I am sorry to be giving up the Jaguar after having spent the last few years getting to know it pretty well..
The game's quite different from T2K; if I had to rate each game I would place T2K still a weensy bit higher than D2K, but nonetheless the game delivers the goods. The emphasis in 2K mode is on intensity of gameplay and extremely violent weaponry - wait until you get your first Lightning Laser activation on a crowded screen, with your shields on and five Humanoids dangling.. bits of alien everywhere and you're almost invincible. Very satisfying indeed.
I shall be putting up a D2K information page Real Soon Now - I have to grab some of the graphics off my archive ZIP disk, as the bulk of my D2K stuff is either on my 486 (may its poor departed soul rest in peace) or on the Atari Pentium, which is back at the Bunker..
For now, I shall tell you: there are three easter eggs in the game, and whilst one is quite conventional, the other two are *cool*.
Naturally I still prefer the Jag version - of course I do, I bloody wrote it - but this is a pretty damn good game nonetheless.
And there, like a lustrous, ovine eye in the middle of this storm of beer and curry, was Flossie; looking rotund and appealing as ever, bleating melodiously and waggling her fluffy little tail. Oh, how my heart ached to see her graceful form, her dainty little hooves, and the lovable angle at which she inclines her left ear sometimes. Oh, how I longed to dig my fingers deep into her thick wool and scratch her in the place that I know she liked best.. *sigh*.. I do miss my Flossie. However, she seems to have settled down in her new abode, with Alastair the goat; she has plenty of room to mosey around on and is well looked-after, so she'll be fine... but one day I shall return at last to Wales, and then I'll bring her home, where she belongs, with me.
*sigh*...