I must admit that 2011 was one of the best years in console and computer gaming ever; sure, theres some great previous years, and a lot of highlights. But I’m an old man and forget now, so I’m looking at this year ;)

Off the top of my head I can rhyme off some ‘must plays’ — if you’re going to play a game at all, play one of these. Different genres all, really.

• Deus Ex: Human Revolution – stealth old-school cyperpunk inspired FPS, but don’t let “FPS” scare you off; this is a sneaker, with detective moments, game changing decision making, absolutely stunning music and art direction (this game is full of ‘oh, wow, pause and look’ moments.) Think Blade Runner is game form, and you’re half way there. On all major platforms, and absolutely worth playing. I also found out the boys behind this (Eidos Montreal) are also making Thief 4, with Thief being one of my favorite old franchises.. very promising news.
• Civilization V – a pretty controversial installment in the venerable turn based wargame franchise, but still an excellent play; think of it standalone from the other games — certainly its related in many ways, but its broken out in core ideology as well. I had been wondering what they would do from Civ IV — which was pretty much an old wargamers ideal game — and they brought it out; a change to how you think (though nothing super drastic to turn off old fans.)
• Portal 2 – a first-person puzzler; Portal 1 was an achievement in its own right, but it did end up being a little actiony in parts, though without spoiling its core (storytelling and puzzling.) Portal 2 exceeds it in every way — more puzzley, an even better story with excellent voice work and music, but withotu dipping into actiony parts really. A very fun high energy you approachable brilliant piece of work
• Battlefield 3 — okay, given Modern Warfare 3 and BF3 coming out at the same time at the end of the year – both FPS shooters — I had to bring one to the table though the genre is not my thing; MW3 is more a balls out shooter and is lesser for it, imho. Still the age old problems of ’spawn camping’ and ‘level mixing’, so excellent players pick on noobies.. totally unfun. But BF3 is a heavy vehicle and squad based shooter, so noobies get carried by their mates, or jump into a tank or jet and get to business. Lots of good balance, so you can pick your spawn point or spawn right into an available vehicle, letting you entirely avoid spawn camping or jump in (or out of!) where the action is. I get bored of FPS quick, but if you’re into the genre, BG3 is gorgeous.
• Skyrim – another Elder Scrolsl title, and they’ve all been excellent. Skyrim is an achievement in gaming and development; an enormous game where you coudl easily spend hundreds of hours and not even get into the main quest. A big open world do it at your own pace your own way RPG; play a warrior a mage, a thief, or just screw around and put pots on everyones heads and steal their pants. And you get to fight dragons.
• The Old Republic — well, its an MMO; probably one of the top ones but .. yeah, its like WoW, so, whatever
• Minecraft — you already heard more than you wanted to about it; I’ve never played it, but thought I should mention it.
• Batman: Arkahm City — oh, almost forgot this beat-em-up; you feel meaty, and beat the snot out of everyone, while skulking around. (See a theme here? I like to sneak arond and be a do-gooder.. Skyrim, Deus Ex, Batman..)

Gorsh, theres a half dozen other titles that could easily be mentioned (especially on the consoles.)

But theres it, thats my GOTY list for 2011; all of those will get awards, or be in the runners-up for Skyrim.

Skyrim will take everyones cake, and worth every pinch.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is utterly fantastic. If you’ve got a PC, Xbox 360 or PS3, go play it immediately. (I’d suggest its best on PC, since I’m a PC gamer and prefer mouse for first person games … but this is generally a stealther game not a pure FPS, so you can probably play just fine with a controller.)

Playing games on the couch is to be commended, but next moment I get near a 360, I’m going to fire up Crimson Alliance. Looks like it wants to channel the old Baldurs Gate console games (not the PC game, totally different series) .. I’m grateful for any old school dungeon crawl beat-em-up.

I’d say Portal 2, Deus Ex, and Starcraft 2 are up for game of the year, but theres some tough competition coming.

I mean, with Skyrim coming in November …. but alas, that is right after the twins arrive, so maybe I wont’ get to see it… things I’m hoping to check out ’soon’ are..

• final episode of Doctor Who season 6 .. DW is my favourite show (for some 30 years..!), but last episode is right after the twins. Blast! :)
• 360: Batman: Arkham City
• PC/360: Battlefield 3
• PC: Portal 2 DLC
• PC: Skyrim
• PC/360: Grimrock – an old school styled RPG (think Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder) on a new fancy engine
• PC: Starcraft 2 expansions
• PC: Thief 4
• PC/360: Deus Ex : HR DLC/expansions
• 360: Crimson Alliance
• PC: Terraria updates
• PC: Diablo III.. when? Q1 2012..
• PC: Halflife III — every gaming ‘want list’ must include HL3, in hopes Valve will think about it
• PC: DoTA 2 from Valve
• PC: Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO.. unless its another WoW clone
• PC: Miner Wars .. Descent reborn!
• PC: Another indie Elite-style shooter
• PC: “X3″ space sim?
• PC: Master of the Arcane.. another MoM type game?

Mind you, I’m still hoping to squeeze a couple hacks in..

• Ordered a TV-out cable from ‘peca’ on gp32x forum; if it arrives in time, I’d like to see some retro-on-big-TV action; bluetooth (iCP) to Pandora to TV.. theres a limited number of ports/apps that support both BT controller and will work with TV-out (notably, picodrive and pcs-rearmed don’t work with TV-out but do support BT controllers..); I’ve done some experimentation and my Hatari port shoudl work fine; time permitting, I’ll patch snes9x for iCP support, should be a piece of cake (take an hour..); might be possible to do a quicik mod, or configurable option anyway, for minimenu. Time permitting, modify MAME4ALL. Then iCP -> Pandora (mmenu, MAME4ALL/Hatari/snes9x) -> TV … total win.
• If I can get one of my Ataris opened up, could apply HxC floppy emulator and UltraSatan hard drive emulator to good effect, but doubt this will happen.

Course, also need to read some books and comics, and watch some video..

Hmm, am I biting off a little much? :)

I’ve got a lot of retro action setting up, so hopefully will post some crazy about the “HxC” floppy emulator and Pandora->TV-out, but for today .. the EverDrive!

Flash cart primer; early generation consoles often used ‘cartridges’ to contain the games; the cart was basicly a big plastic shell around a ROM chip (and possibly some extra hardware) that contained the game, artwork, audio and so forth. Switching carts for each game was part of the experience, but carts could on rare occasions break down or get lost .. or if you had a collection of dozens or hundreds of games, just become a nuisance to store or locate. (Who remembers the Wall of Atari each of us had, with colourful carts and cassette tapes filling a whole wall of your rec-room?) The flash cart was designed by third parties to address these needs (and of course, to balls out encourage piracy; nowadays the goals are more honourable — preservation, encouraging homebrew game development, but back in the day they were more balls out about the intended use.)

“Flast carts” for consoles have been around since carts existed — back in the day you could get a flash cart for SNES while the machine was still brand new. Over the years the flash cart has become increasingly convenient to use – the originals actually used floppy disks to store game backups on! Just a few years ago, flash carts started to get more convenient — plug them into a USB cable to your PC and set them up; not bad, but still not ‘there’.

Enter the EverDrive — essentially some hardware that knows how to read universally standard SD card media and load the game ‘roms’ into its flash memory, and then pretend to just be a normal cartridge for the intended system; the designer of the EverDrive has models for the SNES, the Genesis/Megadrive, Nintendo 64,  and is working on the TG16/PCengine. Pretty darned nifty, and ultra convenient. Too bad they say (currently) the arcade Neo Geo (MVS) system is out of scope — too annoying, but it would be cool there.

EverDrive in various models is available from a number of stores, but I ordered mine from EvilD’s gp2x.de shop (disclosure; I am friends with EvilD, but he _is_ a decent and honest fellow; I could probably order from somewhere more local, but I ordered from another continent to wave the flag, ok?); its pricey (depending on model, 80EUR and up) but is pretty nifty, so if you’re a retro gaming fan and have the spare money, this is certainly a good avenue. Be nice if bulk discounts for buying a bundle (Nintendo64 + TG16 + MD + SNES .. woot :) existed.

EverDrive is a simple premise — it presents itself as a cart to the host system; on startup it offers a simple menu – load a game from SD and flash it to the EverDrive, or just fire up the game already in flash, along with some toolbox options (check the EverDrive firmware version, format an SD card, that sort of stuff.) It does support SRAM load/save but I didn’t fuss with it. It also supports all standard cart ’sizes’ (size of the game pack), though doesn’t offer custom hardware so a few games that contained extra wiring in the cart itself will not work. But in general most actual game ‘rips’ you use should work.

(If you have a Retrode you’ll be in nerd heaven; the Retrode will let you pull the game ‘rom’ from any carts you have, and then you can feed them into your EverDrive :)

Some things to note – the EverDrive is running on real hardware, not an emulator; emulators have some pretty advanced trickery such as region lock ignore, handling PAL on NTSC, emulating custom hardware some games need, being mroe relaxed about carts (allowing larger than real carts or allowing some things to occur that real hardware does not.) So a real cart rip will probably work in EverDrive, but be sure to try and run the rip of a cart that is actually for your machine (NTSC vs PAL though this can be okay, the right region, and unmodified .. many modified games might have a loader or whatever that only works in an emulator.) But if you’re like me and try and stick to the narrow road and use rips of your own carts, life is fine.

The actual process is .. turn on your SNES (or Genesis or whatever) and get the EverDrive menu; hit a button to start up the game as is, or hit another button to load up a different game and flash the EverDrive; the actual flashing process takes awhile – say 30-50 seconds depending on size of the cart, plus some time afterwards for SRAM to be cleared and fixed up; factor a couple of minutes for a game to get going .. which is just enough to annoy the heck out of a 4 year old who wants to play Super Mario.

Other than the flash time sink, its perfect; perhaps future models will speed it up, but as the flash operation is being driven by the host console itself (to keep hardware costs down on the ED unit itself?) theres probably not much that can be done speed wise.

In general, set up is easy..

1. Stick an SD into the ED and use the menu to format it (you can format it yourself on a PC as well, but to get it ‘right’ this is an easy option.); I used a 10 year old 128MB SD I had lieing around, since it was pure SD (not SDHC) and so shoudl work on _everything_, and 128MB is a hell of a lot of space when it comes to retro consoles .. no need to burn an 32GB SDHC on this ;)
2. Using a PC (or Pandora like I did!) copy over the latest firmware from the EverDrive website; I updated to firmware v11, which knows how to deal with long filenames (more than 8 character filenames, as we’re accustomed to these days) and lots of files
3. In ED boot menu, theres a firmware update option; I won’t go into it, but it works well and is pretty safe (ie: low chance to brick the unit.)
4. Now that you’re on latest firmware, use your PC and load up that SD with your SNES homebrew and cart rips

So thats it .. EverDrive is easy to use, holds as many games as your SD card allows, and works a treat.

Oh, one caveat — when I ordered the cart from gp2x.de (a German shop), he didn’t have any North American cart cases so had to supply mine with the European cart case (rounded front instead of flat front.) This actually fits fine into a NA SNES unit, but I did have to clip out a couple notches that are on the casing to block cross-continent use back in the day; pliers and 30 seconds and good to go.

Summary – for classic console gamers, EverDrive is pretty sweet.

The Firebee in a mouthful is a brand new computer based on modern hardware – but is otherwise more or less Atari “ST” compatible. If you’re a fan of retro-computing, an Atari ST (or TT, Mega, STE, Falcon, STacy, ST book, etc) in particular, or just interested in alternative platforms or even a lower end multimedia quiet computer .. this is a very interesting development you’ve been waiting on for quite some time. Formally, the Firebee computer is part of the Atari Coldfire Project (where ‘Coldfire’ is the Motorola processor at the boards heart.)

Notice the resolution; 1680x1024 IIRC

The Firebee itself is a pretty small board; place two paperback novels end to end and hack off half of one of them, and you’ve got an idea how long it is, and how deep it is; it is of course very thin. (or for arcade nutbars, about the size of a Tetris pcboard stretched out.) I brought the board up with only two connections — a DVI monitor with the display above, and a TT030 keyboard; they keyboard itself has a STiK with a non-Atari mouse in it.

The board features many ports for both modern and retro needs; of interest is SD and CF slots for convenient and fast storage; CF implies IDE and yes, theres an IDE pinout here as well for hard drives, as well as the pins for an original Atari hard disk arrangement. USB ports allow for keyboard or mouse or mass storage, but we’ve also got the port for Mega/TT keyboards. Audio ports, serial ports for debugging terminals or modems, ethernet, PS2 keyboard .. I don’t know how the designers crammed all this in without competing on specs, but they did :) (I mean .. ST keyboard, PS2 keyboard, USB keyboard? Obviously someone has worked very hard updating TOS (the basic operating system) to multiplex all these inputs nicely, not to mention including support for ethernet and USB and extended resolutions and so on!)

Firebee from the Atari Coldfire Project

For the ST nutbars out there, is a “POST” boot screen:

Boot screen

I’ve only had a few minutes to play around, but I’ve got my time ahead planned .. need to sort out my development tools and environment — TOS is great to work in, but for multitasking its usually nice to drop into the MiNT environment – a Unix-like environment for TOS computers with a Atari desktop on top; from within MiNT its not hard to get the full gcc toolchain, and really all the Unix shells and tools going (at which time you might wonder why you’re playing with an Atari machine at all, but thats beside the point. Yes you want to run Unix and Linux tools on an Atari, duh.) For old times sake I attempted to run a few versions of GFA Basic to no avail (no surprise, given the firmware is still wildly being developed and a few low level ST assumptions had to be changed for the platform. Well behaved applications may well work from the old days (Calamus!), but applications that misbehave probably do not.)

Once the development toolchain is up, I can work on porting a few of my games over to get used to the feel of the system; my Atari coding skills are a good 20 years out of date. (Yes I’ve done extensive work on emulation of many systems including Atari ST, but writing code _on_ an ST is wildly different than simulating an ST..); I intend to bring over Manticore and BattleJewels..

.. time permitting. Less than two months until the twins arrive!

I just sent this to a buddy of mine:

Given two circles (a drawn point with a circumference drawn around them) — if they don’t intersect, they’re just two circles; if they do intersect a little, the union would produce (say) a vaguely bow-tie shaped
affair.

Given N-points, each with a cirumference drawn around them (radius could vary, but for sake of ease, could make the radius a constant), what is the net _outline_. (ie: in the bow-tie affair, you’d drop the two arcs inside
the intersection, resulting in the outline of the bow-tie. Extend to N-circles.

What does that say about the kind of people I hang out with, and the kind of evil bastard I am?

(and yes, this does factor into a game I’m working on)

Someone has been asking me a few questions about locating and setting up a Gauntlet in their place; I should write up a nice detailed response as it might be useful for a few people, but I thought I might just paste in one of the quick emails I sent back. If anyone should like the topic or a part of it expanded upon, let me know.

Theres a lot of questions could branch into — plugging old arcade gear into a TV, running old arcade fear, running emulators or modern gear in a arcade machine, and variations thereof. But heres a tickler..

–

In this sort of hobby, finding ancient ‘ready to play’ and ‘good condition’ translates to $$, since it means someone else has done the finding, restoration, etc. Its like classic cars..you can find one cheap if you want to fix it

A Gauntlet is a pretty rare items these days, so finding one at auction.. I’d say theres a 5% chance or something. (A newer one .. Gauntlet Legends or the like, is doable.) Certainly, can be found; ebay “Gauntlet” and sort by highest price may find something, but shipping on a refrigertator sized machine is killer.

Something one could troll for, keep the feelers out for a few years and see if something comes up.. *shrug*

Another option is to simulate it; you already know about Emulation, but there are tricks to put an emulator into an arcade cabinet .. so it has the look and feel and plays abuot 95% the same as the original; the advantage there is much cheaper and easier, and you also can play hundreds of other games. (ie: I converted one of my cabinets so it has a emulator and also can play original game boards as well.) When booting to the emulator it pops up a menu with 50 game to choose from, which is pretty handy. (and yes, I own a large stock of game boards and ripped them into the emulator myself. I can post pics, I have a stupidly large collection of spare parts.)

ie: Can even buy a ready to go machine .. theres a ready to go closed box ‘MAME’ kit you can buy for $200 for instance, which plugs right into an arcade machine liek a cartridge, and you’re done. Finding an arcade cabinet is usually $50-$200 depending how picky you are.

So could go to an auction and see if theres a Gauntlet; if not, could just buy a good condition generic cabinet, and then plop an emulator box inside, and your total cost probably be about $300-$400 and good to go (with the option to plug other arcade game boards into it as well.)

If youw ant more info, I can fill you up with crazy ideas

A real RPG is one where you must painstakingly create a part of adventurers 4-6 members big. Each character will take approximately 2 hours to ‘roll’, where-in theres a certain element of luck (so you go through the whole process, then discard the guy, and start over, repeating 100 times per adventurer) and skill (where you pour over all reference materials, maps, species origins and strengths/weaknesses for a minimum of 2 hours each.) But as Square Enix is learning, a real RPG is not one in which there are no choices for the first 10 hours of the game, where there are no stores, nor turns on the road, nor abilities, but only endless pressing of the X button.

I’ve kicked off a new ‘retro gaming competitive league’ of sorts, over at my favourite home away from home, the GP32x forum. (Sister to the OPBoards, the home of the Open Pandora forums, which split off from the GP32x forum.)

If you’re into retro gaming (80s and 90s era, think SNES, Genesis, Turbo Grafx, Arcade, etc) and want an excuse to brag and trash-talk other gamers as a way to motivate yourself, this could be it; it is designed so that even time constrained people (like me!) can play .. got kids, a job, no problem! Games and scoring are designed so you can play in just a few minutes every other week and still be in the competition. You will not be required to play a 20 hour game of Civilization every other week!

Check it out, over at the forum:

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/forum/107-gp32-offline-gaming-league/

This is a seat-of-my-pants posting to gp32x forum again, so its not really up to snuff to be posted here on the blog, but I like the sentiment, and I’m too busy/lazy to rewrite it :)

You know whats sort of sad –

When emulation actually _improves_ the original. I’m an arcade collector, and also an emu author .. those seem opposed in one sense; emulation is great, for carrying around old gear on new gear and for having the ability to switch games without carrying around giant carts or pcboards… but being inexact, its often better to have the original. Certainly, the original controls add a lot (arcade, say) and sometimes you need the right ’sound’ (consider QBert, which had a little hammer knocking on the side of the arcade cabinet; you just can’t reproduce that in emulation.)

But after digging out some of my old gear I’m getting less tolerant; I used to just love some of this stuff, or be blinded to the flaws because it was just so awesome, especially in its time. But looking back now ..

Aside form being _HUGE_..

Game Gear — a crap screen; one of those LCDs thats ‘brightness’ and ‘tint’ was controlled by the angle you looked at it; seriously. And batteries good for 2-3 hours, so you had to buy a huuuge battery pack, on top of an already huge machine.

Turbo Express (TG16, PCEngine handheld) — super crap screen; tiny little screen, but also ‘blurry’ .. ie: its less resolution or something than the CRTs it was replacing (but you could runm real TG16 games on it, not portable-versions of them), so text was unreadable, and anythign using a patterned texture would shimmer like mad. Battery life like 3 hours on 6 AAs.

Atari Lynx — now, this was a pretty masterful machine with a great screen (big, good colours, and atually a pretty nice screen); but huge device. Also a battery life of 3-4 hours. Unique in that you can flip the machine over and hit a switch to rotate the screen.. left handed friendly!

GameBoy — just crap, really.

Emulation improves these guys. Suddenly the size is managable, the screens are 100 times better, no worry about batteries running out just like that .. I’ve been too busy with having a kid and working on pandora and my own games, and real work etc, I’ve just not dug these out in years, and I gotta say .. wow, they still rock, but damned if I’m not more inclined to just fire up the emus

Just for fun, I thought I would dig out an ancient machine .. one of the very first ‘palmtops’ (they were called back then, I think.) I used to trot this out when talking about PDAs years ago, but lets just show it beside a modern clamshell device .. the Open Pandora for instance (which I work on, I must admit.)  The Portfolio is even closer looking to more conventional clamshells (the Pandora has a d-pad on it for instance.) To me, they just seem so similar in so many ways — the overall look and hinge and such. The details are all different of course — the relative openness of the OP, the d-pad and analog controls and so on, but take a 3 second glance and they coudl be sisters.

Pandora vs Portfolio (thumbnail)

For full size image click the pic or go here: http://www.walled.net/~jmitchell/skeleton.org/blogmedia/technology/atari/portfolio/pandora_vs_portfolio_1.jpg

Another pic with no flash: http://www.walled.net/~jmitchell/skeleton.org/blogmedia/technology/atari/portfolio/pandora_vs_portfolio_2.jpg

I posted to a thread on gp32x forum:

Notice the overall design similarity.

Atari Portfolio — 1989
Open Pandora — 2010-ish.

Theres 20 years of technology advancement, folks

For the curious, the Portfolio runs at just under 5Mhz and runs a modded DOS 2 if memory serves; due to low res (less than 80×20 columns, uses like 20×8 or something, I forget) it actually lets you pan the screen around, but well behaved DOS applications will (try to) adjust to fit; it runs old text adventures well .. I actually ported Frotz to it awhile back, just for a lark, and runs great