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.

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 run the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on my main head (though as always I tend to run Everything, from FreeBSD to various Linuxen to Windows to OSX) .. its convenient and has easy ways to get codecs set up to watch store bought DVDs. It has a huge community that I ignore, but that means many common issues are a mere google search away. So, yeah, Ubuntu is bloated and giant, but it works well, so all you Arch guys can stop bugging me, kay? ;)

I’ve been putting off the upgrade from 10.04/10.10 to current 11.04 version for fear of Unity, the big new desktop replacement Canonicle thought they’d push down; many people hate it (and the upcoming replacement Gnome and the not as new updated KDE .. like all the major players have gone the Wrong Path?!) so I’ve just not wanted to get involved. Things were working more or less fine. Also, I’ve got one of those issues where I really don’t like when peopel shove things down my throat, so I naturally balked.

I dont’ quite get all the Unity-hate, since Ubuntu has not (yet!) removed the gnome2 type setup — just log in again and set to ‘Ubuntu Classic’, and *poof*, it looks exactly like it did before the 11.04 upgrade. So why the broohaha and downgrade to 10.10? Sillyness.

Now, should they actually remove gnome2 (Ubuntu Classic session), I’ll be annoyed.

(Why the upgrade at all? Because in Ubuntuworld, they tend to not port patches back to non-LTS versions like 10.10 was, so if you want to stay on top of patches without applying every one yourself, you need to stay on current distros, or at least LTS (Long Term Support) ones. And randomly, a couple months ago, I started having lots of subtle oddities with the machine.. some subtle driver update, or some hardware gone flaky, has caused me no end of grief, in very small bits once a day .. enough to be annoying, but not enough to make detection easy. Blast! So.. upgrade time..)

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)

Yes, you can!

(And yes, people are still using old Atari TOS machines like the Atari ST or TT030 or Falcon; and yes people are still developing and improving the operating system for sed beasts, and better still, people are still making new clone and TOS-compatible machines! I’ll write a bit about that when I get a moment.)

But for now, some news about Gentoo on MiNT (MiNT is a unix-like kernel you can run on TOS-machines. Essentially, its the new OS for that line of machines. Atari was shipping it near the end.)

The fellow releasing gentoo packages is doing a bang up job, but its a lot of work to do that, and he’s not got the time to maintain a how-to or wiki or the like and is hoping the community at large can help out; I emailed some newbie questions his way and thought I’d post a quick summary, in hopes it helps someone .. or possibly makes someone dig out their 20 year old hardware to get it up and going.

The hard part of course is getting files onto an old machine; for TOS machines, you can get EtherNet or NetUSBee or Hydra network cards, or get a UltraSatan SD card reader, or worst case.. a null modem cable with kermit or zmodem, a terminal application, and lots of patience :) If you need links, I can post some, but Google is your friend.

1. Get a MiNT kernel going, such as the recently posted 1.17.0 setup; pick it up from www.freemint.org or sparemint.org for instance; some install steps or installers are available, but that would be gentoo unspecific.. but will help get your brain around this; not sure about you, but these old memories are forgotten, so installers and guides are great at tickling back the old info! The mint download will include the bits for the Auto folder (the MiNT kernel itself) and some MINT folder contents, drivers, etc.
2. You’ll need an AES, such as XaAES (open source) or N.AES etc; XaAES is included in the MiNT download so should be no problem. AES is the GUI OS shell, and the one built into TOS is single-tasking oriented more or less; the newer AES can handle the multiple concurrent apps.
3. Optionally a replacement VDI such as fvdi (open source) or NVDI or whathaveyou; these are often faster than the VDI built into TOS, but optional. (VDI is the device rendering abstraction, letting applications print or render to screen or do fonts, etc.)
4. Optionally, set up a desktop replacement such as Terradesk (open source) or NeoDesk or whatever. Again, you can use good old GEM desktop and desk accessories.
5. Finally, just fetch and unpack the Gentoo distribution over at gentoo.atariforge.org — unpack onto an ext2fs filesystem. This can be tricky if you have a vanilla machine — I think hddriver can format an e2fs partition for you, and you can probably find a tar/gzip tool. If you’re already running a unix-like mint, piece of cake. Or set thing sup in ARanyM, then copy the disk image over your real disk, or boot from SD, or.. etc :)
6. Lastly, ensure your MINT.CNF is pointing to your boot choice — be it /bin/bash or XaAES or whatever, depending on what sort of look and feel you’d like.

Piece of cake, right?

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

I was moving things around on the desk when the top of the recently placed TT opened up — turns out the thing has no screws in it ;) Fortunately, I found out something I was wondering — if the machine might already have an accelerator (overclocker) in it already or not — and fortunately it does! Unfortunately, when I accidentally jarred it open, the accelerate (a CaTTamaran overclock from 32mhz to 48mhz) fell out .. seems like it was barely in place, which could explain much. Even worse, is I’m not entirely sure where the hell it goes into the TT now. I am pretty close, but being out by a pin or two on the connector means the TT is now really unstable … *Sigh*. I’m pretty careful with my gear, but accidents do happen :/

Edit: all fixed up :)

Some quick pics:

TT030 when opened up from the front, all cables attached

Looking right where I think the CaTTamaran is placed

Looking at the RAM daughterboard

Time to fiddle with the accelerator board and see if I can get this back in working order :/

Related to my prior posting, here is a brilliant, simple and cheap solution! I was building some shelving into a too-shallow closet and the idea flew into my mind. . its just too obvious, and perfect.

Shoe rack.

You’ve seen them I bet — ‘over the door shoe rack’ is really a sheet with hooks on one end, that hangs on a door; more to point, on the inside of a closet door usually, so its entirely invisible to the normal room, and adds space to an otherwise unused surface. If you’ve got an office or basement door or somesuch, why not just suspend a ’shoe rack’ from it. Free storage, very organized.. it just doesn’t get any better.

I picked up one at Canadian Tire for $8.97 .. there are a number of options, from transparent plastic pockets, to black fabric ones, to fashionable ones. Generally with 20 pockets on it, for allegedly popping shoes into. Say 5 pockets across by 4 rows, or 4 pockets by 5 rows.

Thats 20 little pockets you can shove power cables, chargers or widgemacollits into. For cheap, for free in space terms.

Awesome.