#oneaday Day 264: Flashcarts: a retro essential?

I can't remember if I mentioned it on here before, but even if I did, I'm going to mention it again anyway: I recently ordered an FXPak Pro for my Super NES, to add to my collection alongside the Everdrive 64 X7 I got a while back for my Nintendo 64, and long-term I intend to also get Everdrives for the Mega Drive, Master System, NES and possibly Game Boy Advance.

For the unfamiliar, an Everdrive is a cartridge for a retro gaming system that allows you to pop in an SD card full of game ROMs, then play them on original hardware. The FXPak Pro is a similar device, but it's distinguished from Everdrives primarily due to its origin, but also because it is capable of emulating the custom chips that many SNES cartridges had in them, such as the famous Super FX chip that powered Starwing.

Most of these devices also have additional benefits such as being able to back up save data and even make use of emulator-style save states in some circumstances — one model of the Mega Drive one can even full-on emulate a Mega CD without having to have an actual Mega CD attached — but their main appeal element is the ability to play any games you want on original hardware without having to use original cartridges. Of course, this generally involves piracy, but at this point, none of the original makers of games on old games consoles are making any money from you buying an original cartridge anyway, which means the often exorbitant prices they go for are pretty much pure profit for the individuals or organisations involved.

A while back, I was all about building a curated collection of games for vintage systems, and there's part of me that would still like to do that. But I have had a few considerations arise over the last couple of years: the first being the available space I have, which is rapidly running out (although I've reclaimed some by banishing some items to the loft and rearranging some of the other shelves) and the second being that I had a run of bad luck with buying second-hand cartridges.

To give specifics, I attempted to buy the game Desert Strike for SNES, a game I never actually owned back in the day, but always enjoyed any time I borrowed it from a friend or played it at their house. I paid £8 for a copy from CEX, and was a little put out to discover when it arrived that it didn't work. Well, it sort of worked; the Electronic Arts logo on startup was garbled, in-game graphics occasionally corrupted and it would just randomly reboot sometimes. This problem persisted even after several sessions with the contact cleaner and cotton buds. The cart was just fucked.

No matter, I thought, it's only £8, I'll buy another copy and return this one if I can be arsed — though I knew from experience that if I attempted to return it to CEX, they'd almost certainly test it, find it didn't appear to work, then refuse me a refund, despite them selling it to me in a faulty state in the first place. So I bought another copy. And the same thing happened.

Couple that with several experiences I've had where I bought games where the save batteries had failed, and, y'know, I just can't be bothered with all the faffing around with aging, failing media when there's a better option just sitting there. Playing on original hardware definitely has its own distinct appeal from playing on emulation or even official rereleases on modern systems, so going the Everdrive or FX Pak Pro route just makes a lot of sense when my priority is not "investing" in a collection, but instead just enjoying the games.

I will add to the above that, if a game I'm particularly fond of or always wanted to play should suddenly become available commercially, I will happily pay up money for it, and have done on numerous occasions, even if I'd already played and beaten the game via "unofficial" means. It's the right thing to do. But there are myriad games out there that are never getting a rerelease for all manner of stupid reasons, and that doesn't mean no-one should be able to play them any more.

So, long-term, I'm intending that all my retro systems will be equipped with Everdrives or equivalents so they can be used and enjoyed without having to roll the dice on whether aged media is still in working order. And once that's all sorted out, I'm looking forward to spending some quality time with some classic games — both ones I loved back in the day, and hopefully some new discoveries, too.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 238: The Sims is still good

The rumours were true! Just ahead of the series' 25th anniversary, EA dropped rereleases of The Sims and The Sims 2 on their own storefront and Steam earlier today, for the eminently reasonable price of £34.99 for the both of them. Considering they both come with all the expansions (well, I think The Sims 2 might be missing the IKEA "stuff" pack, but that's about it), I'm perfectly happy to pay up for them both, particularly considering The Sims has never had a digital release, and The Sims 2 has been unavailable for a long time.

"But you can get them both for free!" the entitled corners of the Internet shout. "They're abandonware, and that means you can legally download them for free!" Well, firstly, one, no it doesn't, because abandonware isn't actually a thing, legally speaking, and two, it is important to support official rereleases of stuff like this, because it gives a thumbs up to companies making a commitment to actually preserving their history and making it available to everyone, even those who weren't there for it first time around. It's no good carrying on about "preservation" if you don't support actual attempts to do that. Piracy is all well and good if there is no other way, but official preservation efforts should be supported. Yes, even if they're by EA.

Both rereleases have been updated so that they work just peachy on Windows 10 and 11, and The Sims is able to run in much higher resolutions than it ever has before, and in widescreen. Okay, the game could arguably do with a UI scale option when playing at 1080p or higher, but it's not unplayable by any means, particularly if you're playing on a big TV as I have been.

I've spent a few hours revisiting The Sims this evening by making a rough recreation of my original "Hartley Family" save file, which featured me and the other members of my hall of residence flat at university struggling to survive. I am reminded that the original The Sims is actually surprisingly challenging compared to some of its follow-ups; thus far, keeping on top of six people's needs has been quite difficult, particularly with a lack of substantial income. Things will get easier once some of them start getting promoted and bring in a bit more money each day, but for the moment it's very much in "scraping by" territory.

Also one of them has died already after burning down the kitchen, but I managed to "Plead" with the Grim Reaper quickly enough for him to be able to return as a zombie. I have made a promise to myself that I'm not going to save scum at all, I'm just going to deal with the consequences of everything that goes on as it happens. Emergent narrative and all that.

I'm interested to spend a bit more time with the original The Sims, as back when it was current, I had a lot of the expansion packs, but not all of them. I don't think I had Superstar, Unleashed or Makin' Magic, and those are three that have some substantial additions to the gameplay — the pursuit of fame, pets and the ability to cast spells using appropriate components respectively.

At present, I've got one of the six Hartley family members equipped with a magic wand and (thus far) the ability to turn someone into a toad, and another who keeps slipping off to the "Studio Town" area to go and sing karaoke badly (earning a whopping 5 Simoleons per performance at present) but so far, it's a struggle to keep their mood high enough to be able to truly take advantage of those features. Much as with real life, getting a solid and stable income stream is important if you want to start doing anything out of the ordinary.

So that's that. The Sims and The Sims 2 are both available on Steam and EA's own storefront right now, either separately or in a bundle together. You also get a "free" copy of The Sims 4 with them, but since that went free-to-play a while back anyway it's probably best ignored unless you want to get into DLC hell. The rereleases of both The Sims and The Sims 2 are complete, meanwhile (aside from the aforementioned Ikea pack for The Sims 2) and should keep you busy for a very long time indeed.

I'll probably write more about one or the other or both at some point, but for now, I'm happy. It's been a nice bit of nostalgia to revisit The Sims — and a reminder that as cynical as people got about the series over the years (not without good reason), it's still just a damned fine game at heart, too.

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#oneaday Day 237: The library is open

A number of things occurred today that I could potentially talk about: some positive, some not so positive. In the interests of… (gesticulates at all this) everything I'll focus on probably the most positive one, because it's something I'm really excited and happy to see.

Those of you interested in video games as a medium may be aware of the work of the Video Game History Foundation. They've been working as a charitable organisation chronicling the history of the medium for some time now, and they're responsible for the figure you may have seen bandied around that "87% of classic games are not available".

Something they've been working on for a while is providing a means of public access to their library of materials, which includes not only old computer and gaming magazines, but also development and marketing materials as well as some thoroughly fascinating bits of miscellanea, such as a gamer's hand-drawn maps of two early Zelda games that found themselves among a donation of other bits and pieces.

Today, the organisation launched the library for "early access", presumably meaning that there might be some kinks to work out and that it will expand over time, but already it's clear that it's going to be both a valuable resource and something that is just interesting to explore.

There are two main components to the library. First of all is the main catalogue at library.gamehistory.org, which is a catalogue of the materials that the organisation holds. This is interesting to browse through and see what's in their collection, but isn't of that much use when researching things. For most, the real attraction will be the digital archives at archive.gamehistory.org, which include digitally preserved material — scans and other digitised content, in other words.

At present the archives only contain a fraction of what is listed in the main catalogue, and the organisation notes that there is some material that may never be digitised for public access via the Internet for one reason or another. But what's there already is plenty to get stuck into. There's a library of magazines, for example, including 33 publications at the time of writing, including complete or near-complete runs of well-known mags such as Game Informer, Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro, plus early attempts at gaming media like Electronic Games, a spinoff of Video magazine's Arcade Alley column.

Right now there is, unsurprisingly, a bit of a US bias to things (and as I type this, the site has crashed under the weight of day-one demand so I can't check what non-American stuff they have, if any!) but there's a significant chunk of gaming media history to explore here; the aforementioned publications all played an important part in shaping video game fandom at one point or another, and the digitally available collection will only continue to expand over time. I'm particularly excited to see the archive of Electronic Games there, as this is an incredible resource to see how early consoles (like the Atari 2600, Intellivision and suchlike) and 8-bit home computers were covered by a fledgling enthusiast press.

But it's not just about magazines. There's also stuff like an archive of the CDs GamePro had that contained press materials, from the days before press assets being distributed via the Internet. There's production materials from games, some of which never made it to market, like SimPeople (what would subsequently become The Sims). There's development materials from a wide variety of sources. And tons more.

I'm really looking forward to exploring this library of stuff and seeing how it expands over time. It's going to be an absolute boon to anyone researching the history of video games and how they were covered by the media of the day, and I can't wait to make use of all this material when composing videos and articles.

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#oneaday Day 219: Getting it done

I finally managed to muster up the motivation to make some YouTube videos today. Three of them, in fact; they'll be up on the channel over the course of the next week or so.

To be clear, I wasn't putting off making these videos because I didn't want to make them; I was primarily putting them off because I had a cold in mid-December, and it's left me with a really annoying cough but no other symptoms. (I went to the doctor to see if it was an infection or anything, and it seems there's nothing to be concerned about; I just Have A Cough for a bit, frustratingly.)

I didn't want to start recording videos and collapse into a coughing fit partway through, so I'd been putting it off, particularly as a couple of weekends ago I started trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough and had to stop because my throat wasn't up to it.

My cough is still here — mostly in the evenings, and especially annoyingly when I lie down to go to sleep — but I managed to hold it at bay for the duration of three videos earlier, which is nice. Those three videos are kicking off something I want to be doing throughout this year: exploring a variety of home computer stuff, including Spectrum, Amiga and C64 stuff as well as the Atari 8-bit and ST stuff I've primarily built my channel on.

It felt good to finally get them done. While I have no real "obligations" towards my YouTube channel and could just… stop making videos at any point with no real consequence, it would feel like a great shame to do so. I have somehow made 1,303 videos so far since I created my channel in 2007 (but didn't start Being A Creator until to any vaguely serious degree until 2017) and my channel has shown very slow but steady growth, particularly over the course of the last five years or so. I don't have any grand designs on Being A YouTuber as a career, particularly since the sort of stuff I do isn't exactly algorithm-baiting, but it is nice to be able to sit down, play some games, talk about them to an empty room and feel like at least a few people will, eventually, listen.

In some respects, being able to do that with YouTube has almost been a substitute for being able to spend time with friends talking about this stuff. Pretty much all of my friends who used to be into gaming to any degree have drifted away for one reason or another, and it really sucks to be enthusiastic about things and have no-one to share that with. So by handling my YouTube videos the way I do — as if I'm sitting playing it with the viewer there as a friend beside me — it at least helps a bit with that side of things, if not all of the loneliness I feel at times.

Anyway, like I say, those videos will be coming out over the next week or so. There's one Spectrum one, one C64 one and one Atari 8-bit one; I'm not necessarily going to do all that every week (at least partly because I want to do some ST and Amiga stuff in there too) but it's a nice spread to start the year with. And it's onwards to a whole new year of exploring classic home computers and the myriad weird and wonderful games they played host to!

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#oneaday Day 210: Making some video plans

I was hoping to make more videos over the course of December for "DOScember", but a nasty cold with a cough that's been lingering for a while (and still is a bit) put paid to those plans. I was really hoping to play through both The Dagger of Amon Ra and the spiritual successor to the Laura Bow series, The Crimson Diamond, but that hasn't happened. I did start trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough, but my throat gave out in less than ten minutes, so I abandoned that plan.

I mean, there's no reason they still can't happen, they just won't be "DOScember" features any more. And that's fine. So I think I may well still go ahead with those, 'cause doing adventure game playthroughs is always a lot of fun.

I've been pondering other things to do along the way, too. One thing I definitely want to do is spend some time exploring other microcomputer systems alongside the Atari stuff I've done a bunch of to date. There was some interesting discussion on Bluesky earlier today about how the overly "Americanised" canon of gaming history has a habit of erasing stuff like the European microcomputer scene, so I want to spend some time redressing the balance there a bit. I've obviously done a lot of Atari stuff already, and I intend to keep going that because it's a personal passion, but I also want to make some use of the C64 "Maxi", TheA500 Mini and The Spectrum that I have, because those are all thoroughly lovely machines.

As good a place as any to start with those would be to work through the built-in games on each, since that's actually not something I've done to date for anything other than The400 Mini. So a cautious plan I have is to spend a bit of time exploring each of those systems' built-in libraries, then onward into some other stuff on each of those platforms, just like I've done with the Atari 8-bit.

Assuming my voice holds out, then, I think that's what I'm going to try and make a start on this weekend, along with maybe a bit of The Dagger of Amon Ra.

I've also reached a conclusion I think I've known all along: I am absolutely not cut out for streaming. I just can't be arsed with it. It's a lot of setup and effort to get going, it's a pain to promote (particularly given my potential audience is all over the globe and thus there's no "good" timezone for it) and the number of viewers I get (both live and on the archived version on YouTube) is crap compared to my standard videos. I know that's something that improves with time, but this is supposed to be a hobby, not work, so I'm just going to stick with what I know and enjoy, and which works well — which is YouTube.

I'm not ruling out occasional "special" streams for events, charity drives and suchlike, or occasional chats with my buddy Chris in a quasi-podcast format. But I'm not going to make it a regular part of my routine. I know several people who want desperately to "make it" as a streamer, and they seem to spend a lot of their lives being miserable, and I have no desire to get into that situation. I do this for fun.

So, amid a bit of game room reorganisation that may be happening this weekend, I'm going to make a start on another year of retro computing fun. Broadening my remit will be an interesting journey for me to take, and it may well bring some new people to the channel, too. I know from previous times I've done this that there are a couple of people who get a bit sniffy when I cover non-Atari stuff, but y'know what? My channel, my rules. I am interested in gaming and microcomputer history, and while Atari stuff will always carry significant personal meaning for me, I want to know more about the other parts of this side of things, too.

So that means C64, Spectrum and Amiga stuff! There's a huge library of things for me to explore on all of those platforms, and still plenty of Atari material I haven't covered, either. So I certainly don't think I'm going to be short of things to play and talk about this year. Now I just need to make the dang videos!

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#oneaday Day 205: Last weekend of 2024

The last hours are ticking away on the last weekend of 2024 as I type this. I have two days of "work" (and I use that term loosely during this ever-curious interstitial period between Christmas and the new year) and then a day off for New Year's Day, and then it's back to normal existence.

I have enjoyed the Christmas break, overall. I haven't done very much with it — the fact I have nearly beaten The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom will attest to that — but the period of just straight-up rest and relaxation has been good for me. It's easy to just sort of "tune out" the stresses of everyday working life until you take a step back from them for a little while, and it's most definitely been nice to be away from work social media and the never-ending moaning that goes on there.

We've got an exciting year coming up at work. We've got some great licenses in the pipe for Evercade, one of which (SNK) we've already teased, but there are several more lined up and ready to go, too. I'm looking forward to revealing these at the appropriate times (you won't get any clues here, sorry!) but not looking forward to, once again, revealing something cool and being immediately hit with a torrent of "you should get [x]" comments. I swear, a significant number of people involved in this hobby don't actually care about the thing itself, they only want to know "what's next".

I was actually thinking about this quite a bit towards the end of the working year. Evercade cartridges are super-cool and good value because they collect together a bunch of interesting games in one place, but this unfortunately means that reviews of them tend to suffer. When you get maybe 150 words in a publication like Retro Gamer to cover a cartridge with multiple games on it, there's not really any time for the reviewer to talk about anything in great depth. And online review sites aren't much better, either; inevitably, when we get a cart reviewed, it'll be a general overview of the whole thing without really going into much detail about any of the individual games.

This is a real shame, I think. If I wasn't working for Blaze directly, I'd be wanting to do comprehensive reviews of each cartridge, covering each game in detail. In fact, as it happens, I may be doing something along those lines for both the Evercade blog and YouTube channel in the new year — we want to celebrate some of our back catalogue as well as the most up-to-date stuff, and there's a lot to talk about at this point.

I know "company that makes the thing writing about the thing" isn't quite the same as a professional review, but honestly, a lot of the reviews out there aren't really providing much in the way of helpful information. What I strive to do in my articles and videos for Evercade is provide some decent quality research, some historical and social context for the games — and just an outline of why they're cool, y'know?

So more of that in the new year. In fact, that's what I might just fill my days with on Monday and Tuesday this coming week. While there's not much in the way of "production" stuff going on, I may as well get ahead of the game with writing some bits and pieces, no?

I didn't intend this post to be so work-centric when I started, but, well, that's happened now, and it's not as if I had much else of note to write about, really. I mean, I could write about Echoes of Wisdom, but like most gaming-related things, I'm going to save my conclusive thoughts about that for MoeGamer once I've actually beaten it — which will be in the next couple of days, I reckon, possibly even tonight, depending on how hard I can resist looking at a guide to find the last few Heart Pieces and Might Stones.

Anyway. If you, like me, are back to work for a couple of days tomorrow, I hope you've had a nicely restful holiday season and that those two straggling days aren't too stressful. 2025 is yet another opportunity for a "fresh start" for all of us, and while many people around the world are staring down some significant challenges (I'm glad I never made it to America at this point, frankly) we can all just take each day as it comes and see how things go.

For now, more Zelda.

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#oneaday Day 97: EverDriving the '64

Inspired by my success with the GDEMU for the Dreamcast, I decided to pick up an EverDrive 64 for my Nintendo 64. Long-term, I'm planning on grabbing one of these excellent devices for all my cart-based consoles, as I've been burned just once too many by duff cartridges purchased from second-hand sources. As much fun as it is to collect things and have the satisfying tactile thunk of slamming a cartridge into a slot, it's even more fun to have games that actually work.

For the unfamiliar, an EverDrive is a cartridge designed to work with a cartridge-based system… obviously. In most cases, they have a micro SD card slot, on which you load some simple OS files for the thing to be able to do its thing, and then any ROM files you want to use. This effectively means in most instances, you can carry around the complete library for a system on just one cartridge. Very convenient — particularly as the EverDrive also takes care of managing save data, and even allows you to back up and restore Controller Pak saves so you don't need umpteen of the little buggers to be able to save your progress.

The one small issue I've found is that when running NTSC games on my PAL N64, there's a horrible "ghosting" effect on the image that makes playing those games undesirable. It's a bit of a shame, as there are a few North American NTSC N64 titles I wouldn't mind playing, but to be honest, I suspect the EU library will keep me busy for quite some time.

This evening I've been exploring a few games I've always been curious about, but never had the opportunity to play for one reason or another. The two that I've probably had the most fun with are both Midway titles, as it happens, and both arcade conversions: San Francisco Rush and Gauntlet Legends.

San Francisco Rush is an arcade racer that is markedly different from most other arcade racers from the '90s that I'm familiar with. Probably its most notable standout feature is that its courses are relatively "open", often offering alternative routes and shortcuts, and in some cases allowing you to proceed around a section of the course in the opposite direction to the rest of the pack and still end up where you're going.

Of course, open-structure races aren't a particularly uncommon sight these days — to be honest, it's harder to find a modern racing game that isn't open world outside of the hardcore sim sector — but I suspect back in the '90s, San Francisco Rush would have been quite the unusual little thing.

It's also noteworthy in that it's an arcade racer where you really do have to slow down for corners. If there's a drift function, I certainly haven't got to grips with it; thus far I've had a reasonable amount of success with just actually using the brakes (or at the very least letting off the accelerator) ahead of sharp corners — and with the game being set in San Francisco, there are lots of sharp corners.

The visuals are fairly ugly by modern standards, though I found that I quickly stopped noticing the low-resolution blurry nature of the game, and the fact that many of the races are covered in fog is entirely appropriate for the setting. It thus far seems to be an enjoyable racer, and with a decent amount of longevity, too; the main "championship" mode is 24 tracks long, thankfully with the ability to save your progress.

Gauntlet Legends, meanwhile, is a successor to the classic 4-player dungeon crawler from Atari Games. It takes the action into the polygonal 3D realm, though still plays mostly like a top-down maze game. It has all the classic Gauntlet elements present and correct: finding keys to open doors, standing on switches to open up walls, blasting generators to stem the tide of monsters. It adds a few new elements to the mix, though, including an inventory where you can activate and deactivate power-ups at will, and some RPG-lite mechanics whereby you can level up and improve your stats.

Perhaps most importantly, your health doesn't tick down gradually as you play. Bliss! This makes it one of the few Gauntlet games that it doesn't feel utterly futile to play; as much as I like old-school Gauntlet, the various home ports tend to trivialise themselves by providing you the opportunity to "insert coins" as much as you want, affording you effectively unlimited health.

Not so in Gauntlet Legends! Instead, you lose health at a much more sensible rate if you get hit or caught in a trap, and healing items give you a meaningful amount of health back. Plus you can buy more health with the gold you earn in levels, and you also get more health every time you level up.

Probably the thing I'm most impressed with about Gauntlet Legends is how smoothly it runs. While it doesn't run at a rock-solid framerate, it happily gets up to a full 50fps (I'm running PAL, remember) when you're wandering around exploring, and while the frame rate does drop a bit when the screen gets busy, it's never to an unplayable degree, and the controls always remain nicely responsive.

I'm looking forward to spending a bit more time with both games, along with revisiting some old favourites and discovering some new titles. If you have an N64 and a bit of cash to splash, I can highly recommend an EverDrive; I suspect it's going to revitalise my interest in this classic system, and I'm looking forward to getting one for my other classic consoles, too. After payday, though; they ain't cheap!

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#oneaday Day 90: Dream modding

The Dreamcast is a notoriously unreliable and temperamental console, particularly now the poor old thing is getting on a bit in years, so I've been meaning to look into optical drive emulators (ODEs) for a while, as I mentioned here.

Well, today I finally got together all the bits for one of these possible ODE solutions, known as GDEMU. This included the GDEMU board itself along with a mounting kit that plugs the gap left behind when you remove the Dreamcast's original GD-ROM drive, and also allows easy access to the "disc change" button for multi-disc titles. (It also supposedly helps with airflow; having a honking great hole inside the Dreamcast supposedly isn't great for that.)

I'd looked up instructions on how to fit a GDEMU and for the most part it seemed like a very simple job. I normally hand over anything that requires delicate use of tools to my wife as she's much less cack-handed (and much more handy) than I am, but this looked like something I thought I could probably do myself. So I decided to be brave and to do it myself.

And you know what? It was easy. There were just a few steps to the process that went roughly as follows:

Remove three screws from the bottom of the Dreamcast
Remove the modem (it just pops out)
Remove the screw that is revealed when you remove the modem
Pop off the top of the Dreamcast
Remove three screws holding the GD-ROM drive in place
Remove the GD-ROM drive (it's just plugged directly into a connector that sticks out from the bottom of the casing)
Screw the mounting kit to the GDEMU board (I forgot to do this, but getting the board back out to do it was easy… I then also forgot to put the button for the disc change in the mounting kit, but, again, it was easy enough to undo the work and correct the mistake)
Stick the GDEMU board into the socket the GD-ROM drive went in
Screw the GDEMU board into the Dreamcast case where the GD-ROM drive used to be
Put the case back together
Put the four screws in the base back in
Put the modem back in
Done!

Most places online also recommended putting some resistors in the power supply between the 12V pin and one of the three Ground pins. This is apparently because without the original GD-ROM drive drawing from the 12V… whatever it is, the inside can get a lot hotter than it would do normally, but this can be avoided with the resistors, which basically trick the power supply into thinking the GD-ROM drive is still drawing power. I don't entirely understand everything about it, but I understood what I had to do, which was twist the wires on three resistors together, then poke one end in the hole with the 12V pin, and the other end in the hole with one of the ground pins.

This was the one part of the procedure I really wasn't sure about. I haven't done any sort of fiddling with electronic components before (outside of maybe a term's work on very simple circuits — mostly logic gates — in secondary school Design and Technology and Science classes) so I was a bit nervous I'd poke something in the wrong hole and make things go bang. I was reassured by some people who take apart old computers and consoles all the time that it was very unlikely putting a few resistors in would make anything go bang, but I was still a bit concerned the resistors might not stay where they were supposed to be or would short-circuit something.

It took a few attempts to get it done to my satisfaction, but eventually I got the resistors in the right place and was satisfied that they were as secure as they were going to be without getting hot glue involved, and I put the whole shebang back together.

And, believe it or not, when I booted it up, it all worked first time! I was expecting something to go wrong somewhere, but no — everything went very smoothly, and I now have a Dreamcast that has a nice selection of games built right into it. No worrying about the drive failing mid-game and causing a reboot to the system menu; no worrying about discs not reading properly; no worrying about region, either.

I'm very happy with how things went, and I'm looking forward to using my Dreamcast a lot more now it's been "revitalised" like this. It also encourages me to look into similar solutions for other consoles — particularly the Saturn. I have a Saturn that I acquired at some point (but no power supply, AV cables or controllers… or indeed games) that it would probably be fun to get loaded up with games in the same way. So I'll probably do that at some point.

Long term I'd like to get all my classic systems hooked up with a solution like this, such as the Everdrive range for cart-based systems. As fun as it is to collect for old consoles, I've been burned just a few times too many by cartridges that don't work — I have two copies of Desert Strike for SNES that don't work in the exact same way, for example — plus I don't really have a lot of room left for collecting, either.

There's still a certain magic about playing games on classic hardware — and part of that, admittedly, is using original media; the clunk of the cartridge slot on consoles like the SNES in particular is a fun part of the experience. But as many of these old games are starting to run into reliability issues by virtue of their age, it's great that we have alternative solutions that allow us to still enjoy the consoles themselves, even if the media is past its best. And for everything else, we have emulation and modern, officially licensed solutions like the Evercade.

Now maybe time for a bit of Dreamcast before bedtime, I say.

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2422: A Different Time

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I've been doing some retro gaming stuff recently which involved trawling the AtariAge and AtariMania forums for information, and as it happened, one game I was looking for information about — the rather peculiar Pondering About Max's [sic] — linked to a scan of an old edition of New Atari User magazine, the very publication that I, my brother and my father all used to contribute to.

I spent quite a while distracted by the format of the magazine, because it's a relic of a very different time indeed. New Atari User — or its former incarnation Page 6 — wasn't a games magazine per se, though coverage of the latest video game releases on Atari 8-Bit and ST formed a core part of each issue. What I found much more interesting was the inclusion of other features. I was well familiar with the Making Music with Your Atari column that my Dad used to write, as I think our whole family remembers numerous MIDI incarnations of various '60s and '70s classics blaring out from the studio at all hours of the day — but I was surprised to see quite how… specialist some of the other articles were.

Take the issue I was looking at earlier, for example. There's a three-page feature in this issue about maths. Just maths, and how to make use of it in Atari BASIC. The article begins with an exploration of the use of the RND function in BASIC, which generates a random number between 0 and 1, expands on this by describing how using multiplication allows you to generate random numbers between 0 and much higher upper limits, and concludes by using the INT function to generate only whole numbers. This is stuff that most bedroom programmers were already familiar with, but the article then goes on to look at powers and roots, signs and absolute values, logarithms and exponentials and finally probabilities — each of which was punctuated with a short BASIC listing for you to type in on your own computer to see how the functions worked in practice. I've never seen anything quite like it.

Elsewhere in the same issue there's four pages devoted to making the Atari 8-bit display an 80-column text screen — this was deemed exciting enough to get a mention on the front cover of the magazine, which is unthinkable these days — an in-depth exploration of the AtariLab computer-aided scientific experimentation kits, and plenty of other things besides. It really is a fascinating relic of a period in computer media that I thought I remembered pretty well, but evidently have forgotten more than a few things about over the years. Looking back on it now… I miss those times a lot.

If you want to enjoy a bit of nostalgia — or are just curious what computer and games mags used to look like back in the early days — then AtariMania has a substantial collection of scans that you can enjoy right here.

#oneaday Day 822: Xoom, Xoom, Xoom, Xoom, I Want You In My Room

I've been spending quite a lot of time with my shiny (well, rather fingerprinty now) new Motorola Xoom since it arrived the other day, and I have to say I'm a big fan. While Android seems to be a little more clunky than iOS, particularly prone to slowing down for no apparent reason on occasion, I'm appreciating the things it does do. Having a fully-customisable homescreen is very pleasant, certainly, and the cool quasi-3D effect it does with the wallpaper is pretty neat.

What's becoming abundantly clear to me as I continue to use it, however, is that using it simply feels very different to the iPad. It might be the fact it's designed to be used in landscape as opposed to the iPad's default portrait orientation; it might be the unique array of apps on offer on both devices; it might be a combination of interface elements. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I can say that both devices certainly have a place in my life at this moment for different reasons — and also that getting the Xoom has caused my desire for a 3rd-gen iPad to drop to zero.

If anything, the Xoom seems particularly suited for more "serious" tasks (and by "serious" I mean "not games") — I'm particularly fond of using it for Twitter, chat, email and that sort of thing. Google Currents has become my go-to app for reading the daily news. The built-in "share" functionality, which allows you to easily send stuff from one app to another easily, is pretty neat. The keyboard I have installed, which lets you type by drawing wiggly lines rather than tapping keys, makes me feel like a wizard, particularly with the sparkly particle pattern that comes from aforementioned wiggly pattern. And the inclusion of a USB port (albeit a micro-USB one that requires an adapter for pretty much every peripheral ever, making one wonder exactly why they didn't just put a regular USB port on it) means that it's possible to do things like hook up a keyboard and practically use the damn thing as a sort of laptop.

A big draw for me was the thriving emulation scene on Android, however. Within a few short moments of getting the device up and running I had downloaded NES, SNES, Mega Drive and arcade machine emulators and a few minutes later had successfully transferred my collection of ROM files of dubious origin. What I have now is a portable gaming device that plays pretty much any NES, SNES or Mega Drive game, and a whole heap of arcade games.

This… is awesome. I hadn't anticipated quite how awesome this was going to be, but the ability to play Final Fantasy VI while on an exercise bike at the gym, or Elevator Action while on the toilet, or Golden Axe while waiting for the kettle to boil… well… yes. It's awesome. The fact you can hook up a USB controller (or, for that matter, Wii Remote with Classic Controller via Bluetooth) and play these games as they were meant to be played — with actual buttons rather than floaty, crappy touchscreen controls — is a happy bonus. The fact you can use floaty, crappy touchscreen controls at times when having a controller is not convenient or socially acceptable is also most welcome.

I'm certainly not going to become one of those gits who bangs on about how much better Android is than iOS because there are things that both do far, far better than the other. But I've been very pleasantly surprised by my first experience with an Android device, and the fact it's turned out to be a portable retro-gaming powerhouse is just a happy bonus, really. Now I can finally get around to beating all the Final Fantasy games that are still on my "to-do" list. (V and VI, as it happens. Also Chrono Trigger, which may as well be a Final Fantasy game.) And, as previously mentioned, playing Elevator Action on the toilet.

Now, if you'll excuse me…