Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in stinkygoat's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
2:02 pm	home stretch Been pretty busy defining and balancing the gameplay for all the levels of GR+++, all done now. Still need to do VLM stacks for shader 2.0 fallback, finish off some bits of UI, final testing and tweaking. Pretty pleased with how it's come out; it has a distinctive graphical style all its own and the control method and play mechanic emphasise the fact that it is most definitely not "just another arena shooter", a genre that's been a bit overdone these days. The Cylons may have had Resurrection but Galactica has the mighty Sheepie Save. Liberator attacks a projectile-spewing Sun. Galactica's strong guns completely shred an incoming line of attackers. OUCH. Enterprise over Planet Squaresheep. Atari bee gettin' busy. Dropship attacks Gilby. Liberator fronting a line of incoming prior to getting some sheepie lovin'. Do not fuck with Liberator or you will be turned into particle disks. Yep, got me. I WARNED YOU. You may have lightning stars and grav projectiles but I am the mighty GALACTICA, Best Ship in the Fleet, and I am going to fuck your shit right up. The text at the mottom of the screen is just a test of the hint system, it'll be absent from all but the earliest levels and it will of course even there be optional. (29 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 26th, 2009
8:28 pm	sheep criticality If you put too many sheep too close together they can go critical and EXPLODE! Wool EVERYWHERE! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
6:47 pm	Sunday is caching day :) This week's adventures began with Vindy discovering a cache of her own before we'd even got started :). This is the valley we were setting off down. That building on the left looked like it'd once been a mill. Pleasant riverside walk... Incongruously enough, in the middle of the forest, a wall with a door opening. And it's dark in there. Proper dark. The flash has a hard job lighting up anything as we retreat from the entrance. Eventually we emerge out the other side into a secluded leafy gully. There was baaing coming from nearby. And after a bit of searching - the prize :). Our next objective was our first experience of what they call a "cache and dash" - a cache placed close by a road rather than in a position that requires one to take a long walk to find. The description sounded intriguing, mentioning large cubes scattered about on the landscape, so we thought we'd take a look. Sure enough, cubes. And not too far away from them: Can't be caching with no walking though, so we headed off again to a more substantial offering. Giles at the GPS again since the last one was so short. Starting off by the river the path wandered up and down a fair bit, requiring a bit of scrambling about here and there. Nice views along the way though: Eventually, deep in the forest, we came across the remains of an abandoned village. And after a bit of poking around: }:-D (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
5:44 pm	more geocaching Another nice Sunday, Giles back from Italy so we headed out to do a few local caches. This one was a "terrain 4.5/5" which involved a degree of vigorous scrambling about on a steep forested hillside. Having a dog on a lead doesn't make it any easier :D. Victoly! Even the NOSE seemed happy about the find. We decided to do another since there was one not very far away. Part of the fun of this is discovering all kinds of nice walks in your local area. There's a really nice trail here through lots of oaks and huge holly bushes. I'd've never have known it was there and yet it's only about 5 miles from my house. Aww, fluffy sheepies! :D There it is :). We decided to do just one more before returning home. The NOSE wasn't complaining about lots of walking and interesting places to smell. A WINNER IS US! :D Definitely enjoying this :). (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
6:38 pm	geocaching I've decided I'd like to do a bit of geocaching. I live in the middle of a lot of beautiful countryside that I don't get out into as often as I should. Geocaching seems to be a fun way of giving a bit of direction to a day out walking, and also discovering nice walks that you otherwise might not have found. There must be a couple of hundred caches within 20 miles of my house (according to the geocaching website, which lets you do a location based search). So today I picked one rated "easy" and gave it a go. Arriving at the parking place, a few miles from home. A pleasant walk along the river. Oh, hello! There were loads of these spotty horses. found it! (I won't show where it was hidden because it's bad form to spoil the game for others). The handheld GPS unit I was using performed impressively well leading me to the right spot - when it said I was 4 feet away from the spot, that turned out to be pretty much true. I signed the log and left a small plastic bull to mark my visit :). Definitely a nice afternoon out, combining a couple of miles walking in pleasant countryside with a bit of fun looking for the cache. I look forward to doing a bunch more over the summer. Maybe in due course I'll place a couple myself, I can think of a few nice spots :). (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
11:56 pm	hanging out with my old friend Vic Well it's been rubbish weather today and I had planned to go out for a bit but it's been tossing it down all day.. Never mind though, because I can stay in and have some Vic 20 fun, thanks to Megacart serial number 65 which landed in my mailbox this morning :). It came nicely packaged in a videocassette style box. The disco Vic is clearly "Stayin' Alive" but I hope that unlike John Travolta it has not succumbed to L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. Here's the cart itself, nicely made and printed. Bar the reset switch it looks like any other cart from back in the day (but it would have been rather awesome to have one of these back then!). Into a scruffy old Llamasoft Vic with it then... Turn it on and after a brief pause there's the menu and a tune playing. This thing is chock full of goodies, and no mistake. Loads of carts including such excellent rarities as the original Jelly Monsters (an absolutely amazing version of Pac-Man, outstanding considering the Vic's limitations) and even Mario puts in an appearance in Atarisoft/Nintendo Donkey Kong. There's plenty of non-cart games there too including nearly all the Llamasoft Vic games (my only very slight disappointment is that the Hellgate on there is the version that is around for emulators and which appears to be a bad dump as some of the characters are messed up and make holes in the bottom "track". This isn't in any way the fault of the Megacart, of course; in fact I don't think I've ever seen a good dump of Vic Hellgate that does not suffer from that flaw). There's loads of other stuff on there too, I haven't been through it all yet there's so much. One nice addition is a menu of "extras" that has some modern demos, tunes and games from the demoscene. Included on there is the Robotic Liberation demo which everyone needs to see, it's stunning. I think it must open up a wormhole into some kind of quantum memory expansion universe because there is absolutely no way that demo should fit into an unexpanded Vic 20 in any kind of normal universe :D. I know one can simply download and play all these games on an emulator but that experience misses a lot; really you can't beat playing the games on an actual, real Vic with the Comp Pro grasped in your hands. It's great to have a huge library of stuff to play on a real machine all presented via nice easy to use menus without having to faff about trying to load old tapes or put stress on your precious old hardware by having to keep pulling carts and memory expansions in and out. It's lovely to be able to use the real machine to have loads of retro fun with the convenience of using an emulator. I've spent a fair bit of today sitting in the retro room with an old joystick in my hand and a big smile on my face. Awesome stuff, I'm really pleased with it and if you've any love for the old Vic (bless) you should consider investing in one of these for your faithful old friend :). http://www.mega-cart.com/ is where to get them from :). (21 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
11:43 pm	Shooty Sunday Weekends are when I usually spend a bit of time tending to my emulator collection, and this weekend it's been the turn of the PC Engine (Turbografx16 in the US). The little PC Engine was home to some of the best scrolly shooters if the 8/16 bit era. There's an excellent and free emulator for the system here: http://www.ouma.jp/ootake/ Don't be daunted by the Japanese text, the emulator itself has English menus so you'll be fine. Back in the day I imported one from Japan as soon as I saw a friend's imported console running a nearly flawless version of R-Type and I spent many a happy hour with my mates playing all manner of excellent shooters on it. I still have the original machine, but it's nice to be able to fire up an emulator at my PC to play all my old favourites without needing to go in the games room and hook up the old system. I even bought one for my dad because he also loved a bit of scrolly shooting action. Me and my dad and my brothers used to spend hours playing the likes of this excellent helicopter shooter: and me and my mates used to while away entire weekends playing the excellent Naxat Soft pinball games "Alien Crush" and "Devil Crash". The system was never officially released in the UK, but over a few years I imported quite a collection of Hu-Cards from Japan, and ended up with the complete CD-Rom based extended system. If you want to play some of the best sprite-based games available outside of arcade systems then I heartily recommend installing this emulator and availing yourself of some juicy roms. There's an excellent page here with a load of reviews of the available Hu-Cards which should give you a good idea of what's worth looking out for. http://www.videogameden.com/vgden_hu.htm It even runs nicely on my little Eee PC. Really nice having a nice big library of Engine games for a quick blast wherever I go. A lot of times when you play emulators you realise that most of the games really weren't that good and aren't worth spending more than five minutes with in this day and age, but I still enjoy the hell out of a lot of PC Engine games even now. If you have any love of 2D scrolly shooters and quirky platformers then you owe it to yourself to check out the PC Engine game library. (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
4:33 pm	back in the dying days of big iron Went to Carmarthen boot this morning and while it was reasonably large there wasn't much there I wanted to buy. Gamewise there was the usual rash of ps1s, the first ps3 I'd seen at a boot sale, a few NES clone all-in-one joystick things and one of those Wii knockoffs for a fiver, but none that really justified a purchase. Giles spotted this book and upon closer examination I had to splash out 25p on it. You may wonder why since it looks pretty boring. Well, those who've read the History of Llamasoft will remember me being rude about a language called CESIL they tried to teach us in 6th form, where you had to write down your code onto sheets of squared paper and then send them off somewhere where someone would type in exactly what you wrote and try to run it, and if you'd made any errors you'd get your ?SYNTAX ERROR in the post a week later. Not exactly the most interactive introduction to programming. Now, we never used a text book and I only went to one lesson before giving up in disgust, but seeing the "CES" logo on this textbook made me wonder - could this be an actual CESIL text book? I opened it up, and moo and behold: Yep, there is the squared-paper CESIL "coding sheet"! Complete with an example of the first and only thing I learned about in CESIL, the print statement }:-D. Also look at how they make you cross your Os instead of your zeros, the exact opposite of everybody else in the universe. ICL, bless }:-). Looking at the rest of CESIL, ironically it's pretty much like an assembly language but with print statements. It has input and output statements, storage to named variables, an accumulator, conditional branches and such - all similar to stuff that I learned later myself on the 6502. The main difference being that instead of doing a few thousand operations per second CESIL only ran at the rate of a few operations per week, making it not quite so much fun }:-D. The book does go on to teach a little BASIC in the last couple of chapters - BASIC by post though, written on those same coding sheet things }:-D. The book I have is from 1978, exactly contemporaneous with my own time at sixth form. Reading the intro it seems that the course was originally authored in 1969, when interactive computing was rare and code really was written in biro on squared paper and sent off to data entry clerks. By the time of this 1978 reprint the course must have been on its dying gasp and had little or no relevance in the emerging wave of small, personal, interactive machines. I just think it's funny they were still bothering to teach this at my 6th form when there was already a PET in the classroom. Still, worth 25p for a little chunk of my own computing ancient history }:-D. Current Mood: a-MOO-sed (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
9:59 pm	and here's what I'm up to with my own graphical synthesizer... ( Cut for absolute hugeness, click here to see. ) Soon now. Soon. (23 Comments |Comment on this)
3:21 pm	A pioneer of graphical synthesizers In 1961 John Whitney combined the optics of a film camera with the aiming mechanism from a World War Two anti-aircraft gun to create an analogue graphics synthesizer many years before it became practical to use digital computers for such experimentation. It's a shame he's no longer with us because I would have loved to have bought the guy a beer and maybe talked a little shop }:-). (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
2:10 pm	inventor of E-Meter a complete bloody loony Most people don't know that the Scientology e-meter wasn't developed by Elron but by a chap called Volney Mathison, with whom Elron collaborated whilst making up Scientology. Here's the Mathison Electropsychometer, ancestor of today's Scientology e-meter. He had a falling out with Ron when he wouldn't sign over the rights to his meter, and Ron went from enthusiastically endorsing metered auditing to a stance of "well as we thought all along metered auditing doesn't really work". But then a few years later the Hubbard Electropsychometer appeared, being a version of Volney's meter sufficiently twiddled with to avoid copyright issues, a typical Scientology dick move, and metered auditing has been the standard ever since. However I'm not here to write about the history of the e-meter. I've known about Volney for years but never read anything that he wrote. I found a couple of articles on an old Scientology magazine online, and I guess it's no surprise to discover that Volney Mathison was completely fucking bonkers. Here's one of his articles from 1954: GALAXY T-8 PATROL BLOCKS DEATH RAY What Happens When an Earth Man Taps His Memory to Build Again The Machine with Which He Once Conquered Space? A Factual Report... By Volney G. Mathison FOR QUITE awhile, there have been garbled and conflicting reports about a radioactive explosion that allegedly occurred in my laboratories while I was experimenting with a "Facsimile One" machine. To put an end, once and for all, to these rumors and tales, I am herewith giving you the lowdown -- a true, factual report on what actually took place. Yes, there was an explosion. I can now, at last, calmly face this strange event as a consequence of recently having had the shocking effects thereof run out. This adventure began in Phoenix during the June, 1952, scientology conference. Ron audited me one afternoon, and through his remarkable methods of interrogation, caused me to disclose -- theta-wise -- both to him and to myself, that I am one of the principal inventors of a weapon allegedly styled as a "Facsimile One" machine, which I first developed in the T-8 Galaxy 42 trillion years ago, and which, as a member-of the Eighth Invader Corps, I used 20 trillion, two and one-eighth years later to take over an entire system of planets in the Arcturus Area. At the end of the above mentioned Phoenix conference, Alphia Hart, on Ron's instruction, gave me a $250 check for "research". The actual purpose was to build a small model "Fac. One" machine operating in the manner which I had disclosed during processing; namely comprising the release of a jet of high-pressure incandescent mercury vapor from a negatively polarized tungsten-carbide nozzle toward and through a positively-charged nickel-steel tube, the nozzle and the tybe being across the terminals of a pyranoil condenser of extremely high voltage and capacity, so that the mercury-borne jet pulse impelled by a power-potential blast of millions of microsecond kilowatts, would launch a lethal bolt through the positive tube, thereby generating a "killer ray". My data was that this ray, in striking a person, would cause a strange and deadly disintegration of certain brain cells, whereby the victim would eventually become inoperative because of myriads of fantastic delusionary images of all colors and dimensions dancing around constantly in his mind. (One of these cases can be detected easily on the electropsychometer.) Although interested in making the experiment, I computed that the discharge of such a mercury jet might cause a dangerous "back splatter" of radioactivity. I advised Ron accordingly by letter. "The description of the 'gun' is very intriguing and electronically enormously sound," Ron wrote. "May I actually suggest that we build this weapon as legally as possible, sell it to the United States Army, and very seriously promote its public use during war... The destructive effects of the existence of such a weapon would... do more to sell Dianetics to the U. S. Government and wake up this country than anything else of which I can think at this time..." I continued on with the experiment, but now I was greatly hampered, since one of my most highly skilled mechanics had inadvertently gotten hold of and read my original notes warning of the backflash danger and he was very reluctant to follow my further instructions. Also he stole and buried out in the yard a very expensive high-temperature trigger valve necessary to release the hot mercury jet. In an effort to use a makeshift valve, we suffered a premature mercury blast into the energized positive collector barrel. The results were simply and completely indescribable! My mechanic has never been the same man since. As for myself, I was so charged that when I reached for a pair of pliers to turn off the mercury heater, a blinding arc from my hand disintegrated the handles of the tool, and for weeks, if I sat down anywhere, an arc would burst from my posterior into the nearest metal elements of the chair, with such a jolting effect that it would cause me to jump about a yard into the air. Worse than all this the night after the blast in the lab, at about 9:02 p.m., one of those so-called "flying saucer" interspatial patrol units landed in front of the lab. window, and the Commander, in green and gold uniform, and wearing the insignia of the carbotite ring with the plutonium center, stepped in and informed me that the accelerative effects of my abortive experiment were radiating all over space. He said, "You know the penalty for disclosing this weapon on this planet at this time! Are you doing this by your own decision?" I replied that I was. "Impossible!" he interrupted. "YOU know better. Who is the CAUSE back of this?" Then he spotted Ron's WHAT TO AUDIT, thumbed through it, and really became grim. "I see." he said. "Leave it to a ------- Arslycan to keep getting himself from one morass into another. It's intolerable, the way those Arslycans go around disclosing things all over the planets. Pull the X-*2yl unit out of this rig of yours, and turn the rest of it over to the intelligence agents of government. (This was done). As for those Arslycans..." You can see what's happening. The Eighth Invader Corps patrols from Galaxy T-8 are perhaps operating very slowly, as they don't care to have anything occur that appears too "un-normal" or startling, but you can rest assured their operations are effective. The geiger men nearly sealed up the labs., they're so radioactive; also, there is a circular radioactive area out in front of the lab. where that Eighth Corps machine landed. I can let you in on something: that machine certainly did NOT look like a saucer at close range, but any further description of it is still considered classified information. A police car spotted the thing, and cops thought somebody was illegally moving some sort of building or structure down the street without the proper red lights and permit. They flashed a spotlight on it, but the radiant energy of the ship came back down the light beam of the spotlight in a blinding flash and fused the spotlight into a little blob of potmetal at the end of the operating handle which was being held by the astonished patrol officer. Further, it did something to him, and also to the lubricating oil in the motor of the car, as the engine completely froze solid and the car had to be towed away. The officer was charged with being intoxicated. Also, they accused him of having stolen a special antenna-elevating box-kite from my lab. -- a kite with a fine silicon-bronze "string" -- and, in flying the kite, the "string" touched a trolley wire, nearly incinerating himself and the police car. That's THEIR theory!" There's more out there if you look around, and it's clear that the guy was just as mad as Ron }:-D. Current Mood: amused (21 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 20th, 2009
7:40 pm	hehe }:-) (10 Comments |Comment on this)
10:32 am	(15 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
6:41 pm	we actually saw these in Swansea Note that they come in three flavours, Faith, Hope and Love. It was all I could do to prevent myself from going up and asking the nice Christian lady in the Christian book stall that was peddling the things if I could please have a Love Pony };-). I went to their web site and it turns out they make all kinds of odd things for Jesus, like godly versions of those awful Bratz girls' dollies called "God's Girlz", and for the boys, a plastic battery-operated Scripture-quoting sword. You can get Godly plectra and drumsticks, and even tools for God such as a Stanley knife with a cross on it and a holy 25 metre tape measure. Which is all a bit strange, and it seems there must be quite a bit of money in making Godly versions of otherwise everyday objects for the devout. At least it isn't Scientology. A My Little Scientology Pony that quoted a selection of L. Ron Hubbard platitudes and kept asking me for money would just upset me. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
9:01 pm	easter lunch we had large amounts of delicious steak cooked outside for the first barbie of the year. it was teh yum. Current Mood: *burp* (8 Comments |Comment on this)
2:51 pm	(15 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
12:27 pm	advanced sheep Ginger is an advanced variable-geometry sheep. Here you can see her ears in normal configuration. The ears are swept forward for maximum acoustic efficiency. And here her ears are in a fully swept-back configuration. This streamlines her whole head, enabling her to trot faster and allowing her to think clearer, less woolly thoughts. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 4th, 2009
1:29 pm	kettle activated Current Mood: ooh don't mind if I do (28 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
3:23 pm	Ram-en (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 23rd, 2009
3:37 pm	Like discovering a new Floyd song Well here's me thinking I knew my Atari history pretty well and I completely missed something and only found out about it this morning while trawling through an old Atari prototypes site whilst having my morning cup of tea. It also involves one of my favourite game designer/coders, a chap by the name of Eugene Jarvis who I could name as being the guy whose style of design most influenced and inspired me in my early career. EBJ is a top chap I had the privilege of meeting and hanging out with some years ago, and the man responsible for some of the most awesome and stylistically distinctive coin-op arcade games of the eighties, games that anyone into videogames back then would have known and respected - Defender, Stargate and Robotron, to name but three. There's another game he made, a sequel of sorts to Robotron, which never achieved such a wide release, and indeed which I only discovered when it became available under emulation towards the end of the 90s; a game called "Blaster". Having found this Jarvis gem I'd not seen before I of course played the hell out of it and really enjoyed it, to the extent where eventually I could play right through all the game's 20 levels. It may look a bit crude by modern standards with all those huge square blocks flying around, but remember it was made in the days way before polygonal 3D was doable in realtime on accessible systems. Layering and scaling these simple shapes enabled the game to give a good impression of 3D motion, and the way in which shot enemies flew apart into their component blocks was a harmonious echo of the way the sprite enemies disintegrated in Defender, Stargate and Robotron (an aspect of EBJ's distinctive design style I'd always loved). A few years ago an earlier, unreleased prototype of Blaster was found which contained 30 levels as opposed to the 20 levels of the released game, and I was pleased to discover that and get a bit more pleasure from revisiting this unreleased variation of a favourite game. I wouldn't've thought there could be any more revelations regarding Blaster to come - until this morning with my cup of tea. I was browsing a site that lists details of Atari game prototypes - it's interesting to see details of games which for whatever reason never got released back in the day; in many cases you can download and play them to see what they were like. I was drinking my tea and looking at the Atari 8-bit list and I saw an entry for Blaster. Now I've never seen Blaster ported to any of the old machines. It's been available in emulations in various forms since the late 90s, but always emulations of the original coin-op, I had no idea it was even attempted on any other hardware, never mind the good old 8-bit Atari. So, intrigued, I clicked the link to see the info on the game. http://www.atariprotos.com/8bit/software/blaster/blaster.htm The first thing that struck me was the programming credits: Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar. Those are the guys who programmed the coin-op, and usually ports to the home machines are made by completely different people. I had no idea EBJ had even put hands on an 8-bit Atari, much less converted his own coin-op to one. Reading on though I was blown away to discover that Blaster was *created originally* for the 8-bit Atari. The coin-op was a conversion of the Atari original. Due to the vagaries of the video game business at the time, the coin-op version was released but the original Atari version was shelved and never heard of until 2004, when the prototype was rediscovered. Having been an Atari fan for many years (and having worked for them for a while) I felt pretty comfortable in the knowledge that I surely knew about all the really great 8-bit Atari games out there, and yet here I found out over my morning cuppa that one of my personal deities wrote the original version of one of my favourite games on that old Atari, and I'd never even seen it. I had to see for myself, and luckily the ROM is available for download at Atari Age, so I nipped over there to grab it. http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=2684 So what's it like? It's astonishingly good, especially when you consider that it was running on hardware that came out in 1979. If this game had been released as intended in 1983 then I am certain it would have been up there as one of Atari's stone cold classics alongside the likes of Star Raiders, and would quite possibly have ensured better penetration of the coin-op. As it is the coin-op never did as well as it deserved to, and what should have been one of the greatest 8-bit Atari games, personally programmed by one of the great masters, never saw the light of day. I think I would have peed myself if I'd seen this running on the Atari in 1983. I'd love to do an updated version of it one day, in a modern-yet-retro style that retains the spirit of the original. I wonder if EBJ would be interested in a collaboration? };-) I can't believe I missed out on this rediscovery in 2004, I really should keep a better eye on the retro sites. Still, now I have a new favourite 8-bit game to crack out the Atari emulator for }:-). Thank goodness for the net and one's morning cup of tea, eh? (33 Comments |Comment on this)