These things take time. I have recently started a new job, and while I am very happy with that, I have come to realize that spare time is more scarce than ever. For the past six months or so I have slowly but surely planned to a theme based marquee for my arcade cabinet, but planning for a couple of minutes before falling into the stupor of exhaustion every night is one thing. Taming the vector lines of Evillustrator ™ is quite another. Still, I see the marquee as pretty much done now – bar a few crooked lines. The theme is taken straight from the C64 demo Andropolis, and while some might call me lazy for not coming up with something fresh, I felt that there was still more ideas to pull out of this apocalyptic playground of the gods. So there.

Yet to come is finishing up the frontend theme – almost done there –  and doing the graphics for control panel. Speaking of, I actually managed to do some woodwork in the basement the other day. I used MDF to do the control panel, and after a few trial and errors I actually managed to cut some straight lines with the shaky jigsaw. I spent quite a lot of time contemplating the button layout, and I ended up with doing a blueprint of the original six button Street Fighter arcade machine layout. According to the www experts this setup is not the most ergonomically correct positioning of the fingers, but it is definetly cooler and more hardcore retro than any of those all-over-the-place Japanese layouts. Next up is using a router to make holes for the joysticks. Another first there, so I will try to do plenty of practice on scrap wood before I do it on the real CP. Doing woodwork is good fun, but there is always something that I manage to overlook or screw up. A measurement here, a jagged line there. Still, my grandfather was a carpenter so I choose to believe that there is a carpenter in my blood as well – even if it is a ten thumbed one.

It has been on the to-do-list for almost a year now. Finally, this weekend, I found some time to install a computer into my arcade cabinet. It goes to show that planning ahead actually pays off, because it all worked from the get go! The computer has an ArcadeVGA graphics card and J-Pac encoder from Ultimarc, enabling me to run games in native modes on the 15Khz Hantarex MTC 9000 monitor, and also to use the old JAMMA harness with some additional buttons. Going with the J-Pac option saves me a lot of work, but the price to pay is that there is a LOT of wires that run nowhere. I could of course dismember the JAMMA connector and pull out all the wires that had to do with the old PSU, but then again I might want to re-JAMMA the cabinet some day. So for now it is spaghetti galore.

It’s indeed a strange thing to see a Windows XP screen on an old  CRT-monitor. When it’s all done, it will hopefully boot straight into the frontend without revealing any OS, but there is still quite a bit of work to be done before I reach that point. One thing in particular that might become an obstacle is the fact that the image is displayed as too wide. Hopefully it is a capacitator related issue, which most likely will be solved when I install my recently aquired cap-kit. If I don’t become electrical toast in the process, that is. Worst case scenario is that it has to do with other components on the PCB, like e.g. the very fragile width coil or some random transistors. Fingers crossed on that one. Apart from recapping and the woodwork for the control panel, what remains to do is quite a bit of setting up of the software and some Illustrator work. I am almost done with the marquee, so once I get the control panel graphics done I’ll send some huge files off to Gameongraphix for printing.

This has turned into a huge project for me. The whole operation is my equivalent of having an old veteran car in the garage that I plan to get running “someday”, but now I have actually been able to make some leaps forward. It feels good!

I love tapes! Nothing in the modern world of computing – or within the world of so called “retrogaming” for that matter – can quite compare to the feeling of loading a game from tape on the Commodore 64. The multicolour flashing of the loader on screen, the title pictures and the SID bleeping is to me the epitome of childhood joy. There used to be quite a lot of kung-fu involved in the process of tape loading. More often than not the dreaded words “Load error” would bring an abrupt halt to the anticipation of playing your newly aquired game. The workarounds for this problem, I believe, were as many as there were Commodore 64 owners around at the time. In my case I had to place the tape deck far away from the computer on a stack of books and then tilt it slightly. I am not sure whether the keeping my mouth shut and holding my breath as long as I could-part was of any additional use, but it couldn’t hurt to do so either – just in case. So when the game finally loaded successfully on the umpth attempt it was a victory in itself, right up there with completing the game I had managed to load. This was of course long before the time of the internetz, and where I lived word did not travel fast regarding the possibility of adjusting the azimuth on the tape deck. In retrospect it is easy to think that possessing this knowledge at the age of 12 would have saved me a lot of grief, but then again I would have missed out on a lot of the voodoo induced victories of loading too.

Nowadays the challenges of tape loading are different. The head of my Datasette is perfectly adjusted, but the tapes themselves are growing old and feeble. Magnetic tape deterioration is a serious threat to what I regard as an important and much neglected part of our modern cultural history, and instead of just sitting there watching while the games on my shelves turn into green ooze, I have decided to act. So, for the last year I have been converting my original tape games into digital files that can be either played in emulators on a modern PC, or on the C64 by means of wonderful  devices like Luigi Di Fraia’s DC2N, the recently added .TAP playing capability of Gideon’s 1541 Ultimate II or the newest bud on the stem – the Cassadapt done by Ross of Commodore 8bit Designs.

The Cassadapt is a fascinating little device which I ordered from Australia based C8D in November. What it is, in a word, is a PCB that fits in the cassette port of the C64. You hook it up to the PC’s soundcard by means of a regular audio cable, and it converts the audio played off your PC to digital 0-5V data that can be recorded to a real Datassette or loaded directly into the C64 without the need for a real Datassette connected. On the PC end the .TAP or .PRG files are played in programs like TapWav, TAPClean, AudioTAP or WAV-PRG where they are converted to sound. If you ever put a C64 game in a regular tape player, that’s what it sounds like. Experimental “music” to say the least, but still music to my ears. The setup process was, admitedly, a bit of a hassle, because you need to adjust both the cassadapt and the sound output from the pc to the right level. I did a lot of head scratching until I realised that my sound card’s output consists in inverted waveforms, but had I first read the excellent manual that comes with the Cassadapt I would have saved myself the trouble. My girlfriend always gives me a hard time about not reading manuals, and she is usually right in doing so. So now, with the Cassadapt hooked up, I now have my whole dumped .TAP collection at my fingertips, and instead of putting up with playing them in an emulator I can now just load them into the C64. One step closer to authentic, but without having to meddle with the voodoo of old every time.

I have not had the chance to make any video of my own Cassadapt in action, but why should I when they guy from C64endings has done an excellent review of it on Youtube? Enjoy!

I find it fascinating that even today there are small developers out there that spend a great deal of time creating recent technology-hardware for the Commodore 64. One of these great products is the EasyFlash cartridge which allows you to “burn” C64 cartridge images into its flash memory. This pretty much eliminates the loading times that usually apply for the machine.

Currently there are some people working hard to port classic games to the cartridge format, and the one release tipped the scale and made me go ahead and order an EasyFlash the other day is Lucasarts’ Maniac Mansion Mercury Edition done by Enthusi of Onslaught. Not only has Enthusi ported the game onto a cartridge, but he has also greatly enhanced it by providing mouse support, savegames written directly to flash and included docs, room viewer, house map, title picture, game poster map, tribute intro and hidden parts! I just love this kind of dedication, and I really look forward to busting the evil Dr. Fred’s nuts again after all these years!

It’s been a while! Half a year to be more precise. I have not by any means lost my interest in pixels nor old games, but you know how it is. Real life kicks in, and in my case real life consists in two small kids and work hell galore and refurnishing an appartment and having my PC blow up. And whooosh! Six months gone! And, as there are far too many blogs on real life stuff already, I thought I’d keep my hands away from the keyboard until I had anything “of interest” to report.

Not that anything much “of interest” has happened. Concerning the arcade project mentioned below, I have collected all the necessary buttons and pieces and bits and bobs so once the refurnishing project is done I will pick up where I left. I will also do my best to follow the Lemon64 games competition in the new year. Yeah, I know, I know. New Year’s promises are likely to last for four days, but even so…

I have done a few absolute “don’ts” when it comes to my games collecting, the worst of which is of course getting a PS3. But you don’t want to read about that here. I have also gone and bought myself some older boxed consoles, namely an Intellivision, a SNES and a NES, which in turn means even more strain on my economy. The Intellivision is of particular concern, because there are so few games available for it. 125 is not an impossible number of games to collect, and hence the ball has started rolling. More on that later.

On the bright side, I have been able to do some pixel stuff for demos for the past few months. Here you can see a selection of my newish stuff for the C64.

Well, what can I say? It all starded when I stumbled across a video on Youtube featuring a home made arcade cabinet. Being equally cursed and blessed with a strong drive to ride the wave of inspiration once it comes my way, I have spent some considerable time researching the possibility of having my very own arcade machine.

The prospect of building an arcade cabinet from scratch is very appealing, but in my case there is the time and space aspect to be taken into consideration. I have very little of either, and while I think I’ll manage to squeese a cabinet into my office, the space needed for construction is simply not there. The workaround came to me rather quickly, though, as I recalled having seen an ad on a Norwegian auction site about a guy in my home town who was selling an arcade cabinet. I dug out the ad on the net, and as it happened to say “expired” instead of “sold”, I took a shot at contacting the seller. Oh happy day, the cabinet was still up for grabs, so without further ado I went ahead and bought it! Rather cheap it was too. Here it is! This is a rather classy looking non-dedicated JAMMA-standard cabinet that used to sit in the very arcade I used to go to when I was a kid. Now, how’s that for a nostalgia trip?

The current status right now is that the cabinet is sitting at my parents’ place, and I plan to do the four hour drive to get it to Oslo in mid May. After that I will spend the hours I can spare to give it a considerable facelift. I hope to have it up and running both as a MAME and JAMMA cabinet by late fall, and I will be posting updates here. I’m excited!

Finally. After a detour all the way back to Austria and some negotiating with the seller, this little gem dropped into my mailbox the other day. The Sorcerer of Claymorgue is a nice text adventure published by pioneer Scott Adam’s Adventure International in 1984. I have only had the chance to play a little bit, and like most adventure games from this era the real challenge is to make the parser understand what you want to do. For instance, “cast fire spell at tree” will return the phrase “in two words, at what?”. So after a bit of head scratching you figure out that you have to divide it up like this: “cast fire spell” – “in two words, at what?” – “at tree”. And then: success! The joy of getting it right is overwhelming!

Compared to other games by the same author, this one has rather neat hi-res graphics. From what I understand the games in this series were first published without any graphics at all, and then republished with graphics from various artists. I think an important matter when it comes to putting graphics in text adventures like this is to  find the right balance so as to leading the imagination in the right direction without dictating too much. If the graphics are really poor, like e.g. in Pirate Adventure from the same publisher, it gets in the way in the sense that it bugs the eye. On the other hand, if the graphics are very good, like in The Pawn from Rainbird, it might get in the way by pushing the game from being a book, i.e. you make your own “pictures” in your head, only slightly aided by visuals on the cover etc., to being a cartoon where everything is pre-defined. Judging from what I have seen so far, The Sorcerer of Claymorgue gets this balance just about right.

I’m on a roll again with making graphics for the sequel of Knight’n'Grail. Since the release of numero uno last summer things have been quiet, but in late January Mikael got in touch with me about starting up again. It appears that he has re-coded a lot of the “engine”, if you might call it that, so the experience will be slightly different this time around. The game will still be a metroidvania type of game though, and I am really happy about this as it happens to be one of my favourite genres. So far I have done all the animations for the main character, and I am now working on monsters and background tiles for a forest section. Good fun!

I can’t reveal any of the new graphics at this point, but I am sure there will be some previews pretty soon. In the meantime, here are some screens from the previous game as well as the promo-video done by Kenz of Psytronik.

In an age of huge online games where the pvp servers are filled to the brim of real players made of real meat, you might think that retrogaming is a lonely affair. Think again! On Lemon64 there is a monthly games competition where you get to brawl against the most hardcore joystick twisters out there. Each month a new game is voted forth as the arena, and screenshots with highscores are posted as proof of glorious ownage or pitiful failure.

For 2010 my goal was to parttake every month, and I started out fresh with a miserable score in the puzzleaction game Spore. In February I couldn’t find much time to play the selected Winter Games (which I have hated ever since it first came out anyway), so I decided to make a comeback in March with LeMans from Commodore, a great overhead racing game from as early as 1982. This game is fairly common in its cartridge version, and I believe that it was a part of a C64 bundle back in the day. I own the cartridge, but the problem is that it is ment to be played with paddles – which I haven’t got. I really want to stear clear of cracked games if I can, but in this case I had to do with Nostalgia’s cracked version which has a joystick hack.

The game is hypnotically fun, and time flies fast as you gradually learn to dodge cars with the dexterity of a snake. The other day I knocked over a cup of hot chocolate while playing, but instead of mopping it up before it managed to seep into my PC keyboard, I finished the damned round. It’s that compelling. Whenever you crash, you have to go into a pitstop which slows you down in a most frustrating way. The trick is to find the balance between playing safe and still pass enough cars. For every tenth car you pass you get 1000 points, and for every 20000 points you get a time extension. After 100000 points the time counter speeds up, and this is when it get’s really hard.

I am at a point where I have to reluctantly admit defeat to the giants of the Lemon64 competition, but I still feel that this is a keeper for me in the sense that I will keep on playing it even after the competition is over. My current score is 178540, and I hope to make it to 200000 before the end of the month. Now if I can just stay out of that bloody pit!

Making music on the Commodore 64 is somthing that is new to me, and I am still a novice as you can probably tell by my latest effort. For the Datastorm music competition I came up with this rather bouncy tune called Ride the Datastorm. It is done in Goattracker. By some unforeseen miracle it placed third.

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