Retro computing
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We've reached the end of a much-needed week off up in the mountains. I've actually spent a bunch of time fooling around with getting RetroPie working on a Raspberry Pi 400 I bought for the kids (ahem). We've been having lots of fun playing Zelda on the NES and Super-NES, Sonic on the Megadrive, and […]
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This is a big week for 1980s computing. Wednesday marked the 40th birthday of the BBC Microcomputer, the machine that helped launch thousands of software development careers (including mine) in the UK. This was such an important machine, in so many ways: it was really well engineered, with great performance, but also – due to […]
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In this week's Floppy Friday – a short one, weighing in at under 10 minutes – we look at a couple of games: Bionic Commando and Zaga (sorry – the best article I could find on this game is in Italian). I found a couple of old reviews online for today's games. The […]
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I've been thinking a lot about "technology wars", of late. Some of this has been driven by my foolings around with Floppy Fridays – thinking about the competition between 8-bit computing platforms, back in the day – but other musings have been prompted by links I've been sent in various newsletters. For instance, here's an […]
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This week's Floppy Friday is all about Indiana Jones games. Well, two of them, anyway. First we look at Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom from 1985 and then we play Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – The Action Game from 1989. They're very different games, which I'm sure you'll see from this episode. […]
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In this week's episode we look at two games: one from 1986 and one from 2021. That's right: we're playing Super Cycle from the 80s and Runn 'n' Gunn which was just released last week. How crazy is that? I did what I could to adjust the settings on my TV and on my phone […]
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In today's episode of Floppy Friday we use a Commodore 128D – with integrated, double-sided floppy drive! – to play some classic arcade games. Many thanks to Daniel from Bern for parting with the C= 128D via an online auction: this was his family's home computer growing up. It even came with a Seikosha SP-1200VC, […]
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Welcome to Floppy Ferrari Friday! In this week's episode we look at two classic video game experiences that allow you to drive a Ferrari. The first is one I've been meaning to play for some time and mentioned back in Floppy Friday #6: the classic 1985 arcade game Out Run. It was fun to play […]
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Over the weeks since AU, I've been heads-down with writing a chapter for a book that's due to be published in this summer. The book is about innovation in the construction industry, and my chapter will talk about opportunities related to digital twins and generative design. Which means I haven't had much time to write […]
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In this week's episode of Floppy Friday we take a look at two games that came on a Game On floppy from April 1991: Turrican II and Pure Seed. I realised afterwards that Turrican II was made available as a demo version on the floppy – and that I'd loaded the "main" program rather than […]