Category: Robert’s Blog

Goodbye 2012, Hello 2013

Posted on

Another year has passed here at the Pages of Fun so it’s time for my annual assessment of the year in media consumption. This was a pretty underwhelming year for movies. If it wasn’t for The Hobbit, which squeaked in at the last minute, there would have been no stand-out films for me this past year. To be honest, I haven’t really been keen on getting out to see movies for a while. I did love the Icons of Suspense DVD collection I bought even though I didn’t rate the individual movies that highly. I need to seek out more obscure foreign horror films this year.

For me this has been the year of the Kindle. I have been reading ebooks almost exclusively since 2000—first on a old black and white Palm Pilot, then a back-lit m505, and finally on a Nintendo DS with an M3 Flash Cart before switching to the ad-supported Kindle. The Kindle is just so much better than all my old hacked ebook solutions. I have managed to get through about two books a month, which is a relentless reading pace for my word-adverse brain. Of all the books I read, I can easily say that Baby Shark by Robert Fate was the best thing I read all year. I’m sure more books from that series will be on my 2013 list.

For the most part I have devoted most of my free time to gaming. I played a ton of great titles but my favorites of the year were Mass Effect 3, Batman: Arkham City and Tomb Raider: Underworld. Steam sales are great and I already have about half a dozen AAA titles lined up to play in the upcoming months (if I ever finish the awesome Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) and I want to continue playing through adventure games as I await the release of Double Fine’s Adventure later this year. Consume! Consume! Consume!

Haunted House Text Adventure

Posted on

Back in the late 80s, I learned much about computer programming from this book: Write Your Own Adventure Programs For Your Microcomputer. This is the same book that I used as a guide when creating Malfunction for my Apple IIgs back in 1988.

The book takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a simple text adventure game using Applesoft Basic. The final product is an adventure called “Haunted House.” It’s about as crude and bare bones as a work of interactive fiction can be, but it does what it needs to: there are objects, rooms and key puzzles.

Well, in a recent flurry of Apple retro computing I got side tracked into porting this game into JavaScript. The result is here. Click the screenshot to launch the game in a new browser window (requires JavaScript, duh – View the actual page if you are viewing this in an RSS feed reader). It’s a fully working port of the original, with all its flaws and quirks. The only additions I made were to make the EXITS display more cleanly and added the verb “drop” to the vocabulary.

CFFA3000

Posted on

One of the more popular pages on this site is my guide to coverting Apple ][gs disk images into real, working ][gs floppies. In order to ease this process and bring some life back to my old computer, this year I splurged and bought a CFFA3000 for my birthday.

CFFA3000 is an expansion card for the Apple 2 series of computers that allows you to use a standard USB flash stick or compact flash card as a storage media for all your Apple ][ disk images. Now you can take a standard Apple disk image, such as a .2MG, .DSK or .PO file, and save it to a USB stick. The USB stick can then be plugged into the CFFA3000, and, with a few settings tweaks, you can boot that disk image on your original Apple ][ hardware. Really cool!

CFFA3000 Installed

Installing the card is just a matter of opening the Apple ][, and inserting the card into an empty slot (I used slot 7). I hooked up a short USB extension cable to the card which allows me to swap out a USB stick without having to open up the computer case. The CFFA3000 even allows you to swap out the flash memory while the computer is up and running. I also have a compact flash card directly plugged in to the card. I have put a few essentials like system software and utilities on that card, but the set up program allows me to pull disk images from both the USB and compact flash at the same time.

CFFA screen

Disk images are mounted from a simple and intuitive menu system that is access via the IIgs control panel access screen. For the first time ever I have been able to run System 6 without having constantly to swap disks (I never owned a hard drive for my IIgs) and it only takes seconds to boot up. Booting system software from a floppy literally used to take minutes for me. 32MB disk images are easily created and can be use to then store all my documents like this kick ass Paintworks drawing I did of Adam Ant:

Adam Ant - Prince Charming - Paintworks Gold

The CFFA3000 is not only about IIgs software. It can also can be used to mount and run disk images of 5.25″ floppies. Now I can Lode Runner and Alpha Plot without worrying about the fragile disk media getting eaten alive by my ancient disk drives. This isn’t perfect. I have noticed that one of my favorite Apple games of all time, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, does not work when running off of the card (same disk image runs fine from booted from a floppy in the real drive).

One additional benefit is that the CFFA3000 makes it dead simple to rip physical disks, 3.5″ or 5.25″, into disk images for use on a PC emulator or the CFFA itself. I’m still getting the hang of that process. It won’t work for copy protected disks.

So far my only problem with it is that there is a limit to the amount of images you can pack on the flash media. This is somewhere around 250 disk images. But all-in-all, this is a great product and an essential add-on if you want to get serious about turning that old Apple ][ back on.

Romantic Fish Eating

Posted on

The Italian thriller Death Walks on High Heels is not terribly noteworthy even within the tiny cinematic sub-genre of giallo. There is, however, one scene in the movie that does jump out like a breaching marlin. It is the only film that I know of that sexualizes the eating of a grilled fish dinner.

Nothing foreshadows an evening of passionate romance like a cart of dead fish.

The flames of love have erupted beneath a pile of gnarly meat and scales.

That’s right, no silverware required. The best way to appreciate good food is by touch.

Next step, start ramming globs of flaky white meat into your mouth.

Be sure to chew carefully. You wouldn’t want to cut the evening short with a bone caught in your trachea. Well, a fish bone that is.

Here’s the Lucio Fulci close-up gore moment.

By the end, her fingertips are just covered in half-chewed fish matter.

And that calls for a little clean up.

Now, bear in mind this scene goes on for like two minutes. The images of Nicole chomping are interspersed with clips of her lover, Dr. Matthews smoking, taking sips of what I suspect is J&B Scotch and then staring at her with creepy middle-aged man-eyes. I’m sorry, but there is nothing sexy about this and, for the record, I still hate seafood.

Occupy Whatever

Posted on

I had thought that the whole occupy Wall Street thing had lost all its steam but then some cop had go and kick it up a notch by spraying a little peppery spice. Bam! All the sudden pepper spray policeman has become a rallying point for the OWS supporters. I suppose this is good for the cause, because, frankly, up until now they haven’t had any sort of unifying message around which to rally. Personally, despite my general agreement about wall street bailouts and corporate cronyism,  I never was a big fan of the movement. It seems to be yet another iteration of standard decades-old lefty memes mixed with the usual chanting and hackneyed street theater. Okay, you dislike corporatism and wealth inequities, but how does camping out all night for weeks on end make your point—other than leading to the inevitable conflict with “The Man?” That seems to be the end game of all these lefty protests. Wear out your welcome, then incite some sort of police confrontation and maybe you’ll get some (literal) kick-ass images you and your bearded hipster pals being dragged away by the boys in blue. But this is just that aforementioned street theater. Unless you are showing civil disobedience over not being allowed to camp in a city park, your point is lost. The vague demands of OWS could just as easily and effectively be made during normal business hours and you could use your evenings for spending time with your family or showering.

Remember When…

Posted on

Ok, so this is my response to this thing that’s been passed around Facebook for the past few months. The original says, “Remember When Teachers, Public Employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS Crashed The Stock Market, Wiped Out Half Of Our 401Ks, Took Trillions In Taxpayer Funded Bail Outs, Spilled Oil In The Gulf Of Mexico, Gave Themselves Billions In Bonuses, And Paid No Taxes? Yeah, Me Neither… Pass It On.”

My first response was, “Well yes, as a matter of fact, I do remember when Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS didn’t pay taxes.” But that sorta misses the point. I suppose the message here is that those nasty teabaggers and other fiscally conservative-types are demonizing these wonderful institutions while corporations are running rampant and ruining the country (nevermind that it was the corporate bailouts and crony capitalism that sparked the whole tea party movement in the first place).

My real issue with the meme is that it is a textbook example of a straw man argument. Nobody on the other side is accusing teachers, etc. of these sorts of awful things. All that is being called for is a little budgetary restraint. Is asking public employees to tighten their belts (like everyone else in the private sector already has) that horrible? Aren’t PBS, NPR and Planned Parenthood valuable enough institutions that they can survive without the small percentage of federal dollars they take in? Geesh. Lighten up lefties.