The Clan of the Cave Bague

Well, who would have thought it. Three days ’til the U.S. Elections, Bush and Kerry are neck and neck, and whaddaya know – that Bin Laden chap pops up again to give any wavering voters a good ol’ chill down the spine, just in case they were swithering about which way to vote.

The cynic in me is beginning to doubt whether or not Bin Laden exists – he seems, to me, to be not much more than a bogeyman, tasked with keeping the American people scared. I’m glad I’m Scottish

CNN.com – Bush meets advisors over new bin Laden tape – Oct 30, 2004

BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | Are we raising a generation of ‘young loners’?:

Television and computer games are creating a nation of young loners, a Mintel survey suggests.



The survey found that more than two thirds of children spend most of their time alone rather than playing with friends

Hardly surprising really – given that the streets are filled with the chavlike remaining 33%. At least the kids sitting playing games are receiving some kind of education. Assuming, of course, that their parents are responsible enough to monitor their playing habits, rather than just dumping them in front of Grand Theft Auto and walking away :-/

I particularly like the way the word “loner” is used to sugest that solitary entertainment is a bad thing. Unlike, presumably, binge drinking with your friends.

“Cash machine networks could soon be more susceptible to computer viruses, a security firm has warned.

The warning is being issued because many banks are starting to use the Windows operating system in machines.”



Well, no surprises there. It begs the question – why do ATMs need to run a windowing system? There was no problem with the old OS/2 machines because they ran in single tasking text mode, so the only thing the banks had to worry about was the robustness of the ATM software itself. Running on Windows is a different matter because it’s a much more complex beast. As well as worrying about the ATM software the banks now have to think about the connectivity, the shoddily written operating system, and the security of not just the ATM itself but the (undoubtedly) windows server it’s networked to.

All this to have pretty pictures on screen that do nothing except slow down the transaction.

Effie the elephant isn’t so much an elephant as an elefumble.

The difficulty comes when her nasty habit becomes apparent.

Effie is known to frequent the darker and danker regions of the less salubrious airports where she indulges in her passion for luggage snuffling.

She snuffles luggage.

In a word, she snorts trunks. With her trunk.

This poses a not insignificant risk.

Should Effie ever be an unfortuphant and snuffle a trunk containing one of the minor species of pygmy pachyderms, a situation could well arise where her trunk is snuffling a trunk containing another trunk.

This sort of recursive luggage snuffling could pose a threat to the very fabric of space/time itself.

Like a malignant grey russian doll, an elephant nasally imbibing a trunk containing a smaller elephant which may itself have snorted luggage containing an unsuspected pachydermic payload could very rapidly reach a density point whereby it would begin to affect the curvature of space time around it, thereby forcing – eventually – the entire universe to pour down a gravity well.

This would not be a good thing.

Guard against luggage sniffing elephants named Effie. The universe depends on it.

Ok, I’ve done some more modifications to the full screen rendering setup so that my framework uses quartz hardware acceleration for the 2D stuff. A couple of the guys at RetroSpec have suggested I use OpenGL for all the 2D stuff but, given that I’m doing this for fun, I’m not entirely sure I want to learn a whole new branch of computer science Seems like a lot of hard work to me!

Another decision I’ve made is that DD isn’t going to scroll, as some people have suggested it should. I want to retain the flip-screen nature of the game so I can put in lots of nice starwarsy scene transitions Next up, I need to have a good old gaming session (with an infinite lives poke) so I can get me head around the mechanics of exactly how everything works….

Well it does, and there’s no escaping it. Two salaries till the big day and one salary is entirely spoken for by estate agency fees :-/ The boys are keen on an import Nintendo DS, but that aint going to leave much room to maneuver. We’ll see what happens.

Our house went on the market (kind of) on Monday – the full particulars aren’t on the ESPC site just yet, but they’ll be up on Thursday. We’ll be taking the first group of viewings on Sunday afternoon. Promises to be fun. I have to say, I’m not keen on having strangers wandering about humming and hawing (a bizarre Scottish colloquialism which means “being rude gits”) at our decor, but it’s a necessary evil.

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An unofficial sequel to Attack of the Mutant Camels, Yak Attack has more in common with Dropzone on the C64. Graham Goring was so incredibly shit at this game that I released a special “Pansy-foo-foo” edition for him. This version is toned down quite a bit (because it was originally really hard). I defy anyone to work out how to gubb the giant spiders Graphics were done by John Blythe.

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My first remake (unless you count a bloody awful game called Lizards for Linux. Splat! is a remake of another 1982 title, this time by incentive software. This was written after I first got into contact with Andy Noble and before RetroSpec was formed. This game is notable for giving Andy’s famous red brick tile its debut in gaming It also has magnificent music by Bjørn Lynne and Matt Simmonds.

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Probably my fave This was my second remake – of Ultimate’s 1982 spectrum game of the same name. It was written for DOS, originally, but this version has been ported to run on any version of Windows. Graphics by the lovely Andy Noble, featuring the second appearance of the famous red brick tile.

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Another remake of a Jeff Minter game, with yet more John Blythe graphical goodness. In this one, you basically have to gob at spiders. It was written over a rainy weekend in C/Allegro.

Should run on any version of Windows