Wa-ay back in November 2005 i managed to get a C64 loading from an audio CD; all told it was a slightly silly idea but that's never stopped me. Today some new car CD adapters arrived courtesy of eBay (there are literally [i]hundreds[/i] of the things on sale) and i'd found an enclosure that was originally used to house a Cumana CDROM drive for an Acorn Archimedes (and still contains and powers the interface board) and wedged a battered but relatively reliable Asus 52x CDROM drive in there; the reason for the drive change was that the Asus has two buttons, play/next track and stop/eject so that audio tracks can be selected from the drive without it needing a computer connected. i never did find a caddy or indeed the 6x CDROM drive i wanted to use for this project, which is a shame because it had all the controls and a really nice LCD panel that gave the drive status and what track it was currently looking at... it would've been bloody perfect for this "project"... oh well, here's a video of the CPC loading Cybernoid 2 from the CD drive perched on top of it's monitor:
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
The postie's just been!
i just got some nice new toys in the post, two of my smaller C64 games mastered onto 8K cartridge. Here's the Kikstart C16 cartridge with it's very nice looking box and inlay...
...and here's the Invasive Action cart in action, with my Action Replay 6 to one side and actually disconnected from the machine which hasn't happened in a very long time...
They both look rather spiffy and, although i've been a bit reticent about the whole cartridge mastering thing (since it's more about revisiting existing code rather than writing new stuff and only smaller projects at that) now i actually have the things in front of me i'm rather pleased about it all. Whilst the Kik C16 box looks very professional indeed, i have ot say that the likkle cardboard carton used for IA is quite charming in it's own way too. In both cases i'm the owner of cartridge number zero too. =-)
...and here's the Invasive Action cart in action, with my Action Replay 6 to one side and actually disconnected from the machine which hasn't happened in a very long time...
They both look rather spiffy and, although i've been a bit reticent about the whole cartridge mastering thing (since it's more about revisiting existing code rather than writing new stuff and only smaller projects at that) now i actually have the things in front of me i'm rather pleased about it all. Whilst the Kik C16 box looks very professional indeed, i have ot say that the likkle cardboard carton used for IA is quite charming in it's own way too. In both cases i'm the owner of cartridge number zero too. =-)
Friday, 6 June 2008
Life's little surprises...
Okay so... erm... it seems i'm diabetic [bemused expression] - although i'm not sure if it's type 1 or 2 at the moment, but the smart money seems to be on type 2 so far. i went to my GP last week because i was feeling tired all the time, since then various people have taken assorted samples and i was forwarded to the specialist clinic at Jimmy's. This has, it must be said, come as a bit of a surprise; i'd assumed the tiredness was just my being a bit poorly and generally lazy or something and easily "fixable" (although the bloody-minded part of me would've sulked for days over the idea of a diet and then probably avoided it like the plague anyway) but it seems that things are a bit more... well, permanent.
Which is a bit of a bugger all told because it's probably going to need significant lifestyle changes and that stubborn side of me is aghast at the prospect of changing what and especially how i eat, of getting [shudder] regular exercise and so forth. But after a bit of wallowing and pessimism yesterday i've decided to put some effort in; the registrar i spoke to yesterday said i should get a thirty minute brisk walk in every day... well i can do that, so this morning i shouldered my laptop bag and left the house at about 10am for a 40 minute walk and i'll have another on my way back. Of course, i do have the concern that i'll not be able to keep this good start going (certainly it's a bit more difficult on Tuesdays or the weekend as such) but i'm actually quite willing to see how much i can do at the moment.
So, right now it's a quarter to one and i'm sat on a bench in a rather nice park, the weather is nice and bright but not too warm and i have a bottle of pineapple and passion fruit sparkling water which i got from a pound shop and had to check to make sure it was sugar free, something else i'll have to get used to doing from what i gather. And i'm and tapping away at my (t)rusty old Compaq Armada lappy with some pleasing results; in the two hours i've been here, i managed to write over 750 words for various publications and now this blog entry which i'll have to cut and paste to Blogger when i get home. Who knows, if i get into the habit of doing this i might get around to restarting work on that book i wanted to write...!
Which is a bit of a bugger all told because it's probably going to need significant lifestyle changes and that stubborn side of me is aghast at the prospect of changing what and especially how i eat, of getting [shudder] regular exercise and so forth. But after a bit of wallowing and pessimism yesterday i've decided to put some effort in; the registrar i spoke to yesterday said i should get a thirty minute brisk walk in every day... well i can do that, so this morning i shouldered my laptop bag and left the house at about 10am for a 40 minute walk and i'll have another on my way back. Of course, i do have the concern that i'll not be able to keep this good start going (certainly it's a bit more difficult on Tuesdays or the weekend as such) but i'm actually quite willing to see how much i can do at the moment.
So, right now it's a quarter to one and i'm sat on a bench in a rather nice park, the weather is nice and bright but not too warm and i have a bottle of pineapple and passion fruit sparkling water which i got from a pound shop and had to check to make sure it was sugar free, something else i'll have to get used to doing from what i gather. And i'm and tapping away at my (t)rusty old Compaq Armada lappy with some pleasing results; in the two hours i've been here, i managed to write over 750 words for various publications and now this blog entry which i'll have to cut and paste to Blogger when i get home. Who knows, if i get into the habit of doing this i might get around to restarting work on that book i wanted to write...!
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