Categories
Gaming

Misfits of gaming science

History lessonAfter our mid-morning meal – ravioli, peaches and a few veggie crackers for Evan, and a big ol’ baked potato for me – we guys were sitting around the house, our bellies full and both of us verging on full-blast sleepy, when a random Google search lead me to MisfitMAME. Put simply, MisfitMAME is a modified version of MAME that allows you to run various and sundry… well… unofficial versions of certain games. Some of these are well-known graphical and game play hacks that apparently don’t make the cut for MAME itself (such as Popeye Pac-Man, the game for which I was Googling), and some of them, frankly, are user-made. Some of the user-made hacks are as cheesy as, well, the multifarious useless hacks of Atari 2600 games that are floating around out there. But there’s something neat about the fact that they hacked arcade code. Now, yeah, much like the 2600 hack scene, you wind up with completely pointless modifications such as a version of Pac-Man where the ghosts all wear Elton John glasses (WTF??), interesting mods such as Pac-Man Unleashed and a hack that turns the graphics of Pac-Man into a replica of 2600 Pac-Man, and actual seen-in-the-arcade hacks such as Popeye Pac-Man. Stuff like Pac-Man Unleashed and 2600 Pac-Man at least show some humor and imagination; the two zillion minor graphical or speed hacks of Pac-Man, I could do without.

However, Popeye Pac-Man is a case where I really have to take issue with the actual MAME team: it was out there, in the arcades. I remember it. I played it. It should be in MAME proper, like fellow Pac-bootlegs Hangly Man and Pirhana are. I can understand the position that MAME and its ROM set shouldn’t be loaded down with every stinkin’ Pac-hack that ever existed, especially not newly-concocted variations, but I have to take issue with this selective eye toward the historical record of what was in the arcades and what wasn’t.

So in that respect, I recommend MisfitMAME. There’s a lot of silliness going on in its ROMset (which, FYI, happens to be sitting in alt.binaries.emulators.arcade at about 45 days old), but there are also some valid entries that have been buried. This is one trip to the island of misfit games that’s worth taking.

MisfitMAME latest version: link
MisfitMAME ROMset: link (first page of several)… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code Critters Funny Stuff

New look

theLogBook.com's new look - February 2009As part of the fun going on for theLogBook.com’s 20th anniversary, virtually the entire site has gotten a nice little facelift. The code’s a little tighter, and so help me, the look might just be a little cleaner. There are still some minor tweaks to be made, so if you find anything broken, let me know.

Looks like we get an extra smidgeon of the Whoniverse next month: there’s a Sarah Jane Adventures skit planned as part of Red Nose Day (the same charity telethon that brought us The Curse Of Fatal Death ten years ago) in March, guest starring K-9 and none other than Ronnie Corbett. An “old enemy” is also promised. Fun times.

Evan made out like a bandit at his day care’s Valentine’s Day – he came home with heaps of goodies (including some chocolates addressed from Evan to mom!), including some additions to the stuffed horsie collection. I guess that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that we set in motion: Evan gets a blankie horse, he takes it with him to day care, and therefore the assumption is “Evan loves horses!” Well, if he doesn’t now, he probably will before too long…not to fear, there’ll probably still be plenty for him to hang out with at the farm. Sundays will probably become a day that Evan wants me to wake up ASAP so he can go watch me feed horses. Oh boy!

But Evan doesn’t have to leave home to get his four-legged lovin’. … Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Should We Talk About The Weather?

Beating the radar rat race

He's all over the place! What an asshole!(That’s the name of an old Commodore 64 game, by the bye.)

In a recent forum conversation about how the public has to rely on either TV stations or the Weather Channel for radar views, I thought I’d try to edumacate folks. All you need for an almost-live animated weather radar view is the interwebs! Here’s the recipe:

  1. Go to https://www.noaa.gov/
  2. Punch in your ZIP code under “Weather.gov Forecast”
  3. When your local Weather Service page loads, page down to “Radar & Satellite Images”
  4. Click “Loop” under “Reflectivity”
  5. Give Java a moment to spin up and do its funky voodoo
  6. When the animated radar starts running, go down and click “AutoUpdate is OFF” so that it says it’s ON.
  7. You now have a self-updating radar view with about a ~15/20 minute lag!

You can also click on the radar and zoom in on your city if you like. Or someone else’s! Watch destruction and mayhem rain down on those other guys for a change.

#7 is important – the Weather Service’s web radar is really an afterthought compared to their meteorologists having live data. Call it a nice side effect, but don’t be a bonehead: use this only to give yourself a heads-up advance warning of what’s inbound – there’s too much of a lag to wait until it’s on top of you and then suddenly make life-or-death decisions on 20-minute-old data.

During tornado season, I have one older PC that’s almost exclusively dedicated to running the local radar view, and maybe one out of Tulsa or OKC if there’s some big bad stuff heading in from there. Your tax dollars are paying for the Weather Service bandwidth – use it!… Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff Music

“iPod Shuffle” meme

Is that BOSS rock? WELL TURN IT UP, MAN!Everyone keeps tagging me with this particularly silly meme, so I figured, what the heck – with my abundance of truly weird music sitting on my hard drive, not to mention Doctor Who audio stories, film & TV scores, various and sundry sound FX albums and whatnot, I’ll be able to elevate this meme to a completely surreal new dimension. Either that or every answer will be an ELO or Split Enz song. … Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3

Revenge of the Rainbow Yawn

Infinitely improbable barfageBlurgh. Evan’s been barfing again, much more explosively than his last bout of the barfies at the beginning of the year. I’m hoping that maybe this is just a recurrence of the same stomach bug, but it worries me that I haven’t been hit yet (and believe me, I’ve been up to my ankles in it, cleaning it up, and all but field-stripping the crib to clean it all up, so I’ve been in physical contact). Evan and I have spent so much of the past three months being sick with one thing or another that I worry that his immune system just hasn’t quit reeling from the punches. Such are the joys of day care: interesting new social situations for Evan and his immune system! 😛

Other than that, day care is going well for Evan; he’s the biggest kid in his “class” – which is the 3-18 month category – so he’s kinda like the king of the babies. (He rotates to a new “class” in March when he turns 18 months.) A few times when I’ve gotten him in the door late enough for it to be morning snack time, I’ve literally seen all the other little ones stop and wait for him to get seated before they resume eating: the boss is here! But he doesn’t seem to be using his size to lord over everyone. If anything, he’s very encouraging and sympathetic: if one of the little ones is crying, Evan can be found patting them on the back, kinda like “Hey buddy, it’s okay.” Where he learned that behavior, unless it was from me picking him up and patting him on the back, I have no idea.

We won’t go into him coming home from day care last week having learned the word “howdy.”

I still seem to be a bit of an oddity in that I’m a dad who looks forward to showing up and picking the kiddo up. I’ve seen and observed other dads there, but some of them are real humdingers – you can tell they’re more eager to drop their child off than to pick them up. I know people have bad days and so on, but we’re talking every single day, there are a couple of guys who seem supremely irritated that they’re having to be involved at all. I go poke my head in the door, look for Evan, and make faces at him – maybe not the manliest thing in some people’s books, but hey, maybe it’s time to redefine that. There are few things I look forward to more than picking him up, because he’s my best buddy right now – which probably just means that daddy needs the kind of meaningful interaction with kids his own age that Evan is getting. 😆 I can’t figure some of these guys out. Sorry the kid’s harshing your buzz, dude, but hey, it’s all about the little ones now, so you might as well make the mental adjustment.

Anyway, hopefully he’ll be feeling better soon – he might be missing a day of day care tomorrow depending on how his tummy’s doing. Though given that the 2009 tornado season apparently begins tomorrow, maybe it’s a good day to hang out at home with dad…… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 Home Base

The Hand-Me-Down

Shortly before Christmas, my dad and his wife came into town to see Evan, something which really only happens 2-3 times a year for a variety of reasons I won’t go into. This was yet another case – they’re bad about this – where the meeting had been set up less than 24 hours before, and I just didn’t have a chance to pull together anything to give them. Really, though, my dad just wants to see Evan on any given day, so I had them meet me at a restaurant in Alma called the Red Rooster, which is my favorite place to eat (that’s right, as if I wasn’t already enough of a heel for not being ahead of the curve on my Christmas shopping, I made them buy me lunch). I took some food for Evan, including a banana which I fed to him on the spot: Evan and his grandfather both love bananas. I knew my dad would get a kick out of that.

As we were leaving, my dad said that he had some goodie bags, mainly for Evan, and it was some pretty good stuff – books about animals, books about telling time, all sorts of neat stuff which Evan loves (I guarantee I have to read at least one of these animal books a day to him – he demands it). But the biggie was something that I had already seen, and had never expected to see again.

Little red wagon

That little red wagon actually used to be mine. I was probably all of 3, 4, maybe 5 years old. I don’t think I’ve seen it in nearly 20 years; I remember at some point spotting it stowed away on an upper shelf in the basement of the house I grew up in, sometime in the ’80s, and the thought never occurred to me at the time that I’d be seeing it again, or that I’d have a reason to. I hadn’t thought about it since then. In fact, I’d forgotten it until I laid eyes on it for the first time in nearly 30 years.

My dad apparently hung on to the little red wagon all these years, got it cleaned up – I don’t remember it ever being this clean, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have had it repainted – and now it belongs to my son. Evan, of course, being the neat freak that he is, keeps the wagon in his bedroom and stows his toys and other goodies away in it. It’s kind of like the mobile toy chest: he can drag it into any room in the house and deploy all kinds of fun all over the place! And yet he always puts it back in there when he’s done, and back to his room it goes. (Where Evan comes by these neat-freak tendencies, I have no idea – it must come from the same place as his height, which is now exactly half of mine.)

Someday I’ll fill my son in on the history behind his first (used) set of wheels. But until then, I just love knowing that he has this now.

Thanks, Dad.… Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3 ToyBox

The Mosesmobile

Collect the whole setWhen I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, there was one basic rule in the toy world: Star Wars was king, so if your toy line had to have a chance of success, it had to be in the same basic scale as the Star Wars figures. Things aren’t quite so unified in the modern toy-making or toy-buying world, but it’s neat when it does happen – mixing and matching characters and vehicles and whatnot kinda flexes a kid’s mental storytelling muscles (or at least it did mine). There was some justification for the smaller-scale G.I. Joe guys and the Micronauts and the crew from The Black Hole hanging out on the Death Star. You just had to use your imagination to figure out what that justification was.

So generally speaking, when buying toys for Evan, I keep half an eye open on “compatibility.” It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s kinda neat when stuff fits/works together. Right after Christmas, I was delighted to see that Evan discovered that the engineer, the monkey and/or the elephant from his little train set could also sit in the driver’s seat of the little jeep and the little truck that he got. Which is cool, you know – you can’t get everywhere by train. The Wonder Pets and their “Fly Boat” are vaguely compatible with all of the above too, though they’re slightly larger than everyone/everything else.

When one of my wife’s cousins sent a big belated Christmas package for Evan in January, I was pretty jazzed to see that the big wrapped gift inside was a big Fisher-Price Noah’s Ark set. All right! More critters! And they can sit on the train or in the driver’s seat too. Well, maybe not the train – it makes noise, and has no volume or mute switch, so mom kinda disappeared the batteries that kept the train running. It can still make its rounds manually via Evan power, though. But without the noises, the train seems to have lost some of its appeal for him.

But that’s okay! The engineer, the monkey, and the little elephant quickly joined the motley crew of Noah’s Ark. Or is it Noah’s? I’ve caught no end of grief for the fact that, as we untangled all of the critters and characters from the ocean of twist-ties that held them in place and handed the critters off to Evan, I told him “Here’s Moses!” Wait, what? Well, he looked a little more like a Moses than a Noah when I first saw him in my perpetually sleep-deprived state. I was quickly corrected on that account, but when Evan eagerly added the train characters to Noah’s Ark, it certainly raised some other questions: why are there suddenly three elephants and only one monkey? And who the heck is this engineer? (Well hello, doesn’t someone have to keep the boat running smoothly? I mean, if all the animal species on the planet are riding this thing…yeah, I want an engineer. Dare I say…a miracle worker.)

And of course Noah (Moses? Moses!?) and his buds can drive the little jeep or truck. Evan has already decided that since the pickup truck is the same color as Noah’s Ark, it’s Noah’s Truck. Well, he got the animals to the boat somehow…wait, I’ve got it. While we’re rewriting the entire Old Testament to include the combustion engine and the Wonder Pets, Moses can be the driver of the truck. Um…and the engineer…whoever he is…drives the jeep. With the monkey. And as for the Wonder Pets? This whole boat gig is all about saving animals. Well, if you’ve watched Wonder Pets at all, somebody’s gotta save the baby animals. See? Daddy’s got this whole thing worked out about how to mix and match the backstories of all of one’s toys.

Well, okay. Maybe this is one case where toy compatibility has caused a few more problems than it’s helped along. (Moses!!??!) In the meantime, Evan’s having a blast, and that’s all that counts.… Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

Torchwood: Children Of Earth trailer

Interesting – not really what I was expecting at all. This is the five-episode season that’s supposed to play out one episode per night over a single week. Supposedly it’ll air almost simultaneously (i.e. same day) on the BBC and BBC America in July.

As for what I wasn’t expecting…I guess I thought “Children Of Earth” was going to be more metaphorical than literal somehow. Kinda like the Children of Time. I’m also still a little bit bummed that, in a year that’s going to be light on Doctor Who, we’re only getting five episodes of Torchwood and they’re blowing the whole wad in one week (again, metaphorically speaking).… Read more