Retrolife

December 2001 (26th) Well, a bumper update for December! And why not, it’s been an eventful month. I’ve been learning a load about Linux, GIMP, Quanta and all that - I guess every cloud has a silver lining. I also now have ADSL - a download increase of about 15 times over ISDN (I get 800K/s - 1.2Mb/s on mine). It’s amazing, and of course with the router, I no longer have to slave my Linux box off my 2K one like a second class citizen. Amazing - 2 years ago I tinkered with Linux…November 2000 it got it’s first box to itself, now it’s a full equal to my PC and Mac. I’ve updated Quanta to 2, but I’m still looking for alternatives…a few things kind of bug me about it. Anyway, looking forward to Linux into 2002! ...

Logitech Wingman 3D Extreme Digital If you have a game like Freespace 2, then you need a good joystick, and this one represents great value for money. It has a good solid feel, and the drivers offer many presets for many popular games. The directional hat is also a big advantage for looking around in cockpits. PCi 8 Port 100Mb LAN hub If you’re going to have 3 PCs all running off the internet, it’s not essential to have 100Mb available, but hell, it’s cheap enough now, you may as well, and it makes a huge difference when transferring big iso files and such. ...

Fasuto Fu-do ファストフード If there’s one thing that I find difficult to understand, it’s people who don’t like food in Japan. Why? Great selection, variety and everything from all over the world. Certainly way better - certainly in Tokyo - than many other cities. Certainly, it wouldn’t take much effort to write a lot about purely ‘Japanese’ food - cooking it, great restaurants to go to etc. - there are whole websites devoted to it. For this page though, let’s look at fast food. ...

So what is Myth? Well, Myth is strategy action war game mainly set in 'Lord of the Rings' type times. In it you must play through 25 levels again the evil Soulblighter and his armies of the dead and generally unpleasant creatures. The normal single player game is excellent, but Myth 2 (M2), can also be played multi-player over a LAN, or over the internet. Also, extra maps and levels can be downloaded from the net, and played single or multiplayer. So what makes M2 a great game then? Well, basically because it gives such a variety, some games are straight on kill everything that moves. In some levels you are well outnumbered, so you must learn how to fall back whilst not being overrun. In other levels you have to sacrifice large numbers of units to ensure others survive. Oh yes, and lots of huge explosions. There are a few bonus levels too, in one of which you play red-necks with blunderbusses, shooting suicidal exploding sheep (I'm not making this up). Although this game was released in late 1998, it still compares well, and is far better than other 3rd person war games like Age of Empires 2, which is just dull. Excellent animation, excellent sound (including Scottish berzerkers) and very impressive graphics make this a great experience too. It's available for Mac, PC and now Linux too. As far as hardware requirements go, I recommend a 3D accelerator card for hardware rendering, but it still plays well in software rendering on a standard 8Mb ATI. Sound also supports A3D and EAX for 3D stereo, and I must say, it sounds really good. The online M2 community is huge, producing hundreds of new maps to play, everything from American Civil War, to futuristic battles too. ...

In Hindsight ‘Densha De Go!’ in December 2020. I don’t remember much about writing this one, though the title is a play on the name of an arcade game which came out around the same time, and made it onto consoles. You played a train driver and had to get simulations of real trains to real stations on a real timetable. Yup, it was a big thing. There were sit down versions also, where you could even put a driver’s faux uniform on. There were fans indeed. All I remember from the few times I played it was that I was horrific at braking, cueing small animations of passengers being thrown around in the carriages. ...

Posted: 2000-05; Updated: 2000-12 December 2020: Looking Back At: ‘PC Upgrade - May 2000’ We can always have a good laugh at PC specs and prices from decades past, but this was fairly balanced I suspect for the time. Ah, VersionTracker, I used to check that thing every day in the 90’s until RSS and in-application updaters were a thing. I have fond memories of that first GeForce too, if only because it was indeed my first gaming card. I want to say there was a DDR version, but mine wasn’t that, mine was the cheaper version. I’m pretty sure I was mostly playing Counter-Strike and Myth II around this time. That obsession with BIOS updates would take a long time to abate, and wow, 2 CD/DVD drives. Some of these companies are still going, some aren’t and some are shadows of their former selves. This also reminded me of that ATi Rage Turbo too. I’d completely forgotten about that. I cannot explain the sheet number of commas though. ...

First of all, you’re probably wondering what a fun bus is. Well, I’ll tell you (that’s just the open kind of bloke I am :-). If you live in Japan - specifically the large cities, you’ll have probably seen them, but if you live outside Japan you maybe not have heard of them. Basically, they’re the busses of the various Nationalist parties in Japan and a few smaller racially based groups. Let’s be straight here - every country has racism in some shape or form, and anyone who believes that’s not true is either blind or dangerously ignorant. One more thing before I get into this - racism is about people, and the changes therefore come from people - sitting back and thinking ’that’s how it is’ and do nothing just perpetuates it. ...

Shareware: 40 days free Sonosoft Requirements: OS: System 7 or later Extensions: MacTCP or OpenTransport RAM: Over 2MB This piece of shareware is from a Japanese outfit, Sonosoft. It’s an e-mail program, but it’s a little special in that it handles both English and double-byte Japanese very well indeed. I guess the question nowadays is, “Why pay for an e-mail client?”. Well, to be honest, because this is a good one, especially if, like me, you need a reliable multi-lingual client. I send and receive about 50% Japanese language e-mails, which rules out clients such as Claris Emailer, and Barebones’ Mailsmith. True, Outlook Express can handle double byte characters, but it can be a bit overly complex, and not very flexible. OK, then, let’s say that you’re looking for a piece of e-mail software, what does Musashi 3 have to offer? Even if you don’t use the Japanese language side of it, this is still a worth while investment. It offers multi-user support via password, and multiple accounts, making it ideal for a business or family PC. You can also set-up different colour schemes for each user too, hence the white on black in the screenshot below. Musashi supports all the features you would expect, as well as giving a few new and interesting ones - also, most features are quickly accessible. Seperate folders for mail can be assigned different icons, and those folders given seperate window settings, which can make access to mail much easier. ...

Shareware: 30 days free, $30 after; V2.2 Sonosoft This piece of shareware is from a Japanese outfit, Sonosoft. It’s an e-mail program, but it’s a little special in that it handles both English and double-byte Japanese very well indeed. If you need double-byte support and want something a bit friendlier, not to say smaller, faster and more stable than the browser-based e-mail clients, then I can heartily recommend this one. It has many great features, including comprehensive encoding choices, a clean interface. Upon opening, the user sees the folder index window, and double clicking a folder opens another window to show contents. When opening a mail, or writing a new one, the user can choose how much of the header and encoding boxes they can see, meaning that you can choose how clean or comprehensive the interface should look, and yet have quick access to additonal features. Nice. Even if you don’t use the Japanese language side of it, this is still a worth while investment. If you are looking for a ‘bilingual’ English/Japanese e-mail client, then this is the best I’ve seen, and it’s direct input. I found it far more reliable than Outlook Express, which sometimes ’lost’ kanji. It’s also available in a Japanese version, so if you’re Japanese, and you’re looking for a good e-mail package, try this! The filters are well implemented too, allowing the user to file things as they are delivered; you can also give each folder a different icon in the index window, helping to quickly identify a folder, and whether it has mail on it. The only bad point on the filter set up box, is that some of the options seem to be worded ‘backwards’. I’m assuming this has occurred in it’s translation from Japanese, but it in no way hinders their set-up. Search functions are also well supported, allowing the user to search folders or just messages for specific mails for pieces of text. Musashi also allows exports to text with the added bonus of being able to choose how much of a mail’s headers are exported to text. Useful. All of this is managed from a well thought out preferences panel. It can also handle multiple accounts at the click of a button. This also has one of the best address input systems I’ve seen in a long time. A bit like Eudora’s menu system, but much better implemented, it allows you to set user groups in the address book and just click a button on a new mail message to insert a group of addresses, or just a single name. I liked this feature a lot. ...

On this page, I’m just going to outline my basic computer set-up, both hardware and software, that I’m using right now. I’ve also put in a bit about previous computers I’ve owned. I hope this is at best a little interesting, and at worst, not a waste of time. Computer model Apple Macintosh Powerbook G3, aka “Wall Street”; 14"TFT screen, Millions of colours at 1024 by 768 233MHz G3 Motorola chip 2Gb Hard drive 32 Mb RAM Built in: ...