Well, things are still nuts around here, but in my frustration I finally got around to doing something positive. I got in one of my "I don't care" moods (rare) and brought my old computer back to life. A while back I bought a "new" computer. 2.6 Ghz, card installed for output to T.V. (Old games on a large screen T.V with a 200 watt stereo….how can you resist?), basically a computer that was up to speed with the times. Well, when you go to work and you got family members scanning magnetic jewlery, unpluging and pluging in wires, and downloading who knows what, bad things will happen eventually. They told me….it was working and… I don't know… it won't boot up any more. Gee go figure! So we started using an older 800 Mhz model PC with Windows ME and less of everything. I got sick of it finally, *COUGH) asked for someone to donate thier hard drive… I swaped drives, wiped out the old one and got XP running on it. So now my old "newer" computer is up and running good as new (well…it's a 30 Gb hard drive rather than 80 but when you are into old games it's hard to fill up). On the positive side I should be able to run all the yummy "heavy on the special effects" games that wouldn't run before or ran cripled on the old machine.

Otherwise (being the retro-freak I am) I have been loading up all of my emulators and games I own on the drive. Had to find a few emulators that support XP, but I got most of them… and everything is running totally sweet now with all the speed. =)

I spent most of a day looking though all the Amiga games I downloaded from Back To The Roots and Ami-Sector One way back. Some I couldn't get running before and others I never even loaded up. I had alot more than I thought I did! Hybris and Battle Squadron are running totally sweet now (joystick respods quite quickly with the fireing compared to before with fast paced games). I am totally digging the AGA games as well. Slam Tilt Pinball and Pinball Illusions are consuming much of my time. I am also getting back into playing "Nevermind". If you haven't played this puzzle game, I highly recomend it. You walk on the floor (as well as the side walls) collecting puzzle pieces to make a picure. The cool thing is after a few rounds the puzzle pieces become "animated". Try putting together an animated jigsaw puzzle! =)

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Otherwise…most of the emulators are running great. Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Colecovision, Vic 20, Commodore 64, Amiga, Sega Master System, Genesis, Arcade, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Vectrex…. Intellivision runs fine but I get an error when it closes and Odyssey 2 won't run at all. (I have the bios, but maybe missing a file yet?)

Also, when I got back on the internet I saw there were some old Exidy arcade games that are now free to emulate with MAME. (I love the old as well as the new). So for those of you who may not have tried MAME out (Who hasen't?) and you want to play some old arcade games from the 70's (Yes, there was more than Pong, Tank, Space Invaders and Asteroids!) You can download some free ROMs from here…

www.mamedev.org/roms

Emulator here…

www.mame.net

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Crash is pretty close to Dodge 'Em on the 2600 (and came out before Pac-Man? Yep!). Side Track was even earlier. And of coure Star Fire had to come out arround the time Star Wars came out in the theater. There are more to snag… Yes, Preserve the "Stick People" games! Black and white is still alright. =) (Everybody runs to thier XBox 360…) Hey, try making a game with only a few killobytes and make it fun!

Well, gotta go search for some prototype ROMs I lost. Thier was a fight a while back and some CDs were thrown in my direction and… Aw…skip it. ;)