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Golf video games are one of my passions, ever since World Class Leader Board and Microprose Golf on Atari ST. These days my favourite golf games are still the old ones. In particular I have a soft spot for T&E SOFT’s New 3D Golf Simulation series with its blue skies, bright colours, and FM synth tunes. This series has a long history so I thought...

So the Macro extension and a bunch of smaller extensions were supposed to be it, but it’s so much fun to create these that whenever I get an idea for an extension I can’t help making it. This time I wanted to keep track of how many times I’m calling certain functions in my code. That’s quite a niche requirement so I made a more general purpose...

After creating a bunch of smaller Nova Extensions quite quickly I wondered how far I could push things, just as a personal challenge. I had the idea of implementing a Macro text recording and playback system. There was something similar in TextMate editor, and whilst the Nova API doesn’t currently allow as sophisticated a system I thought it was...

I’m a big believer in solving problems yourself if it’s possible rather than waiting for app updates that might never arrive. Making extensions for the Nova editor that I do most of my programming and blogging in is so much fun! So, here are some of my own creation: YAML Tag Picker Allows you to easily select tags for the front matter in your...

I’m a big believer in solving problems yourself if it’s possible rather than waiting for app updates that might never arrive. Making extensions for the Nova editor that I do most of my programming and blogging in is so much fun! So, here are two more: Reindent-o-matic Allows you to apply .editorconfig indent rules to the current file, or all...

I’m a big believer in solving problems yourself if it’s possible rather than waiting for app updates that might never arrive. Making extensions for the Nova editor that I do most of my programming and blogging in is so much fun! So, here are two more: Reindent-o-matic Allows you to apply .editorconfig indent rules to the current file, or all...

Back in 2021 I had a look around and decided to base this incarnation of my blog on an open-source Jekyll theme called “Type”, though I’ve changed and added so much it’s quite some distance from the original as it stands today. Initially I blamed Jekyll for the poor performance, until I took a closer look. What I learned was that the blog theme...

Back in 2012 I wanted to make a quick game for the AGBIC game jam (A Game By Its Cover; make a game inspired by the imaginary cover art from the Famicase exhibition). There’s only one rule for this game jam, which is taken very seriously: respect the wishes of the original artists, and don’t appropriate their designs without consent. Otherwise...

YAML Tag Picker allows you to easily select tags for the YAML front matter in your blog posts. It scans your existing posts for tags and presents them in a Choice Palette, making it easy to maintain consistent tagging across your blog. You can select multiple tags one after another; when you’re done choose “Finish Selection” or press Esc. Each...

Markdown File Linker is an extension for the Nova editor that allows you to insert links to local files as Markdown links, perfect for linking between articles in your Jekyll blog! Usage To run Markdown File Linker: Select the Editor → Insert File Link menu item; or Open the command palette and type Insert File Link You might also choose to...

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away I had to give an impromptu presentation about something I didn’t know much about. The goal of the task was to see how well we could ad-lib a presentation under pressure. Everybody in the room had to think of a topic whilst waiting for our turn. The person next to me couldn’t think of anything and asked...

Let’s celebrate! we just hit 1000 games at my database of moai in video games 🗿 today is Fiestas Patrias (Independence Day) in Chile 🇨🇱 So here’s some “Moai-chan-dise” ✨ t-shirts and stickers in both silly and serious styles special “relaxing” sticker by @Vxcl T-shirts Various sizes and colours. ...

Back in the mid-1990s I was using Windows 95/98 and running up against bugs, problems, driver issues, unexpected things happening. I would often end up on the Microsoft Knowledge Base support web pages, where the issue would often be accompanied by the line “This behavior is by design”, which remains in use to this very day. This mantra has stuck...

A couple of days ago I was reading on Hacker News about a feature in some Linux window managers where they allow collections of tabs from different apps. This reminded me of BeOS, but at the same time it reminded me of an app from 1992 for classic Macintosh called Stapler, and how I’d talked about that and it’s one-time spiritual successor,...

Sharp’s Denshi Techō (電子手帳) were a range of electronic notebooks or organisers, marketed as Bware in Japan and Wizard or IQ elsewhere. In Japan they won a prestigious G-mark Good Design Award in 1988 and in the USA an episode of Seinfeld was the prize. As well as being home to some of the earliest emoji these devices could run software from IC...

Earlier this year I made a workflow for Alfred app to allow easy searching of Moby Games. Earlier this week it was released on Alfred Gallery. Download alfred.app/workflows/gingerbeardman/moby-games/ The workflow requires an API key that you can get instantly via your Moby Games profile page. If you’d like access to the free API...

Recently at Internet Archive a “glitch” (their choice of word) deleted a great many accounts, including my account that had been at archive.org/details/@gingerbeardman since 2015. Somewhat surprisingly, they are not reaching out to affected users but rather waiting for them to create new accounts and silently relinking their old uploads only if...

Yesterday on Twitter the inimitable Morten Just posted a preview of a tool he’s created that wrap ffmpeg to allow movies, such screen recordings but pretty much anything, to be re-encoded to a smaller filesize. I responded with a trick I use to do the same on “right-click” context menu using a macOS app called ContextMenu, and others said it was...

For June and July of 2024 the Shibuya Pixel Art Contest has been running, a welcome return after it not happening in 2023. Entries are open all over the world, but can only be submitted to Twitter using the hashtag #shibuyapixelart2024. You have to include a name for the artwork and its original pixel dimensions (though it’s OK to rescale small...

Given the ongoing discussion about whether or not TETRIS is 40 years old this year (I say not), I thought it would be cool to add something interesting and relevant to the conversation. As a bonus, this is an item that at the time of writing is not covered in English anywhere else on the internet. An old Japanese book about TETRIS, written in the...

A little over a year ago I wrote a screenplay/pitch for a video game based on an animated short film created by THE LINE Animation Studio: the opening film from the CICLOPE Festival in 2016. I’d like to make this game but I need support to do so. Until then I figured I’d post it here for all to read. CICLOPE Think of this as the game trailer....

I use an Android tablet for reading ebooks. My favourite ebook reader is the Sony PRS-650 which was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. But these days I like to have internet connectivity whilst reading so I can do both dictionary lookups, Wikipedia lookups, and quick Google searches. But at the same time I don’t really want the total distraction...

Emigre magazine was a highly influential graphic design publication. It was known for its innovative and experimental approach to typography and graphic design, pushing the boundaries of traditional design norms—for better or worse. The magazine was published from 1984 (year of the Macintosh launch) until 2005, and during its run it played a...

Since some of my first prototypes with Playdate I’ve wanted there to be a way to interact with the device using a mouse. Well, today is that day! No doubt you have some questions? How are you doing this? What’s the weather like? etc. How? A custom Hammerspoon script monitors mouse coordinates and sends them to the Playdate over serial connection....

During my research into vintage Japanese drawing software, I came across some devices that had built in sketch or handwritten memo functions. I bought a couple of them to see if they did anything cool or interesting. These sorts of devices are pre-internet, so there’s not much about them online, and they can’t be emulated, so the only way to find...

I’m really enjoying Dolby Atmos, “spatial audio”, or “surround sound” as we used to call it. There is so much music in this format on streaming platforms, both new albums and classic albums. I wanted to listen to Björk’s first four albums in “spatial audio”, but they don’t currently exist in that format on streaming platforms. But I was reminded...

Apple recently changed the App Store rules to allow emulators, which means we’re now seeing emulators for classic video game consoles available for download! This is great news for a retro gamer like myself. Delta is one such emulator that currently focuses on Nintendo platforms: NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, SNES, N64 and DS. I thought it would...

First, a little bit of Macintosh History. You probably know that on modern macOS you can select a file in Finder, on your Desktop, or in an app, and send it to the Trash by choosing the Move to Trash menu item, or by pressing Cmd+Backspace/Delete. This keyboard shortcut was added in System 7.5.3 where it was largely unadvertised and somewhat of a...

I use some software called Huginn to do various automated web searching and scraping. One use case is checking the status of all the institutions where The Great Wave is currently on view, or not. I also have it do automatic auction searches for various items I’m looking for, that would otherwise take up a bunch of my time. And much more. Huginn,...

This week sees the first Anniversary Sale of Catalog, the official store for Playdate games. This means it’s almost the anniversary of the release Sparrow Solitaire, which was the first Playdate work I did in 2023 after taking an enforced break. So I thought it would be interesting to look back and take stock of the last year of me making stuff...

There are no downloads here, only links" /> 1984 In early 1984 Scottish band The Blue Nile released their debut album “A Walk Across The Rooftops” including the single Tinseltown in the Rain. After 40 years the album is still regarded as a classic, and in all that time the band have released only three other albums. 2010 A user called XTC343...

At the end of 2023 I bought a one-in-a-million find from Japan: it’s a postcard from Barbara Nessim’s residency at The Ginza Art Space, September 26 thru October 19 1986. This residency came on the back of her breakthrough early computer art that was done on a Telidon system, a type of Teletext graphics system that displayed rudimentary vector...

Kenta Cho is a Japanese indie game developer, who has been active since the 1980s. He became well-known in the West in the early 2000s with a series of bullet hell shoot-em-ups. In 2021 he created a total 139 games, which is one hell of a lockdown project. In early 2024 his game Paku Paku went viral, as “1D Pac-Man”, a year after it was made. I...

It’s 2024 and for some years now Apple have stopped supporting non-retina displays. From their perspective it makes sense given that all of their devices run retina displays, but from the user’s perspective it’s annoying given that so many of us are still using non-retina displays as either an external main display or as a secondary display. Not...

At my core I’m a software guy. I don’t really get attached to hardware: in my mind it exists only as a conduit to software. I use emulation whenever I can to benefit from the increased convenience and reliability. But when I can’t… I buy old devices, and with old devices come old problems. I’m fascinated by vintage digital art software, from my...

In April 2023, after I’d been listening to a bit of Japanese music during the last stretch of making the game Sparrow Solitaire for Playdate, Apple Music started recommending me Japanese music in the weekly #NewMusicMix playlists. Every week I post my favourite track to social media, keeping the best of each week as curated playlists. You can...

2023 was a year where I feel my blogging really hit its stride. I’ve spent most of the year trying to comprehend 2022’s traumatic events, the lingering impact of which continues to affect me daily. Positive outcomes are that it gave me a little more time to write, and I developed some small games that might not have existed otherwise. And one of...

Recently I’ve been following a trend in macro-pads, specialised/bespoke keyboards that provide an easy way to trigger keyboard shortcuts. A host of small companies have flooded the market with modified Bluetooth numeric pads that target Procreate, and Figma have teamed up with Work Louder to create a branded keypad with additional jog and rotary...

Thoru Yamamoto (Japanese: 山本徹 or とーるやまもと), born 1955, is a Japanese multimedia artist. Over the years he has released work in many formats including, but not limited to: magazine illustrations, HyperCard decks, interactive CD-ROMs, printed books, websites, digital stickers, and videos. He is perhaps best known for his story books distributed as...

The only aspect of game development I’ve not attempted myself is the music. I mostly use royalty free music of Japanese origin (just because I dig their vibe, man) as in the case of Sparrow Solitaire or Fore! Track or in rare cases I pay friends (like the amazing Jamie Hamshere) to write music specifically for a game as in the case of YOYOZO....

I’m fascinated with Moai so I always try to squeeze an appearance into my games. Moai in video games is a meme, or easter egg, going all the way back to 1983. But my game YOYOZO (out now for the Playdate handheld) is about capturing stars in space using a yoyo, so how could I get a Moai in it? The source of my inspiration was a trip to Japan back...

2023-12-27 — Ars Technica: YOYOZO wins GOTY accolade! almost unbelievable to be listed alongside such games as: Chants of Sennaar, Cocoon, Dave the Diver, Humanity, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Pikmin 4, Puzzmo, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Venba and Viewfinder. A game I made for the Playdate handheld was released today! Go buy it and...

Whilst searching for something else entirely I stumbled across these images and was struck by just how beautiful they are. The artwork is by Barbara Nessim and was featured as the cover and section pages in the September 1984 (Vol 9, No 10) issue of BYTE magazine. Larger versions are at the bottom of this blog post. They were drawn during a...

Collecting Japanese Macintosh Magazine Media was not without its challenges. After buying those discs, and figuring out a way to index the content, I wanted to run some of that software! So I needed a way to work with Japanese files and display them correctly in a real Classic Macintosh environment. For the reasons outlined below I decided to use...

For a while now I’ve been collecting references to old Japanese pixel/dot art software. My main sources of information are the treasure trove of scanned magazines on Internet Archive, Twitter archives, YouTube videos, Yahoo! Japan Auctions listings, and Google search. I’ve been keeping this list for a while, and the release of 16bit Sensation:...

From LOGiN Magazine (1987, No 5) comes the story of 篠原賢一 (Kenichi Shinohara), a “cheerful uncle” from Hyogo Prefecture, who at the age of 60 years old began using an NEC PC-98 to draw pixel art reproductions of Ukiyo-e. He also printed them and made folding screens and kites! Just “for something to do”. I like his style! What a guy. His process...

I just released the “OpenSCAD to Spritesheet” workflow I created for Daily Driver: github.com/gingerbeardman/openscad-spritesheet It’s a Frankenstein mish-mash of a Makefile and several shell scripts that evolved over many months/years. Initial rendering is done using OpenSCAD, and post-processing is done using ImageMagick. Model poses and...

I like to think everybody collects something odd. Me? I collect hanafuda video games: digital implementations of traditional physical Japanese card games. Mostly that means physical copies of games for consoles and computers both new and old, for handhelds like Game Boy Advance, WonderSwan, digital versions for computers, handhelds and smart...

This interview is reproduced from the January 1976 “Disco” issue of Black Music magazine. TOM MOULTON is the behind-the-scenes figure of disco music. His name has appeared on the credits of discs by Gloria Gaynor, B.T. Express, Bobby Moore, Al Downing, Peoples Choice, South Shore Commission and many others. Yet Moulton’s vital contributions to...

On 9th August 2006, “Fake Steve (Jobs)” started blogging at The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. The blog featured scathing criticism of Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large, a pinch of political satire, along with many in-jokes and pandering to the zeitgeist. It was, above all else, very funny. A year or so after it began the identity of the...

Here’s how you can downgrade to an older version of Twitter (pre-X changes) and install it in a way that means it will not be automatically updated. Twitter 9.66 (858339189) running on an iPhone Xs just now Downloading the old version This is the trickiest part of the process as it requires installing some old software and following a...

Following on from yesterday’s extraction of old sound effects, I quickly realised I needed an easier way to search them as they came out of Director as unlabelled, numbered files. I can use QuickLook or a media player to quickly audition them, but how could I easily find the sample that contains the sound of running water or a horse trotting? I...

For my latest “quick” Playdate project—a remaster of a ~1997 web game by Thoru Yamamoto—I decided to add sound effects. In order to keep it as authentic as possible I decided to use only sound effects created by Thoru Yamamoto that were used in his other productions. The largest collection of sounds I could think of were those included in his...

I was looking through some old Macintosh CD-ROMs, searching for my usual things that I do whenever I add new discs to my collection: hanafuda, specific artists, favourite software, plugins for said favourite software, and so on. Whilst I was deep in the filesystem I stumbled across some old sample files from Deneba Canvas and noticed how they...

This blog post assumes some familiarity with Playdate (a handheld game console with a cool crank control scheme), Playdate SDK and the Lua programming language. During the development of my forthcoming Playdate game Ball und Panzer Golf (tentative title), I wanted to be able to draw to the debug layer from anywhere in my code. The SDK allows you...

I’ve had a pair of Beyerdynamic Blue Byrd 1st generation bluetooth earbud headphones since June 2020. They are great Bluetooth headphones but were recalled just after I bought them. Somebody got too sweaty and managed to somehow burn themselves on the headphone wire. Given that no replacement was being offered I refused to send mine back in the...

I’ve been following the X68000 Z mini computer since it’s announcement in the hope that it will bring new activity to the X68000 scene and it seems to be having that effect. In one video from the recent 「68の日」(“68 Day”, named after the date written in Japanese order, 6-8, that’s 8th June the most special day of the year for X68000 fans) I spotted...

Marguerite is a defunct Japanese website, previously at marguerite.jp (dead link) that hosted HTML5 implementations of Hanafuda and Mahjong. Their Hanafuda in particular was very well done, offering a variety of rulesets some of which are difficult to find in video game form and impossible to find in a browser game. The experience was single...

I recently played through COMPILE’s うさ雀外伝 俺が切り札！ “Usajong gaiden ore ga kirifuda!” (a ninja-themed Hanafuda Koi-Koi game for PC-98 featured on Disc Station Vol. 10) and took the liberty of recording its great soundtrack as I went along. Soundtrack download archive.org/details/usa-suzume-gaiden-ore-ga-kirifuda-pc-98-unofficial-soundtrack Track...

Some things you probably didn’t realise about the design of the original Sony PlayStation: it was inspired by Apple’s Macintosh Plus the colour is grey with a hint of violet to counteract plastic ageing/yellowing Sony acquired the PlayStation name from Yamaha it led to the VAIO range of PCs Bonus fact: VAIO was originally an acronym for...

The ultimate hot hatch. Most people are familiar with the first game in the GTi Club series due to its prevalence in arcades throughout the later half of the 1990s. The second game in the series is very hard to find in the wild, whilst the third is perhaps least known but a little easier to find and play today. The PlayStation 3 received a loose...

Recently I have been looking for a specific issue of an old 1985 Japanese PC magazine, but there are non currently for sale, nor have there been any sold for some time judging by sold listings. Over the past several years what I would normally do in this scenario is play the waiting game and hope one pops up for sale and that I can win it. But...

IntelligentPad was a drag-and-drop software creator based on the concept of reusable components. Pads could be reused on other pads. There was no programming language so software could be created by anybody, including those without programming experience. It was generally referred to as IP, and often “iPad” which resulted in some users...

For the past month or so Apple Music has been suggesting new music from Japan in my weekly “New Music” playlist. I’m not quite sure what flipped the bit in their recommendation engine, but I’m happy it did. If I had to guess I’d say it was the music I was listening to whilst finishing off Sparrow Solitaire for Playdate which has an excellent...

This is version 2.1 of F-MIN INFINITY, a sprite-scaler 2D/3D racing game by mpulip for Windows 95. You could describe it as Power Drift meets F-Zero. The copy of its homepage in Wayback Machine was incomplete, as were direct links from an old feature on Vector, so it took a long time to find a copy of the .lzh archive file. Eventually I managed...

一筆 (“Hitofude” = Single Stroke) aka “Ippitsu” is a puzzle game by H.Hirabayashi. Released in 1995, a decade before Mitchell Corp & Nintendo’s Polarium 直感ヒトフデ (“Chokkan Hitofude” = Intuitive Single Stroke) & Polarium Advance 通勤ヒトフデ (“Tsūkin Hitofude” = Commuting Single Stroke). As huge fan of the Polarium games this discovery has rocked my world....

I just pushed some changes to my Playdate-centric fork of Piskel: github.com/gingerbeardman/piskel-playdate/tree/dev-1047 This fork: can be used to build desktop apps on latest operating systems updated to future-proof dependencies and build process builds for Windows, Linux, macOS has Playdate-specific...

I recently collected over 250(!) sets of user created graphics for MaciGame the classic Macintosh tile-matching puzzle game by Takeshi “KEN” Takahashi. まきがめ (MaciGame) was a wildly popular game worldwide in the mid-to-late 1990s, and there was even a play guide book published about it in its native Japan! The game is a variation of さめがめ...

A little known feature of Sparrow Solitaire is its ability to load user-generated content from files copied onto the Playdate. One day I thought it would be cool to combine two tile sets, so I built a web app to do it! A wild tile set builder appears! sparrowsolitaire.com/workshop/ 3-in-1 As well as allowing you to cherry pick tiles from existing...

A while ago I bought a 2.5” Crucial SSD and a UGREEN USB 3.1 Gen 2 Hard Drive Enclosure (SKU: 70499) on which to keep some working files whilst connected to a Mac mini. I used that on macOS 10.13 High Sierra, 10.14 Mojave, and 11 Big Sur (I skipped 10.15 Catalina). Over the years the setup served me well. After I upgraded to an M1 MacBook Pro I...

I’ve previously written about the Playdate game Sparrow Solitaire, when we released the Early Access version of the game. That was almost 9 months ago and a lot has changed! This week the hugely expanded full version of the game released on itch.io, where it’s been for sale for a while, and on Playdate Catalog the new on-device store. It even got...

I’ve been obsessed with The Great Wave (or its more literal title: Under the Wave, Off Kanagawa) since the mid-1990s. This Japanese woodblock print designed by Katsushika Hokusai is one of the world’s most iconic works of art. You’ve probably seen it crop up in a whole host of scenarios. The interesting thing about woodblock prints is that the...

Safari 16.4 has some breaking changes (fixes?) to CSS, which means Polyglot the Safari Extension by Yasuaki Uechi that I use every day no longer displays its popup. Oh no! It turns out that some 6-year-old CSS and recent changes in WebKit mean the translation popup disappears immediately after it appears. But, all is not lost, I created a...

Universal If you’re using the Dolphin emulator, by far the easiest method of syncing a Wii remote with it is to use a cheap Bluetooth adapter and Dolphin’s “Passthrough a Bluetooth adapter” controller option. If you want to use the Wii remote outside of Dolphin, on modern macOS, you have a couple of options: software: WiimotePair will pair a...

Yes, the iPhone Xs came out in 2018. I thought it would be interesting to review it in 2023. Plus, I only just bought one! I hung on to the old home-button form factor for as long as I could, using a 6s for the longest time, but two things made me move to an edge-to-edge phone: I was on an SE2020 which doesn’t have enough RAM to run modern iOS...

Sometimes after posting to Twitter I’ll decide that I should really archive the information as a blog post. For single tweets that’s as easy (or difficult) as copying the text and images and publishing. For Twitter threads, it could be a lot more complicated. With a bit of lateral thinking I’ve found an easy way to do it. Get the URL to a post...

I’ve been falling behind watching Masahiro Sakurai’s game development videos, so decided to subscribe to his YouTube channel using RSS. This is as simple as plugging the channel URL https://youtube.com/@sora_sakurai_en into your RSS feed reader. BUT only the most recent 15 videos will be listed! Google’s YouTube API allows listing of the most...

2022 was a mixed year for me. I secured my own studio and continued to be hugely productive, creating some of my best ever work. Unfortunately, I experienced multiple traumatic events, and their lingering effects knocked out the last third of the year and beyond. Life-changing, and not in a good way. How many posts? 18 posts (down from 55 in...

My favourite artist is Kawase Hasui (1883–1957) who was a printmaker during Japan’s shin-hanga (“new prints”) movement of woodblock printing in the early 20th century. I’m lucky enough to own a book containing his complete collection of his prints, as well as many other books featuring his work. He is known as one of the most prolific printmakers...

At the start of December I decided to do a sort of “gaming advent calendar”, a single-tweet review of a bunch of my favourite video games. I’m collecting them here for posterity. Hopefully you will find something of interest in the list. Each tweet contained: hashtag #GamingAdventCalendar title & year text review YouTube video link 4x...

I have a Becker Traffic Pro 7949 car audio and navigation system in my LHD Renault Twingo mk1. This unit, effectively a re-badged Becker Cascade with a green OLED screen rather than colour, was bundled with high-end sports cars of German and Italian origin, but I added one to my lowly Twingo because it’s a 1DIN headunit with great sound quality,...

This weekend I’m taking part in Christmas Open Studios at Krowji in Redruth. FRI 2nd Dec, 5pm–9pm SAT 3rd Dec, 10am–4pm SUN 4th Dec, 10am–4pm See you there!? You’ll be able to buy my art and play my games. More info: www.krowji.org.uk/open-studios/

The re-recorded version of “Ride on Time” (featuring an uncredited Heather Small on vocals) released in the UK on Deconstruction Records. It was (re)made as the original samples couldn’t be cleared. The track’s success is what gave us M People, for better or worse. 😅 Sadly this version is the one you hear today on UK radio. And here’s the...

Tenohira Hanafuda Kai (掌花札 kai) is a koi-koi card game for Palm OS, created in 2001 by Hiroki Takahashi. It’s a fun game with varying difficulty, stats tracking, and lovely high-resolution (for the time!) colour graphics. But, it has one serious problem: sometimes it will forfeit the current round when you choose to continue! Analysis After...

I recently found out that it’s possible to run Palm OS in a web browser, using cloudpilot-emu.github.io which is optimised for use on iPhone and Android, so you can use old Palm apps and run old games and apps on your smart phone! Koi-Koi I play a lot of video game hanafuda and out of all platforms Palm OS has three of the most interesting games....

This post is a history of Sparrow Solitaire, my latest game for Playdate. It started out as a prototype and was later taken on by Mac Vogelsang. We’re working together to make the best ever mahjong solitaire game. 2021, January 10th I’m really into Hanafuda (Japanese flower cards) and found that the 1991 Macintosh game Shanghai featured tiles...

This concept was a typical prototype: the core action came together quickly but then making that into a game took a while. At some point soon I’ll write a devlog about the problems, solutions, questions and answers involved in its development. I’m really proud of this little gem. It’s my first time putting a lot of effort into score balancing in...

Ten years ago I made a web game called Bender for the AGBIC game jam. It was powered by CSS transitions and a little bit of JavaScript. It was fun to make and devilishly addictive. Since I started spending more time on itch.io managing my Playdate games, I’d been seeing a lot more of that old game in my list of projects. Fridays are the day I...

Often I want to restore the latest version of a file from Time Machine, but using the Time Machine interface to do so is awkward and slow. So I came up with my own solution that can be triggered from the Finder context menu of any file. Usage right-click on a file select “Restore from Time Machine” file is trashed (recoverable using Trash’s...

Since 6th April 2022, Yahoo! Japan has blocked access to the majority of their services for anybody located in the EEA (European Economic Area). That means the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia,...

One of my “lockdown projects” is a collection of media from vintage Japanese Apple Macintosh magazines. These are mostly CD-ROMs but there are some floppy disks too. I started the project in July 2021 and have so far collected an archive of over 250 items spanning just over a decade, uncovering many long lost classic pieces of software in the...

My GTi Club: Supermini Festa! obsession has bled into my game Daily Driver… the “Club GTi” car features smaller wheels than the standard size, more roll during turning, and lots of detail and decoration to show off the rendering workflow I spent so many hours on. A good choice for the autotesting/motorkhana/gymkhana stages. Here’s the 3D model,...

If you don’t know already, I am of the opinion that the Nintendo Wii is the greatest console of all time and host to the greatest collection of games of all time. My Wii was a gift for my 30th Birthday, and still play games on it regularly to this day. I also have a love for odd controllers. On one of my searches for alternative classic...

I’ve recently started using RSS again, with a couple of goals in mind. to read the latest interesting blog posts in a more focussed way to assist with personal research, and that’s what this post is about Internet Archive You can set up an RSS feed for any search using their Advanced Search page: scroll half way down to “Advanced Search...

I use world.hoyoyo.com quite a lot. It’s a forwarding service for buying stuff from Japan. However, I found that their website took around a minute to load a page, which became hugely annoying very quickly. HOYOYO are great as they will negotiate discount prices from Mercari sellers, which has saved me a ton of money, so I wanted to stick with...

Google are transitioning Analytics users to GA4, which has a different type of reporting. Previously it was very easy to see a list of referrers with their full URL. In GA4 it doesn’t seem possible, but I found a reasonable workaround. Use the Explore tab to create a new Exploration with the following settings: Variables Dimensions: Page...

I recently set up an old HP ProLiant Microserver N54L as a NAS running Xpenology (Synology DSM 6) and it’s a great little device capable of a lot. It’s also fun to write scripts and configure things to add automation and extra capabilities! Here’s a script I wrote that will look for mkv and avi files and quickly copy-remux them as mp4. I do this...

2021 was the year I got serious about blogging. Thanks to Louie Mantia for the encouragement to do so! I set up this current incarnation of my blog on a software stack I dislike (ruby & jekyll), but I probably won’t change things until it breaks beyond repair. Anyway, I (re)launched the blog filled with my collected writings spanning the past ~20...

(image: Junichi Matsuda @mactechlab)" /> Contents Introduction Berkeley Systems Enzan-Hoshigumi MacWorld EXPO Selected Works Mandala Timeline Introduction Tomoya Ikeda (池田友也) might not be a name you’re familiar with, but if you used a classic Macintosh computer at any time during in the 1990s you’re likely already familiar with some...

There is a lot of great Japanese software for Palm OS. It has arguably the best selection of Hanafuda games on a single system, and more besides. Palm OS took a lot of inspiration from the original Macintosh system and it shows. The OS can be hacked, edited and otherwise modified at runtime which allows for a lot of cool stuff to happen. In the...

AsistantPickle was a desktop toy by Thoru Yamamoto, released for Macintosh in September 2000, featuring a suite of tiny applications: TinyMemo TinySketch TinyPiano TinyWatch TinySchedule TinyEmail TinyAddress TinyClip TinyTimer TinyAudioCD TinyCalc TinyPrinter TinyLauncher (use the blue arrows) It can now be downloaded...

A previously unknown/lost demo of Roly-Polys World Tour (ローリーポーリーズの世界旅行) [aka Banabana’s First Big Adventure] has been found in my Japanese Macintosh magazine CD-ROM collection. It was featured on CD-ROM MacPeople 1998 No.2 1.15 in a folder of product demos. Creator Osamu Sato is best known for cult game LSD: Dream Emulator released for Sony...

Good news, everyone! For over a decade I’ve wondered if there was a 1-bit Hanafuda game for Macintosh made by somebody in Japan back in the day. It turns out there is! It’s called 花札スタック (Hanafuda Stack) and was created by Kenji Chihara (千原健次氏)in 1992/3 using HyperCard. YES! ✨🎴✨ I couldn’t find a single thing about this game online. My first...

It doesn’t get much more Japanese Macintosh than this! There were only two mentions of this game on Google at the time of writing, and only one screenshot. So I felt it was worthwhile documenting the game in some detail. My copy of the game, version 1.0, came on CD-ROM MacLife No. 161. This disc was included with the January 2002 issue of the...

For a while now I’ve been collecting CD-ROMs and Floppy Disks that came with Japanese Macintosh magazines for the sake of preservation of classic Macintosh software and games. These magazines were released before widespread adoption of the internet, when it was tricky to discover new software and even more difficult to obtain it. Buying a...

This is a Special Appendix that came with the 1993-04-30 issue of Japanese magazine Theスーパーファミコン (The Super Famicom) This guide book shows tips for all 18 holes on each the four T&E SOFT golf games available on SNES: Harukanaru Augusta Pebble Beach no Hatou Waialae no Kiseki Devil’s Course These courses were also featured in games on...

My favourite new TV discovery is this Japanese felt-stop-motion guinea-pig-car thing on Netflix called Pui Pui Molcar. It’s brilliant. Saying any more would spoil it. And don’t miss the OST on your favourite streaming service: Apple Music Spotify

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/pc98/256450-pebble-beach-no-hatou/faqs

I recently did a teardown and clean of one of my Japanese Mega Drive controllers. When I received it I notices that it had some sticky residue in the inside of the the d-pad causing up and right to feel a bit sticky. The controller is called the BLASTER, sometimes MEGA BLASTER, and was released by ACE which was a sort of hardware sub-brand of the...

With the introduction of iOS 11 in 2017 Apple stopped supporting 32-bit apps on iOS. This event came to be known as the app-ocalypse with users forced to stay on iOS 10 to keep their apps or upgrade and abandon them. I seem to remember I stuck around on iOS 10 for a while but eventually succumbed to the upgrade and said good by to a bunch of...

Macintosh Story “Sweet or Sour Apple?” (マッキントッシュ物語 リンゴ甘いか酸っぱいか) is a comic strip drawn by Hitoshi Tanaka for the 1993-11-25 “MacBoy” issue of Japanese men’s lifestyle magazine POPEYE (widely known as the “Magazine for City Boys”). The comic strip details the history of Apple and the Macintosh from 1970 through to 1993, and features a whole lot of...

The Flying Luna Clipper (フライング ルナ クリッパー) is an animated movie produced by Kan Tsuzurahara at Sony and directed by Ikko Ohno. It was released—only in Japan—on 8mm, Betamax, VHS, and Laser Disc, in October 1987. It’s a quite surreal but relaxing 55 minutes, and well worth a viewing. If you plan to watch it, I’d suggest to do so now before reading...

If you’ve not yet read my review of the P/ECE hardware comparing it to Playdate, now is the time to catch up! It includes my 6 favourite games on the system. Below I cover more of the interesting and unique games that I enjoy on the system. Delta Star, by BLACK FTZ A new game for P/ECE in 2021! Well, technically it’s a re-release but I’ll take...

I commissioned the talented @vxclhd to create a clay-style diorama of Daily Driver! There are a few things in this scene that I’ve not yet shown in game footage. Imagine this is a box shot teaser in a game magazine, while you wait for the Playdate and its game to release. “Please understand”, as Satoru Iwata used to say. It's inspired by a style...

The P/ECE was a Japan-only handheld/mobile gaming console released in late-2001. It was created by Aquaplus, a company better known for visual novels, so it carries with it a certain oddball charm. After 20 years I find it heart-warming to see that the official website is still online! What is it? An early preview of the P/ECE referred to the...

Since the early days of the project I’ve been generating the car sprites by rotating the 3D model 360 degrees in a sequence of 32 steps. It works well and I hadn’t given it much thought. Until over on the unofficial Playdate Discord server user Jono showed of a hot-dog trick rendered using 64 steps which looked super smooth! This got me thinking...

Yesterday saw the opening of pre-orders for Playdate, a new handheld gaming device that I’m developing some games for. To celebrate the occasion I drew an illustration in 1-bit with dither patterns using Macintosh System 7. This kind of style is most associated with HyperCard, which provides a bunch of great drawing tools and modes, and can be...

Last week I briefly entertained buying a MiniDisc bookshelf system, before I came to my senses. These days all my music playback happens digitally so, as much as a MiniDisc system would look cool and fill me with warmth and light, I know I would never use it. I play most music through the Music app on my Mac or iPhone, new releases through Apple...

Kururin Paradise is the Japan-only sequel to Kuru Kuru Kururin. To encourage people to revisit this masterpiece of a game I’ve put together a Translation Guide that should help people navigate the menu and understand what the game offers. I’ve also uploaded one of my Game Saves which has all mini-games and magic-tricks unlocked. A full set of...

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/gba/582341-kururin-paradise/faqs

When rendering my vehicles I generate a single PNG containing all frames. Playdate SDK calls these image tables, or more specifically matrix image tables. You could also call them sprite-sheets, with the one qualification that every sprite has the same dimensions. Given that these are plain old images they can be viewed easily. Showing a grid on...

To celebrate today’s Playdate update video here is a Daily Driver teaser trailer. Yay!

After successfully splitting out dark and light elements of the sprites and rendering them in a HDR style, I figured: why stop there? Maybe I could squeeze another colour into the render - some specific shade of grey - that I could treat in a different way to introduce dithered areas to the sprite. This came together very quickly but it resulted...

I love OpenSCAD “the programmer’s solid 3D CAD modeller”, despite its idiosyncrasies. One of the quirks that causes me most pain is the lack of controls for scene lighting in the Preview render. Unfortunately, I use that very Preview render as my main output! This lighting issue manifests as shadows cast on the model. As I rotate the car some...

During the shadow rendering changes I was generating new sprites quite frequently, and I quickly realised that my mess of shell scripts just wasn’t a good enough system to be used in anger. I would have to call my scripts manually, with a variety of parameters, and remember a bunch of stuff unique to each script. So I spent a day converting the...

Since very early on shadows in Daily Driver have just been simple rectangles: one size fits all, rendered from a single 3D model, and post-processed to add dithering. MVP, you know? Over time I decided to do multiple shadows, one each for short cars and long cars. Sometime later I threw caution to the wind and decided to render per-car shadows....

I recently saw a feature on Racketboy about “The Best 4:3 LCD Monitors for Retro Gaming” which is an interesting list that misses the mark for one reason: it ignores scaling. LCDs are best at their native resolution and all the listed monitors in that article are odd PC resolutions so most images will be scaled by uneven, non-integer amounts. If...

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/gamecube/922054-kururin-squash/faqs

It never fails to amaze me how at home System 7 feels on an iPad. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I’ve never felt more capable than when I’m using it this way. What a time to be alive! Still, there are times when it makes sense to lean on the features of the host device to get your job done more easily. In this post I detail common tasks that...

Whilst researching the Wacom ArtPad II for my Macintosh Classic, I stumbled across some information that the Samsung Galaxy Note S-Pen is compatible with the pen used on the Wacom ArtPad and other tablets from that period. I love that the same technology is being used almost 30 years on. So after buying a Wacom ArtPad II, which came with an...

System 7 is a great operating system. The experience using it today remains very close to modern macOS. It’s surprising how little has changed on our Desktop in the 30 years since. That said, the experience can be improved with the judicious use of additional software. When adding things to the system my goal is always to increase quality of life...

I sometimes use an app called KeyQuencer Launcher that is part of the KeyQuencer software. The app presents a simple window containing a list of macros allowing quick and easy access. The text in the window is very small, which makes sense as you want to see multiple macros in as little space as possible. However, my use case in System 7 on iPad...

One of the most interesting things about Deneba’s early 1990s Macintosh drawing apps is that they were built in a modular way with additional files adding specific features. These days we call those Plugins but back in 1990 Deneba referred to them as External Tools. They are first seen in UltraPaint and later in Canvas 3.0, artWORKS and Canvas...

Below is a list of various drawing applications that are available to use with System 7 (68K). I’m mostly interested in apps that can do both pixel and vector, and that support layers and transparency. The table below might be useful for at-a-glance comparisons. Apps run in both mono or colour, unless stated otherwise. Deneba artWORKS can do both...

I’ve had numerous requests for a guide to building BasiliskII on iOS. Let me know of anything is unclear or would benefit from more details! February 2024: Updated for building with Xcode 15.2 on macOS 14.3 to iOS 17.3. YMMV. Building Install Xcode from Mac App Store Clone project source from GitHub Switch to the ios branch Open...

I’m a huge fan of the Pang series of video games. In my experienced and humble opinion the best game in the series is the one on Nintendo DS. It takes the core Pang concept—refined from the original game in 1990 through to Mighty! Pang in 2000—and turns everything it up to 11. It makes full use of the dual screens to add in some novel level...

One of my favourite Google products is their Custom Search Engine (CSE) feature. It allows you to create walled-garden search engines that return results only for chosen selection of websites. This is ideal for creating interest-specific search engines. These days they seem to be calling the feaure Google Programmable Search, though I’m not quite...

As I’ve previously mentioned, UltraPaint and artWORKS share a lot of DNA so their structure is effectively identical, including the tool palette. This is a good thing as I intend to automate tool selection in both apps and I’ll take any help 30-year-old software wants to send my way! Chapter 6 in the book “The Automatic Mac” (1992, download)...

I’ve started work on the next in my 1-bit Woodblocks series: “Tekagami” (Ito Shinsui’s “Hand Mirror”). So it’s a good time to talk about how I turned an iPad Pro into the ultimate Classic Macintosh. Emulators Both Macintosh emulators available on iOS we’re ported by @maczydeco who has done an amazing job making them feel truly at home on iOS....

I recently stumbled across a series of Facebook posts about the origins of DenebaCAD, from humble beginnings as MasterCAD on Atari ST, of all unlikely places. The app still exists today as DCAD VectorSpace. Here I provide the story translated from Spanish into English. Year Title Platform ...

Photoshop 3.0 (1994) Monitor Setup, Phosphors reads like a wish list of the professional CRTs now adored by retro gamers:- Barco- Hitachi- Ikegami- Trinitron pic.twitter.com/VJLkRl7WgR— Matt Sephton🎴 (@gingerbeardman) April 7, 2021

I received a package from America: the 30-year-old manual for UltraPaint, Deneba Software’s Macintosh graphics program. It doesn’t get much more exciting for me than this! I love how the Option key in printed material from this era looks more like a 2-way switch symbol from an electrical circuit diagram than it does today. Similar Books The...

I just finished increasing the size of toolbar icons in Deneba artWorks from 24x16 to 24x24. Easily done by finding the dialog that contains these icons, and resizing the canvas of each related PICT. Several trips between ResEdit and Photoshop (version 1.0!) and I was done. This is to make the tool buttons easier to tap with my thumb when running...

Second in my series 1-bit Woodblocks. I’ve just finished “Asanegami” (Morning Hair) so I thought I’d go into a few of my favourite details! eyes eyebrows background lips comb/history I spent a long time adding and refining eye details, my reasoning being that these are the first thing you look at. Also I went without “blusher” skin tone...

Woman Combing her Hair (Portrait of Kodaira Tomi) original by Hashiguchi Goyô, 1920. This work-in-progress by me, 2020–date. First in my 1-bit Woodblocks series. My process involves both modern software (custom image processing tool & custom build of a Macintosh emulator) and old technology (1992 Macintosh Classic & period Wacom ArtPad II tablet,...

Classic Mac on iPad is also great in Portrait!Double height resolution scales to fit very closely.iPad Pro 12.9" = 2048x2732Macintosh Portrait @ 4x = 2048x2760Install Mini vMac on your iPad from the source on GitHub:https://t.co/5t1iXBv0kcThanks @maczydeco! #MARCHintosh pic.twitter.com/yDj0MqkC5F— Matt Sephton🎴 (@gingerbeardman) March 25, 2021

Back in 2017 a large number of games and apps were rendered obsolete when iOS 11 removed 32-bit compatibility. At that time I was still downloading app into iTunes as backups, and seem to have put aside these couple of great Llamasoft games. You should be able to side load them onto any jailbroken iOS device running iOS 10 or earlier. I’m still...

Samurai Mech サムライ・メック preserved! I’ve been digging up old Macintosh games, and this search has rested in the website for the classic Japanese game #samuraimechcoming back online after over a decade! Thanks Ritsuko! (patreon.com/posts/48174477) (samuraimech.net) Samurai Mech サムライ・メック is a Japanese sci-fi RPGs set in a future-medieval-space Japan....

Difficulty: 7/10 Cost: I last used my Macintosh Classic a few years ago. At that point everything worked OK. Switching it on this month I find there’s no sound and it won’t boot. This is par for the course with these 30-year-old machines. Time for a service! I decided quite early on that I would not rush any part of this, which turned out to...

Less is more. A Little Bit of… was series of previously released retail DS games adapted to suit Nintendo’s DSiWare download service. The idea for these “Chotto” games came from Satoru Iwata, who said “I thought it would be good if there were a Chotto game series that you could play with little by little and interact with little by little in your...

Added Ordered Dithering to my tool:- 2x2 Bayer- 3x3 Bayer- 4x4 Bayer *- 8x8 Bayer- 16x16 Bayer- 3x3 Dispersed- 4x4 Horizontal- 4x4 Vertical- 2x2 Crosshatch- 3x3 Crosshatch- 4x4 CrosshatchNoticed it makes JPG artefacts more visible, so I redid my test images as PNG! pic.twitter.com/fdUYzs9jeh— Matt Sephton🎴 (@gingerbeardman) February 5, 2021

Nintendo's first USA trademark, dated 4 Oct 1955: https://t.co/9ONME6pgTLThe first use of the word @Nintendo in US press is a description of this trademark in the 8 Oct 1955 issue of @nytimes (see quoted tweet)thanks to @suryongchan for digging digging this up! https://t.co/XZhiotm5ZA pic.twitter.com/Uscxvbv0DP— Matt Sephton🎴 (@gingerbeardman)...

Difficulty: 7/10 Cost: I play a lot of Hanafuda games. In the arcade these games share a control panel with Mahjong. It’s basically a keyboard featuring the first half of the alphabet, presented as a long row of keys in alphabetical order. This makes playing Arcade Hanafuda games a bit of a chore without a bunch of keyboard remapping and...

I hope you’re safe and well and wish you a great 2021. I’m back at it, and am confident this year will be the year of Daily Driver and more besides! Recent work on the game includes improvements to the physics of in-game objects and creation of yet more vehicles and levels. “The car’s the star”, as they say, so I have sunk untold hours into both...

I loaded the GRX file from Band-kun into GraphicConverter (macOS) as RAW 1-bit data and was delighted to see the graphics are uncompressed. This made it somewhat trivial to extract all the graphics, including some I’m yet to see in the game!

Single tweet reviews of the best games I’ve played this year. All old, but gold. DigitalGlider Airman (PS1) Immensely rewarding glider simulation with perfect difficulty progression and a lovely, mysterious vibe. Trying to play this as an arcade game won’t get you far - it requires minimal, accurate input with a lot of thinking and forward...

SkateBoarder Magazine (1964–1980) scans at Internet Archive, these include pages missing from the official website. Here’s a quick link to the famous Dogtown articles in these specific 9 issues: 2-2/5/6, 3-2/4/5/6, 4-1, 5-7

A recent friendly nudge from Jason Scott at the Internet Archive let me know that somebody had lost their manual for their 1981 Epoch Cassette Vision and tweeted EPOCH to see if they could help. But EPOCH did more than that, spending time to scan and upload manuals for all of their vintage consoles! Mirroring these at Internet Archive was a nice...

I’ve been playing an old (1990, KOEI Co Ltd) Japanese NEC PC-9801 game バンドくん [Band-kun; Mr. Band; Band Man] where you start a band and have to recruit members, make some recordings and live a life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. It was also available for the Fujitsu FM Towns and Sharp X68000 Japanese personal computers. Band-what? Band-kun is a...

The last couple of months have been tough going for a couple of reasons. Firstly, a new version of the Playdate SDK broke my game in a couple of important ways: my method of targeting 60fps stopped working, and more seriously the controls stopped working. The workaround for both of these issues was long and drawn out, but here’s a quick summary:...

Difficulty: 5/10 Cost: ~ £100 My Dreamcast is an NTSC-U model that I bought in the middle of the Dreamcast’s short life. It was a special order from UK mail order firm Madeira Games based out of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and is chipped to play import games. It has a replacement UK PSU and has served me well over the years. I’d resisted GDEMU,...

This collection is a British video game fanzine/magazine that ran from 1989 to 1993 for an almost uninterrupted total of 35 issues. The first 8 issues went by the name PC Engine Fanatics which was a hand made fanzine/newsletter that was promoted in period magazines. The following 10 issues received a name change to Console Ma’zine along with...

I scanned these a while ago, but dealing with a troll in an online Atari ST community made me forget about them for a while. Not out of spite, but more because I don’t have time for toxic people so I just dropped what I was doing and changed direction when I encountered this particular person. Remember: be excellent to each other! Be nice....

I’m relaunching my “bubble era” T-shirt store on @teespring with international shipping in time for Christmas! teespring.com/stores/gingerbeardman Retro games, computers, scooters and other cool logos on your favourite colour T-shirts! These T-shirts have been a side-project of mine for many years — I redraw old logos as vector art, just for...

Honda ICVS Concept “Intelligent Community Vehicle System” emphasising vehicle sharing over owning. 1994 introduction 1996 concepts presented 1998 public test (Japan) 1999 World Good Design award 2002 real world application (Singapore) 2008 discontinued (Honda Newsroom) Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3XR8pXminc Archived website:...

I spent a few hours last night unbinding The BeOS Bible (1999, @ScotHacker) using a hairdryer and putting it through a feed scanner, making light work of 994 pages!The resulting 100MB Searchable PDF is now on @InternetArchive & @OpenLibrary #preservation https://t.co/b8ypsCNHwZ pic.twitter.com/vN1cQ487OO— Matt Sephton🎴 (@gingerbeardman) November...

The recent automation was really just help with organisation. As soon as I started looking at running OpenSCAD from the shell/command-line it became obvious that I could do the rendering and organisation in one step without having to use external apps like Hazel. So, that’s now done. I render all the frames, with more sensible filenames, to a...

In preparation for regenerating my many cars with x3 the number of sprites, I thought I’d try to sort the rendered frames automatically into named folders because this is fiddly manual work I really don’t enjoy, and a bit of a bottleneck in my asset generation. For each pose I have to render the frames then group the new image files into a folder...

Backed up a very old laptop and found a bunch of cool old stuff from 15-20 years ago! #thread 2003-04-25: Custom Fruit Labels for a Zelda: Wind Waker competition (I think in Official Nintendo Magazine?) I sent them a fake plastic pear with one of these these stuck on. 2005-01-18: grid-based music puzzle game called BEAT HIT 2004-12-24: game...

I’ve been playing old Japanese PlayStation game Touge Max G and besides this having a gymkhana mode similar to aspects of Daily Driver, it also has a realistic handling model. One of the things that struck me about that was how the car rocks back and forth when accelerating and braking/reversing. One of the other games in the Touge series also...

The launch of this Patreon for Daily Driver also sees the game’s topic on TIGSource Forums as the first Playdate game! And also on IndieDB as perhaps the first Playdate game? Though I do see fellow devs and Patreon Creators RNG Party are already listed but they are yet to add their current Playdate game.

Accidental new game mode discovered? “Cannonball Run” Collect stuff whilst a barrage of heavy things bounce around the screen! This was a result of my continued work implementing different surface frictions, and I mistakenly set the cones to not be affected by friction and thus never slow down. Hitting them a few times was enough to get them...

Since I am targeting 60fps one of the things I can do is flash a black sprite every other frame to get a shade of grey. Yes! Grey on a black and white screen. It only works at high frame rates (note: 50fps isn’t high enough!) because the screen is so damned good that flashing at a slower rate simply looks like… an image flashing. The effects is...

When you get a crazy idea that you’ll probably never be able to use, but you do it anyway, just to scratch the itch.

A made a demo build of Daily Driver. It is based on code a couple weeks old (dated 30 July 2020) so whilst not representative of where I am right now with the game it does show my progress since the last build I shared at the start of June. Controls any combination of d-pad, A/B, Crank d-pad U/D, or A/B = accelerate/brake d-pad L/R, or...

My post-processing to 1-bit is fairly simple. I use a bespoke tool that allows me to have “live” (realtime) manual control over a bunch of image filters so I can see the results immediately. But essentially it’s: convert to greyscale, using one of many algorithms reduce colours to 1-bit, decide on dithering or threshold level on case-by-case...

.carousel__holder {width: 100%; position: relative; padding-bottom: 82%; margin: 1rem 0 1rem;} .carousel { height: 100%; width: 100%; overflow: hidden; text-align: center; position: absolute; padding: 0; } .carousel__staticimage, .carousel__controls, .carousel__activator { display: none; } .carousel__activator:nth-of-type(1):checked...

.carousel__holder {width: 100%; position: relative; padding-bottom: 82%; margin: 1rem 0 1rem;} .carousel { height: 100%; width: 100%; overflow: hidden; text-align: center; position: absolute; padding: 0; } .carousel__staticimage, .carousel__controls, .carousel__activator { display: none; } .carousel__activator:nth-of-type(1):checked...

Added steering assist, which locks your final steering direction to one of 16 directions, rather than allowing any angle. This prevents over steer when trying to turn to the specific directions required in a level. Of course this is optional; it is variable and can be switched off if the player does not want it. 25 July 2020. I added another type...

I guess this looks like a looped GIF, but it’s not! I added some quite simple code to record every button press and the tick time at which it happened. The beauty of this approach is that most frames there are no button presses so the recorded data is very small. The work I’ve previously put in structuring the game in an Object-Oriented way...

Over the course of development I’d been unhappy with the game running at 30fps, as it did not feel responsive enough. I’m a big believer that if a gamer features fast action gameplay and requires quick reactions then higher frame rates and lower response time are what is needed. Over the lifetime of the project I had beeb experimenting with...

Trying out some different things: a grab bag of scenarios. This long GIF shows several scenarios, different physics, and more! Essential viewing.

Bit of fun at lunch today.

Some fellow Playdate developers commented that at this point the game reminded them of Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road, Super Sprint and even Rocket League. A few of my influences for vibe: Atari’s Sprint series, including Badlands Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road Wild Wheels (a car soccer game that pre-dates Rocket League by...

6 June 2020. Finally found and fixed a bug in my collision code - needed to use math.abs() in one place to avoid some double negatives messing up collision rebound direction. D’oh! And now it’s time to Play Ball! I added a lap timer and a cool little LCD font. 9 June 2020. The core flow of the game has been decided: there will be daily driving...

I have redone the collision/rebound physics, and car visual and steering is now affected when colliding - makes collisions feel really physical. Tyres and Cone obstacles have different collision properties so they feel different when you hit them. It’s a lot of fun to simply drive around and knock into things, which makes me confident I’m onto...

At this point I have three rows of rotated cars in the sprite sheet: each has wheels pointing in different directions. I’m currently doing the skid marks as sprites (which is why they disappear over time) partly because it was easy to get going, and partly to try to figure out some performance limits (~350 sprites in the GIF below, 25 of which...

At this point, the only thing that remained of the prototype was the car sprite so I wondered about creating a new one myself. It uses 32 different images of the car with different rotations, making for smooth animation and movement on screen. Whilst I could draw all those frames by hand, I decided to go down a path that could produce assets on...

Now that I was convinced that a driving game could be fun, I was unhappy with the controls and very rudimentary “physics” that the car had. It just didn’t feel very real or compelling; there wasn’t enough depth to the control scheme. So I used Marco Monster’s Car Physics article (and looked at source code for various implementations of his...

Shinji and Good Friends: Second Hanafuda Impact is a hanafuda video game for Windows, released by Gainax in 1999. You can unlock wallpapers though beating each of the characters in the game. Just for fun I reverse engineered and edited the save game to unlock all the wallpapers. The save game data is not very big so I decided on a brute force...

The Collector prototype didn’t end up being as fun as I had hoped, but I thought it was interestingly that it felt a little like driving. So I wondered whether it would change the feeling by putting some different graphics on top of it. I ripped some temporary graphics from the Atari arcade game Badlands and added one simple collision detection...

After receiving access to the Playdate SDK I took a while to read the docs, and play around with small code samples, eventually starting to create my own prototypes on 1st May 2020. One prototype in particular was the genesis of Daily Driver. Collector Everything is drawn using graphics primitives (circle, rect, line) Pattern fills rather...

One of the best (according to MetaCritic, and IMHO) Wii games is a WiiWare game called MaBoShi that is now mostly lost to time in that Nintendo have closed the Wii Shop Channel. Of course, there are other more nefarious means to procure the game, but I’m not going to go into those here. Anyway, I still play this game regularly (still not managed...

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ps/573058-junclassic-cc-and-rope-club/faqs

I recently created this Virtual Machine of Windows 98 SE (Japanese) because one did not exist. Download should be on winworldpc.com soon, but you can grab it now at: archive.org/details/windows-98-se-japanese-vmware

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/wii/946472-maboshis-arcade/faqs

This is a special 100th issue of POPEYE a Japanese lifestyle “Magazine for City Boys”: archive.org/details/popeye-magazine-for-city-boys-1981-04-10/mode/2up Only very minor game related things in this, but I thought it worth posting. There’s a Game & Watch as a selectable reward/prize in a competition by Puma. Plus a “how to” for Hanafuda (the...

Yesterday on Twitter I spotted a plea for more information on an old Flash game “The Claque Beignet” - a game in which you slap singing characters with an extended arm. Apparently there was no maker’s mark on the game nor ties to any website. I was intrigued! Here are the steps I took to trace the creator of the game. 1. Searching with Limited...

I’m a huge fan of the music in T&E SOFT’s “New 3D Golf Simulation” series, so I have spent some time to digitise the music from those games in the series I did not have in my music library. That makes 13 new soundtracks! Devil’s Course (PC-98, 3DO) Eight Lakes G.C. (PC-98, X68000) Harukanaru Augusta (PC-98, X68000) Harukanaru Augusta HD...

This tool downloads the Iwata Asks series of interviews, saving as Markdown and HTML with images. ePub files are optional and can be generated in a secondary post-process phase. I created this tool in Spring/Summer 2019 so that I could more easily read and search the Iwata Asks interviews. More details:...

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ngpc/916535-soreyuke-hanafuda-doujou/faqs

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/wonderswan/577014-hanafuda-shiyouyo/faqs

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ps2/921032-hanafuda/faqs

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/wii/945463-bomberman-blast/faqs

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ps/572974-hana-to-ryuu/faqs

These beautiful cards were created in 1983 using only characters, without bitmap graphics. This was because the Sharp MZ-700, like many home computers of its era, couldn’t do bitmap graphics. Here is a download of the Playscii art files for the above cards: Sharp MZ-700 Hanafuda.zip Also included are a set of blank cards so you can try creating...

343 issues of Japanese arcade magazine GAME MACHINE spanning 1974/08 to 1988/12: https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/archive.html Mirrored as one archive: https://archive.org/details/game-machine And as a collection at: https://archive.org/details/game_machine_magazine_jp Interesting issues: Yoshikazu Endo honors Special Issue (No. 72 May 15, 1977)...

I created a website mashing up a bunch of things that I love: Moai Videogames Lists moai.games

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ds/939118-suujin-taisen/faqs

Verbum “The Journal of Personal Computer-Aesthetics” (1986–1991) was an early personal computer and computer art magazine focusing on interactive art and computer graphics. All issues (well, except issue 4.3): archive.org/details/verbummagazine?&sort=date Table of contents for all issues: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbum_(magazine) Podcast...

A version of this article was originally posted on my Patreon I found an old Hanafuda Koi-Koi game that I can no longer easily play due to… sigh… what they call progress? It’s called Koikoi Komachi and was released around 2005 for Mac OS X (initially for PPC, and later Intel). I really like the cards images that it has, and was able to extract...

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ps/583577-youkai-hana-asobi/faqs

Redump is a Disc Preservation Project that requires multiple verified dumps of the same game disc before it is marked as good. It’s a worthy endeavour that secures the future for disc-based games. Their data is public and downloadable, and I’ve heard that the game data is available at archive.org. To get involved with such dumping and...

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/genesis/570461-devils-course/faqs

If, like me, you can’t read katakana and hiragana then Japanese games can take a fair bit of deciphering to be able to play and enjoy. I use the Google Translate iOS app and some other tricks (which I’ll save for another post) to translate game menus and text, and have mostly kept notes of my findings. With my most recent game translation, I...

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/genesis/586373-pebble-beach-golf-links/faqs

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ps/572768-cross-romance-koi-to-mahjong-to-hanafuda-to/faqs

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/genesis/570460-harukanaru-augusta/faqs

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/genesis/570462-new-3d-golf-simulation-waialae-no-kiseki/faqs

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ds/997750-pang-magical-michael/faqs

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/msx/953282-the-golf/faqs

I often browse old Japanese console and computer magazines. I’m mainly searching for old Hanafuda Koi-Koi video games, but sometimes I stumble across something else that is interesting in a totally different way. In May 2019, whilst browsing an old issue of POPCOM over at the wonderful Internet Archive, I found a period map of the Akihabara 秋葉原...

As part of my ongoing efforts to uncover lost gems from Japan, I recovered two exclusive games made by SEGA in their brief flirtation with Palm OS back in 2002. These games were presented by their Smilebit division at PalmSource Japan Forum 2002. This was around the time SEGA were abandoning consoles and Palm OS seems to have been part of an...

I created a Discord server for discussion of traditional Japanese flower cards. discord.com/invite/mKbdwy9

I redrew the box art from Door Door (1985, Famicom). It’s a great game and worthy of your time. Door Door was designed by Koichi Nakamura, known as one of the creators of Dragon Quest. The game was the runner-up in the Enix-sponsored “First Game and Hobby Program Contest” in 1982, winning the “Outstanding Program Award” with a prize of 500,000...

I often need to calculate the hash of a file for verification purposes, to confirm that a download has completed successfully or that an ISO I have dumped from a CD is a correct match with known good dumps. I couldn’t find a nice easy to use app for this so I put together my own app. Download it here: Hash.app.zip (version 1.3). Features: Auto...

I get a strange error from time-to-time on my Sony Reader (PRS-650). After the Reader powers up, or comes out of transfer mode, it does the busy spinner and then says: +---------------------------------------+ | Exceptional internal memory state | | Formatting | | [ OK ] |...

Below are details of a script to generate custom CSS to make sure custom fonts all appear at similar sizes when they are used as the display fonts on Sony Readers running PRS+ custom firmware. Without this script certain custom fonts will appear much bigger or smaller than others. I use this with my PRS-650, but it probably applies to most Sony...

A future sports game that aims high but struggles to hit the mark. In the era of the 16-bit home computers, there was a trend to take concepts that had made an impression at the arcade and create a version of them for home release that neatly sidestepped any licence that may have otherwise been required. And so Disc, whilst not being a straight...

This is how I easily feel where the headphone socket is around the back of my iMac. I stuck a little felt circle around the socket which has the benefit of being easy to physically feel as well as acting as a guide for the headphone jack.

The size reported on the App Store (204MB as of today for PayPal version 6.8.0) does not take into account App Thinning. The App Thinning process only delivers the parts of the app required by the device. For example, the launch screen for iPad would not be downloaded onto my iPhone; and the 32-bit binary would not be downloaded on a 64-bit...

This post details how to easily deal with a request from Apple to update an old app that is still working perfectly — without having to setup a development environment to build it from source. TL;DR Bump the version in Info.plist Create a new .icns icon Do a fresh codesign on the app bundle Use Application Loader to get it into iTunes...

One of my favourite little touches in macOS: Look Up And don’t forget that you can add look up support for Emoji symbols using my Emojipedia Dictionary. Detecting Data On iOS (since version 10) and macOS (since 10.5 Leopard) there’s a feature called Data Detectors that helps recognise various forms of data in text, such as phone numbers, street...

I recently created a Safari Extension that renders plain text Markdown files as good looking HTML right in your browser. I also added a context menu item so you can swap between the rendered HTML and the original Markdown text. Download www.gingerbeardman.com/safari/Doctor.safariextz (25Kb) To install: double click the file after it has...

This is my first iPhone launch since leaving Apple, and that’s the only excuse I need to take a guess as to what today’s announcement might feature. Given the amount of rumours and leaks, I think we’re set for a substantially improved iPhone 7 with no headphone socket — my guess is for reasons of waterproofing more than anything else. In addition...

Video game news outlets are currently abuzz with articles about No Man’s Sky, one of the most eagerly awaited and massively hyped games in recent years. The game sees you dropped somewhere in space with the goals of exploration, resource management, trading and combat. The dubious matter of how closely the released game resembles the one that was...

Right now Google is in the process of pulling off one of the greatest technology heists in recent memory. They’re using the global juggernaut that is the Rio Olympics—with the mind bogglingly large number of eyes that are following it on TV screens around the world—as an opportunity to advertise Google Photos. That may seem like an odd choice,...

With the news that Apple are courting TV programmers with the idea of an all-encompassing TV Guide, I thought it would be fun to recap my personal history of TV Guide usage and think about where it might be going next. Disclaimer: whilst I am a former Apple employee, I know of less than nothing about any current or future plans for iOS or tvOS. I...

Note, August 2023: this method is outdated, for the latest please see this newer blog post. Change is the only constant. Nowhere is this more visible than on the App Store. Thousands of new apps and games appear every day and existing apps receive regular updates to add features and fix bugs. This will only accelerate further now that the App...

One of my favourite features of Mac OS X is the ability to point the mouse cursor at a word and press Command+Control+D to quickly see a popup definition courtesy of Dictionary.app: It annoys me when I use this feature on an Emoji and it doesn’t work. 😠 D.I.Y. During my job as a Technology Evangelist at Apple, I took great pride in learning as...

One of the most successful console games of 2016 has been Rocket League. It features cars playing football (soccer) rather than people. Cool! Some would say it’s both a surprise hit, apparently coming out of nowhere, and also a novel concept. A while go I was chatting with Simon Hade, COO and Co-Founder of Space Ape Games, who made exactly these...

This article was originally posted on pico8 BBS in 2016, and on Playdate devforum in 2020. I was interested to see how easy/difficult it is to edit the animated GIF recordings. My goal was to trim some frames from the beginning and end to make a more succinct video. After much trial, error and experimentation here are my findings using Mac OS X....

The second half of WWDC Day One is a different sort of keynote. Not as glitzy or glamorous as the one with the Apple SVPs you know, and almost definitely not as well rehearsed and exciting for the general public. But for developers, this is the where they find out how much work they’re going to have to do to take advantage of all the new...

June is the highlight of the year for any Apple fan, with WWDC being the focal point of all eyes on Apple. Having recently left Apple it was interesting to view the event as an outsider for the first time in a while, with no prior knowledge of anything that was announced. This year I also had the company of a nice a cold drink in my hand as it’s...

Frantic Architect for iOS and Android is a great casual game by Will Kwan/BulkyPix in which you have to build as tall a tower as possible, with the kicker being that you have limited control of where exactly the next building block will go. A video will help explain better: The game has a high degree of polish and the user interface design and...

From time to time I’ll be posting critique of video games in this way. It’s meant as constrictive criticsm in the nicest possible way. It also goes to show the type of feedback I give to developers when asked to test or review their games. Recently I’ve been playing a fair bit of Hill Racer 2 on my Apple TV. It’s kind of like Tiny Wings, but with...

One thing I occasionally do is a sort of third-person-post-mortem of a game I’ve been playing a lot of. I think about how it might have been put together from a game design and programming perspective. Of course this sort of analysis is just my opinion, but I do try to think things through far enough to prove my point. Often I go so far as to...

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ps/566070-the-hanafuda-jarin-ko-chie/faqs

Raise da Roof!!! Fly Guy takes me back—way back. Whilst 2002 seems so long ago, it comes as no surprise that it is so long ago. Screens were smaller, computers were slower, web browsers were much less capable and had to be helped along by plugins; so long ago that there was no iPhone! It was also the year I met the girl who would become my wife....

I started a new job at Apple in June 2013, and seeing as I was living away from home a fair bit I had a bit of free time and the hunger for a big puzzle game to get my teeth into. So I bought an extra copy of Polarium Advance. I’d played the game before but had never finished all of the puzzles. It’s a typically brilliant game by Mitchell...

Three games for the price of one in this innovative WiiWare title. Six if you count the fact that you can download a version of the game over Wi-Fi to your Nintendo DS to play on the move. WiiWare is the downloadable game service on Nintendo’s Wii home console. It lets you download smaller sized and lower priced games direct to your console, and...

Sokoban for the 20th century. Sokoban was a Japanese puzzle game created in 1981 by Hiroyuki Imabayashi in which the player pushes boxes around a warehouse onto a number of designated goal locations. It’s a game whose depth and complexity rivals chess, and which has been used as a testbed for Artificial Intelligence applications and other science...

Back in 2012, before my time at Apple, I was a contract developer and would often work with designers on specific projects. Over the course of those projects, we’d have to find stock photos for the apps or websites we were building and generally turned to iStockPhoto as our main resource. During the design phase we would go through number of...

Music from the 3DS game Pullblox (EU), Pushmo (USA), Hiku-Osu (JP). © 2011 Nintendo/Intelligent Systems. soundcloud.com/gingerbeardman/sets/pullblox/

I own a Bally/Midway arcade cabinet of the SEGA game Flicky from 1984. So, I decided to make a Tumblr blog all about the game. Check it out flicky1984.tumblr.com

The greatest video game ever sold? Wizkid was born in a time when British video game developers ruled the world. That such a time existed may seem strange today, as developers from Japan and the USA roll out one blockbuster game after another whilst British development companies quietly wonder where it all went wrong. Back in the early 90s a...

Take to the skies in one of the most relaxing video games of all time. Pilotwings is best described as an arcade flight simulator. The game enrolls you in a flying school and gives you a series of missions of increasing difficulty using a variety of aircraft from hang glider and airplane to rocket pack. Gaining enough points in each set of...

It’s brave to go up against an established franchise, but that’s just what Konami tried to do with Enthusia Professional Racing. In many ways it’s a better game than Gran Turismo but that wasn’t enough to take any substantial market share. The first thing you’ll notice about the game is that it looks every bit as good as PS2 rival Gran Turismo 4,...

It’s common knowledge that video game movie tie-ins generally result in disappointing games. So it’s interesting to see a game that takes so much inspiration from the big screen and manages to wrap it up in a great game. And all without a movie licence in sight. The look of Split/Second: Velocity will be instantly familiar to many. It will remind...

I’m not one for traditional adventure games - ones with a long, drawn-out main quest, lots of optional sub quests, experience points, levelling up, random battles and all of that sort of stuff. I need more direction in what to do next, although I still want to have fun figuring out how to do it and on the journey getting there. My first Zelda...

His and hers gaming at it’s finest. Bubble Bobble is one of those old-school arcade games that stands up well today. It’s single screen platform mechanics haven’t aged one bit. Capturing monsters in bubbles and then popping them to collect fruit is a supremely addictive pursuit. Things are constantly kept fresh with power ups, expert level design...

I’d love to see somebody calculate just how much time was wasted by University students playing GoldenEye: 007. Or, perhaps, how better off industry might be had we used that time to study rather than shoot each other in the face for hours on end. GoldenEye is one of the most lauded games in history, being lavished with heaps of praise that might...

As far as “zone” games go, there are none finer than Jeff Minter’s remake of arcade classic Tempest. It built on the solid foundation of the original and added all manner of power-ups and tripped-out graphics. There’s no doubting that the original Tempest arcade game is as much of a classic today as it was in 1980, the concept apparently...

Attention! Ready? Go! Bishi Bashi Special is a set of games originally found on a pair of Konami arcade machines, the PlayStation version of which allowed up to 8 players using two multi-taps and featured 85 completely mental minigames. This was all years before Wario Ware, Inc., Wii Party or any other mini-game compilations came along. The games...

Nintendo started out in the entertainment business by manufacturing Hanafuda, or flower cards. There are a number of games that are commonly played with these cards the most popular of which is Koi-Koi, a game of surprising depth and one of my vices. A Hanafuda deck consists of 48 cards split into twelve suits - one for each month. Each is...

The Dreamcast was the first truly online home video game console, and brought with it the first wave of fantastic online multi-player games that could be played on your TV. ChuChu Rocket! was one of the best, an outstanding action puzzler with a glorious multi-player mode. The aim of the game is to guide mice (“ChuChus”) around the screen into...

Joust was the first arcade game I ever played, at Royal Video on Breckfield Road North in Liverpool in the mid-80s. Those were the days. It’s a fascinating, old-school arcade game that still holds up well today. During the peak of video game arcades, most games were based on abstract or fantasy concepts with a small amount of realism thrown in...

Nintendo seem reluctant to release more than one Mario Kart per console, so fans of the game will often seek out a new challenge by playing one of its many clones. It’s often a futile exercise as it makes painfully clear how far ahead of the competition Nintendo are. That said, there have been a handful of games that manage to capture enough of...

Drifting through space without a care in the universe. During the final days of the Game Boy Advance a series of games were released by Nintendo in their home territory of Japan under the bit Generations label. A set of seven games featuring basic but stylish graphics and somewhat experimental gameplay. My favourite of the bunch was Orbital, or...

This game was a real time sink for me during my formative years, with its simple rules hiding a fiendishly difficult set of puzzles that chewed through the hours as if they were minutes. It has to be said, however, that the Quavers crisps licence attached to the game was a very odd marketing move. Each stage in the game consists of a number of...

Evil pigs, giant eggs, farting flowers, butterflies, mushrooms, a hungry monkey, a lost dwarf child, a thousand year-old wise man and a pink-haired feral boy. Yes, Tomba! may not be your average game but it’s certainly an overlooked gem. Sony’s PlayStation brought gaming kicking and screaming into the third dimension. Before the introduction of...

The beautiful game. When people mention football (soccer) games these days there are probably mean one of two games: FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer. These games have evolved year-on-year, from when they were originally poles apart to today where they are very much the same sort of game: photorealistic players, recognisable stadiums, team kits,...

Creating a sequel to a game is a tricky thing. It’s often difficult to retain the essence of the original game, meaning a lot of sequels keep things safe and don’t stray too far from the concept along the way. This usually leads to an average game, which is why it was such a shock to find that this one goes up to 11. One of the most well...

A tale of enduring love, spiders and spray cans. This charming little maze game is interesting for one major reason - you control both characters simultaneously. It’s not as difficult as it sounds, though, so don’t worry. Both characters walk up and down the screen as directed, but when you attempt sideways movement the first character does as...

This game was dedicated to the memory of Gunpei Yokoi - genius creator of Nintendo’s Game & Watch and Game Boy handheld consoles. A fitting tribute that means his name will live on. The game was released for the WonderSwan an odd little machine available only in Japan and created by Bandai to compete with the Neo Geo Pocket and - of course - the...

When does a Tetris game have nothing to do with Tetris? When you’re trying to market a fantastic but niche Japanese game to the rest of the world, of course. Tetris Attack has a strange heritage, starting out life as a Japan-only release Panel de Pon. It was successful in Japan and prompted Nintendo to wonder how well it might do with a worldwide...

In a sea of badly realised licenced games French company Infogrames made a daring move to buck the trend, creating this cartoon stealth ‘em up set in the Looney Tunes world. The result is a fabulous game as imaginative as the source material it’s based on. You play a Ralph Wolf – a Looney Tunes character the double of Wile E. Coyote from their...

You’d be forgiven for not having heard of RalliSport Challenge - a rally racing game for the original Xbox, and Windows PC. But don’t go away without playing the sequel - the best rally racing game ever made. I missed out on the Xbox during it’s ascent to online gaming console of choice, picking one up only recently when a friend of mine gave me...

It’s easy to forget that when dual screen feature of the DS was announced some corners of the gaming world thought Nintendo had lost the plot. Whilst a reasonable number of launch games used the lower, touch-sensitive screen in novel ways, it was important that games continued to do so as the console matured. Meteos was the DS’s second big-name...

Flicky is one of those games that’s been released so many times on so many compilations that you probably already own it without even realising. It’s also a typical 1980s arcade game—simple to pick up, difficult to master, and a lot of fun along the way. I’m a bit too young to have encountered Flicky in the arcades. I actually stumbled across the...

It seems a long time ago when mobile phones functioned more as a phone than anything else. You could download games for them, of course, but the whole experience was hard work and underwhelming at best. In fact, you’d be forgiven for wondering why you’d even bother. And then along came Vijay Singh. I’ve always loved golf video games, even if I...

Kuru Kuru Kururin sums up what I think is so great about the sort of games Nintendo publish. It’s an unorthodox action/puzzle/maze game made by a third party best known for their scrolling shoot ’em ups. No other company would have the balls to release a game like this, never mind as part of a console launch line-up. The launch of a console is...

I like to think that this game taught me as much about world geography as school did, but that’s probably a slight exaggeration. Still, it remains to this day one of my all time favourite games. You’re a little dude in a white safari suit on an around-the-world quest to destroy bouncing balloons at various well known locations. A second player...

I’ve been playing this on-and-off for years and still haven’t finished all the puzzles. It’s one of those games that I love so much that I sort of don’t want to finish it. Possibly the greatest puzzler of all time – disregarding Tetris, of course. Each stage sees you having to complete the image by placing and removing blocks on the board. The...

I’ve recently come back to this game in an attempt to complete it 100%, picking up my 10 year old save game. It’s a great game, though the sensitivity of the controls can be unforgiving at times. But it’s definitely worth persevering with. Think of it like a modern day Stunt Car Racer and you’ll be fine – laying off the accelerator is just as...

I just had my tonsils removed and whilst recovering at home I decided to try to figure out how I could use larger CF cards in my Becker Traffic Pro 7949 car audio and navigation system, a close relative to the Becker Cascade. The unit came with maps on a 2GB card which is barely big enough for the maps, leaving not much room for MP3 files. Later...

I translated the Mission Mode screens: www.flickr.com/photos/emsef/albums/72157614337766883 2020-06-29: I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: www.gamefaqs.com/ds/940888-1500ds-spirits-vol-5-hanafuda/faqs

I watched updates from the 2008 WWDC Keynote through my Nintendo Wii! And why not?

I hacked my last iPod Color using AlterPod so that I get the Prince of All Cosmos instead of the standard no entry sign. The iPod was later stolen, returning the little Prince to live amongst the stars!

I’m a big fan of the 1981 arcade game QIX. Back in 2003 tracked down the author of the game, Randy Pfeiffer, who had moved on from the video game industry to run his own business creating CAD software for model railway enthusiasts. I asked him some questions about the game and he was gracious enough to answer, albeit a little puzzled why anybody...

Spring morning sun coming through my blinds, across my sofa, onto my disco ball. Taken with a FujiFilm FinePix 1400 Zoom, which at 1.3 megapixels saved photos at 1280×960 pixels!

I won a competition in a magazine that resulted in my design for a Sensible Soccer T-shirt being put into production by a company called Joystick Junkies. By early 2004 they were available to buy at online from the BSI Merch website and Amazon UK, as well as on the UK high street at all River Island stores, and to buy wholesale from Big Ben...

A letter I received from The Designers Republic after creating a font inspired by their work. They chose to order a cease and desist, rather than fostering creativity. Matt Sephton created an original font called Blockout–a techno font that can still be found here. He had used Fontographer. It was, as he put it, influenced by the tDR font in...

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: gamefaqs.com/console/psx/file/micro_machines_v3.txt

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: gamefaqs.com/console/psx/file/wipeout_xl.txt

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: gamefaqs.com/console/psx/file/hermie_hopperhead.txt

I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: gamefaqs.com/ps/572737-penny-racers/faqs

This might be the first entry on this blog, but it’s not quite my oldest content on the internet. For that you’ll need to check out the archive linked to from the bottom of the about page. I wrote a video game FAQ and uploaded it to GameFAQs: gamefaqs.com/console/psx/file/motor_toon_gp_2.txt