Cartoon

Red Light

Red Bollocks more like!

Dark Shadows

Dark Bollocks

The Iron Lady

The Iron Bollocks

Well, to get started then, you may or may not be aware of the saga of my stolen Nintendo 3DS and the ensuing problems around it, well, I have an update and a final chapter, and if you are so far unaware of it, I have the full story, so read on. At the end of this you can make up your own mind about how well Nintendo have resolved it, and whether or not they would have resolved it if it weren’t for some not inconsiderable persistence on my part.

Let’s go back to the beginning and I’ll take you through the whole thing.

It started on January 12th 2012 when my house got broken into and a bunch of stuff got stolen, including my Aqua Blue Nintendo 3DS. Now on this console, for those who don’t know, you can access the Nintendo eShop and you can use either a credit card or Nintendo Vouchers to purchase games in much the same way as you can for the Wii and the DSi.

On my console I’d put £20 worth of credit on the console and I’d used about £15 of it, so I had about £5 left to spend when I saw something I wanted to buy. Now you’ll notice I said “I’d put £20 worth of credit on the console” as oppose to “I’d put £20 worth of credit on my account” That’s because Nintendo do things differently to their competitors’ online stores. On the Playstation Network, on Xbox Live, on the Apple iTunes store and on the Android Market Place, you have your own account, and if for any reason you have to get a new console, you simply move your account over to it. With my Sony PSP that was also stolen during the same break in, I got my new console, entered my account details and I had my account back straight away and I could access the games I’d bought.

On the 3DS however, things are not so simple, you see, the account is tied to the console itself, so whoever had hold of my 3DS also had all of the games I’d bought and all of the credit I’d put on there as well. Nice. Cheers Nintendo.

So, the day after the break in I contacted them by email to see how I should proceed. I wanted my games and my credit back and I didn’t want somebody else spending it for me. So on January 13th I emailed Nintendo Customer Support (customer-support@nintendo.co.uk) and told them simply:

Hi, I have had my 3DS console stolen and I had some eShop credit on there. I had also purchased several games from the eShop.

Is there a way to lock my account, ban my console from online activity and to transfer my purchases and credit to my replacement console when I get it?

Thanks

They replied the same day with a message that said:

Dear Mike,

Thank you for your email.

Your Nintendo eShop account (including Ambassador titles) is tied to the console itself so if the console has been lost, stolen or has been replaced by the retailer then transfer is not possible.

Please note that this cannot be performed with the use of just an your SD card and the 3DS transfer tool will require both both (sic) consoles to be in your possession and both need to be fully updated and configured for internet access to follow this process. Both consoles also need to be from the same region for example Europe for this to be possible and you may need to re-download your titles from the eShop once more once complete.

If you have purchased a second console for example because you wanted to take advantage of one of the new range of colours we now offer but traded-in your original console we strongly recommend getting in touch with the retailer/buyer to see if they still have possession of your original console to carry out this process.

Please note that if the console has been sent to our repair centre and no longer has the downloaded titles stored on the console then you should re-visit the eShop and they should be available to re-download free of charge.

If this is not the case or you have any further queries please call us on the number below.

Kind regards,

The Nintendo Team

So, not quite what I wanted to hear. Sorry Mike but you’re screwed, buy your games again bitch. So I posted this on a gaming forum (not our own forums) and I was contacted by a member who shall remain nameless as they work for Nintendo UK. They sent me a private message that read:

This is a summary of what I’ve been told: Hope this helps you!

There should be a paragraph there to highlight the steps to take in order to recover accounts if the product has been stolen. There basically needs to be an official email from the police to our R.I.P.A. email. Thanks for feeding this back to me, it’s really helpful.

The local police dept need to put in a request on the following email RIPA-notices@nintendo.co.uk

It basically needs to be logged as stolen and then request then comes to us on the above email and we can action.

So OK, Nintendo Customer Support had told me a complete lie. Transferring accounts was possible, they just couldn’t really be bothered or they would rather keep my £20. Not the largest amount of money in the world and a pittance compared to their income as a whole but every little helps, especially in this day and age. So I took this advice and I got Greater Manchester Police to send an email on my behalf outlining the crime and giving the crime reference number and sending it to this RIPA Address (RIPA-notices@nintendo.co.uk) but by now more than two weeks had passed and this email was sent on February 1st:

I won’t read that email because it’s got Police and private stuff in it but the very next day and just in case they didn’t know that the Mike James in the Police email was this Mike James, I sent them another email quoting that email and reference numbers and told them we were one and the same. I sent them this:

Hi,

Further to your standard reply below I have been informed that there is indeed a way to recover my account and access it from my new console.

I have followed the advice given by yourselves and had an email sent from Greater Manchester Police to your email address at RIPA-notices@nintendo.co.uk so that you have it on record that my console has been stolen and you can pursue the process of account recovery.

The email sent on my behalf by the Police refers to a crime reference number (Greater Manchester Police crime reference blah blah blah).

I look forward to your reply.

Thanks

So now they knew my console had been stolen, they knew that it was me and they knew that I knew that they could recover my account for me. No problem now right? Well, after a week of not hearing anything I rang them, for the first of many times.

Ringing Nintendo UK is a mind numbing experience not unlike hitting a brick wall constantly and whenever I rang them I was told on different occasions that:

Basically, piss off and give us your £20.

If you persist you will get through to somebody who is helpful but it generally isn’t easy, and finally I got to speak to somebody purporting to be a manager who said that they hadn’t received the email from the Police or the one from me either, but if I sent them again they would follow them up personally, so I did just that. I told the manager I would send it within the next five minutes and if they didn’t receive it they should contact me.

Oh of course we will sir!

Yeah right. I was only ever contacted by them twice and this wasn’t one of those occasions. They would usually spin me a line about trying to contact me but being unable to, despite holding two phone numbers, two email addresses and a postal address for me.

I left it a week and rang them back, and guess what?

No sir we haven’t received the emails from you, would you like to send them again? Also, actually our policy on stolen consoles has changed, you now have to send the email to the RIPA address and also an additional one as well so we can follow it up.

I did just that and sent both emails to both addresses on what was by now February 24th. Again I said I would do it within 5 minutes and they should contact me if they didn’t receive them. I was assured that they would, and after the weekend when I hadn’t heard from them I rang them back yet again and this time sent the emails while I was on the phone, by now we were on March 8th.

Feeling at least a little aggrieved by the whole process and lack of good service so far I decided to complain using the online complaint system, so I filled in a lovely account of my lack of success and my complete frustration with the company so far and hit the submit button.

I’ll show them!

Well, I would have done if the complaint system actually worked but instead I got a 404 error on the page. Luckily I’d pasted my complaint to Notepadd++ before hitting Submit so I did it again, and again I got a 404 error.

Now really pissed off I decided to email them on the email address that also apparently wasn’t working and I said:

Brilliant!

Not only have I received shoddy service from yourselves, but when I try to complain about it I get this:

Not Found
The requested URL /survey/confirmation.php was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Fantastic.

Knowing that there was every chance that they would ignore or pretend not to have received this email I sent it with Delivery Notifications on it and got back the message:

Delivery to these recipients or distribution lists is complete, but delivery notification was not sent by the destination:

Fair enough, not all mail servers send a response but at least I knew it had hit somewhere, and now I felt the need for a letter of complaint, but who did I know that specialized in letters of complaint? My brother Neil, that’s who, so I gave him the basic info and he came back with one of the finest complaint letters you’ll ever read. I won’t quote the whole thing here because it’s quite lengthy and repeats some of what I’ve already said but you can read it yourself here and I recommend that you do so because it will definitely give you a good laugh if not inspire you into writing your own.

I sent two copies of it, one to Customer Support and one to Satoru Shibata, the Head of Nintendo UK. It began:

Dear Shibata-san,

The Customer is Always Right”, and Other Modern Myths

and it ended:

PS. According to a TARP report in 1997, a customer who is satisfied with an organisation’s response to a problem will, on average, tell four or five people. If the experience was bad, they will tell nine or ten people.

I’m sure that you can hazard a guess at my current quota (although maybe times were different back in 1997 but, from recent personal experience, I think they underestimated).

You remember earlier I mentioned Nintendo getting in touch with me twice? Well, this was one of those times, following receipt of that letter. Not only did they contact me but they did it on a holiday weekend. They even apologized for ringing me on a Bank Holiday too, and the guy I spoke to was the most helpful person I’ve ever spoken to on the phone and he outlined exactly what was going to happen and how Nintendo were going to resolve this for me.

They would email me a prepaid postage label and I had to send off my console to them so they could transfer my account to it. Not only that but they would add me to the Ambassador program and give me the Ambassador titles as a gesture of good will.

OK, a result it seems, so within the hour they had indeed emailed me a label and launched a support ticket for me on their site, signed:

Many Thanks
The Nintendo Customer Support team

so they did have more than one person working in that department, so I packaged up the console and sent it the next day, by now it was April 10th.

On April 13th I got an email from them to let me know that they had received it and they would process the repair of my Aqua Blue 3DS. I didn’t like saying that I had sent them a black one, but still, they knew best.

Once again things now took a turn for the worst because two weeks slipped by before I heard anything from them so I called them and got the usual response of

Yeah yeah managers, yeah yeah get back to you yeah yeah leave it with me.

Within five minutes of me putting the phone down from that idiot, he must have looked into the support ticket and seen the notes attached to it and the fact that Shibata San was on the case and he rang me straight back and couldn’t have been nicer.

Aah Mr James, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you for a while now.

Again, this is despite having two phone numbers, two email addresses and a postal address for me, but never mind that minor detail.

What they actually wanted and were waiting for was for me to confirm to them that they could delete the account that my new console had on it in order to restore my lost account, so once I’d confirmed that my new console didn’t have anything on there that I wanted to keep they could get on with the repair and was there anything else they could help me with today?

So, on May 4th they emailed me to tell me that they had, and I quote;

Excellent news! We are please to inform you that your Nintendo Aqua Blue has been despatched.

So now there just remained the small problem of what colour console they had actually repaired for me and what colour console they were going to return to me, and luckily it turned out to be my very own black console that showed up, resplendent with my original Nintendo account and eShop purchases, and all of my remaining credit.

Unfortunately they hadn’t added the Ambassador titles like they had promised but do you know what? I couldn’t be bothered chasing them up. I’d had enough, I got what was rightfully mine and what I had asked for and I had my console back and I was happy enough with that in the end.

The Ambassador titles would have been nice but whatever. I was more concerned with having to re-unlock some of the features I’d unlocked on my deleted account, like all the features of Nintendo Letter Box (Swap Note) and the Puzzle Pieces and Streetpass Quest that I had to do again, but no biggie.

So, to summarise all of this then, did Nintendo UK manage to port my old account from my stolen console to my replacement console? Yes they did.

Was it a pleasurable experience? On no account was it pleasurable.

Would 99% of people have given up before getting a result? Probably yes.

They really only carried out the restore because I was so persistent and because Neil wrote such a good complaint letter. Whether Satoru Shibata or one of his minions read it, it doesn’t really matter, but without that letter I would still be waiting for them to ring me back on one of the two telephone numbers they hold for me.

Mike James

Snow White And The Huntsman

Snow White And The Bollocks more like!

Max Payne

Max Bollocks

Cartoon

Water For Elephants

Bollocks For Elephants

Mirror Mirror

Bollocks Bollocks

You may notice the development of a theme to my reviews as we go on, but here is the first:

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN

Salmon Fishing In The Bollocks more like.

Cartoon

Cartoon

Cartoon

Cartoon

You’re wearing a tartan hat?

Whatever next?

Cartoon

Well, the majority of it anyway.

Cartoon

Cartoon

Cartoon

Here they are writing Cher Lloyd’s debut single that was recently leaked onto the Internet.

The song is very poor by the way but I’m sure you expected that.

Cartoon

Keith is a character played by the actor Nathan Barnatt.

Youtube Channel

We’re gonna impress all our friends and youtube fans with a professional looking weightlifting video.

Let’s do this!

Linky

Captain Stopcock is here!

Linky

e.g. “I refuse to argue with my unborn child on Facebook, I am contacting child services.”

Read on: http://some.ly/hnuSdm

It’s my first fruit machine, or slot machine if you will.

The best place to pick up arcade machines in the UK is by scouring web forums and newsgroups rather than trawling eBay where prices tend to be on the optimistic side, if not leaning towards the outrageous side. The best forum that I’ve found so far for picking up machines and parts is Jamma+ where I’d already picked up my Disco Fever Pinball machine, and this fruit machine popped up on there for my favourite price of “Free if collected.”

Luckily it wasn’t too far away, just under an hour’s drive, and the guy wanted it out of his way but assured me the machine had worked the last time he had plugged it in. Feeling adventurous I decided to go and pick it up, honestly more for my wife and children than for me. I sometimes play fruit machines but not very often, however, following a trip to St Anne’s, Lancashire where we’d all played a few fruit machines in the pier arcade. and particularly a 2p roulette machine, I decided that if I saw a suitable fruit machine on offer somewhere that I would get it.

The machine in question was an old one themed around the Space Shuttle called Moonraker, also the name of a Bond film that featured variations of the Space Shuttle. I picked it up from the cellar of a house in Accrington, Lancashire and I can honestly say it weighed a bloody ton. Not only because of the cab itself but it was an electro mechanical machine with a lot of fairly heavy moving parts inside.

Once I got it home I did what every right minded arcade machine owner does when they get a new machine. I checked the coin box to see how much money the previous owner had left inside. Unfortunately the previous owner had also been a right minded arcade machine owner and had checked it himself before getting rid of it, so the coin box contained a couple of pieces of fluff, a washer and an old style 10p piece.

Looking around the cab itself, it is battered and bruised, and in truth beyond quick repair because a lot of the wood on the corners has been bashed and is either broken off or rotted away. There isn’t any ongoing rot problem but it essentially needs rehousing in a new cab rather than repairing. I was warned about that before I collected it so I was prepared, and it confirmed my intentions of just getting the machine clean and playable. I would fix it, use it, and if it broke to the point of needing an expensive repair, I would sell or trade it on for something else rather than throw money at it to restore it.

Two immediate problems became obvious:
(1)  It is running on old coinage and wouldn’t accept any new coins that I put in it.
(2)  The reel paper is slipping on the reels so when the reels come to a stop, the paper continues for a fraction of a second and displays the wrong symbol.

To overcome those problems I would need to convert or replace the coin mechs and reset the reels and reel papers.

Time to hit another forum then and ask for help and advice. The best fruit machine forum in the UK that I found was MPU Mecca so I signed up and asked for a couple of things: some general information about the machine itself, and how to fix the problems that it had.

A couple of very helpful and informative members filled me in somewhat, apparently it is a Bell Fruit base machine, most probably a Dash or a Sprint housed in a wide button panel cabinet and converted by Nobles as most Bell Fruits were in the 1970s, which would seem to be supported by a sticker in the back of the machine that bears the name Barry Noble, and they were of the opinion that although the cabinet is not the best, the machine and it’s control panels and reels should still function very well and can be repaired if not.

I tackled the issue of the slipping reels first because I would be able to play the machine without changing the coin mechs, it just meant that I had to manually trigger the coin up switch each time rather than drop a coin in and have the coin trigger it automatically.

The machine has three reels, and the unit comes out as a whole and contains all three reels. Once this was out I could see that down one side of each reel are a set of brass wipers that touch a series of contacts on the reel, and as the reel spins the wipers touch different contacts and complete different circuits so the machine can tell what position the reel is in at all times.

The reels themselves are reset by rotating them until the wipers are in the same horizontal position on each reel, and then the reel paper also needs resetting to its home position on each reel. Once the reels are in position, the symbols on the win line should have the end of the paper reel strips directly above them. The reel strips are paper rather than the plastic I expected and were originally stuck down with double sided tape, but over time the adhesive on the tape dries and the strips break loose and slide around the reel. To stick them down again I used a dab of glue from a glue gun and replaced the mechanism in the machine.

Next up, the coin mechs. The S1 coin mechs in the machine determine whether or not to accept a coin based simply on diameter and thickness of the coins. Any coins not accepted are simply returned to the reject slot so I had to remove all the mechs from the machine to make adjustments to them. In total it has 4 coin mechs; a token slot which adds 2 credits, a 5p slot which adds 1 credit, a 10p slot which adds 2 credits and a 50p coin slot which doesn’t add credits but pays out five 10p coins that you can use to play.

Once out of the machine I could access the adjustment screws on each mech and it was simply a case of trial and error, making adjustments and then dropping a coin in to see if it was accepted or rejected. The height adjustment bar must allow the coin to roll free in an upright position along the coin ramp. If the bar is set too high then the coin will tip over in the gate, if it is set too low the bar will ‘nip’ the coin and stop it from rolling. The coin thickness adjustment also has to allow the coin to roll down the ramp. If it is set too wide the coins will drop into the reject slot, and if it is set to narrow the coin cannot roll down the coin ramp.

The token mech, the 5p mech and the 10p mech were fairly straight forward, but the 50p mech was not because it contained a rocker inside it, so if the coin entered was not a genuine 50p then the rocker would also reject it. This rocker did not like new 50p coins at all, so I had to remove it and use a fairly primitive but effective replacement, a coin and a piece of tape.

The 50p mech has 2 exits and the genuine coins had to drop out of the front one, but with the rocker removed they would always fall through the back one, so I put an old 50p piece in the back exit and used some tape to stop it from falling out, and now the genuine coins pass through the first part of the mech, hit this old 50p and then fall forwards into the front exit and down into the coin box. Quite rudimentary but very effective and not a single coin has got stuck in it or failed to fall into the right place yet.

Having the coin mechs working meant that I could play the machine properly but it did however present a new problem: The coin tubes and the payslide mechanism.

As the 10p coins are put into the machine they are sent to a coin tube where they sit in a horizontal position, stacked on top of one another. Once this tube is full to the top, the next coins then roll over the top coin and go into a tube which sends them to the coin boxes at the bottom of the machine. As the machine pays out, it has a plunger that pushes the bottom coin in the tube out into a chute that the player can retrieve it from. All the coins in the tube drop down one position, and the next 10p inserted will fill the tube again, and then future coins rollover it again until the next payout.

Now that I had adjusted the coin mechs to accept new 10p coins this presented a problem. The new 10p coins being smaller than the old ones did not always stack neatly in the tube and some would fall down the side and sit vertically, so when they dropped to the bottom of the tube the plunger could not cleanly shoot a coin out into the chute and would stick and jam up the whole mechanism, so I would have to change the coin tube to one with a narrower bore.

I headed off to B&Q and found that a piece of plastic draining tube had the right bore and I just had to cut it to length and make an opening in the side for the switch mechanism to go through.

What this switch does is tell the machine when there are a certain amount of 10p coins in the tube. If the switch is triggered, then the 50p slot is activated as it will be able to kick out five 10p coins in exchange, but if the switch is not triggered then there may not be enough 10p coins in the tube to be able to exchange a 50p coin for five 10p coins so the 50p slot is disabled.

With the new tube in place the 10p coins all stacked up nicely and it has not jammed up again even under heavy use.

Sometimes a machine in an arcade under heavy use would also need the top of the payslide chute changing as well as that can also jam up but mine never has done, and under home use is not that likely to see enough wear and tear for it to become an issue.

So now my machine was working and usable I noticed a couple of smaller issues:
(1)  I adjusted the token slot to also take 10p coins and it accepts them and trips the microswitch but it does not add a credit.
(2)  The machine says it will pay £1 wins in tokens which is an issue because I don’t have any tokens, so I need it to pay in 10p coins instead.

The token slot is actually disabled by a switch that’s connected to a key operated switch on the front of the machine, and once I switched it on it worked as normal, and there are a couple of ways around the Jackpot payout problem:
(1)  Fill the token tube with 10p coins and replenish it when it empties.
(2)  Move the wiring from the token payout slide to the 10p coin payout slide so the machine may still trigger a token payout but it will actually payout from the 10p coin tube.

When I looked into it and my daughter finally won the Jackpot, it paid out from the 10p coin tube so somebody had already made this change which helped.

Some research and some more helpful people on MPU Mecca told me that there are a couple of common faults with this machine, it would constantly keep running out of tokens, which is not an issue for mine as I don’t use tokens and it isn’t paying out the Jackpot in tokens, and the middle reel will sometimes stick when nudging.

I’d noticed some issues with the reels sticking a little or more often not stopping straight away. The reels are held in place by a locking bar connected to a solenoid, and when at rest a spring holds the locking in bar in place so the reel can’t spin. When the Start button is pressed and the reels need to spin the solenoid fires and pulls the locking bar away from the reel so it can spin, and then it release the bar so the spring can pull it back into place and lock the reel again. If these solenoids are failing or the piston is not moving freely then the spring may not be effective enough and the reels will not come to a clean and immediate stop, they can stutter a little or even stop in the wrong order if only one is failing.

I dismantled the mechanisms and cleaned them which seems to have helped a lot but if this were a restore project then I would just replace the solenoids as part of that project.

For now though, and for occasional use it is fine. We’ll all use it until it breaks, and when it does, if I can’t fix it I’ll move it on like the previous owner did. I think a fruit machine has earned its place in my home arcade though and I would always pick up another to replace it should it be moved on in the future.

As one astute forum member noted “Not bad for a freebie machine.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5TuGQcXgc8

There was I getting drunk with my brother Neil and discussing religion when I explained my foolproof method for living the life you want to live and still being able to make it into heaven (should such a place exist).

As you know, the whole confession and repentance idea will cleanse your soul of sin and God will forgive you for your trespasses, thus allowing you into his heavenly kingdom (should such a place exist).

So, no matter how heinous the acts you have carried out during your earthly existence, all you have to do is say sorry to God (or one of his servants) and you’re good to go. You can look forward to a life of cloud sitting and lyre strumming in Heaven (should such a place exist).

Thus was born the “Church Of The Death Bed Repentists.”

We have no manifesto or good book to follow, we don’t have to meet every Sunday, or ever actually, all you have to do is say sorry to God on said Death Bed.

We all  have a Death Bed, and as it is not necessarily a physical object we carry it with us at all times, so there is no expense required, no equipment necessary, no idols to worship and no barrier to entry. Anybody can join and embrace the philosophy of the Church Of The Death Bed Repentists.

The only problem is that we need to rethink our motto “It’s never too late to join” because sometimes, it actually is.

Suggestions for a new motto gratefully received.

You clearly gave them a great start in life.

Sorry, lyfe.

That is a waste quotient of exactly 100%.

I wonder if the Third World would be helped even more if I had only been left a single copy of the leaflet?

If they ever find out they would be livid.

Man Arrested for Public Nudity, Sex Acts with Claw Hammer. That’s Illegal? Who Knew?

Original

Full Story:

While on patrol Monday evening, an Indiana cop noticed a naked guy standing in the window of a Fort Wayne home. So she approached the man’s front door, which was wide open, to investigate further. It was then that Officer S. Hughes and a colleague were treated to the sight of a prone Ronald Miller, 56, engaging in a remarkably lewd act on his living room sofa.

For the dirty details, you’ll have to read the Fort Wayne Police Department report, which notes that Miller is apparently handy with a claw hammer and some motor oil. Miller, pictured in the mug shot at right, was arrested on a felony indecency charge. A neighbor told cops that Miller was “not right” and parades around naked “24/24.”

Police Report

The dirty bastard!

Yes, yes they can.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/10191164.stm

Obviously.

Full BBC Story:

Hundreds of blonde Latvian women have been marching through the capital Riga to try to bolster the national spirit in time of recession.

Most of the participants dressed in pink and wore high heels.

The blonde parade began last year and was planned as a one-off but it is back by popular demand and is now a two-day festival.

Latvia has been hit badly by recession. Its economy shrank by 18% in 2009 and it has Europe’s highest unemployment.

‘Proud to be blonde’The BBC’s Damien McGuinness, who attended the festival, says that this might not be everyone’s idea of female emancipation but if the aim was to bring a smile to recession-weary Latvians, the idea certainly worked.

He says there are parties, concerts and a Marilyn Monroe lookalike competition.

Money collected from the event will go to Latvian charities.

Marika Gederte, president of the Latvian Association of Blondes, told the BBC the idea came out of the economic gloom.

“I was so tired, you know, every day opening the computer and reading the newspapers and just reading about problems. We decided… let’s do something nice. And I asked myself the question: what can I do for my country? And this is what I did… We are very proud to be blonde.”

Next year, our correspondent says, Riga’s blonde ambitions are even bigger, with a blonde carnival planned – like Rio, just a little bit blonder.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8627335.stm

Finally the add on track that we’ve all been waiting for has been released for Grand Prix Legends. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you …………

The Targa Florio.

What? You don’t know what the Targa Florio is? Well, you have some reading to do but basically it was a motor race around the island of Sicily on a road circuit 277 miles (446 km) long. Oh, and Stirling Moss won it too.

GPL Add On

Wikipedia Entry

1969 Targa Video

I wonder if work will miss me tomorrow.

A lot easier than it used to be, which was never that difficult anyway. Simply go to rockbox.org and download the installer for your iPod version and run it.

Wait! That’s not the end of it. There’s other stuff too.

The Rockbox utility is pretty much foolproof and will walk you through the install itself and picking any themes you want to install for the user interface and choosing what games you want to install too, if any. Personally I gave the games a miss I was only interested in using my iPod as an iPod but the installer holds your hand and does everything for you.

Once installed if you switch on your iPod it will boot into Rockbox very, very quickly, if you want to boot into the Apple firmware then switch it on and slide the hold button to the on position and it will boot Apple for you. Rather slowly as usual.

Another thing you’ll notice now is that whenever you use the Safe Removal tool in Windows to disconnect the USB device, it will be ready for removal really quickly whereas it used to take a very long time before. Obviously iTunes is not synching the database any more and like I said, your iPod is essentially a hard drive with a UI and a headphone socket so you can now remove it really quickly.

In fact the only thing I’m currently still using iTunes and the Apple firmware for is videos. I deleted everything out of iTunes apart from 4 films that I keep on there for the kids when we’re on holiday to play throught the TV out lead.

Rockbox does support video but not the standard iPod format which is a weird one anyway. It claims to play several formats including mpgs but some of the ones I tried didn’t work, but I haven’t looked into the video side of rockbox too much yet because I rarely use the facility anyway, but I will look into it at some point.

Once you’re up and running you can play around with the themes and pick out one you like, then you can customise it further still by changing things like the font type and the font size and changing various colours like the font and the background.

There are tons of settings you can alter and you can do it all live in the interface very easily. If you want to get a bit more technical you can edit the config files using the built in text editor which works surprisingly well given the limited input options of the iPod. I edited the Now Playing screen as by default it showed the Next Track in the album or Playlist, and when I increased the font size this didn’t quite fit on the screen and half the text was missing so I just removed the lines from the config file that configured the Next Track option and it stopped showing.

So it’s time to go full circle then and look at the reason I was using iTunes in the first place and what my alternatives are now for Podcasts.

Podcasts, and in particular my own podcast were the reason I used iTunes, but now that I had taken back my iPod how was I going to get podcasts from the Internet and on to my iPod quickly and easily and without missing any?

The final solution would have to satisfy these criteria

(1) It would have to check the rss feeds so I wouldn’t have to go to each site to download episodes.
(2) It would have to run portably so I could copy it to my iPod and run it on any PC I was using.

There were three main contenders here
• Mozilla Thunderbird Portable
• Juice Portable
• GreatNews

The Thunderbird E-mail has a portable version and will act as an rss reader but it is primarily an email client. It did work when I tried it, but the main problem was that it wouldn’t tell me which rss feeds had new episodes until I clicked on them all and that was annoying.

Next up was juice which I have used for a long time in the past and which works very we’ll, and it now has a portable version in Beta. When I tried it, it did the job. The trouble is, Juice goes right ahead and downloads all new episodes which I didn’t always want, and it puts episodes from each feed into a separate folder which made it slightly annoying when playing them back on my iPod.

Step right up GreatNews then which I had never heard of before doing a Google search for portable rss readers. GreatNews has a very similar interface to most rss readers bu it works better than Thunderbird in this instance. It’s very fast, very lightweight, and unlike Thunderbird it shows which feeds have got new episodes straight away so you click on the feed in the left pane, and then in the right pane  select the mp3 file and save it to your podcast folder. Very easy, very portable and very simple. Like all good readers it supports importing opml files with all your feeds in and when you add a new feed it will check your clipboard to see if you have one copied there, and if you do it will paste it in for you.

Overall then I like the ease with which my iPod works now, I love not being bound to iTunes and its limitations and sluggishness, and I like not having to keep a media library just so I can sync with it. I’ve taken back my iPod, so, Great News. Try Rockbox and GreatNews.

That’s the hook that makes you click the link to read on.

I have started my own podcast along with 2 Americans (I know. Who would have thunk it) so as part of this process I started to use iTunes so I could start up the rss feed on the iTunes Music Store and so I could make sure that published shows were appearing when they were meant to.

In for a penny, in for a pound I thought so I switched my mobile media management allegiance to the dreaded iTunes, and a couple of months down the road I can no longer take it. There I was one day, waiting for iTunes to become responsive again and I started thinking about the whole thing. I think it is good the way that it handles podcasts in that it checks the feeds and when new shows are out it downloads them for you. It marks them as new both on your computer and on your iPod, and when you have listened to them it marks them as listened to on both your computer and your iPod. More cleverly, if you listen to half of one on your iPod, plug it into your computer and then play the podcast on your computer, it continues from where you got up to on your iPod so clearly the bookmarks are synced as well.

That whole part of it is fine, but that is the end of the “fine ness” now iTunes really begins to get annoying. The media library on my 30GB iPod Video is around 26GB with 3 or 4 films and because of the way iTunes works, that same content has to sit dormant on my hard drive at all times as well because otherwise if I delete it from my hard drive it will get deleted from my iPod the next time I connect it. Knowing that to be true, and making iPod models (currently) with storage up to 160Gigabytes, why, when iTunes gets loaded up, even to the 30 Gigabyte level does it slow to a crawl? It becomes so sluggish as to be almost unusable, and if it hadn’t been managing my podcasts so well I would have ditched it far sooner. So once again I needed an alternative to the iTunes solution.

Having previously tried all the management software solutions like Floola, Yamipod and Sharepod before, I wanted to try something different, and since I tried those, something interesting had happened, I had bought a new car, and this one has an audio in jack plug on the dashboard so I didn’t need to rely on the FM transmitter to be able to listen to the iPod in the car, I could just use the headphone socket and hook it straight into the car stereo. It also meant the sound quality was better too. The importance of that being that it meant I would be able to try Rockbox and not lose any functionality.

Basically Rockbox installs onto your iPod and when you switch the iPod on you see Rockbox running and not the original Apple firmware, but it is dual boot so if you do need to use the Apple firmware again you can do so without having to uninstall Rockbox. The reason I couldn’t use Rockbox in the past was that it did not support the FM transmitter which I was relying on in my old car, but now that I was using the headphone socket/audio in option that was no longer an issue. As an aside, Rockbox does actually now support the FMTransmitter, so I could have switched sooner.

So what advantages would I gain by no longer using iTunes and the Apple firmware? Well, a few actually.
(1) I could ditch the sluggish iTunes.
(2) I wouldn’t have to maintain 30GB of dormant data on my hard drive.
(3) I could add content from any computer anywhere.
(4) I could listen to the audio on my iPod via the PC I was using without having to use a third party program like Yamipod or Floola.
(5) I could delete content from my iPod on the go without having to do it using a PC.

Why are these things an issue then and how does Rockbox solve them?

(1) I could ditch the sluggish iTunes.
You don’t need to use iTunes to add content because Rockbox does not use the iTunes database like third party apps have to do. It can read the file structure on the iPod in disk mode, so you simply create a folder on your iPod called Audio or Music or whatever you prefer, and drag and drop your music into it. That’s it. No need to tag it all if it isn’t already, and you can organise the structure however you like. The beauty of it though is that Rockbox has a file and a database option so you can either browse for music using your own file structure or the database which uses your id3 tags as iTunes would normally do.

(2) I wouldn’t have to maintain 30GB of dormant data on my hard drive.
Because I am dragging and dropping music to it, I can do that straight from my file server at home or straight from any other computer. I wouldn’t have to leave iTunes populated with all that dormant data on my own PC all of the time.

(3) I could add content from any computer anywhere.
Because Rockbox can use the file structure your iPod essentially becomes a hard drive with an interface and a headphone socket. You use it as though it were a USB hard drive and copy music to it from any computer on and Operating System that supports USB hard drives.

(4) I could listen to the audio on my iPod via the PC I was using without having to use a third party program like Yamipod or Floola.
Previously when I wanted to connect my iPod to a PC and listen to my music through the PC, I would have to use an app to do it. The app would load the database and allow me to browse it and listen to my audio. The problem with doing this is that it negates one of the nice features of iTunes and its podcast management. If I listen to a podcast it gets marked as not new so I can easily see which episodes I’ve listened to and which ones I haven’t. When you use Yamipod or Floola, they can reset the markers and all my podcasts get marked as new again and I lose track of which ones I’ve heard. Not the end of the world but bloody annoying after a few hundred times. I could now just browse the file structure and use any media player installed on the PC I am using, Winamp, Media Player, VLC etc etc. The only issue with using Media Player is that it downloads all sorts of album art files by default and its playlist management is not as useful as something like Winamp.

(5) I could delete content from my iPod on the go without having to do it using a PC.
Rockbox has an option in its menu to delete files. If you highlight a file and do a long press on the menu key it will pop up a context menu allowing you to do things like Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Delete etc, so once I have listened to a podcast episode I can simply delete it and so ends the confusion about what I have and have not listened to.

Is it me or does he look like he should be on Planet Of The Apes?

The picture you had to caption was this one

and the proud winner is Michael Southern with his entry;

“I told you the Sat Nav goes on the handlebars not the sidecar!”

Keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming caption contest.

Here is how to solve every problem you may ever encounter.

Click on the answer to your troubles.

Do you start with the shoes and work your way up or do you ask about the fire first?

Of course, the saying was made up by somebody who didn’t care about tardyness.

I meant to write this tutorial ages ago when I was in the thick of my M.A.M.E. cab build but just never got around to it. Anyway, here it is, finally…..

Nowadays we have clever interfaces like the I-Pac to convert arcade cab button presses into inputs that our M.A.M.E. computer understands, but before they came about you had no option but to use the Keyboard Hack. Literally hack into a keyboard and take it apart, but that was just the beginning of the fun.

Would I recommend you use a keyboard hack in your cab? No.

I would recommend that you use the I-Pac or a similar device, but if you don’t have the budget, or simply have lots of time and keyboards then give it a go.

ADVANTAGES OF A KEYBOARD HACK

COST - If you have got some basic electrical tools then your total cost is the keyboard which can be bought for next to nothing, if you don’t already have a spare one.
INPUTS - A keyboard hack will allow over 100 separate inputs, however only probably 16 of these can be pressed simultaneously. This is more than any other option and probably more than you would ever need.

DISADVANTAGES OF A KEYBOARD HACK

SOLDERING - Even if you know how to solder, a drip in the wrong place could mean that you fry your motherboard. That’s bad. very bad.
TIME - If you have a lot of it, fine, if not just buy an I-Pac.
PROGRAMMABILITY - A keyboard hack is non-programmable. While M.A.M.E. allows reassignment of all input keys this is not a problem, but for other emulators it might be critical.
BUILD EASE AND QUALITY – An I-Pac is a Printed Circuit Board with a terminal strip that the input wires attach to, and a detachable cable to connect to the PC.  There is very little possibility of damage.  A keyboard hack generally has the keyboard cable soldered to the PCB with a mess of wires soldered to the inputs sides.  The entire assembly is much more flimsy. Should either one “die”, with a dedicated encoder you just purchase a new one, unwire the old one, and wire the new one up to the same wires. If your keyboard hack dies you probably won’t find the exact same model keyboard so you will have to start all over again and then re-configure M.A.M.E. to match the new inputs.
SIMULTANEOUS INPUTS – If you are playing a multiplayer game then there may be times when you need more than the available limit of simultaneous key presses. Further to the limitations already mentioned, there is usually a hardcoded limit on the number of simultaneous key presses which reduces the amount of RAM required in the keyboard microcontroller.

Why is this such an issue? Because of Key Ghosting, Key Blocking and Key Masking.

Basically, newer keyboards work by scanning a matrix and when three keys that form the corners of any rectangle anywhere on the matrix are depressed, one of two things happen, either the keyboard will assume that the key marking the fourth corner of the rectangle is also depressed and send this key to the computer (key ghosting), or the third key will not register (key blocking). In addition, if ghosting occurs, if the fourth key of the rectangle is depressed simultaneously and one of the other keys is released, the key release will not register (key masking).

Bear in mind that even a single player game like Robotron using two joysticks with diagonals can generate four simultaneous key presses without any other buttons being pressed.

Still intent on going ahead with this outdated hack?

What you will need is a cheap keyboard. Only the Integrated Circuit card from the keyboard will actually be used so don’t bother with an expensive one, however, don’t use a USB keyboard or a PS/2 convertor with the USB port as the standard USB interface only supports six simultaneous key presses (plus any modifier keys such as Alt, Ctrl, Caps Lock, or Shift). Due to the limitations of ther Windows keyboard driver, any attempt to press more than six keys simultaneously will result in a Blue Screen of Death and require a reboot.

What you need to do is to take the keyboard apart by removing the screws on the back, and it should then come apart easily. Some of the screws may be under labels or some keyboards use plastic retaining clips to hold the halves together. Inside you will find the buttons, a rubber sheet, a plastic matrix plate, and the main part we want to use, a small controller board. The cord should be attached to this little board.

What you do now depends on your electrical equipment and how technical you want to get.

THE EASY WAY

Right at the base of where the cord attaches to the controller there is just a plastic interlocking joint holding them together. Use the marker to mark a line down one side of the little plastic joint so that you can remove the cord while you are soldering but be sure that you put it back together the right way around.

The first step is to solder a length of wire about eight inches long to each of the little metal pins that were covered by the plastic sheath you took off of the controller board where the plastic matrix was attached. Now you should have a controller board with around thirty wires hanging off it and you will have two groups of wires, a large one and a small one.

It is a good idea to do this next part on a spreadsheet but you can use graph paper or even just make your own grid on a plain piece of paper. What you need to do is take the smaller set of wires, count how many there are then enter the numbers from to that number along one axis of your grid.  Now take the large set of wires and again count how many there are then enter the numbers from to that number along the other axis of your grid.

Now plug the keyboard cord back into the controller card using the black mark you drew as a guide and boot up the computer. Run a program like Notepad and once it is open, take the first wire from the small group and touch it to the first wire in the large group. If you get a key press registered in Notepad record it in your spreadsheet in the cell A1 or wherever 1 and 1 on your two axes intersect. If you don’t get a character on screen don’t worry as not every connection will type a noticeable character such as the SHIFT key. Now touch the first wire in the small group to the second wire in the large group and again record any inputs you get registered. Once you have been through all of the large group, take the second wire in the small group and touch it to the second wire in the large group (you have already touched it with the first wire in the small group last time around). Continue until you have used every possible combination and record any results in your spreadsheet.

Once you have a full list of inputs you can start to build a button list, finding out what keys you need to run the emulators you want to run and create a list of which two wires will make those key presses. When that is done you can unsolder any unnecessary wires from your controller and connect the necessary ones up to one side of a junction box. To the other side of the junction box you can wire up your arcade controls buttons.

Now you have a working keyboard hack.

THE TECHNICAL WAY

Rather than explain the other method myself, I will let somebody else do it as they do a much better job than I would. The original page can be found at mameworld.net here, but just in case that link ever dies I have recreated the page here.

This method is recommended over the easy way for several reasons:

1) The keyboard is unplugged so there is no possibility of damage to the computer during testing.
2) Many inputs like ALT or SHIFT won’t display on a screen like NotePad, and even a program like GhostKey or some of the other utilities won’t pick up the NumPad keys, or the difference between R ALT and L ALT. If it doesn’t detect these keys they will be left out of the final matrix.
3) With this method you are using the physical locations on the keyboard so every key gets tested and no effort is wasted.
4) If the keyboard ends up being a poor choice to hack, with this method you can reassemble it and use it again. With the other method you have spent a couple of hours soldering wires to a keyboard encoder that you will never use.

I’m sorry.

This one shows the safety measures taken for 1971 following the earlier drivers’ boycott of the circuit, mainly removing the grass immediately bordering the tarmac and adding runoff areas where possible. In the distance is Ex-Muhle which is the corner preceding the scene of Nikki Lauda’s fiery accident in 1976.

This is the same section of track today. Again, Ex-Muhle can be seen in the distance.

And now, a caption competition.
The best one will receive the notoriety of a mention in the blog.

The picture is taken at Flugplatz, and in the background you can see the exit of Hocheichen, and the straight leading up to the “jump” at Quiddelbacher Hohe which is just out of shot to the right. Today the rise visible on the straight is actually a bridge where a road passes under the track.

Submit your captions via the feedback form, and good luck.

What are you a twitcher or something?

Merry Christmas.

It’s my interpretation of Circuit Training.

Grand Prix Legends is an old Formula One racing sim in the true sense of the word, i.e. it’s a simulator more than a game. Developed by Papyrus Design Group and published in 1998 by Sierra Entertainment, it simulates the 1967 Formula One season and is considered one of the most realistic racing games ever. It is definitely not an arcade experience as there’s not a weapon or a power up in sight. This is definitely for the die hard racing sim fans.

I’ve also been reading quite a lot about some of the racing circuits that have now fallen into decline, some of them have been modernised or even rebuilt and are still in use today, but many of them show few signs that they were once such hubs of activity.

One such example is the German track called Avus which was basically a section of autobahn with a loop at each end.

You can see how the Avus circuit looked at the time with the banked Nordkurve and where the loop rejoined the autobahn.

 Here is how it looks today, still detectable to the educated eye.

The Spa circuit in Belgium is also typical of tracks of a bygone era in that it is built on real roads with houses right at the side of the track, and people would stand on the grass verges and watch the cars fly by. The late 60s and early 70s were also before the days of safety measures and regulations that were really pushed for after Jackie Stewart’s crash here when he found himself upside down in his BRM soaked in fuel and in somebody’s cellar. This was far from the only accident of note too, there was the high profile fiery crash of Lorenzo Bandini at the Monaco chicane in 1967 and then Jim Clark’s death in 1968 at Hockenheim.

Jim Clark was widely regarded as one of the greatest drivers at the time and still one of the best ever, and when he didn’t reappear at the end of his lap people drove round the Hockenheim circuit looking for holes in the trees where he may have gone off the track. They eventually found him.In fact the 1969 race at Spa and the 1970 race at the Nürburgring in Germany didn’t take place because the drivers boycotted them as safety upgrades were not installed as they had demanded.

If you want to gain a taste for what the racing in this era was like, you should watch the 1966 John Frankenheimer film Grand Prix which was released to DVD in 2006. Starring James Garner and featuring actual race footage of the 1966 races at Monaco, Clermont Ferrand, France, Spa in Belgium, Zandvoort on the Dutch coast, Brands Hatch in England and Monza, Italy with the now defunct banked curves, Grand Prix gives a good insight into the dangers and the realities of being a race driver. These classic circuits made for great racing, and in fact Clermont Ferrand was so twisty and undulating that drivers like Jochen Rindt raced there in open faced helmets in case they vomited from motion sickness.

The famous German circuit, the Nürburgring, sometimes known as simply “The Ring”, is near the town of Nurburg in Germany where it was built in the 1920s around the village and medieval castle. It remained largely unchanged until the late 1960s and was nicknamed The Green Hell by Jackie Stewart. It is widely considered, and rightly so, the toughest, most dangerous and most demanding purpose-built race track in the world.

Originally, the track featured four track configurations with a (17.and a half mile Gesamtstrecke (“Whole Course”) made up of the north loop Nordschliefe and the south loop Sudschliefe. The circuit of the same name that is used today is vastly different and positively tame in comparison.

By the late 1960s road circuits like The Nurburgring were becoming increasingly dangerous for the latest generation of F1 cars so they started to add chicanes to bring the speeds down. In 1970 Formula One drivers decided to boycott The Ring unless major changes were made, so the German Grand Prix was moved to Hockenheim which had already been modified.

Even higher demands by the drivers were either too expensive or impossible to meet due to the tracks extraordinary length and the lack of space for new run off areas as it is literally sat on the side of the mountains, so the 1976 race was deemed the last ever, even before it was held.

That year, Nikki Lauda the reigning world champion, and the only person ever to lap the full 22.8km 14.189 mile Nordschleife in under 7 minutes proposed to the other drivers that the circuit should be boycotted again. The other drivers voted against the idea and the race went ahead. Ironically, it was Lauda who crashed in his Ferrari, probably due to failure of the rear suspension, and because it was only lap 2 his car was still loaded with fuel and he was badly burned. It could have been much worse other than for the combined efforts of his fellow drivers rather than by the ill equipped track marshals who came to his aid.

The Lauda crash proved that the circuit’s distances were too long for regular fire engines and ambulances and this crash marked the end of the old Nürburgring. It never hosted another Formula One race again.

If you want a more relaxing look at the Nurburgring, go to youtube and you will see dozens of videos, both professional and amateur, showing in car footage of the circuit. Alternativley you can buy the documentary “In Car 956″ by Derek Bell that features Bell driving around these old classic road circuits in a Porsch 956 with turn by turn commentary.

Incidentally the filmed lap of the Nurburgring featured in the documentary was the 4th fastest ever around the circuit.

If you want to experience it for real, then at certain times such as weekday evenings and some weekends the road (for that’s what it is) is given the legal status of a one way road with no speed limit, so you can take your road legal car or motorbike along and drive around the Nordschliefe. Sadly the Sudschliefe is partly abandoned and partly used as an access road to the new F1 circuit though you can still gain access to parts of it.

Drving on the Nürburgring is only permitted using vehicles which comply with the law and which can achieve a minimum speed of 40 km/h. Joining and leaving the circuit is only allowed at the official entrances and exits, and vehicles must drive on the right, in particular when overtaken, when on crests, in bends or in case of breakdown. Stopping is strictly forbidden, including on the grass next to the track. Racing is prohibited and this includes attempting to set speed records with individual vehicles, though you can see in an episode of Top Gear Jeremy Clarkson trying to get around the circuit in under 10 minutes using a diesel saloon car.

Perhaps one of the most famous things about the Nurburgring circuit is the corner known as the Carousel. Although it is one of the slower corners on the Nordschleife, Karussell is perhaps its most iconic because of its banking. It came about when a driver called Rudolf Caracciola used to drive around it by hooking his inside tyres into a drainage ditch allowing him to take the corner more quickly. As more concrete was uncovered and more and more drivers copied his technique the trend took hold, and when the corner was reconstructed it was made with real concrete banking, as it remains to this day. As it is such a slow corner and because of the variation in viewing angle as cars rotate around the banking, it has become one of the circuit’s most popular locations for photographers.

The entrance to the corner is blind, although Juan Manuel Fangio is reputed to have advised a young driver to “aim for the tallest tree” and this tree was built into game versions of the circuit. For more information, pictures (both historic and recent) visit nurburgring.org.uk.

If you want to experience the Nurburgring in game form it is featured in Forza Motorsport on Xbox and Gran Turismo 4 on Playstation 2, but for the real thrill of the circuit you need to experience it in Grand Prix Legends.

For some reason I seem to be sticking to German circuits here, but a good example is the already mentioned Hockenheim circuit which has been remodelled in recent years.

You can see here where the old track used to disappear into the forest where the modern day Formula One cars would reach incredible speeds of over 210mph.

Now the circuit breaks away here and turns sharp right.

Sadly though, unlike some circuits like where the road has been left intact and in some cases still in use, the old Hockenheim track has been ripped up and to some extent reclaimed by the forest.

By looking at the treeline you can see where the old forest section ran. The part of the circuit where Jim Clark lost his life, later named the Jim Clark Chicane, had a memorial erected in his memory, this memorial has now been relocated and sits approximately in the centre of the old circuit.

The new Hockenheim circuit layout has been well received, but the new Nurburgring feels pale in comparison. In fact a shadow of its former self which shares only the start-Finish straight with it’s iconic predecessor.

It’s a bluetooth keyboard that’s been around for a few years now but still works with the new Windows Mobile 6.1 on my HTC TYTN 2.

How do you like it?

The QWERTY keyboard on the TYTN 2 is good, but for longer emails and for Word documents it is much easier to use a regular sized keyboard like the iGo.

Oh, and it allows me to be so much more productive, and blog from anywhere too.

Now, if only I had something to say……….

I definitely won’ say uber kewl though.

DAMN!

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Sent from my super duper PDA.
That’s why I didn’t speell check.
#####################

This mobile blogging by email could catch on you know.

–
Regards
Mike James

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Sent from my super duper PDA.
That’s why I didn’t speell check.
#####################

Chicks dig it.

I mean this one.

Kindly make up your own jokes about my blog posts and arses.

Thank you.

Maximus Arcade basically manages interaction with many different arcade and console emulators while keeping the Windows environment hidden. It’s easy to setup and it doesn’t require any additional Frameworks or Runtimes to function. The download contains both the Frontend and a Skin Editor should you wish to configure it further. It will run on either Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista, and the trial version will work fully for 30 days at which point a registration code is required for further use. The registration allows you to use Maximus on two computers that you own at your residence, though there are discounts available for multiple licenses, and once you have used it for that long I don’t think you’ll want to be without it.

The long, long list of emulators that Maximus Arcade supports include:
* Built-in Adobe Flash Player
* Built-in Screensaver
* 3DO
* Atari 2600
* Atari 5200
* Atari 7800
* Atari Jaguar
* Atari Lynx
* Bandai Wonderswan Color
* Batch Files
* Coleco ColecoVision
* Commodore 64
* Commodore 128
* Commodore Amiga
* Daphne
* Future Pinball
* GCE Vectrex
* Kawaks
* Magnavox Odyssey2
* MAME
* Mattel Intellivision
* Nebula
* NEC PC Engine
* NEC Turbo-Grafx-16
* Nintendo Entertainment System
* Nintendo Super NES
* Nintendo 64
* Nintendo Gameboy
* Nintendo Gameboy Color
* Nintendo Gameboy Advance
* Raine
* Sega Genesis
* Sega 32X
* Sega CD
* Sega Master System
* Sega Game Gear
* Sega Dreamcast
* SNK Neo-Geo
* SNK Neo-Geo Pocket
* SNK Neo-Geo Pocket Color
* Sony Playstation
* Visual Pinball
* Windows Media Player
* ZINC

Clearly I have not tried them all, but the ones I have tried worked great. There was just one issue I had when I tried the Z26 emulator for Atari 2600 games. A lot of them required an [F1] key to start the game and I couldn’t see an option to remap it, so that would have meant adding a key to my cab should I have wanted Atari 2600 games on there. Actually I think
they are still on there and the emulator is still set up but I just took the launch option out of the Maximus menu. Plus, that is more an issue with the emulator rather than the Frontend but it is worth bearing in mind.

As I mentioned, Maximus is extremely versatile and as well as just managing your emulators it can be used to do things like:
* Filter out mature content from your MAME games list.
* Use a universal exit switch to quit all emulators and return to selection mode.
* Manage both horizontal and vertical layout options for use on cocktail cabs.
* Create and modify multiple favorites list.
* Launch program shortcuts and batch files.
* Display game screenshots, movies, flyers and marquees within the interface.
* Take screen captures during game play.
* Jump through game lists alphabetically or a page at a time.
* Play videos in various formats.
* Play ambient sound effects in .wav or .mp3 format during selection mode.
* Display a screensaver that uses an attract mode to launch games.

Some of these features gave me ideas and allowed me to add nice finishing touches to the cab interface but first let’s get Maximus set up to control M.A.M.E.

This is made easier because Maximus doesn’t install as such, you just need to extract the zip file to your hard drive and run the executable inside. Should you make a mistake in configuring it, or just want to start again from default settings, you can simply delete it and extract it again to the same location and start over.

To get started launch the Maximus executable and on first run it will notify you that there are no emulators set up and it will go straight into the the configuration screens. To manually go into these screens later use either [CTRL] + [P] or right click and select Preferences. Select the “Configuration” tab and then select M.A.M.E. from the pull down menu and either fill in the file paths or browse for them by clicking on the button next to the Executable field.

You will need to use at least M.A.M.E. 0.90 or a newer version because unlike older versions they allow the MAME executable to generate an XML game list which Maximus needs to generate its file descriptions that it shows in the menu. I tried the same M.A.M.E. 0.66 that I had used on DOS and it did not work. My game lists were empty.

After selecting the M.A.M.E. executable you can choose paths for the folders containing the Media (ROMs), Images, Movies and Marquees if they are not filled automatically. These pictures and videos will then be displayed alongside the game in the Maximus menu when you are browsing through your game lists.

Select the secondary tab under “Configuration” labeled “Launch” and verify that the command information is: %file -skip_gameinfo -nowindow. This is the command that Maximus will send to M.A.M.E. when it launches a game so any settings such as resolutions to run at could be applied here.

Select the secondary tab under “Configuration” labeled “Scan” and make sure that the “Media Extensions” field has .zip in it so that it will search your ROM folder for .zip files, and make sure that the “Scan within subfolders” option is checked and that the “Force rescan of media folder” is checked too. This force rescan should only be checked either when you first run, when you change the ROM folder or when you change the folder’s contents. It simply refreshes your game list to reflect the folder’s contents. Bear in mind it will run every time Maximus launches though, so normally it would be unchecked to speed up the Maximus, and therefore the cab’s, launch time.

Select the secondary tab under “Options” labeled “MAME” and make sure all of the switches are selected based on your preference for resolution for example. You may need to deselect the “Disable unplayable roms” switch and rescan if you receive an alert that no roms are present. You may also need to deselect the “Disable clones” switch and rescan if you receive
an alert that no roms are present.

Select the “Display Order” tab and make sure that only MAME is in the right hand field by deleting all entries and then adding MAME again. Select the “Close” button at the bottom of the preferences window and Maximus will now rescan the new folder paths and the M.A.M.E. ROMs then present you with your game list. If you have set up the images path correctly, and have got game images in the folder, they will be displayed on the left hand side.

You can test a game if you like but it is best to wait as we have not configured our controls properly yet.

Press [CTRL] + [P] or right click and select Preferences again to go back into the configuration pages and select the “Options” tab where you will see the “Setup1″ and “Setup2″ tab. In here are the controls that Maximus will use for all emulators not just M.A.M.E., so bear that in mind when you set up the controls for your games. The first thing to do is to save a new control scheme and give it a name (you will see that it is currently set to “default”). If you create a new one and make a mess of it, you can always revert to the default settings by choosing “default” in the scheme list again.

The main options you will need to configure are those for navigating the Maximus menus, configuring your favourites lists, selecting games and exiting games. Once you have your controls mapped correctly save your control scheme again so that you can always restore it later and then feel free to try M.A.M.E. out. Everything should work as planned.

Now you can go back into the configuration screens and under the “Display Order” tab add Visual Pinball to the list and set the file paths for it the same way you did for M.A.M.E., remembering to force a rescan on the first launch then test it before making any adjustments that you need to.

All of your emulators should now be added to the “Display Order” list and set up in the same way though SK Jukebox does not need any additional file paths for its artwork. You just set the “Media” folder to the the parent folder containing all of your albums, and as long as you have a relevant artwork file (i.e. folder.jpg, cover.jpg, folder.bmp etc) in each album folder SK Jukebox will display it for you.

It really couldn’t be simpler.

I mentioned earlier that seeing some of the options and features available in Maximus gave me a few ideas, and one of them is a folder called ambience. What this does is gives you a folder
path where you can put .mp3 or .wav sound files and then when you run Maximus it will play these files as ambient noise in the background. If you have multiple files in there it will play them randomly but I just have one file in there and it is a recording of a real 1980s arcade with the actual sounds of 1980s games being played. There are separate Volume levels for Master volume and ambient volume too so that your game can be played at full volume but ambient sounds in the menus can be quieter and more, well, ambient.

Sometimes it’s cool just to have your cab running and playing the ambient sounds as though it were sat in a real arcade, and you can imagine yourself as a child being back there all over again.

Don’t forget to wash your hands before tea though.

Maximus also gave me the idea for using Windows Media Player when I saw it mentioned in the options. If like me you own the Digital Leisure DVD sets you will know that contained on them are full uninterrupted play throughs of the games, so you can just sit back and watch Dragon’s Lair or Space Ace for example being played through correctly.

I copied these video files over to my cab and added Media Player to the “Display Order” list then selected the videos folder in the file paths window, and now I can watch them on my cab. I made a few minor changes to Media Player so that it ran full screen and didn’t show the controls. You can also set these videos as a screensaver if you like which looks good. In fact you can set any emulator as a screen saver and after the configured timeout it will launch and play a random game. Personally I don’t have a screensaver set as I use the ambient settings which just loops nicely and gives a constant stream of arcade sounds.

Now all there was left to do was to swap the DOS PC out of the cab and put the new Maximus one in, but before I did that however I backed the whole thing up to another hard drive in the PC using HD Clone. So there are actually two hard drives in the PC which are identical to each other but one is disconnected
until it may be needed (hopefully never).

The amount of disk space this whole install will consume will depend mainly on the M.A.M.E. version you are running and the size of your music library of course, but mine clocks in at around seventy Gigabytes. That’s why I chose the method I did to back it up. Any other way would be impractical so now in the event of a hard drive failure I would simply need to switch over to the new one without having to go through all of the setup process again.

In practise I would run HD Clone again and back up my reserve drive to another new one which would then be disconnected until it may be needed, and because I don’t have both connected all the time, nothing is being written to the backup drive and corrupting it. It simply serves as a snapshot of the original setup I had configured.

Finally I am happy with it and in fact the only thing I would do differently should there be a next time would be to use a bigger monitor and perhaps some more lit buttons. The results of all this hard work can be seen in this demo video of my shiny new Maximus Arcade cab.

A good old fashioned Jukebox.

I already have various methods for streaming music and other media around my house from a file server, but being in a cab the music would have to be stored locally on the PC. More importantly, it would need to have a simple user interface that I could control via my arcade controls.

I tried a couple of different programs such as Silverjuke which did work and did allow me to configure the controls somewhat, but the fact was that it just looked a little bit too much
like iTunes or any similar music management program. Either way it didn’t sit comfortably within the context of an arcade cab at all. In addition to this free option there are several paid for products out there but again, they didn’t look and feel the way I wanted them to, and around this point I had a free application recommended to me called SK Jukebox, and while the downside is that the project is no longer in development, the upside is that it is very much in a usable state.

SK Jukebox has the look and feel of a real live jukebox with flipping album covers showing the album art, coin drop sounds and the ability to select songs using a numeric keypad.  Conventionally SK Jukebox would be used as a standalone product using directional arrows for scrolling through the music library and a numeric keypad for selecting tracks. Each album has a number beginning at 01 (or 001 if you have over 99 albums) and if you enter the number 056 it will jump to album number 56, then you press the number of the track you want, so for track 8 on album number 056 you would press the code 05608 and the song will play.

While I don’t have a numeric keypad on my cab I am able to scroll through the albums by moving the Player One joystick left and right, and I can jump from letter to letter, i.e. Queen to Radiohead, by moving the Player One joystick up and down. Once the album I want is on screen, the four covers shown are numbered one to four from the top left to the bottom right, so I select the album with one of the four Player Two buttons then scroll up and down the track list with the joystick and hit fire to play the song.

When a song is playing you can choose what gets displayed from album art to a screen saver or a graphic equaliser. Album art just has to be an image file in the same folder as the album called folder.jpg or in more recent versions cover.jpg as well, though bitmap support has also been added and now the folder will be searched for .jpg, .bmp and then .jpeg in that order. It will also display hidden album art too such as that created by Windows Media Player.

Initially the music would have to be in .mp3 format and you were required to have Windows Media Player 9 installed, but later revisions removed that requirement and added support for other audio formats including WMA, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, AAC, MP4 (sound only), AC3 and ALAC. Playlists are also supported and if you like you can restore a previous queue from when the program was last closed.

The only requirements for SK Jukebox now are the VB6 Runtimes and a file called MSCOMCTL which you will need if you get an error about the file missing.  Download it and unzip it to either the application path or your Windows System32 directory. You can grab both sets of files from the SK Jukebox World Download page or my site here.

To set SK Jukebox up all you need to do is install the VB6 runtimes and copy the application folder and your music library over to your hard drive. Once you run the program you can go into the options with mouse right click or pressing [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[O]. Most of the options are self explanatory but a couple to bear in mind are the mapping of the keys to your own control panel. All the emulators on my cab are exited with the [ESC] key which my I-Pac maps to holding Player one and pressing Player Two so I made SK Jukebox exit the same way. Also because the PC will be sat in a cab, make sure you select that the music library is static otherwise it will rescan the whole lot every time you launch the player, and obviously with a large music library that can take a while.

I took my time with the setup and tweaked quite a few of the settings just to make it run better in the cab environment, and a lot of it is just trial and error but don’t worry about breaking anything because if it does stop working (don’t forget it is no longer developed or supported) simply re-copy the program to your drive and start again. Occasionally even now I will get an error where the program shows the splash screen but fails to launch, so I just have to [ESC] out of it, launch it again and it always works the second time.

So now all the emulators I wanted to run were set up it was time to configure a Frontend that would drive it all via my control panel the way ArcadeOS did on DOS. Obviously I needed a Frontend that would run on XP but also one that would interact with Daphne, M.A.M.E., Visual Pinball and SK Jukebox. I did look into several such as MameWah but on a friend’s  recommendation I chose Maximus Arcade despite the fact that it is a paid for product where others, including MameWah, are free, but once you see Maximus running, see what it can do and appreciate just how versatile and how easy to set up it is, you can’t help but like it.

It also gave me an idea for another thing to run on the cab but more of that later.

Full of nerds but huge.

A bit like a Star Trek convention without the hot women.

Pinball is essentially a coin-operated arcade game where you score points by keeping the ball in play and hitting different parts of the play field and maximizing the time spent playing by earning extra balls and free games known as replays.

Pinball is believed to have evolved originally from outdoor games like Bowls and Croquet which in turn gave rise to indoor games such as billiards around the 15th Century. Pinball tables however bear a striking resemblance to Bagatelle tables which themselves date back to 1777 when a party was thrown in honour of King Louis XVI and his wife at the Château de Bagatelle. The highlight of the party was a new table game where players used a cue to shoot ivory balls up an inclined play field. The table game was dubbed Bagatelle by the King’s brother and soon swept through France before becoming popular in America when French Soldiers fighting the British in the American Revolutionary War took their tables with them. Bagatelle became so popular in America that a political cartoon from 1863 shows President Abraham Lincoln playing a tabletop bagatelle game.

In 1869 a British inventor named Montague Redgrave was granted US Patent #115,357 for his “Improvements in Bagatelle” which replaced the cue at the player’s end of the table with a coiled spring and a plunger. The player shot balls up the inclined play field using this plunger, a device that remains in use on pinball tables to this day, and Redgrave’s innovations in game design are acknowledged as the birth of pinball in its modern form.

In 1931 David Gottlieb’s Baffle Ball became the first overnight hit of the coin-operated era and it originally sold for $17.50. The cost to play was a penny and that got you five balls. The games could be found in many drugstores and taverns and were so popular that the owner could often make back the cost of the game in a matter of days. Baffle Ball sold over 50,000 units and established Gottlieb as the first major manufacturer of pinball machines. Soon tables began to use electrical components to fire balls, make sounds and illuminate the play table, and by the end of 1932 there were approximately 150 companies manufacturing pinball machines, most of them in Chicago, but competition between rival companies was so fierce that by 1934 there were only 14 companies left.

Chicago has been the centre of pinball manufacturing ever since and despite innovations in the game play such as speech, LEDs and computerisation the video game boom of the 1980s signaled the end of the boom for pinball. Arcade owners quickly replaced rows of pinball machines with games like Asteroids and Pac-Man which earned incredible amounts of money compared to the pinballs of the day, but Bally, Williams, and Gottlieb continued to quietly
make pinballs while they also manufactured video games in much higher numbers.

After the collapse of the coin-operated video game industry pinball saw another comeback in the 1990s when some new manufacturers entered the fray such as Capcom Pinball. David Gottlieb’s son, Alvin and Sam Stern’s son, Gary both founded new pinball companies with great success and the digital era of pinball really took off with many TV and Movie licensed games such as Indiana Jones, Star Trek and the record selling Bally/Williams game The Addams Family hitting an all-time modern sales record of 20,270 machines.

By 1997 there were only two companies left, Williams and Sega Pinball, who later sold their pinball division to Gary Stern (President of Sega Pinball at the time) who called his new company Stern Pinball. Stern Pinball is the only current manufacturer of pinball machines, and
they are unique in that they will re-run popular tables instead of just making one limited production run. This enables arcade operators and home enthusiasts to obtain classic Stern machines in brand new condition.

So what about playing Pinball in a virtual environment then? Well, most early simulations were top-down 2D games such as the 1982 game David’s Midnight Magic for the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari computers which was notable for being the first commercial simulation of an existing pinball machine, namely Williams’ Black Knight.

Over time, and with improving computer specifications, more accurate ball physics and 3D simulations have become possible and while most pinball simulators feature tables created specifically for the computer there are now commercially available packages featuring renditions of simulated Gottlieb tables for the PC, PlayStation 2, Xbox, PSP and Nintendo Wii.

Visual Pinball, released by Randy Davis in 2001, is a simulation and editor program that allows users to create and play 3D computer simulations of pinball machines on a personal computer. More importantly its ability to import external sounds and images allows players to recreate and play renditions of real pinball machines.

Every Visual Pinball table comprises two main parts: the “physical” play field design (displayed in the editor) and the script which controls the table game play. The editor uses Visual Basic but the Visual Pinball program itself is written in C++ with ATL (which helps in making ActiveX controls) thus allowing Visual Pinball to run on Windows 98 or newer.

Visual PinMAME is an ongoing project that is similar to M.A.M.E. in that it combines the Visual Pinball program with an emulator that recreates the hardware CPUs and the connected ROM chips used in modern pinball tables. Unlike older tables with solid-state electronics and electro-mechanical devices that contain no ROMs or advanced chips in their hardware design, most modern tables require VPinMAME to run as it controls both the behaviour of the simulation in Visual Pinball and reproduces the sounds and score displays of the actual tables. Without VPinMAME, Visual Pinball can be used to make original pinball and pinball-like games such as pitch-and-bat baseball, pinball bingo, and pachinko.

Well it all sounds very complicated but come on, we’re on installment three here. Nobody has got this far through these incoherent, and at times over indulgent, ramblings without being up for a challenge, so how do we set it up on Windows XP? Well, there are two ways to get all the components installed and set up.

Both of them involve signing up at AJs VPinMAME site and forums where you can download the files you want and get support should you need it.

The default controls for VPM are:
Insert Coin – 5
Start Game – 1
Buy Extra Ball – 2
Left Flipper – LSHIFT
Right Flipper – RSHIFT
Tilt Up – SPACE
Tilt Left – LCTRL
Tilt Right – RCTRL
Pause – P
Launch Ball – RETURN

If the table you downloaded doesn’t work then you may have hit the same problem that I did. As I mentioned you will need two components for each table, and they are the table files (.vpt) and the ROM files (.zip archives) and both of these can be downloaded from AJs, however, some tables have more than one ROM archive, and some of the ones I got from AJs didn’t work. I had to get either different ones or different versions of them from the
Internet Pinball Database site at ipdb.org.

Please note that both tables and ROMs are usually found online in compressed (zipped) format but the ROMs must NEVER be unpacked and you should leave them as .zip files in the ‘roms’ folder. Tables on the other hand must ALWAYS be unpacked and the .vpt file inside should be placed in the “tables” folder. The exception to this rule is if the zipped table file contains a file with a .vps extension which is an additional script
file for that table. These .vps files should be placed in the “tables” folder along with the corresponding .vpt file.

Another important thing to note is that you should never unzip a table file directly into the tables folder, always unzip it elsewhere and then copy the .vpt and .vps files over to it. The reason for this is that the tables folder, and some table zips, contain .vbs files (which you will remember we had to install during the manual install procedure) and if any of these .vbs files
get overwritten by an older one then a lot of the newer tables would not be able to function anymore.

The Visual Install Pack automatically installs all the relevant .vbs you need, and the version available for download always contains the latest available files, so the only thing that you as the user has to care about (besides the installation) is really only to move the .vpt (and occasionally .vps) files into the ‘tables’ folder, and the ROM files into the ‘roms’ folder. The rest will be O.K. (and up-to-date) as it is.

Depending on the layout of your M.A.M.E. Cab control panel you may want to change some of the default Pinball controls as I did, you could even add further buttons to the sides of the cab which would give you a more conventional Pinball control feel but I made do with my existing controls and assigned the flippers to the green buttons on my layout.

This presents a problem that we didn’t come across in ArcadeOS running on DOS, because when running Windows (or even linux), if you hit the [SHIFT] key five times you will activate a feature called StickyKeys which is found under Accessibility Options. It is an accessibility feature designed for people who have difficulty holding down two or more keys at a time, so when a shortcut requires a key combination such as [CTRL] +[P], StickyKeys will enable you to press one key at a time instead of pressing them simultaneously. It can also be activated on
Windows when you hold down a modifier key such as [CTRL], [SHIFT], [ALT] or [WINDOWS] for longer than 5 seconds.

What you need to do in order to successfully play Pinball is disable the StickyKeys feature using the Accessibility Options in Control Panel. Once that is done you can test a few tables out without interruption.

Now that the gaming side is covered, there is one more function that I wanted my cab to perform.

No!

Not that!

Saucy!

Hmm, bit torrent, that’s illegal right?

Wrong.

Using bit torrent as a distributuion method is both good and bad. Good in the sense that if the Daphne site is down you can still download them but bad in the sense that you are dependent on other people having the ROMs and making them available for you to access.

Be warned, this download can be a lengthy process, and like I said, it is dependent on others as well as the speed of your own connection. In actual fact I left my Daphne install downloading for about two days until it was finished. If your Internet connection has a bandwidth cap limiting your downloads every month then your I.S.P. is not going to be happy with you downloading the approximately ten gigabytes of game files for Daphne.

To set Daphne up use the easiest, and the recommended method, for Windows.
(1) Unzip the archive file you have just downloaded (keep it simple and unzip it to C:\daphne)
(2) Run DaphneLoader (running Daphne directly will not work). If you are prompted that a new version of DaphneLoader exists click OK to automatically update to the latest version
(3) You will see a list of games so click on one of them then click the Start Button
(4) Now you will be prompted that DaphneLoader needs to download some files so click OK
(5) The download will take hours or days as I mentioned so be patient
(6) Once you eventually run a game for the first time Daphne will need to parse the video files
(7) When that has finished your game will run. The controls are much the same as in M.A.M.E.

The process for running some of the games for the first time is slightly different and those games are;
Dragon’s Lair
Dragon’s Lair II: Timewarp
Space Ace
Thayer’s Quest

Full details can be found here but it is essentially due to Copyright issues related to those titles and when you run one of these four games you will be prompted to insert your original DVD.

Once inserted click OK and DaphneLoader will attempt to authenticate it. If authentication succeeds you can begin the game and if it fails go here.

The only time you will need to insert your DVD to authenticate the disc is upon the games first run or if you change your Daphne configuration, either by moving the install folder to a different location or to a different computer. Yes that’s right you only need to download the game files once (or get a friend with unlimited bandwidth to do it for you) then you are free to move them around to other computers but you will asked to authenticate your disks on each new computer that you use them on. The only disc that I don’t own to authenticate with is Thayer’s Quest so I have yet to play that game.

NOTE:If you do move them to a different folder or drive then you will also need to configure the location of the vldp files for each game.

Should you wish to use Daphne on any other Operating System:

For OSX it is distributed as a compressed .DMG file that you need to mount, then drag the Daphne icon to your Applications folder.
For Linux it is distributed as a .TAR.GZ file which can be extracted with the command

tar xvfz daphne.tar.gz

with daphne being the name of the archive file you have downloaded.

When moving either of these two versions you will need to copy your Daphne home directory. On linux, the home directory is $HOME/.daphne, on OSX it is $HOME/Documents/DAPHNE User Data.

For me though it was Windows XP all the way, but if you get stuck using any version you can always try the Daphne Wiki site.

One good tip when you are putting the PC in a cab is to turn off the Internet awareness in Daphne, otherwise when you start it up it will check to see if it is online and see if there are
any updates. This slows down the start up process and takes longer for a game to run which you don’t want in your cab. Ideally you need to run each game at least once so that it can authenticate those that it needs to and can parse the videos for each game too. Once that is done Daphne is finished and it is time to put another emulator on there and the one I chose may or may not be of interest to you. It is Visual Pinball, so it’s time to polish your balls.

The silver ones, because it isn’t just me that has silver balls.

You don’t have silver balls?

Hmmm.

Let’s not hold back, we’ll get straight into it.

You with me?

Firstly M.A.M.E. is quite simple and the process is very similar to setting it up on DOS but you will need the 32bit Windows version and you can use a much newer M.A.M.E. build. I simply created a folder called “mame” on the root of C Drive and copied all of the M.A.M.E. files into it, but the beauty of using using a newer version and running it on a different Frontend is that you can make use of all the supplementary M.A.M.E. files that ArcadeOS didn’t use such as the artwork, flyers, control panels, screenshots and even video clips so copy those over to the relevant folders within C:\mame too.

Once that is done you can test your install in much the same way as on ArcadeOS with DOS commands (yes, even in Windows you test M.A.M.E. with DOS commands) so open up a Command Prompt by either trawling through the start menu for it or by using the shortcut of holding down the Windows Key and tapping [r].

Once the Command Prompt is open change to the new mame folder by typing the command

cd c:\mame

NOTE: If you are having problems and find yourself frequently accessing the Command Prompt and running the cd command, there is a quicker way to open up the desired folder directly. As I use the Command Prompt a lot in my work this is a fix I always configure on my own computers.

(1) In Control Panel enter the Folder Options applet and select the File Types tab
(2) In the list of extensions select (NONE) Folder and clickthe Advanced button
(3) In the new window click the New button
(4) In the Action window type Open Command Prompt Here
(5) In the Application Used to perform action: window type command.exe
(6) Select OK on each window to accept the new settings

Now when you right click on a folder you can select the new option and the Command Prompt will open up and already be in the correct directory for you.

Once inside the c:\mame folder at the Command Prompt you can then run the game 1943 with the command

mame 1943 (remember the command on DOS for the dos version was dmame 1943)

This time around M.A.M.E. will not ask what sound card you have but will simply use the one configured in Windows.

If the game runs you know that your M.A.M.E. install is fine and you can move on to the next emulator which is going to be Daphne.

That one is actually quite fun.

Honest.

Of course you do. How could you forget?

Oh those heady halcyon days ………………

Well while I didn’t do that here I did remove the default XP boot logo and that is done by editing the file boot.ini which is found in the root of C Drive. There are two ways you can do that; either in msconfig or by editing the file directly in Notepad. I favour the msconfig method simply because I will be going in there anyway to stop any unwanted processes from running at boot up.

(1) Click Start and then click Run and type the command msconfig
(2) Click OK then select the BOOT.INI tab
(3) Go down to Boot Options and tick: /NOGUIBOOT
(4) You can also select the STARTUP tab and see a list of startup
processes and programs
(5) Untick any that you don’t want to run every time your computer is booted
(6) Click Apply then OK to close msconfig
(7) You will need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect

The splash screen will now be gone but it can be re-enabled by going back into msconfig and unticking /NOGUIBOOT.

If you want to edit boot.ini directly simply open it in Notepad and add the switch

/noguiboot

after the switch

/fastdetect

To re-enable it just edit boot.ini again and remove the /noguiboot switch. Bear in mind that removing this splash screen will also remove any boot-up messages that might come up such as chkdsk but if your system runs without any problems then it shouldn’t matter.

If you want to go to a little extra trouble and create your own splash screen for the boot process then you can do it following the instructions here. Be careful though, making changes like this to Windows can have an adverse effect if done wrong and can even require a full reinstall.

Once Windows has booted you will have a short delay before your Frontend runs so you will temporarily see the desktop wallpaper. To make it look less obtrusive simply use a gaming related picture as your wallpaper and remove all the icons that you can from the desktop. This will be everything apart from the Recycle Bin by default, but even that can be removed in a couple of ways.

The neatest way is by applying one of these registry patches to add the Delete option to the Recycle Bin’s own context (right click) menu, or you can edit the registry directly. Again take care when editing the registry as you don’t want to have to reinstall XP all over again, especially if you have already screwed up the splash screen earlier.

To edit the registry
(1) Click Start and then click Run and type the command regedit
(2) Navigate to the value
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
(3) Double-click the NoDesktop value if it exists
(4) If not, create it. Select Edit – New – DWORD
Value, and type “NoDesktop” for its name
(5) Enter 1 for the value, and click OK. (Just delete the value entirely
to undo this.)
(6) Click on the desktop, and press [F5] to refresh the desktop and see the change take effect

Once you have done that you need to go into the Control Panel and change a few more settings such as turning off any screen savers and power options that will stop the disks or turn off the monitor after inactivity. You also need to change the option for shutting the PC down when the power button is pressed. To do that double click on the Power Options applet and under the setting “When I press the power button on my computer” change it to “Shut down” so that we can kill the cab with a single press of the external button.

While you are in Control Panel go into the Sounds and Audio devices applet and change the sound scheme to “No Sounds” to remove all the default beeps and dings whenever Windows does something. Now you can put in a couple of your own sounds for the two options Exit Windows and Start Windows. Now on power up and power down your cab will play those sounds. You can use your own .wav file if you like but I used the two .wav files (startup.wav and shutdown.wav) from ArcadeOS.

All of these G.U.I. (Graphical User Interface) changes and little tweaks can be done with a program like TweakUI, but to be honest any performance gains there may be will be lost simply due to the fact that TweakUI is running in the background, and these changes aren’t that difficult to do so I recommend you do it the way I’ve described here rather than using a third party application to do it.

Plus it’s way more fun obviously.

Don’t get me wrong, it was amazing to play all those classic games in that environment and it worked brilliantly, but I did just want a little bit more, so here it is.

I wanted a newer version of M.A.M.E. because that would not only make it compatible with newer games but it would also include bug fixes for some of the older classics that I was already playing. In addition to that though, I had to be able to play more than just M.A.M.E. on it because my cab had a S.A.R. Factor (Spousal Approval Rating) of 1. i.e. I would only get away with having one cab in the house so it had to be a Jack of all trades, so what else did I want to be able to do on it that would still sit happily within the context of an arcade cab?

Ever heard of Laserdiscs?

Laserdiscs were the first commercial optical disc storage medium and they had great storage capacity. The discs were the size of a vinyl LP record but they looked like a CD with which they share similar technologies but which they predate by four years. The first Laserdisc title marketed in North America was the MCA DiscoVision release of the film Jaws in 1978, and the last two titles released in North America were Paramount’s Sleepy Hollow and Bringing Out the Dead in 2000 but a dozen or so more titles continued to be released in Japan until the end of 2001. It was estimated that in 1998 laserdisc players were in approximately 2% of US households but they have now been all but eradicated by DVD players, a format which has itself been outdated to some degree by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.

One interesting aspect of the Laserdisc, and one of the reasons that they were used inside Video Arcade machines, is not only the fact that they could store quite large amounts of video and audio data, (around 60 minutes on average), but that the discs were read optically by a laser which meant that there didn’t need to be any physical contact between the player and the disc itself other than on the centre spindle around which the disc was spun. This meant that there would be less wear and tear and the system’s life span was potentially much greater.

One of the first Laserdisc games released in 1983 was Dragon’s Lair from Cinematronics which starred an animated character called Dirk The Daring, drawn by the former Disney animator Don Bluth. Most other video games from this era represented the characters as an object known as a sprite which was then animated by displaying the same sprite but with subtle differences such as the arms and legs in a slightly different place, much like stop motion films do, but the quality of this kind of animation was severely limited by the hardware limitations of the day and the resolution and frame rate were restricted as a result. Dragon’s Lair took a different approach and showed full video quality animation but with limited game play: i.e. you watch a short clip of video and at the right moment press the “sword” button to make Dirk swing his sword. The Laserdisc would then jump to the appropriate “sword swinging” video clip on the disc and play it, giving the impression of one long video sequence controlled by the player.

The game caused such a sensation that the cabs would often break due to excessive use, and Dragon’s Lair was arguably the most successful game on the laserdisc medium which makes it aggressively sought after by collectors. Hardly surprising then that it spawned a sequel and several imitations too.

If like me you have never played Dragon’s Lair in it’s original form you are now unlikely to ever see it, so the next best thing you can hope for is to emulate it on your own cab using an emulator called Daphne.

For me that presented a slight problem in that Daphne does not run on DOS, or even Windows 98, it runs on Mac OS X, Linux or Windows XP, so the whole thing needed a rethink. The DOS machine I had in my cab just wasn’t powerful enough to do what I wanted any more so it had to be replaced. I still have it because I know that the next time we have a party and people get to play the cab, one of them will want their own and I’ll end up doing it for them and sticking that machine in it.

The last spare PC that I had was a P3 1.4GHz with 1GB of RAM and that would be powerful enough for me to do what I wanted, but I also needed a new Frontend because ArcadeOS would not run on XP and therefore would not launch Daphne ROMs.

I’ll just mention Daphne ROMs quickly here as they are not subject to the same legal issues that I described in Part One for M.A.M.E. ROMs. Daphne ROMs are freely available for download and use for non-commercial purposes, and in fact once the emulator is installed it will help you to download them. The only proviso is that some of the games will only run if you own original discs for them in some form, and those games are Dragon’s Lair, Dragon’s Lair 2, Space Ace and Thayer’s Quest, but more of that later when we get there.

Obviously the first thing I needed to do was to install the Operating System and all of the drivers then update and patch it using Window Update. I chose to use Windows XP Professional but there are certain tweaks that need to be applied to it. Fantastic Operating System that it is, it is weighed down with lots of services and processes that we simply don’t need running in our cab, and anything we can do to reduce this number of background processes will improve not only its performance while running but also decrease its start up and shutdown times too. It will also help if you go into the BIOS settings and disable any hardware that you are not going to be using such as serial and parallel ports, integrated audio if you have a sound card and on board video if your motherboard has it. Though I won’t be using the USB ports for controls, (I will be sticking with a PS/2 i-Pac cable), I left the USB ports enabled for a very good reason that I will come to later.

Cant’ wait eh?

I knew it.

Chase The Chuckwagon

Oh, and tell them I sent you.

The Cool Cash game – launched on Monday – was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.”

Well, you had to do sums to work it out.

From an article in the Manchester Evening News (source)

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.

“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.

“I think Camelot are giving people the wrong impression – the card doesn’t say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled.”

A Camelot spokeswoman said the game was withdrawn after reports that some players had not understood the concept.

She said: “The instructions for playing the Cool Cash scratchcard are clear – and are printed on each individual card and in the game procedures available at each retailer. However, because of the potential for player confusion we have decided to withdraw the game.”

More than 15m adults in Britain have poor numeracy – the equivalent of a G or below at GCSE maths

Almost three times as many UK adults (15.1m) have poor numeracy – the equivalent of a G or below at GCSE maths – than with poor literacy skills, according to the government’s Skills for Life survey.

Peter Hall, of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics, said: “The concept of minus numbers is something we would cover with 11 or 12 year olds, and we would expect them to have come across it before.

“The concept of smaller numbers is something that some people do seem to struggle with. Seven is clearly smaller than eight, so they focus on that and don’t really see the minus sign. There is also a subtle difference in language between smaller – or lower – and colder. The number zero feels lower.

“There have always been some people who find numbers and basic mathematics difficult. Maybe in the past it was less noticeable because people could find jobs they could excel in without having qualifications in maths.”

The bezel can take a couple of forms, it can be a fairly sturdy material that supports itself or more often it is a thinner printed film which needs to be supported perhaps between two sheets of glass, or in my case I will sandwich it between the front glass and a sheet of perspex with the same hole cut out of it.

After thinking about a few different designs I opted for this one which is something very basic and classic and is somewhat in keeping with the cab as a whole. I’ve seen M.A.M.E. cabs that have been plastered with artwork and stickers that are completely out of context and they look ridiculous. I think mine has a much more classic and faithful look about it and I haven’t vulgarised my piece of gaming history.

If you want to see what I mean by vulgarised and how NOT to refurb a M.A.M.E. cab then take a look here. Beware though it contains lots of profanity.

I don’t think mine looks as bad as any of those abominations, and so you can make your own mind up, here is the finished product in all its glory.

Seeing as we’re talking about controls though, buttons and joysticks, I may slip in a knob gag later.

While fitting the monitor was awkward, the Control Panel was just downright annoying if I’m honest and it was made doubley difficult by the fact that it was made of metal. Had it been a wooden panel I would just have taken some measurements from it and built a brand new one, but as you can see here it is a quite complex, moulded unit with a hinge all along its length and lots of extra fixings and fastenings and holes drilled out for the speakers. All of that meant that having a new piece fabricated was out of the question and I would have to work with this one.

The problem was that the cab in its original state had this control layout with just 2 buttons and a trackball in the middle. When I got the cab it had already been modified and had extra controls added to it such as 2 more buttons and a joystick. This meant that all the holes drilled in the panel were in the wrong places for my new two player layout and I needed those filling in before putting my own holes in.

I toyed around with different ideas for getting back to a smooth had to go for the only and clean surface to put my own controls into because clearly a new panel was out of the question, a wood panel fastened to the top of the old one would leave exposed edges that would be both ugly and perhaps even sharp, so I decided on the only solution that would really work well and give me a good finish at the end.

I got a friend of mine to weld a plate to the underside of the panel which just left me some holes to fill so I took a trip to Halfords and bought some Davids Isopon P38 (Bondo) which is basically a fibreglass compound that you mix yourself before applying. Be warned though, this stuff really does smell very strong and it should only be done in a well ventilated area, preferably with a respirator, or better still do it outdoors as you can see I did. You mix it and apply it with a plastic spreader and work it into all the areas to be filled and then leave for a couple of days to completely go off and set rock hard.

Once it has set completely it needs to be sanded down before a finish can be applied to it, and the finishes you can apply to it are now a little restricted. The best finish you will get on a panel like this is powder coating which is fine if you are just renovating an original cab and leaving the original controls on, but if you have used fibreglass filler to repairholes then you won’t be able to have it powder coated afterwards, and the only solution is to use paint.

The paint I decided to use was Hammerite which is very resilient, needs no undercoat, can be applied straight to rust and leaves a slightly dimpled finish. This suited my project as there are a couple of dints in it already and I may not get a flawless finish when I sand it, so any imperfections would be glaringly obvious with a smooth, high gloss finish.

Happy with my decision though, here is where I made the first of two mistakes on my panel, one quite big one and one small one with annoying and time consuming repercussions.

I put a couple of coats of Hammerite on my panel and got a nice finish that I was happy with then left it to dry for a couple of days. Once dry I marked out the centres for my holes and drilled them out as you can see here. Now I needed to widen these holes out to 28mm to accommodate my buttons and joysticks, and to do it I bought a set of these bits.

The small one did its job really well, the medium one widened the holes a bit more quite easily, but the large one just didn’t make any impression at all. All it succeeded in doing was making the whole panel get hot and force the paint to start bubbling. The bit itself got really hot and a little burned out, so now I was left with a panel with bubbling and burned out paint and with holes too small to use.

That was mistake number one.

The next step was to give the panel back to the fabricator to drill the holes out for me but unfortunately he only had a 26mm drill bit that was suitable, so he drilled the holes out and I then had to use a half round file to open them out to the required 28mm. With that done I had to strip what was left of the paint from it and start all over again, only this time it was a little more tricky getting an even coat while painting around all the holes. Just as I had applied the final few brushstrokes and was trying to move the panel out of the way to dry again, I knocked it over and it hit the floor.

That was mistake number two.

Stuck into my brand new coat of paint was lots of dirt, some bits of fluff and a few chips. Mad at myself I left it to dry overnight and the next day set to work sanding it down for what seemed like the fourteenth time. This time though there were no hiccups (must be something to do with all the practise) and I got a good even coat on at last before it was time for a dry fit and it looked and fitted just great. Now it was time to wire it then.

I mentioned in some detail in this post about how the controls work so I won’t repeat myself here, suffice to say that I would use an I-Pac as my controller interface and rather than solder my connections I would use crimpers and Spade fittings to make things easier and to make future repairs simpler. Here is the finished effort with the speakers in place, and if you look closely you can see the single lit button I have included. Perhaps on a future project I will use more lit buttons as I think they look very impressive when complete, and here it is from above.

I paid a little bit extra for the two joysticks but I’m glad I did now. Joysticks can either be 8-way, 4-way or 2-way. 2-way joysticks only have left and right movement, 4-way joysticks have up, down, left and right movement and 8-way joysticks use diagonal movement too. The joysticks I bought are switchable between 4-way and 8-way depending on the game I’m playing. The reason for that is if you are playing something like Skramble or 1943 then you need the diagonal movement to move freely around the screen, but if you’re playing Pacman or Burger Time then you only need 4-way movement. On these games an 8-way can actually cause your character to stop moving as for example both the right and the down micro switch could be pressed at the same time, then the game won’t know how to handle the input. What switching to 4-way does is ensures that no two micro switches can be pressed together so the right micro switch will be released a fraction of a second before the down one is pressed and the game will continue as normal allowing you to move in any of the four directions.

Some switchable joysticks are only switchable by reaching through the coin door and activating the mechanism underneath but mine are switchable from above by simply lifting and twisting the joystick until you feel the mechanism switch over. The extra I paid for that ease of switching was well worth it in my opinion, and as a bonus the joysticks have much less “throw” (lateral movement) than others I have tried and they are also magnetically centred when you let go of them. I am more than happy with the extra I paid. They are the Mag Stik Plus from Ultimarc and you can see them here.

Now that everything is wired to the I-Pac it is just a matter of plugging in a cable from the I-Pac to the computer using either the PS/2 keyboard port or a USB port. There is also a second keyboard pass through port on the I-Pac which allows you to plug a keyboard in at the same time so that you can configure the PC if necessary without disconnecting anything else or reaching right into the cab.

Well, that’s it for this entry.

Damn, I forgot the knob gag.

Oh no, there it is.

I had some really big issues with it managing my artwork and at times it just plain didn’t work.

Well, I am currently using version 2.9.4 and it has worked perfectly with my artwork and it is displaying correctly and for the correct albums.

So far so good.

This week I have actually been laying a lot of cable in someone’s old box.

I also did a lot of screwing too which was nice, but very hard on the knees.

In general a renovated MAME cab will have 4 components that require Mains power and they are the PC, the monitor, the speakers and the marquee light. You could, if you wanted to, use 12 volt speakers and a 12 volt strip light in the marquee and the advantage of that is two fold: (1) You can take a 12 volt feed from the PC itself. (2) Both the speakers and the marquee will only power up when the PC powers up.

If you plan on including fire buttons with lights in then these will also be powered by the PC as the bulbs in them will either be 12 volt or 5 volt. Both of these voltages can be easily found using the Molex connectors on the PSU. The 2 black wires are Negative while the red is 5 volt and the yellow is 12 volt.

My cab has no marquee and my speakers are Mains powered so I will need to power 3 components, and to do that I will fit a four way surge protector inside and leave the cord trailing out of the back to be plugged into a wall socket. Here you can see the surge protector and the lead going through the back of the cab, and here on the left are the components stripped out of the speakers original case to help make the controls easily accessible via the coin door.

Another important issue to bear in mind is that you will have to rewire the PC’s power button so that it is easily accessible and the cab can be turned on without having to reach inside and switch it on. To prevent having to hack apart the original button assembly I came up with an idea to reroute the cable out of an adapted PCI slot cover.

One end will now connect straight to the motherboard connectors so I can just disconnect the original one and leave it untouched, and then on the other end I fitted a Molex Connector enabling me to run the other end to a power button on the cab somewhere. The beauty of this solution is that if I ever need to remove the PC from the cab at some point I can simply disconnect it here and leave all the other circuitry in place. I can also swap the PC for a different one very easily if needs be.

To hold the PC steady and in place in the cab I positioned it how I wanted it and then drew around it with a pencil. Using the lines I screwed some thin wooden lats to the floor of the cab so that the PC wouldn’t move laterally and I then held it down with a ratchet strap.

During the software build undoubtedly the most difficult part was getting the sound to work in DOS, and the most difficult part of the hardware build was the next part, seating the monitor. You can see that the old monitor just sat loose on a shelf and underneath you can see where previous adjustments have been made to the shelf’s height, probably when the original arcade monitor was replaced.

As I was using a different sized monitor I would have to adjust the height again. It wasn’t that fact that it was difficult, it was just awkward having to hold the monitor roughly in place and picture whereabouts the shelf would need to be then temporarily screwing it in place and trying the monitor on it. The idea was to find an optimal height so that when the bezel was fitted, the screen area would occupy a central part of it.

When thinking about fitting a monitor to a MAME cab there are a few things to bear in mind; the main thing is that in general a CRT monitor is the easiest thing to use. A TFT screen is no good for the job at all as arcade cabs had a wide variety of screen resolutions and refresh rates but TFT monitors have a fixed refresh rate. This means that if you play MAME on a TFT screen you will notice graphical glitches and ghosting as the picture is redrawn on screen with the wrong timing. An arcade monitor will give you the best results but (a) you have to get hold of one and (b) you need to buy a specific graphics card to send an output to it A television would give you decent results but again you would need specific outputs on your graphics card for it. You would almost certainly have to decase it to make it fit inside the cab too, and that can kill you. Literally.

Monitors are easily the most dangerous thing inside an arcade cabinet whether it is an original cab or a MAME cab and the monitor can hold a charge anywhere up to 30,000 volts. If you want to work on a monitor like this you will have to discharge it. While it can be done it is not something I will cover here as I have never done it. If you are going to do it you must take great care, for example NEVER go into the back of a monitor with both arms because if you were to get a shock the current would cross your heart, and while that is a great commodity to have in a bra, it is not something considered wise when dealing with massive amounts of electricity, especially if your have wire in your bra.

I will be using a CRT monior in my cab and initially I tried to fit a 19 inch monitor because the more gaming “real estate” you have the better, especially if you are sitting your monitor horizontally. While a horizontal orientation is great for games like Defender, any games that originally had a vertical monitor setup like Pacman will be resized and squashed vertically so you want the biggest monitor you can get away with. Unfortunately due to the construction of my cab I was unable to fit a 19 inch monitor into it. Whenever I had the monitor in I couldn’t get the front glass in place over it, even if I completely decased the monitor it still wouldn’t go in.

Look at the difference between these various cabs and you can see how and where the monitor sits in the various constructions.
Upright Cab with reclined monitor
Cocktail Cab with flat monitor
Solitaire Cab with upright monitor

You can see that with a cocktail cab or a reclined monitor layout there is much more room to accommodate a larger and deeper monitor, but as it was I just didn’t have the space to fit my 19 inch CRT in there so I had to settle for a 17 inch CRT instead. Even that was a bit of tight squeeze as you can see from my modifications to it. I just had to screw a few little extra pieces of timber to the shelf to prop up the monitor so that it would sit both centrally, and at just the right angle so that it’s front edge sits roughly parallel with the front glass when in place.

You can see that the original monitor was a beige one with the front fascia painted black so that it looked better in the cab, but luckily mine was a black Dell monitor so I didn’t need to worry about painting or removing the fascia.

Once all the components had been dry fitted I could test the cab using a keyboard to double check that (a) all the cables were the right length, and (b) the power button on the cab worked to power the machine both on and off.

Now I could remove everything and make all those final finishing touches to the cosmetics without getting dust all over the components and without having to lean in and out of the cab too much when the final finish was on there.

Next time, some final cosmetics.

Here’s another:

What has a sticky back and rhymes with Fablon?

erm, Fablon.

It was fairly standard faire filling and sanding the sides of the cab but I had to reconstruct 2 of the bottom corners where they had been bashed. I tried using an ordinary wood filler but it didn’t really work out the way I wanted it to. In the past I’ve used sawdust and chippings mixed with wood glue, but this time I tried something slightly different, a glue gun (damn themz hot!) Yes just an ordinary glue gun.

I made a mould around the edge of the cab just by bending stiff card around it to form the rounded edge, then tacked it in place with small nails and squirted hot glue into it. The glue knitted really well with the existing bashed edges and moulded right up against the card. Once it was dry I just removed the card and rubbed it down a little with fine sandpaper.

Will it survive a severe thrashing? No. Will it be strong enough to survive day to day to use? Absolutely.

With the corners taken care of, and it was only the 2 back corners at the bottom of the cab, obviously where it has been tilted back to be moved, I had to think about the routed edges. They would be mostly covered by new T Moulding but if I didn’t get exactly the right width then there would be some bare timber showing through like there was with the old one in places. All I did was applied a cheap matt black spray paint from a car repair shop and it worked a treat. Any little bits that got bumped later or showed through could be touched up with a black permanent marker pen.

Once that was done I had to think about getting a satisfactory finish on the front, back and side panels, and really the options were paint or a vinyl covering, and I decided pretty early on that I wouldn’t use paint. I was concerned that I wouldn’t get a smooth and good looking finish with a brush or roller so the only other option was to spray it, and I have no equipment to do that, and my garage is not really set up for spraying paint around either. I did consider some kind of speckled or textured paint because then it wouldn’t matter too much how smooth the brush finish was as the speckling would hide it to some degree, but I didn’t find anything I liked, and throwing a bit of sand in the paint is a little too amateurish even for me. So I settled on a vinyl covering and it came down to a straight choice between this and this.

In the end, and for the only time in this whole exercise, I made the choice on price alone. Yes the Happ Vinyl would have looked better when finished, but it was pricier and it was shipped from America. Fablon I could buy either by the roll from B&Q or Wilkinsons or by the metre from Wallpaper Supplies.

The only trouble with a smooth finish Fablon is that it will show imperfections in the underlying surface, so the finish below it had to be good. If the cab had been in worse shape and had more knocks, dents and scrapes then that would have dictated the finish I applied, and the decision would have been different, but considering that this was a refurb, the finish was surprisingly good. In a couple of places if you look closely you can see imperfections but the finish is matt and not high gloss which helps hide things a little too.

Applying the Fablon is really easy but you need to ensure that the surface and the air if possible is dust free because if any dust gets stuck to the glue on the back of it, it can be difficult to get off, and even if you do manage to get it off you can leave a scar on the Fablon itself.

Once applied, the overhanging edges can be trimmed with a sharp Stanley knife and any small rectangular pieces of Fablon can then be applied to your top lip in a satirical parody of Charlie Chaplin. You family will find this most amusing. Oh yes, they will.

They may groan and call you stupid, but inside they are laughing as much as you are. They just can’t show it. It’s the law.

Next time we dry fit the Surge Protector, PC and monitor.

This is an old clip but I’d forgotten just how funny it is.

It is not work safe though.

Be warned.

Well, excuse the condition but it had been living in a stable in North Yorkshire, and that would test the mettle of any man, and indeed the metal too.

Do you know any metal men?

Hmm.

Way back when I began this little foray into the world of Arcade cab renovation, I mentioned that the ideal scenario would be to get a cab that was no longer functional then I wouldn’t have the guilt trip of sacrificing a piece of history. Hardly Antiques Roadshow I know but a piece of history none the less.

Well, this one was no longer working so it fitted the bill.

Originally the cab had been the 8th Solitaire Challenge cab sold by Valley Dynamo in 1984 to a UK company, but somewhere in its lifetime the game had been removed and had been replaced with a PC running MAME. However, once the then owner moved out of his parents house, his brother kindly stole the PC and the cab was abandoned until I rescued it.

So, when I brought it home the PC was no longer present but the monitor was. All 15 inches of it. The first thing I would be looking to do was upgrade that to a more respectable 19 inch model but judging from the original bezel around the screen though, it was clear that the original game had only contained a 15 inch monitor. While authenticity is one thing, squinting while playing games is another so a bigger monitor was the order of the day.

The Control Panel still contained the original controls of the Trackball and Fire button and 1 player game button, but more had been added to create a 3 button setup along with an 8 way joystick. I would be looking to install a 2 player layout with 2 joysticks and 4 fire buttons for each player.

As you’ll see from my prototype panel I had originally planned on 3 buttons, but playing Defender for example with 3 buttons is not the best way to appreciate it so a 4th button would be added.

Obviously the cab was dirty and dusty but luckily apart from a couple of bashed corners was structurally sound, and I would discover, pretty solidly built actually. So much so that I wouldn’t in fact strip it completely, just take it back to a bare carcass.

The first job though was to strip it out so that I could begin to check and repair the actual physical cab first, and once the insides had gone I took out the monitor shelf and coin door, then removed the kick plate and the damaged T Moulding.

Once it was gutted I could lie the cab down on its back and sides to work on it and I fitted some temporary wheels to the bottom so I could move it around more easily. That allowed me to spin it round to get to the sides as I needed to, and basically the main job just involved a lot of filling and sanding in preparation for a new finish.

What better way to greet someone that switches on your arcade cab than with a couple of aliens?

Flamboyance? Pah!

A short entry this time round but we have pretty much covered the software install now and we can move onto the process of refurbing the cab itself, but just before we do I’ll share the contents of my Autoexec.bat file with you.

Ever the gentleman eh?

During the testing of my DOS setup I got pretty fed up with the boring boot process and I wanted to make it a bit more interesting.

Once my PC is booted it gives a brief notification from the graphics card and a quick POST test then you see a few DOS commands and messages roll by (only a few as the @echo off command is at the top of the file). Then it sits there with the screen showing the confirmation messages until the ArcadeOS frontend loads up with the game list menu, and it is this last part I wanted to change.

Now, once the DOS commands have run I clear the screen and then echo a picture onto it which stays there until ArcadeOS has loaded. You can see how it looks by downloading this file unzipping it and running it by double clicking.

If you right click on it and select Edit you can see where I have commented out the commands that execute ArcadeOS and have added a pause at the end that will leave it on screen for you.

It’s only on screen for a few seconds but it adds a nice touch to the boring boot process and helps take away from the fact that there is just a plain old biege box inside there.

Who is the coolest person in I.T.?
Not the one that can get sound working in DOS that’s for sure. That person is dull and boring and has a high boredom threshold.

If you intend to get sound working in DOS then you are better off starting with a later version of it such as 6.22 or better still 7. It will help your MAME build to run better too.

As I already mentioned I used a DOS install from 2 floppies, but if you don’t actually have access to MS-DOS but you have a version of Windows 95 or 98 you can use then do a full install of that and just change the boot settings so that Windows doesn’t load up and the system stays in DOS. Failing that you could also use the excellent and, as the name would suggest, free to use FreeDOS. Just bear in mind that the file CONFIG.SYS will be called FDCONFIG.SYS and the DOS install folder will be called FDOS.

To change your Windows 95 / 98 boot settings boot into your Windows install and find the file MSDOS.SYS in the C Drive and change its attributes so that it is no longer read only.

Now open it up in Notepad and add or change the following options;

LOGO=0
BOOTGUI=0

(This will stop the Windows Logo appearing and stop Windows booting. Now save the file and make a new directory on C Drive called TEMP then check that the following lines appear in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file;

@echo off
path=c:\windows\command;c:\windows
set tmp=c:\temp
set temp=c:\temp

and if your sound card requires EMM386.EXE, also add the following to your CONFIG.SYS file;

device=c:\windows\himem.sys
device=c:\windows\emm386.exe noems novcpi

In order to save yourself a huge amount of rebooting and shouting at your equipment I would recomend you use a PCI Creative Sound Blaster card as DOS drivers are freely available and though no longer supported by the company, there are lots of forums and sites with tips on getting them to work if you hit trouble.

One such site I found invaluable was this one and there are excellent tips there. such as this;

If you plan to run MAME in pure dos you will most likely have to run the DOS initialisation application which comes with your soundcard drivers. This allows DOS to hook into the soundcards interrupt.

Some PCI soundcards, like the Pine CS4281 card do not have a DOS installation program. Instead, the drivers are installed via Windows. The DOS drivers are then installed and can be copied to your DOS configuration.

whatever your sound card and configuration, you will need the following line (or something very similar) in AUTOEXEC.BAT

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T2

This sets the sound blaster environment whre

A220 is the I/O Port address
I5 is the IRQ or Interrupt number
D1 is the DMA IRQ number
T2 is the Soundblaster type (or emulation mode)

The card I used is an Ensoniq AudioPCI and even on a different system it would require different settings so they really are individual to you, and I had a lot of trouble getting this to work.

Basically what I had to do was to disable all the hardware that I wasn’t using in the BIOS. This included things built onto the motherboard such as the serial port, the parallel port, the USB ports, the modem and the on board sound card. To get the best functionality out of these settings I flashed the BIOS with the latest version which will sometimes allow you to manually specify what IRQ a piece of hardware will use.

The reason I did that is to minimise the number of hardware conflicts and problems that my sound card settings would cause, and then any issues I was having should be easier to solve. For me this involved what seemed like a never ending cycle of booting, getting an error, typing

edit autoexec.bat

making changes and rebooting. I know the pain of an annoying BIOS beep. It hurts.

The settings in question are explained well here

There can be no space between the word BLASTER and the = or the parameter will be read incorrectly, and some of these parameters (P, H, and E) are dependant on certain types of card. Some of the parameters are optional, for example, I just have the minimum requirements of A, I, D, & T configured and the other three may or may not be needed depending on what type of card you have.

The Port Address is almost always 220 but the IRQ is something that varies from system to system. The DMA sometimes causes problems if it isn’t set to 1 and can cause a system halt. The Type should be 1 if you have an older Soundblaster, or a Sound Blaster emulating card, 3 for a newer plain Soundblaster, 2 for an older Soundblaster Pro or 4 for a newer Soundblaster Pro.

All this fannying around though is truly worth it in the end. Not perhaps so I could go down to my local boozer and tell everybody that I got sound working in DOS, but I did feel a bit chuffed when it worked. What better way to celebrate then and test it fully than hitting www.486games.net and downloading a classic DOS game such as Prince Of Persia or the excellent Overlord?

Next time: Autoexec.phat

Then again it could be in binary, in which case this is part 1 of 7.

Or Hexadecimal, in which case …….

OK, well before I got my cab I started on the PC build to get that side of it set up. Initially I tried using an old Dell Optiplex P3 450 but it wasn’t quite powerful enough although it ran almost silently. It was just to slow when launching games so I had to use a P3 800 instead. I put a 256 and a 128 MB stick of RAM in and a 10 Gigabyte Hard Drive and then the fun started.

The first job was obviously to format the drive so I chose a Partition Magic boot cd to do that with, just 1 10 Gigabyte partition filling the whole disk.

Next I installed MS-DOS 7.10 from 2 floppy disks which is surprisingly quick, especially if you’ve ever installed MS-DOS 6.22 before.

Once I had a working DOS system I simply used another PC to burn a CD containing DOS MAME and any other MAME files such as samples and artwork etc. I also put ArcadeOS on the disk too, but didn’t run it just yet.

Another file I discovered I needed (as with most other things through trial and error when it didn’t work) was one called CWSDPMI.EXE. This helps the primitive DOS system to manage its RAM usage better and MAME will come up with an error without it. I copied it to the MAME folder, though when I did that, MAME still ran with an error so I copied it to the root of the C Drive as well and it was fine.

The first thing to test is that MAME actually runs, and to do that change to the MAME directory with the command

cd mame

then run a game with the command

dmame 1943

MAME will ask what sound card you have but as I hadn’t set it up yet I had to select 0 for no sound but the game should run just fine without it.

This is where I hit a bit of a problem because when I ran a game, the disk would begin to thrash and the game would take a bit too long to run. After a bit of Googling (yes, it’s a verb, deal with it, move on) I came to the conclusion that it was because I had formatted the hard drive with a 4kb cluster size.

What this means is that each cluster can only hold a tiny bit of data so to run a game the hard disk has to patch together the data from lots of clusters and it degrades performance. I decided to run my Partition Magic boot disk again and change the cluster size. I changed it to 64kb and rebooted.

Oops, no dice. it failed to boot after not finding the operating system.

Once again I was regaled with the splendour of installing DOS again. DOS installation and I would become good bedfellows.

I came to the conclusion that DOS didn’t like 64kb clusters so changed it to 32kb and things went swimmingly, after copying MAME and its supplementary files over to the hard drive again and ArcadeOS as well.

Once I had tested MAME again, I decided to test ArcadeOS to see if it would successfully launch the same game. Obviously, if it doesn’t the fault is clearly with ArcadeOS rather than MAME.

To be honest though, this part of the whole setup was easy, and ArcadeOS just worked right from the word go. I never had any problem getting it to run other than when I tried to launch the executable from C:\ rather than C:\ArcadeOS, it came up with a license file error even when I added the C:\ArcadeOS directory to the paths line in my config.sys file. What this does is specifies at boot up that if you run a command that can’t be found in your current directory it will search those directories in the paths line for it and run it from there for you.

Next time: sound.

Once more into the fray then.

The emulator MAME has a standard set of inputs, for example, pressing 5 will insert a coin (credit), pressing 1 will begin a 1 player game and pressing 2 will begin a 2 player game. Movement is controlled using the keyboard’s cursor keys, up for up, down for down etc.
Fire button 1 is mapped to the CTRL key, Fire button 2 to the Alt key, Fire button 3 to the Space Bar and Fire button 4 to Left SHIFT.

This means if you run MAME on your own PC those are the keys you would use for each game, some games using as many as 8 Fire buttons or even 2 joysticks for a 1 player game such as Robotron or Battlezone.

What we need then is some kind of interface between our arcade controls and our PC inputs, the PS/2 or USB sockets.

The way this used to happen is that you would plug your keyboard into the computer but you would hack into it and solder a connection between your Player 1 Fire button 1 and the CTRL key. Then you would solder a connection between your coin slot and the keyboard’s 5 key, and so on and so on.

The problem with this is that it can get very messy very quickly and is ever so slightly annoying if your keyboard breaks.

Enter the I-Pac.

The I-Pac is a small PCB (Printed Circuit Board) which takes the place of the hacked keyboard and sits between your controls and your PC. Each press of a fire button or directional movement on the joystick triggers one of these, a microswitch which is obviously connected to the I-Pac.

If you look at the top right of the I-Pac you will see a connector labelled GND (ground) this must be connected to the bottom contact of each microswitch in the cabinet. It can be daisy chained around each one and does not need returning to the I-Pac. Once that is done, you will see that the next connector is labelled 2RGHT. This must be connected to the right direction microswitch on the Player 2 joystick. The next one is 2LEFT which goes to the left direction microswitch and so on and so on.

I made a temporary control panel to use until I got my arcade cabinet and as well as being functional it was also a valuable learning experience, though it wasn’t going to win any glamour prizes. Here is a picture of the underside showing all the controls connected to the I-Pac which you can see near the top right, and here is what it looks like from the top.

You can see that when finished it looks a bit daunting with the number of wires but it really is quite simple to do if you take it a step at a time.

Now it is just a matter of plugging in a cable from the I-Pac to the computer. There is also a keyboard pass through port so you can plug a keyboard in to allow you to configure the PC when necessary.

That’s it. The basics of arcade controls in a nutshell. Now I really must get onto keeping up with the diary of the build.

I went to pick up the Solitaire Challenge cab that was offered to me for free and it now takes pride of place in my garage.

Some of it on the floor, some on a shelf, some in a box.

Yes, I stripped it down and it is now ready for a cosmetic makeover before it gets rebuilt.

Along with the cab I was also given a couple of bags of spare parts, lots of buttons, 4 joysticks and assorted adaptors and converters etc etc.

Anyway, I will soon begin the diary aspect of this whole shenanigans and keep you up to date with progress, I know you can’t wait.

You’ll also get to appreciate my l337 camera skills as I capture various stages on film.

Now we have a 10 year old beater up and running, what finer way to bring it to life than install a 25 year old Operating System on it?

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!”

Think about an arcade game you played as a youngster, you stood in front of it, you turned it on and it presented you with the game. You put a coin in, pressed Player 1 Start and you played the game.

This process could be repeated almost without fail. Switch on, coin in, press button, play game, switch on, coin in, press button, play game, switch on, coin in, press button, play game.

Now compare that to your experience with computers. Switch on, wait a bit, press some buttons, switch it off and on again, wait a bit more, press some more buttons, kick it, maybe switch it off and on again, finally begin to play your game ……… Aaah, it froze. Switch it off and back on again ….

You get the picture.

Our end goal here is to build a software environment that is stable, that will turn on when we want it to and let us play a game when we want it to, and turn off when we want it to.

As you know, we will be running the emulator MAME on our cabinet, and MAME comes in 3 flavours, DOS, Windows and Linux, so we need to decide which version we will run.

As we know, Windows has a tendency to be a tad unreliable when we need it the most, and over time, it creates lots of system files and lots of little errors, and given long enough will steadily commit suicide. Not only that, but there are services and background processes running all the time, not necessarily doing anything helpful to us, but just trying to keep the system alive and all of these have a performance impact especially on an older PC like the one we are using.

Linux can be hit and miss at the best of times but a good distribution will be perfectly happy running on our old PC, and driver support for old equipment in Linux shouldn’t be a problem. In fact the only real concern when running a Linux box of any description is how well supported we will be should anything go wrong.

I know my way around a Linux system and run one as a workstation at home. It is stable, reliable and easy on resources, but how many people run MAME on Linux? Some obviously, perhaps even a lot, but not as many as run it on Windows or DOS so should it go wrong at some point help may be more difficult to come by.

It also comes down to confidence too, for example, do you know every major file on your Windows system? No way. How could you? Do you know every major file on your Linux system? No way. How could you?

Could you know every major file on a DOS system? Yes, probably, and you’ll have to configure some of them, but as the title for this entry would suggest, I have chosen to go the DOS route and for several reasons.

DOS can be had for free. Legally.
DOS is very stable.
DOS boots up very quickly. Very quickly.
DOS has no hidden background services and processes.
DOS consumes a tiny amount of disk space.
DOS consumes a tiny amount of RAM.
DOS does not slowly commit suicide over time.
DOS does not need to be gracefully shutdown so it can be just powered off.

Why would you want to run anything else?

Now we come to the question that has been nagging you all along. It has, even if you don’t know it. Picture the scene, you stand in front of your arcade cabinet and switch it on, then it presents you with a Windows logon screen, so you get out a keyboard and mouse, dig in your pocket for a 10p coin, and ……

Aaaaaaaaaaarghh!

Fear not, we will NOT be attaching a keyboard and mouse to our game of Space Invaders and we certainly do not want to have to type anything in to get our game to launch, so how do we run games in DOS from a DOS Command Prompt without using DOS Commands?

With a Frontend that’s how.

Normally, to run a game using the DOS version of MAME we would cd (change directory) to the MAME directory and to run the game 1943 with no sound we would enter the command

mame 1943 -nosound

To play the same game with a Creative Sound Blaster sound card, we would enter the command

mame 1943 -soundcard 1

A Frontend is just a GUI (Graphical User Interface) that we can control using simple arcade controls such as directional joysticks and action buttons. The Frontend will browse our game folder for us and list the games it finds on screen, then we can scroll up and down this list with our joystick and it will convert these joystick movements into the relavant commands for us. Then when we want to run a game we press the relevant button and the Frontend will convert that button press into the DOS Command and the game will run.

The Frontend I have chosen to use is a very simple, basic and low resource one called ArcadeOS and it will suit our needs very well.

So we now have the PC hardware and software in place, and a little background knowledge to help us along the way, how difficult can it now be? It’ll be a breeze right?

Hmmm. Next time we will take a quick look at how we go about getting our joystick movements and button presses into our PC in a way that it will understand them, and then we will get down to the nitty gritty and begin configuring things. Sound like your idea of fun?

Nerd!

Only thing is, it’s a long way from my house, but I may be making a trip over that way this month, and the reason? To pick up …….

… one of these. Free.

It is an empty cab which will suit my requirements pretty well as you’ll remember from the first MAME Cab blog entry.

I can get free use of a van so it’s just the little matter of setting aside half a day to go over there and pick it up.

It’s a good looking cab though I would have preferred one with a nice marquee, but as a first build and for free I can’t complain.

Stay tuned to see if I make the trip or not.

You know, it’s amazing the amount of crap you find lying around your home if you look hard enough. I seem to acquire mainly 3 things;

#1 – old computers
#2 – old game consoles
#3 – old mobile phones

Well, among the many rare and extremely valuable computers ….

Sorry, among the crappola I had acquired was a Dell Optiplex that was taking up space and doing nothing, so I decided to make use of it. This Dell had been rescued by me from a builders skip 2 years previously. I had brought it home, booted it up and it worked perfectly. Obviously the first thing I did was to check the My Videos folder to see if there was anything compromising (fully intending to delete it instantly of course). Anyway, I formatted the hard disk and it had sat there for a couple of years waiting to be turned from a dead piece of crap into a working piece of crap.

MAME (especially older versions like the one we will be using) likes to run on certain hardware. It isn’t too fussy about motherboards or RAM or anything like that, it is more to do with graphics cards and sound cards where the issues lie, the favourites being ATI graphics cards and Creative Soundblaster sound cards.

Personally I have had better success with PCI graphics cards than VGA cards but ISA cards (if you ancient PC supports it) can be better still.

MAME will happily run with the on-board graphics on your motherboard but you may find that some of the more graphically intensive games only display in a smaller window if they display at all.

Another thing to bear in mind is the amount of RAM you have in the system. You don’t want your MAME cab to have to start paging so the more RAM you can throw in the better but to be honest 512 MB will be plenty for your needs.

With regard to disk space a relatively small Hard Disk will do, and something around 8 or 10 Gigabytes will be more than sufficient for running classic MAME games. However, once you start to run the newer versions of MAME and more modern games, then the disk space requirements soon begin to increase, For example, one of the latest releases of MAME supports a ROM set of around 40 Gigabytes. Ours will be around 6 Gigabytes.

As for input methods, to set up our system we won’t even need anything so modern and technical as a mouse, because a keyboard will be more than sufficient. Bring on the Command Line, remember that?

It turned out that the Optiplex having only a Pentium 3 450MHz processor was a little underpowered, despite running some games and running them well, it wasn’t powerful enough to run all of them. The same goes for the P3 667MHz unit I had too, so the general rule of thumb for our antiquated version of MAME is a processor of around 800MHz, and lo and behold I had one of those too.

Don’t worry about the Optiplex though, it has been put to good use as a NAS Server running FreeNAS which I can definitely recommend.

So now that you have your parts bin assembled into a working and bootable PC it is time to turn your attention to the software build, and though the software build is also as potentially infuriating as the hardware one, you won’t be cutting the ends of your fingers on crappy old circuit boards any more.

Tune in next week when I will no doubt bestow upon you the delights of configuring a working PC using nothing but the power of the Command Line ….

…. and Google. Lot’s of Google.

So, you got through the first part and you’re ready for more? Not tempted by an application so far, then read on and maybe one of these will tickle your fiancee.

Err…. fancy

GTKPod

I tried GTKPod because I wanted to try an iPod app on my Linux box running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, and GTKPod was the first one I tried. It was a breeze to install using Synaptic Package Manager and it worked.

A bit.

Actually, once I had edited the mount point properly it worked quite well but the trouble was, at that time I was still using Anapod on my PC, and as I mentioned last time Anapod didn’t write the database properly, so other 3rd party apps would be flaky at times and that was the trouble with GTKPod. It would give me errors that related to the database file.

The one time I reinstalled all the music on my iPod using GTKPod and didn’t use anything else for a while it worked great, and other people using it exclusively also report that it works great. Were I only using Linux to manage my iPod I have no doubt that GTKPod would do the job admirably and I recomend it.

It supports artwork, it works with video, it categorizes audiobooks properly if they are m4b files and allows you to edit id3 tags. You can set up sync folders and remove duplicates while uploading and create playlists too. it really is a breeze to use.

It doesn’t support streaming content but that’s not a major blow and I found it to be quite fast too.

Overall I would recomend it, along with something else to download your podcasts as it doesn’t support them, something like gpodder.

Hipo

Hipo was another Linux based app that I tried and I discovered by accident. I was searching through Synaptic just looking for various apps, and when I searched for “iPod” Hipo was among the results.

Hipo is quite early on in its development, and the versions I used (0.4 and 0.5) showed that. It doesn’t support streaming and is just a means of updating your iPod with audio and nothing else.

It supports playlists, editing id3 tags and artwork, but despite looking, I couldn’t find a way to update the artwork for multiple tracks. That presents a problem because editing the artwork for 20 tracks individually is a bind. Editing the artwork for 5,000 is nobody’s idea of fun.

Not even a Linux enthusiast.

Does it work?
Yes

Is it good?
If you require only limited functionality.

Honestly, if you’re using Linux, use GTKPod.

Yamipod

Now we are getting down to it. YamiPod is one of those apps with a version for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, so if you are using any or all these platforms you can stick with the same app across the board.

These kind of apps create a folder for themselves in your iPod_Control folder, so if you set an option in the preferences on the Windows version, that same option will be set in the other versions when you run them. It’s more like running one app with 3 different front ends rather than 3 different apps.

This makes them truly portable as they will run from your iPod itself and on any machine. You may have problems on some of the later model iPods but it worked for me on my 5th Generation iPod video.

Yamipod will let you do all the usual stuff like manage audio content in MP3 and AAC format and edit playlists, and as well as these standard things it also supports some iPod specific tasks such as creating notes and updating play counts and song ratings.

As a bonus it will also let you stream audio content from your iPod through the host computer.

Incidentally Yamipod was the program that told me my database had been corrupted by a third party application, but I can’t really go into too much more detail about Yamipod because I didn’t use it for very long. Soon after I tried it I found another, and in my opinion, better app. If my current favourite lets me down or a future release of Yamipod provides some feature that I can’t get elsewhere I’ll go back to it.

That would appear to be a recomendation in my book.

Floola

So, the final entry in this fascinating instalment of my prosaic meanderings would appear to herald the appearance of the victor. The winner to the rest of you.

Like Yamipod, Floola also creates its own folder in your iPod_Control folder and has a front end for Windows, Linux and Mac, so all your settings are universal.

Like the best of the rest it allows you to create sync folders and add either single files or folder heirarchies recursively, editing the id3 tags as you add them or later once they are on your iPod.

Where it differs from others is that it not only supports videos but it will allow you to categorise your them as things like TV Shows, Movies or Video Podcasts.

Speaking of Podcasts (see what I did there?) it is actually a decent Podcast tool. You can set it to completely automate the process by doing things like checking and downloading the latest episodes and deleting previous ones already transferred, or you can choose to manually manage them yourself.

You can easily add, remove or edit artwork for single or multiple files, and navigating around the content by genre, artist or album is easy and quite fast too. In fact I find that the app in general is quite fast, even with an almost full 30 Gigabyte iPod Video.

Using Floola you can play your iPod content through the host computer very easily, and this includes videos as well as audio. You can create and edit playlists easily and create notes too.

If you should come across a problem with your iPod, Floola will allow you to repair it with its own tools. It will ask you several questions such as whether or not the problem was caused by Floola, and based on your answers it will restore your database file from either one of its own backups or from the one iTunes created before you started to use Floola.

Now, remember back to what must seem like 3 years ago when I listed my requirements and optional features, and I listed artwork as an optional? Well, Floola did cause me some problems here, but they were minimal and are listed in the things to fix in future versions. The problem is that Floola does not write the artwork database properly on certain models of iPod, and my 5th Gen iPod Video is one of the troublesome ones.

What happens is that the artwork gets added properly but then when you are playing your content later you will either get the wrong artwork displayed or a corrupted image, and because of this I had no option but to delete the artwork for all my albums. Should this bug be fixed in a future version then I can easily add my artwork again.

So, despite this glitch, we clearly have a winner. Floola.

I can add, edit and delete audio and video.
I can add, edit and delete podcasts.
I can add, edit and delete playlists.
I can add, edit and delete artwork.
I can add, edit and delete notes.
I can stream my iPod content via the host computer.
I don’t need to maintain an idle media library.
I can run the same program with the same settings on both major platforms (and Mac too).
I have yet to see it crash and burn on any platform so it would appear to be very stable.
Oh, and it’s free.

I think that meets my requirements, which almost brings to a close my series of iTunes bashing blogathons. Almost but not quite. All that remains is to explain why you should never, not ever, buy a single song from the iTunes Music Store.

Beware, it is acronymtastic but with my laid back and easy reading prosaic style it will be a breeze and a pleasure to get through.

(I know. I used the word prosaic twice in one blog entry). Damn that’s three times now.

Anyway, toodle pip for now.

So, what’s so bad about iTunes? Why don’t I use it and what do I use instead without having to sacrifice functionality?

Read on, it’s great.

Honest.

Prerequisites

So, as all you long term readers of my fantastic blog are aware, I made the switch from using any old portable media player to using an iPod, but the problem was, I don’t like some of the functionality that comes with the iPod, and I like even less the software that comes with them. Or rather, should I say, used to come with them as you now have to go out and download it yourself because they can’t be bothered to include it in the packaging.

Anyway, there were a few criteria that any application I was going to use with my iPod had to fulfill, and those criteria were that it must:
(1) be portable just like the iPod itself so I can run it on different machines.
(2) not be platform specific as I use Windows, Linux and occasionally Mac.
(3) support Drag and Drop so I can don’t have to carry around a media library.
(4) support adding Video as well as Audio.
(5) be stable.

There were also a few other criteria that were desirable but not essential, and those were that it should:
(1) allow streaming of content through the host computer.
(2) support album artwork.
(3) categorise podcasts and videos for easy browsing later.

So, how did they all measure up?

Let’s find out.

iTunes

There’s nothing like a little lightweight, low resource app for managing your media, and iTunes is nothing like a little lightweight low resource app for managing your media. It’s a hog. A 50 Meg download that consumes a whole lot more once installed, and that’s if you can find a version that doesn’t have some other crappy software attached to it.

If I want to install iTunes, I just want iTunes, I don’t want it bundled with Quick Time Player, so if you install it and then uninstall the attached Quick Time Player, guess what? iTunes will stop working. Yeah, thanks Apple, your crappy Quick Time Player is so bad that the only way you can get people to use it is to attach it like a limpet to iTunes which you tell people they have to use with their iPod.

Already we’re off to a brilliant start here, but it gets worse. The biggest problem I have with iTunes is that I would have to maintain a media library for it, so if I use a 30 Gig iPod I could be required to have 30 Gig of music and video just sat there on a machine doing nothing but waiting.

I do actually maintain a media library but I keep it on a Server attached to my network which allows me to stream content around my home and beyond. Plus, I like to be in control of things like that rather than allowing some errant software to have its wicked way with my carefully constructed folder structure. I know every file and folder on my media server because I put it there, and I don’t want anything moving it, renaming it or deleting it.

Anyway, aside from this issue, there is another, iTunes does not like you transferring your iPod from one machine to another and transferring music among them all which as you remember is one of my prerequisites. In fact, iTunes finds this so disdainful that it will kindly offer to format your iPod for you if you so wish.

Why thank you.

I am never going to buy content from the iTunes Music Store for reasons discussed elsewhere in this blog, so we are not going to cover that aspect here, but despite the bad press, iTunes does some things very well so it would only be fair for me to outline them here because for the short time that I used it, it didn’t let me down in these respects.

Once running, it is easy to subscribe to a podcast and have it automatically downloaded and transferred for you. Importantly it will be listed in your iPod under the Podcasts category where you can easily find it later.

If you are transferring videos it will also sort these into the correct video category for you too, something which not many others I have tried will do.

If you wish to add album artwork to your collection and have it shown on your iPod then iTunes is more than able to cope with that and make a good job of it. It is also fairly simple to edit the artwork for an entire album rather than having to edit individual tracks.

If you wish, iTunes will also make your library available for playing on the host computer, not surprising really, as that is where your library has to sit doing nothing. It is also available to stream over a network too which can be handy.

So, most of my criteria have been met here but not all, and crucially not the ones that matter the most, and make no mistake about it, iTunes is a resource hog, my advice is switch on your computer, double click the iTunes icon then go and make a nice cup of tea, maybe even have a relaxing soak in the bath, and by the time you return, there’s a good chance it will be up and running.

Slowly.

Anapod Explorer

I like Anapod Explorer, I liked it so much I bought it, and I don’t often buy software when there are other free alternatives available, but it did what I wanted and I liked it, but it soon became problematic, and I wanted something quicker and easier.

Oh, and more stable.

Anapod needs to be installed on a PC and runs on Windows only, but if you buy it you can use it on multiple machines so that wasn’t a problem. If you wish it to integrate into the Windows shell it gives you the option during the install which means that you will see it show up the right click menu. If you have a folder or file(s) that you want to transfer, just right click on it and use the “Send To iPod” option. This is recursive too, so you can select the parent folder, and all subfolders will be included.

Now, this is why I mentioned stability. Adding content in this way was hit and miss for me. On one machine it worked unless I added a large number of files at a time when it would freeze. On another machine it didn’t work at all, even following reinstalls.

The most common way to add content in Anapod is truly drag n drop, just drag the relevant file(s) folder(s) into the window and they will be transferred.

One thing that Anapod does not do is support podcasts. It won’t subscribe to them or download them, but it will add them for you if you download them manually, but the problem with this is that they are added as ordinary mp3s so they no longer show up on your iPod as podcasts, they just appear as normal music tracks. This problem presented me with a workaround that became a bind and is ultimately what drove me to use a different application.

I had to use Juice to subscribe to and download Podcasts, then use Tagedit to alter the id3tags then they all showed up on my iPod together by the artist Podcasts and on the album Podcast. Another way to easily find them later for playing is to create a playlist when you add them which Anapod supports, but then when you want to delete them later, you have to scroll through your list to find them then, so you may as well edit the tags and have them all in one place.
Once edited, Anapod did have a neat feature which allowed me to transfer them easily. I created a folder called Anapod Sync and in there created a shortcut to each Juice folder I wanted to add, and once in Anapod just click the Speed Sync button and they would all be transferred.

Another good feature of Anapod is it’s artwork support, but be aware that this is a double edged sword. If you have a folder full of mp3s and an image file in that folder called folder.jpg, when you play one of the mp3s in most programs, they will display folder.jpg as the album artwork. Try it in Windows Media Player and see for yourself. Well you can tell Anapod that when you add a folder of music, to use the file folder.jpg in that same folder as the artwork for that album. Easy.

Now, I said it was a double edged sword, and here’s why. When you close Anapod and eject your iPod it updates the artwork database, and this can take a while especially with 30 Gigabytes of music. If you forget to properly eject your iPod then this syncronising won’t take place, and your 30 Gigabytes of artwork is screwed. This happened to me several times and I lost all my artwork which was a little bit annoying after the second time, but after 3 or 4 it becomes a little more than that.

This is what made me decide that future artwork support was an option rather than a necessity, I mean, how long do you stare at your iPod when listening to it? Once you have selected a track, 5, 10 or 15 seconds later the backlight goes off and it returns to the Now Playing screen anyway. This is even less of an issue when you are listening in the car like I mainly was. it is a nice feature to have as an option if it works, but if it doesn’t, c’est la vie.

Anapod has one more ace up its sleeve though, and that is it’s streaming capabilities, just turn on Xstream and allow access for everyone or certain users then in your web browser got to either http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 and the player windows is displayed, allowing you to stream any of your music collection from your iPod. the beauty of this is that if you know your computer’s ip address you can access the player from anywhere on the network. Sadly, this doesn’t include video content, but the audio streaming works really well.

So, over all Anapod is an OK application with a few hangups and I believe bad customer support though I never experienced it, but it did also cause me a further problem even after I stopped using it. When I tried to use some of the programs listed below, they came up with errors, and one of them told me the specific error was caused by a 3rd party application corrupting the music database. That 3rd party application was Anapod.

Oops.

Well, this has gone on long enough for one blog entry. Not even Stephen Fry’s blessays are this long, apart from maybe the first one.

The second one was quite long too.

Come to think of it, his blessays are all quite long.

Anyway, this is the end of this one, and the concluding part will appear as if by magic later.

Anyway, welcome aboard, here we go.

So, hands up who has never been in a Video Game Arcade as a kid and marveled at the sights, sounds and even the smells therein.

Thought not, so that’s why I wanted to build my very own arcade cabinet, but not featuring just a single game like Space Invaders or Pacman, but every game that I used to love playing in the arcades.

Every year my family would go on holiday to Looe, Cornwall and as luck would have it they took me with them. There in the town, right on the harbour itself was an amusement arcade I would go into and hear the sounds and see the sites that seemed so familiar. All the classics that I loved to play were there; Space Invaders, Pacman, Asteroids, Defender, Donkey Kong, Scramble and Rally X, and I would put 10p after 10p into them, so I wanted to build my own machine that would allow me to play these same games at home.

I didn’t want to just sit down at a desk and use a PC mouse and keyboard to play them though, I wanted the real deal, a complete upright arcade cabinet, so I set about devising a plan.

The build will consist of 2 main parts;
(1) The physical cabinet build itself.
(2) The computer that will sit inside it and run everything.

As of yet, I don’t have a cabinet to use and I have 2 options really.
(i) Build my own from scratch.
(i) Buy an old arcade cabinet that is either no longer in use or is in need of restoration.

The trouble with a new build, either from my own plans or from buying a flatpack kit, is that I want the real feel of authenticity that an original cab will give me, and after all we are on a nostalgia kick here.

The trouble with buying an old one is preservation. If I buy an old one that still has its original game working inside it, I think it should be preserved and restored where possible, so to rip them out and replace them with a PC would be sacrilegious. Cabinets like that should be restored to their former glory, so what I am looking for is either a cab that no longer runs or one that has got no internals left inside it.
One that has its workings but no longer runs would be the better option I think, as some internals may be reusable and of use to somebody, so I could see them go to a new home and be used as nature intended. That is if nature ever built an arcade cabinet. Doubtful.

Before I manage to pick up a cab though, I can be proceeding with the actual PC build as I had a couple of old desktops lying around doing nothing so I wanted to put them to good use. Specification wise the PC doesn’t have to be a high end performance machine as we are only going to be running 20 year old games on it, so an old Pentium machine which is what I had would be fine. Space wise, the build is only going to consume around 8 Gigabytes, so an old hard drive will suffice too. The only prerequisites we really need to worry about are the sound card and the graphics card.

The sound card ideally needs to be a Creative Sound Blaster as they have the driver support we are looking for, and the graphics card is admittedly an optional extra, but using on board graphics may mean that we don’t always get the performance that some games may require. In particular, ATI cards are well supported and will suit our needs. I also happened to have one of those lying around too, so all the more reason to use it.

So how do we go about getting our old beater to run the much loved arcade games?
An emulator is how. One called M.A.M.E.

Emulators are software programs that recreate hardware environments, so for example an original arcade machine would be made of physical hardware such as circuit boards and chips and the games would be hard coded onto these chips and boards. “However, the game Scramble’s board was especially easy to “re-use” and several games were hacked to play on it. A long-running joke with MAME enthusiasts is that anything can be run on Scramble hardware. Ironically, Scramble itself was hacked to play on Galaxian hardware!” [source] but by design many were not interchangeable so would only play one game. The changing of boards was mainly brought about when new games were released, but the arcade owners didn’t want to buy a machine. Instead they would hack a game to run on one of their existing machines.

An emulator recreates all of this bespoke hardware but does it in software, and it recreates all the hardware, so a single emulator can recreate the boards for every cab and allow us to play every game.

The emulator we will be using is called MAME which stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and is perhaps one of the most used and most famous of all emulators. As such, it is very well supported and documented and has a long history of builds. The beauty of this is that if you want to emulate some of the more modern games you can use a more recent build installed on a higher end machine, but for our purposes here, we will be playing mainly the old classic games so we can use an old MAME build on older hardware.

That is the emulated hardware covered, so what about the games themselves? The game files that the emulator uses are called ROM files (Read Only Memory) and as is customary when mentioning ROMs I’ll now type a meandering an unspecific diatribe about the legality of using them.

Remember when blank audio cassettes first came out? Me neither, but at that time the record industry attempted to have them banned because people were buying vinyl albums and using a cassette tape to record them to listen to elsewhere such as in their car. You had bought the album and owned the album, but the record company wanted you to buy the cassette version as well so they said it was illegal to copy something you owned and took the matter to court.

They lost and people everywhere recorded their vinyl albums to listen to in their car.

The same thing is true of Video Games and other similar technologies like music CDs, though you will be told otherwise again by the record companies. Let’s say you buy a CD and listen to it every day until one day it has got so scratched and damaged that it has become unplayable. You have to buy it again. That’s paying twice for the same thing. Well, here’s what you should be legally able to do.

You buy a CD or a game, take it home and make a copy of it, then place the original in safe storage. You can’t sell it on or give it away, you must keep hold of it as you own it. You now play this copy every day until it also becomes so scratched and damaged that it is unplayable. At this point you destroy the copy, do not sell it or give it away, destroy it and get your pristine original out of safe storage and make another copy of it for everyday use.

Well, the idea is the same with MAME ROMs it’s just that the technology is different. If you own a Space Invaders arcade cabinet, you can own a ROM file for Space Invaders, and the company Atari have even made some of their ROM files available for purchase in the past, but nobody owns every arcade game cabinet, so what about ROMs for games you don’t own?

Well, Wikipedia has this to say about it. The full quotes can be found in this article.

Freely licensed ROMs
The vast majority of computer & video games from the history of such games are no longer manufactured. As such, the copyright holders of some games have offered free licenses to those games, often on the condition that they be used for non-commercial purposes only.

Unlicensed ROMs
While some games which no longer make any profit fit into the category above, the vast majority are no longer available in any form. The legality of obtaining such games varies from country to country. Some countries have special exceptions in copyright laws or case law which permit (or discourage less) copying when an item is not available for legal purchase or when the copying is for non-commercial or research purposes, while other countries may make such practises firmly illegal. There is often a distinction drawn between distribution and downloading, with distribution being seen as the greater offence.

Abandonware
It is often the case that games which are still in copyright are no longer sold or marketed by their copyright holders. This may be due to the perceived lack of demand for the game or for other reasons. Some of those engaged in ROM trading claim that such games should be deemed abandoned by their copyright holders and that the game, termed Abandonware, can be freely traded by users.

Commercial distribution
Commercial distribution of copyrighted games without the consent of the copyright holder is generally illegal in almost all countries, with those who take part in such activities being liable for both criminal and civil penalties.

24 hours claim
Some ROM websites claim it is legal to download and keep a ROM of a game one doesn’t own for as long as 24 hours, after which it is one’s responsibility to delete it. Although this claim is widespread, it has no basis in the law.

Enforcement
Many have argued that it would be irrational for a company to spend money prosecuting for games that they are no longer making profit from, as there would be no damages to speak of. Even so, this has not deterred Nintendo from pursuing a number of lawsuits against ROM distribution websites via non-profit subsidiaries.

So, now you’re familiar with MAME and ROMs we need to think about what Operating System we are going to run on our old beater, but more importantly how we are going to control it when it is inside the cabinet.

Tune in again for the next gripping instalment and a story so far where we’ll discover just what a ball ache it can be messing around with old computers.

During my intense and gripping investigations I heard this word podcast. Podcast……. What is a podcast?

WOW! Apple must have invented this brand new technology right?

Wrong, but you wouldn’t know it.

A Podcast is basically a radio show that is not broadcast over the radio waves, but instead is streamed over, or downloaded from, the Internet, but the beauty of the Podcast is that, unlike the vinyl album I mentioned previously, you don’t have to trudge all the way physically from your house to the shop to get it. You don’t even have to trudge virtually from your desk to the relevant website. The Podcast is delivered to you automatically once you subscribe to the RSS Feed.

RSS Feed?

Yes, the RSS Feed. Whenever there is a new show recorded, it is placed on the website and the RSS Feed is updated, then the show is delivered to you, or to be more precise to your RSS Reader.

The casual listener would assume that this is a new technology discovered by Apple themselves, after all, perhaps nowadays one of the most famous RSS readers is iTunes. Far from it, RSS feeds have been around since the early days of the internet and were originally used for things like news headlines, and still are of course. The only difference is that those ancient RSS feeds now have audio and video content within them.

Now because I’m down wiv da kidz I had to get in on this brand new phenomenon and after looking at some of the most popular Podcasts, I decided on a few that I would listen to. Now, this was pretty much the turning point, and the point at which owning a player other than an iPod would begin to become a problem for me. Not a problem so much as an inconvenience really, but there is a point at which the inconvenience becomes too much.

The thing is I would listen to Podcasts at home, in the car, on the toliet or on holiday, and I would download them and transfer them to my player using different computers and even different Operating Systems both at work and at home. However I was going to do this, it had to be convenient.

Yes, I did say on the toilet. Go figure.

Using the Creative, I was only able to transfer Podcasts using Windows as there is no other client application, so my Linux machine at home was out. I could use any Windows machine which meant installing the Creative transfer client on my home and work machines. Not great but not really a problem as it gave me the next best thing to Drag n Drop, i.e. I didn’t need to maintain a media library like iTunes does. If I wanted a file or an album on my player, I transferred it using the client and could delete it from my computer.

So how would I listen to the Podcasts? Well, when I was at home, walking around with headphones on was not convenient, so I needed a pair of speakers that would use the headphone socket on the player. After trying a £3 pair with no built in amplifier, I bought a set of these which did have an amplifier in and were plenty loud enough, but of course that amplifier needed powering somehow. The speakers didn’t come with a mains adaptor but did come with a USB adaptor that could power them, yet I failed to see the sense in that. If I could plug them into a USB slot, why not just listen to the podcast on the PC instead?

Battery power was more convenient in that respect, but the damn things would always seem to run out when it was least convenient, plus you had the added consideration of ensuring that the player itself had enough battery life in it. Maintaining battery life in 2 devices is double the trouble and we’re going for convenience here.

In the car an easy solution would have been a line in socket on my car radio but I didn’t have one of those, so I had to buy one of these instead. It plugs into the headphone jack on the player, and transmits the sound using an FM signal on 1 of 4 preset frequencies which you then tune your car radio into and the sound comes through your car’s speaker system. The problem with this solution was two fold in that I drive into Manchester every day which has lots of local radio stations, some of which occupy the same frequencies that my transmitter used so every so often my player would get drowned out. You can buy models with a fully adjustable frequency range rather than 4 presets like these, but once again our old friend battery life raises its ugly head. Again you are maintaining batteries in 2 devices which again is inconvenient. It may not sound too inconvenient, but I was doing this every day, and it became a bind. An annoyance I could well do without, and that wasn’t the half of it.

I was forced into several steps in order to get this radical new content onto my Creative player and organized how I wanted it. You see I wanted all the podcasts together rather than searching through the long list of artists and albums for each show while I was driving, so I wanted them all to show up as being by the artist Podcast and on the Album Podcast, and that meant me following 3 steps which consisted of;

(1) downloading the podcast
(2) changing the id3 tags
(3) copying the podcast to my player.

Whoa! id3tag?

Yep, there’s another new term. Basically an id3tag is information contained within a music file which gives us metadata about it such as the Artist, Album, Year, Genre etc. Most modern players organize music using these tags rather than the actual filenames.

So, Step 1 was easy while I only listened to a couple of Podcasts a week, I could virtually trudge all the way down to the website and manually download them, but once I started to listen to half a dozen or so, this became far too laborious and I had to find an RSS reader that would do it for me. The one I settled on was called Juice. I still use it today for some things and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in such a program.

It was so simple, run Juice, add an RSS feed and it would go out and pull down a complete episode listing for you. If you wished it would download them all or just the ones you selected. Once subscribed to a feed, just run the program and it does the rest, downloading the Podcasts to a folder within My Documents.

Once that was taken care of I had to change the id3tags so that the artist and album for each was Podcast, or I actually used ZPodcast so they would be right at the bottom of the list and if I searched upwards, they would be the first artist/album I found. To do that I used a simple and free program called Tagedit.

Step 3 was easy and was just a case of using the creative client as normal.

While the software and editing issues weren’t major, the daily problems of batteries and portability and losing FM signals got to be an annoyance, and in the end it was just so much easier to bite the bullet and buy an iPod. At home I could either play it through speakers or one of these, and conveniently, if I plugged it in at the same time it would charge my iPod erradicating the battery problem. With a standard usb lead it would also allow me to connect it to a PC without the bespoke iPod lead.

In the car I could play it through one of these, which is an FM transmitter with an adjustable FM signal, and conveniently it takes its power from the iPod, so there is no need to worry about charging it. What could be simpler?

Well, finding a piece of software I preferred to Itunes, that’s what.

Tune into the next gripping installment to find out about iTunes and it’s alternatives. Just don’t tell Apple about it.

PICK n MIX

At the side of me was an iPod, a 30GigaByte iPod Video to be precise. It belonged to my Brother In Law so I picked it up and started to scroll through the list of albums on it. I had used an iPod before but not very much, yet I found scrolling through the menus became almost second nature very quickly. I work in the IT industry but I just about managed to stop myself before I said “Nice interface.” That would have made me a geek, and only my wife thinks I’m a geek.

I found an album I wanted to listen to and hit Play. Three and a half minutes later the “album” finished. I investigated and found that it only contained one song. I scrolled through and found another one, a better one, this time it was James Brown, now I could listen to a James Brown album for ….. another three and a half minutes apparently. That too only contained one song.

I reported the fact that I thought his iPod was broken but he informed that no, in fact it wasn’t broken, he had only bought one James Brown song.

I picked up my Creative Zen again and found my own James Brown Greatest Hits album. It lasted much longer on a Creative than on an iPod.

Another bonus was that nobody wanted to mug me for my player but I’m sure I caught people looking at him with envious eyes. He did have white earbuds in after all. WOW! He had an iPod. Little did they know all his songs were missing.

I left my Creative Zen NX on my sunbed while I went for a swim. Nobody laughed at it, but nobody stole it either.

I was happy with my Zen, I liked my Zen, I used my Zen a lot. I would soon use it even more. When I got home I began to look into this whole iPod thing and found that in comparison they were quite pricey. I found that if the battery lost it’s ability to charge which they seemed to do quite a lot, it meant you should buy a new iPod, and why not, a new model came out every year.

So why did he have so many songs missing? How could he only buy one song and have it masquerade as a full album? Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The iTunes Music Store.

There is officially (according to Apple at least) only one way to put your music onto your iPod, and that is via the software iTunes. iTunes has the market pretty much cornered. If you have an iPod you need iTunes. If you have iTunes you need an iPod. iPods “officially” work with no other software, and iTunes works with no other player.

Built into iTunes is the iTunes Music Store which is a web based frontend for purchasing music online. You open iTunes, go to the Music Store, browse for the music you want to buy and pay for it online whence it will be downloaded to your computer and stored within the iTunes database. From there you can choose whether or not to add it to your iPod.

*** GEEK ALERT ***

We shall return to this particular part of iTunes a little later, but when we do you had better get your acronym hat on. T.T.F.N.

*** END OF GEEK ALERT ***

The reason that so many songs are missing from iPods, is that you buy songs not by the album but individually. You can buy a song for 99p or you can buy the album for a fixed price. So what do people do? They hand pick songs they want from the album and ignore our old friend The Album Track. This is a good thing then right? No. It isn’t. It is a bad thing, a very bad thing.

Chris Evans said many things while working at Radio 1, but the one thing he said that made any sense is that musicians make most of their money from touring and very little from CD Album sales, and even less from CD Single sales. If you want to support a Band you like you should go and see them live and buy their albums. That was said before what I consider to be the death of the Singles Charts too.

The Singles Charts used to mean something because people used to care about what was number one. That was because to get to number 1 you had to have a record that was not only more popular than any other around at the time but better than any other around at the time. you also had to outsell everybody else. If your song was very good and became very popular you could stay at number 1 for a prolonged period. That meant you were on the TV show Top Of The Pops that week.

Aaah, Top Of The Pops, remember that? The show that fashion forgot. The U.S. was no better off than the U.K. in that regard either. Remember Casey Kasem and America’s Top 40? Sure you do. Kasey Casem was on at what can only be termed Prime Time for drunks. Around 2am on a Saturday if memory serves. Right after Sledgehammer. You went out Friday night, came in steaming drunk, watched The Hitman and Her if you could stand it, watched Sledgehammer thinking you were cool because you loved a show that wasn’t mainstream, then just as you were slipping into your alcohol fuelled slumber, you were awoken by Casey Kasem and his awful home knitted sweaters presenting the most mediocre Middle Of The Road crappy music you’d ever heard.

Too tired to get up and turn the TV off, you would nod off and dream the dreams of a 6 foot, 185 pound, mulleted American living the American Dream. Driving his Crown Victoria back home to Soccer Mom who would have the Meatloaf ready and waiting for him to eat in front of the TV while he watched the game.

No, Top Of The Pops got scrapped because people no longer watched it, because people no longer cared about the singles charts. Oh you will hear that it just got phased out due to the competition from channels like MTV and VH1, but that’s just sour grapes. Are those channels accessible to everybody in the UK? No. they are not, people just don’t care about Singles any more, and the reason for that is our old friend the Record Companies.

To get to number 1 now, you get the backing track from an old tune (you know, a good one) mix it up a little then get your good looking dancers to sing a few lines over it, then you hype it up. You market it, you let everybody hear a snippet, you send it out to radio stations and send the soft focus Music Video out to the TV Shows, and you release it a few weeks later when everybody under the age of 10 will go out and buy it. Those between 10 and 16 will either buy it when their friends aren’t watching or ask Mummy to buy it for them from Sainsburys.

That marketing scam means your act hits number 1, stays there for a week until people realise the song is crap and it sinks into oiblivion to be replaced at number 1 by the next hyped up tune on the conveyor belt.

Compare the number of singles nowadays that stay at number 1 for 2 weeks to those that stayed there in the past, then compare those that stayed there for 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 17 weeks. See what I mean?

Singles SCHmingles.

Most of the money from Album and Single sales goes into the coffers of the record company. Record Companies like sales, they love sales, they live off sales. That is why they are happy to do business with the iTunes Music Store and allow people to buy songs individually without them even having to press a disc, whether it be on vinyl or CD.

Don’t fall for it, don’t buy your music this way, but not just for financial reason, or even for completeness so that your albums will have every song that the artists intended. There are other very good reasons why you should not but your music from iTunes Music Store, but again I am teasing you with them. I promised earlier that we would return to the issue, and we will. Just not yet, because I’m running the show round here not you. Once again T.T.F.N. (Did you Google what that meant earlier?)

So, I was quite happy to stick with my Creative ZEN thankyou as it suited my purposes because I like to listen to my albums all the way through. Can you believe that some players have a feature that plays the first 10 seconds of a song and then jumps to the next one just in case you don’t like the song it found. Sure I’ll jump ahead to a track occasionally, but not usually, so what would I ever need an iPod for? Nothing right?

Hmm, we’ll see shall we?

I’ll not title them as such, but this one is called how we arrived here.

Sorry, HOW WE ARRIVED HERE.

For a long time now, I have used portable media players of one kind or another, beginning with the cassette based kind, then the CD based kind, then the CD-MP3 based kind and now the Hard Drive variety. I have always been a fan of portable media players and have owned several which have always served me well, but recently, things have changed, and not just for me, but for people in general. The way that we listen to all audio based material, but particularly music, has changed.

Gone are the days of watching and listening to long news programs, we want our headlines delivered in short sound bytes so we can listen and then move on to continue with whatever is so important that we have to do it right now. Our collective attention spans are so short that when we return from a commercial break we have to be reminded of what happened in the previous segment we watched less than 3 minutes ago. Heaven forbid we should go a week between installments of a TV show as the first 5 minutes is taken up refreshing our memories about what happened last week.

“Previously on <insert show here> ……..”

It’s so bad that now even daily shows are doing it. Have you seen Neighbours recently?

e.g.

Show begins, we watch what has happened over preceding shows, we see the opening titles, finally we get to today’s show. Currently it is uninterrupted by commercials as it is shown on the BBC in the UK, but that is about to change and Channel 5 will no doubt insert a convenient ad break before showing us “today’s tidbits.”

Primarily though, in this article at least, we are concerned with audio and its own idiosyncrasies, and that is no different, we have changed the way we listen to our music, and IMO (in my opinion) not for the better.

Remember the days of vinyl? I mean the real days of vinyl. The days when everything came on vinyl and that was how you listened to your music. At home in your lounge, or if you were of the teenage variety, in your bedroom.

What you would do is trudge physically all the way down to the record shop where you would sort through huge racks of empty record sleeves (for those under the age of 20, they were the same size as a pizza). Remember, this was also a time when album artwork really mattered too, and choices could be made on that as well as on the actual music contained within. You would trudge all the way back home again (I know, so lame) where you would remove your pizza sized piece of plastic from the protective sleeve and place it onto your turntable.

You would then take whatever measures were necessary in order to make the needle lower itself onto the revolving plastic and what would ensue would be the first half of the album you just bought. If you were lucky, about 40 minutes worth.

You could sit in your easy chair or if it suited, lie back on your bed, and listen to it. Just listen. You didn’t even have a remote control in your hand. If you wanted to hear that last bit again or skip ahead to another bit, you got up, walked over to the turntable, lifted the needle, placed it on the relevant area of the pizza sized plastic and it played. Often this would be far too much effort and you would just listen to the whole darn thing in its entirety. From start to finish, including that all but forgotten item The Album Track.

The Album Track was that song not quite good enough to unleash on the Top Of The Pops crowd, but good enough to occupy a concentric inch or two on the album. Lots of them proved to be quite pleasing on the ear if given the time and effort required to listen to them. Some even enhanced one’s listening pleasure simply by providing the hypothetical troughs above which the peaks of the Album’s stand out tracks and singles would tower.

So what changed? What turned us from that patient, attentive lot into a race of people whose attention span has all but eradicated the album listening public and turned us into a bunch of Fast Forwarding “Generation Gimme’s?”*

We went digital is what happened, we left analog behind and went digital. We were empowered by the remote control thrust into our outstretched hands. We didn’t even need to get out of our chairs any more. Great!

We had to have what we wanted and we had to have it when we wanted it.

It is our right after all. Isn’t it?

To be continued……….

* A term stolen from Shane R. Monroe, the host of Retrogaming Radio.

Coming Soon

Anyway, enjoy…..