wee doors banging

This weekend I was lucky enough to be able to attend Replay Expo. Held in Norbreck Castle hotel in Blackpool, Replay is a two day video gaming event featuring both classic retro machines and games as well as the latest releases. So. Many. Highlights.

In a recent attic clearance, I discovered a carrier bag full of Amstrad CPC 3″ floppy disks and a drive capable of reading them. I suspected the disks contained programs that I and my brother wrote back in the good ol’ days and, being a nostalgic old fool, I was quite keen to salvage the data from them.

Some time ago I bought a little 13″ white MacBook of the “Mid 2009″ MC240LL/A (MacBook5,2) variety that, according to the specifications, was already at its maximum supported memory configuration of 4Gb. However, after reading about a firmware update that somehow magically enabled greater memory capacity, I decided to try it for myself.

Hot on the heels of the impressive Batman Forever demo on the Amstrad CPC, comes this state of the art effort on – wait for it – the venerable old Commodore VIC-20.

And it really is State of the Art. It’s a remake of Spaceball’s famous Amiga demo “State of the Art”. On a VIC-20. Unbelievable!

A new, and rather impressive, Amstrad CPC demo has just been released by The Batman Group team: Batman Forever.

It was with disappointment that I read that the BBC had cancelled their much hyped new sci-fi series Outcasts. It had a big-name cast, decent budget and talented writers, and was aimed at a larger “mainstream” audience, but none of these managed to save it from being another one-series-wonder.

Disney’s Tron: Legacy, sequel to 1982′s Tron, has a number of references to the original movie and other geek culture. But did you catch the 8-bit gaming easter egg in the Disc War arena?

Twenty eight years. That’s how long I’ve been waiting for a sequel to Tron, but now, finally, and almost unbelievably, it has arrived in the form of Tron: Legacy. It’s been a long time, and the new film has a lot to live up to. For the most part it delivers.

Good news, everyone. My “Alien Breed on Quake 1 Engine” conversion project, QBreed, has been picked up by a clever chap by the name of ltheden who is working on extending and packaging it up for release.

Programmers (and all geeks) enjoy Christmas too, so here’s my seasonal take on the #songsincode Twitter hashtag game. How many can you get? Feel free to submit your own!