Posted on March 18, 2021
Livestream 3/18/2021 – Startopia
We just finished up the livestream for the week which this time was Startopia. A really fun management/building sim from 2001 that tasks you with managing a starbase with a bit of a humor twist. I haven’t played this in years and it was fun to dig back into it realizing how much I enjoy those sort of management games. Think Dungeon Keeper or Theme Hospital and you get a general idea.
Also I should mention it was super simple to buy the game from GOG and then move the executable to my XP machine and then simply run the game. It’s great GOG still offers these old games without any DRM allowing this to happen.
Speaking of that XP machine the retro rig for the evening was a P4 2.26 GHz sporting a Geforce 4 Ti 4400. It’s actually spot on time period accurate for this game and ran it great. Anyway it was a fun stream so feel free to check out the replay below if you are interested.
Posted on March 15, 2021
Game Pickup – M.A.X.
The very forced title aside I grabbed a big box copy of the game Mechanized Assault & Exploration or M.A.X. for short (see very clever) recently.
It’s quite an interesting take on the turn based formula where you spend a lot of time building your base and utilizing resources to upgrade your units. I used to own the EU big box version but it was sadly lost in a move at some point so getting this for a good price was a nice surprise. I’ll probably stream the game at some point as I remember having a lot of fun with it.
Posted on March 14, 2021
New Video – K6-2 Build
A new video just went live featuring an AMD K6-2 build. It includes a pretty bone headed mistake so keep an eye out! This machine came from a business primiarly used as a voicemail or fax server based on where I found it. Specwise it’s not super exciting but I thought hey this would make a good build using primarily parts from 1998. So this is part 1 which focuses on the teardown, cleanup and build. The next part will be more about finishing it up, loading up the OS and then of course playing some games.
Posted on March 12, 2021
Livestream 3/11/2021 – Sega CD on the MiSTer
Last night we took a whack at exploring some of the library on the Sega/Mega CD thanks to the MiSTer. I didn’t have any exposure to Sega CD when it was out but I really like the 16 bit+ appeal to it that it seems to have. We tried some FMV games and they were alright (it can’t really output “good” quality FMV like some later systems) but I think where it truly shines are the 2d games that have been enhanced. Such as Sonic CD, Snatcher and Lords of Thunder. All games that we tried out last night so if you are curious check it out below. I sure had a blast trying out some of these.
Posted on March 11, 2021
More Arcade Cores for the MiSTer
If you’ve hung around me long enough you probably know I’m a big fan of the MiSTer project. I have future plans for a video series as well as write ups on this site regarding how awesome this project is. To really summarize it as brief as possible MiSTer is an open source project using an FPGA development board to duplicate, on the hardware layer, old consoles as well as computers. It provides in some cases a near 1 to 1 experience of playing it on the original hardware.
One exciting part about arcade games being brought to it is that they basically play like the original games. One such coming soon would be Mortal Kombat!
Why is this exciting? Well the Mortal Kombat board is shared by many other similar games such as Smash TV and NBA Jam. This means cracking this nut (which involves literally tracing the chips on the original arcade board) opens up other games that used a similar design. It’s a snowball effect at that point which means we are in for a great lineup of games to play on our MiSTers!
