You were 12 years old and supposedly ‘only out at a friend’s house’ which was usually true, except that one time you rode 5 miles away to a place you never had been before and explored a house under construction. You climbed up half-finished stairs, jumped on piles of wood, over foundation holes full of loose nails and screws. You took wood scraps and built a little fort in the woods from stuff you took from whatever wasn’t nailed down at your house.
“Children are like rats – they scamper around and get into everything.”
I found out that the Prost brewery here in Portland hosts a free annual Thanksgiving meal. They ask for volunteers to help serve and offer the food free. That’s pretty cool.
As automotive demand falters in Europe, Bosch said 450 of it’s employees (primarily in Stuttgart and Gerlingen) would get reduced hours, and equivalently reduced pay, starting March 1, 2025. In Oct, they also announced plans to lay off 7,000 employees
Coming this March 25-29th, 2025 in Manorbier, UK, for a measly £2800-£3200, you can join in playing a Dungeons and Dragons campaign in a real castle. You Meet in a Tavern will provide 24 hours of actual D&D in the castle spread over 5 days – along with themed activities, elaborate medieval themed feasts and banquets, and can even stay at the castle (only a few slots – everyone else stays at the nearby cottage or in town).
Activities include archery, falconry, miniature painting, cooking experiences, and reenactments.
The world has gotten very familiar to retro hardware re-creations, game emulation, re-releases, speed runs, creating new games for old platforms, as well as new exploits, tools, and discoveries. The nitty gritty work of doing all of this, however, is a labor of love. For those that dig into the binary, there’s tricky copyright concerns that need to be managed, only scraps of information about old hardware and software, highly optimized/tricky code that is tough to read, and almost no financial gain – except for commercial re-releases.
Made Up of Wires walks us through a live bit of decompiling of the PS1 classic: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to give you a taste of the work involved in this kind of work. Not really that different than any other reverse engineering but surprisingly accessible as these old games were relatively small and simple.
Akka Arrh was a never released arcade game developed in the 80’s by the ever-wacky Llamasoft/Jeff Minter for Atari. A few cabinets were made, but only 3 are known to exist. None of the cabinet owners were willing to copy and share the roms. However, that all changed in 2019 and you can now play the old version via emulation.
As the story of the controversy goes on the MAMEWorld Forums, one of those collectors had a technician come to his home to repair some other game. In the process, the technician allegedly went into the Akka Arrh cabinet, copied the ROMS, and then anonymously posted them online. This generated a lot of controversy in the collector and retro gaming controversy.
Jeff Minter was hired to re-build the game in 2023. He said the original game’s design was “interesting but flawed” and lacked a compelling design to draw players back in when they lost. The much improved version is now available on PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch, and PC.
I think the interesting part is the gameplay. It plays like a multi-level Missile Command in which you start zoomed out and as attackers break through your defenses you zoom in and back out again. I think that kind of mechanic is pretty difficult, and makes me ponder how that kind of mechanic could either be done differently or applied to very different kinds of games…
David Oranchak post a video of how a 3-person international team of unlikely codebreakers (David, a warehouse operator in Belgium, and an applied mathematician) made the discovery that solved the Zodiac killer’s 340-character cipher. Cool points for the fact they used an old school hill climbing cipher program called AZDecrypt that was written in BASIC to solve Zodiac’s cipher.
