My friend Rob has been kickstarting the Liverpool geek talk sceene, with the guys at his place of work, organising and hosting SWIG. It’s grown from a small meeting discussing WordPress at InterconnectIT‘s office, to taking the upstairs at Leaf Tea Shop in Bold Street.

Rob had been on at me for a while to do something at a SWIG event, and upping the ante, he said they were doing a bigSWIG, and would I like to talk about one of my projects, MegaDrive.me. I’d asked Rob a hundred questions about WordPress – which MegaDrive.me is built in – so I did feel obliged to return the favour!

MegaDrive.me was a project I’d started to catalogue Japanese Mega Drive games, write reviews and comments, and learn WordPress on the way. I also stressed something which as an employer I think is very important.

The talk went well, I was up after my mate Dan Donald, and it was great to see loads of familiar faces from the Speak the Web event and Naconf the week before. You can find the slides from the talk on SlideShare.net.

Good things are happening in Liverpool, and it makes me proud to be part of it. Keep it going, Rob!

Scanlines. If you hear someone talking about scanlines when discussing video games, you know they’re a dork. I talk about scanlines a lot. Mostly with @damienmcferran and @michaelheald.

What’s the deal then? Well, when we played video games on CRT televisions, there would be faint horizontal lines between the rows of pixels. Kinda didn’t notice back in the day, but when you play an old Mega Drive through a modern HDTV, you will instantly see something is missing.

Modern TVs have built in picture scalers, so a 320×240 picture gets blown up to fit your gloriously large display. You’ll notice the pixels look big and slightly smudgy, edges bleed and the picture just looks a little… smoothed. All arcade games used to have scanlines. I swear a scanline generator/emphasiser was built into the Hanatrex monitors! Adding scanlines makes an arcade game feel even more authentic. I still play all my retro games on a 14″ Sony CRT portable TV because of this effect.

However, all is not lost. If you only have a HD TV, and let’s be honest, very soon this is all people will have, then there is help at hand. A fairly clever German called Jochum over at arcadeforge.de has been making bits of circuitry that will allow you to hook up your old SCART devices to a HD TV and get those beautiful old scanlines back.

It started off with the SLG3000, which took a VGA input, added the scanlines (adjustable too, so you could have them heavy or light) to a VGA output. This looks utterly ace on a Dreamcast with an old Dell 3:4 ratio PC monitor.

But what about consoles that don’t output VGA? Next up came a Sync Strike that basically takes an RGB SCART signal and convert it to a CSYNC composite signal, thus enabling retro gear to run on new teles. However, this does depend on what resolutions your HD TV accepts. My Samsung won’t take anything below a 640×480 resolution, which made me panic at first as things weren’t working!

So… we need another bit of circuitry. A video scaler. Video scalers have been available in Japan and to video enthusiasts for a while, but clock in at around £300. Devices like the XRGB 2 Plus cost the earth but produce great results. Recently, there’s been a growing market for cheap scaler boards from Hong Kong. They feature a multitude of inputs, some basic onscreen displays to adjust settings (including language!) and geometry, but are bare. Jochum started casing them in the same clear acrylic plastic housing that his SLG3000 and Sync Strike come in, and selling them on.

Ultimately, we have three separate doohickeys, two VGA leads and a 5v power supply to get scanlines.

Then Jochum released an SLG SCART box. This simply takes a SCART input, adds scanlines and spits out SCART. Much simpler, one box and a 5v power supply required.

Why would you go through the rigmarole of the first solution if you can do it in one box. Well, the one box came after all the other bits!

But is there more to it than that? Yes, take a look…

SCART to HD TV
Plain jane. Multi-Mega RGB SCART > Samsung 38″ HD TV. Smudgy image. Lego block sized pixels and varying colours across areas of the same colour. What you don’t see from the stills is the way the image “wiggles”. Will try and get video at a later date.

SCART – Sync Strike – Scaler – VGA input
Here you can see Thunder Force III played on a Multi-Mega via RGB SCART Sync Strike > VGA/CGA Scaler > VGA input. The picture is clearer than using the HD TVs scaler. But still you can see the pixels look chunky and the colours tend to smudge into each other. In the last picture, the white edges still loose their sharpness a bit, but generally this £50 scaler is better than the built in TV scaler.

SCART – SLG SCART – SCART input

Getting better. Multi-Mega RGB SCART > SLG SCART > TV SCART input. The scanlines are quite visible on the Mega Drive, because the image has the scanlines applied to the 320×240 image, then the HD TV is scaling the picture up. However, the introduction of scanlines helps add definition to edges, clean up large areas of colour and add that retro feel. On something like a Saturn hi-res game or Dreamcast, the scanlines should look thinner as they’re applied to a higher res image, then scaled.

SCART – Sync Strike – Scaler – SLG3000 – VGA

Here we have Thunder Force III running through the Sync Strike > VGA/CGA Scaler > SLG3000. The scanlines are thinner, as they applied to the image after it’s scaled up to 640×480, as opposed to applied to the image then letting the TV do the scaling. A lot less distortion, you don’t see much “wiggling” while playing, and the picture just seems so much cleaner… and arcade like!

There are plenty of videos on YouTube about using this set up, and lengthy discussions of building your own Sync Strike on a scaler board over on the shmups forums. The SLG SCART is a great, quick and dirty way to add scanlines to your retro games. If you go the whole hog, you get a lot more control and a better output from the combination of Sync/Scaler/SLG. This can also be used to a range of inputs, including Component and CGA, and can connect to a stand alone PC monitor too.

Which ever you chose, it really does help recreate that retro feel on modern TVs.

Most of you know I’m a gaming nut. Most of you know I collect Japanese Mega Drive games.

I was browsing through the ace pcengine.co.uk site, watching videos, reading reviews, planning on buying a few more shmups, when I thought “why don’t we have something like this?”. The “we” being Mega Drive gamers.

Obviously, there are a lot of sites out there that details release dates, genres, covers etc. like the great SegaRetro.org, but there was something… complete about the PCE site. It had factual information, it had visual information, it had opinion. You could relate to the authors and what they were saying, and it did make me reassess my opinion on a game or two, and go and physically play R-Type again after browsing.

For me, the Japanese Mega Drive’s biggest charm was the box art. Glorious, explosive, full colour illustrations set the scene before picking up the box and looking at screenshots. Box art is where it’s at! When you stack them all together, there’s something really mesmerising about the colourful spines with Japanese type, topped with the red, green and black MD logo.

So,with my WordPress skills coming along well, I decided to see how far I could push myself and designed a site to show case the box art, the facts about the game, opinion of the review as well as providing a place for comment and discussion, screenshots and video.

Now, I knew I couldn’t do this on my own. Something my mate Ian Wilson had said to me kept ringing in my head. He’d edited some articles about Japanese Mega Drive games on Wikipedia, but the overlord page owners had reverted the changes. What’s the point in helping if it was going to be over-ruled? Sod it, let’s make our own! Together with Ian, and prolific games journalist Damien McFerren, I thought we’d have a good, knowledgeable trio to build such a site. We’re also all Mega Drive collectors, and it’s important to me that all experiences and thoughts about these games are from playing the original games on original hardware. Yeah, sad I know.

Please take a look at megadrive.me

Yes, know there’s a lot of work left to do! Writing the synopsis and opinion for all these games will take a long time. We’re only scanning cover art for games we own, so is an expensive journey ahead!

We’ve also got shirts and posters in the pipeline. These will be kept to limited runs, once sold, forever gone. We’re in talks with quality paper suppliers like Fedregoni and GF Smith, and print places like Team Impression, to make sure the quality is of the highest order. My good friend and fellow jaypee Dan Clarke is doing the illustration work, and the first piece looks awesome.

Stay tuned, and feel free to add your memories about some of the brilliant — and not so brilliant — Mega Drive games from 20 years ago!

Hello again, been a while…

Me and the boy had a weekend of Dreamcast gaming, and after a few power-ons, having to reset the date and time – every time – due to the dead battery was beginning to annoy.

I’ve been here before. Less than 3 months ago, I’m sure, after I got my SLG3000 and tried out the scanlines, realised the internal rechargeable battery was dead. No problem, I have about 30 CR2032s kicking around. A quick google soon but that plan to bed. The internal Dreamcast battery is a rechargeable coin battery. A CR2032 is no good, as the DC will output a charge to the battery, and terrible things could happen. I don’t know what, exactly, but didn’t fancy finding out.

More googling for a rechargeable battery shows they can be an arse to get hold of. Minimum orders of 100x, minimum trade orders of £50 or more etc., so I settled on a more practical solution.

You can solder two rechargeable AAs together (+ to – ) with a short piece of wire, then the other end’s + and – to the same terminals on the PCB. I had a few older AAs lying around, that could hold a charge, but were a few years old, soldered together and wrapped them in electrician’s tape. I removed the three pronged coin battery and legs, then soldered some bell wire into two of the holes on the PCB.

Worked first time.

And I am not the most skilled with a soldering iron.

I did have to move the location of the AAs from the pic shown below, as the case wouldn’t fit back on. I ended up putting them running length ways just to the left of the GD-Rom drive apex.

Me and a few mates have been working on something…

Sonic the Hedgehog. For many of us retro games an icon. A trailblazer and true competitor to that ever-present and overly-competent plumber.

To many of the younger generations, well, I don’t know. The subject of many random game outings and IP tie-ins, of which very few are done well. An object of ridicule.

When Sonic first got a few column inches in gaming mags, the news fresh from America (way before we had internet) made the excitement palpable. The screen shots looked cool. He had bags of attitude, and because all the shots were stills, word on the street was the guy was rapid. Faster than any scrolling platformer you’d ever seen before. Eat that, plumber!

20 years ago, I was 16. I think I’d finished my exams, and school was in a wind-down period, so my absence on release day wasn’t noticed. I’d asked and pestered Ken at MicroByte about release day, delivery time, amount of copies expected, and had about £35 saved for weeks. I rang in the morning before setting off into town, and was told the game was en route via courier to the shop.

Doing my very own Sonic impression, I hot-footed it to the train station and headed into Liverpool city center, walking into MicroByte mere seconds before the delivery guy. Ken signed for the box, and opened it up. Silence. Here it was. I didn’t stick around to watch a demo, handed over the cash and did one.

I hammered the game, but savoured every moment. I looped every loop and collected every ring on the first 3 levels. I’d completed the game in three days round at a friends house, watched by four or five other lads, all competent gamers and older than me, so a bit of a moment. I grew up with Sonic.

Sonic was the Mega Drive’s defining moment. The platform had a champion. A challenger to Mario, and a statement for all Sega gamers, and back then he was cool as fuck.

Time and franchise licensing have not been kind. While Sonic Adventure brought back the epic speed through levels (chased by an Orca Whale, brilliant memory!) and a few decent tie-ins like Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, most of his own games on recent platforms have been crap.

The 20th birthday was a chance to play the classics again, fully rose tinted, and appreciate a time gone by. This was helped by the release of a Sonic Generations demo, which to be honest, made me nauseous. A forced 3D perspective that moved too much with simple up and down jumps, and overly detailed background graphics really made the game feel like the game was trying too hard.

Sonic on the Mega Drive by comparison was like “Ahhh, relax. This is how it should be. The physics are correct, the backgrounds not overly colourful so you can see the baddies and bullets, now just run!”

I don’t think we’ll ever see Sonic back to his best. Personally, Sonic 2 was his pinnacle, but I am old and jaded. Mario has, overtime, utterly trounced the blue fella, but that’s due to Nintendo’s understanding of protecting IP. Sega needs a lot more than a Generations “tie-in” paying lip service to the way he used to move to bring Sonic back to relevance. Which is sad.

This comes up in my mind time and time again, as I try and peg my favourite games of all time. In fact, I guess most gamers play this game when not holding a joypad…

Anyway, this needs some formalised rules!

• You can pick any eight games to be stuck on a desert island with for the rest of your mortal life (no continues). They can be from any year, any system, any format, any region.
• If it’s an old system, assume users, networks or technology is still in place to allow enjoyable gaming.
• This island has plentiful plug socket points. So if you need to take your Mega Drive, Mega-CD and 32X, no problem.
• You can have whatever the best display is to play these games, from a Sony KV-M1421U through to Hanitrex arcade cab monitors… but I don’t really need to know what you choose, just helps your choices.
• This mythical island also has ethernet sockets and wifi in the, err, palm trees, so multi-player online games are in the running.
• You can also nominate some poor sod to be stranded on this island for those co-op games that simply must be played with a 2UP, like Bubble Bobble.

So, since I’m posing the questions, I’ll go first…

1. Bubble Bobble — Arcade
2. Skool Daze — ZX Spectrum
3. Batman–Arkham Asylum — PS3
4. Gunstar Heroes — Mega Drive
5. Mario Kart DS — Nintendo DS
6. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 — PS3
7. Super Mario World — Super Nintendo
8. Phantasy Star Online — Dreamcast

I’ll try not to come back and edit this list! If I do, I’ll explain why… promise!

I so badly wanted to put Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast in there, but it really doesn’t have enough depth to justify a life-time sentence. I’m looking forward to hearing from you guys, whether to say I’m completely wrong and a stupid-head, or to list your favourite eight. But your list *is* wrong.

Spurred on by @rewindgaming‘s massively misguided (I’m kidding!) top 10, I feel the need to set my stall out and tell you all what I consider to be the finest Sega Mega Drive games ever crafted.

I’d be struggling to put them in some kind of numerical order, so alphabetical it is.

• Bare Knuckle II
• Devil Crash MD
• EA Hockey
• Elemental Master
• Gunstar Heroes
• Rainbow Islands Extra
• Sonic 2
• Strider
• Street Fighter II – Special Championship Edition
• Thunderforce III

Had to miss out some right stonkers too, like Golden Axe and The New Zealand Story!

What makes my list better than @rewindgaming‘s is that all these games mean so much to *me*, which is part of the fun when arguing about games! The name of each one conjures up a time and a place that I remember well, and the box art just leaps into my mind. I remember completing the games, or beating friends, hours and hours spent in front of my old 14″ Sony Trinitron memorising enemy ships and bullet patterns, until Thunderforce III could be completed without so much as a scratch on my shields… yeah, I’m a shmup fan. No apologies.

However misguided he was, he got Sonic 2 right, Soleil was fun, and I’d never heard of or played Light Crusader, despite being by one of my favourite gaming houses, the Japanese legend that is Treasure.

Fairly sure my mate Ian would come up with a completely different list from this, all based on his favourite memories too.

Oh, and I reserve the right to come back and change this list as I see fit, as I discover more gems via my collecting of Japanese Sega Mega Drive games!

A Thursday night out? Drinking? …Again?

But wait, you were out on Monday night too… what gives, Smith?

Ok, I will come clean. Monday’s drinking was less about the drinking (hah!) and more about talking with Chris Mills and Patrick Lauke about presenting, presentation material and subjects around validation and general geekiness. We did not at one point mention any rumour or conjecture about the iPad, which I feel is very important to mention. Leffe and Hoegaarden were order of the evening!

However the Transmission 3 (#tx3) event was different. It was all about the mobile web, the pleasure and the pain of being in this field. There were 3 speaking slots, starting with Chris Mills from Opera giving an overview of mobile to date. Peter-Paul Koch of Quirksmode whose done a ridiculous amount of research on the state of mobile browsing. Finally, two likely lads from down south, Polls and Mills from usTwo, would look at the world of iPhone app dev.

Developing for Mobile Platforms – The pleasure and the pain (ker-tsscchhhhh!)
The talks kicked off with a good overview of mobile history from Chris Mills, the beginnings of mobile browsing, the reasons why it’s prevailant and reasons why it’s a current fave for marketing folks. Good content from Chris, like WAP, earliest networks and general do’s and dont’s about developing for mobile platforms. Interesting to be reminded how far we’ve come with mobile browsing in a short space of time.

PPK on the state of mobile browsers
The amount of time PPK has put into testing mobile browsers is insane. He’s tested, prodded, poked and broke pretty much every flavour on every device. A very interesting sentence from PPK was something along the lines of “on the mobile web, IE does not matter”. IE on mobile is so utterly shit, everyone who has it instantly goes and gets something like Opera Mobile.

The mobile browser usual suspects usually fall into one of two camps, Opera or WebKit. However, that’s not quite as simple as that sounds, there’s about 10 flavours of WebKit browsers, running various Javascript engines, with different switches set at compile time. Still, 95% of what you do in a browser will work on all WebKit devices.

PPK also got quite excited about Widgets and their future potential. Supported by Opera, a widget is a collection of HTML, images, CSS and JS, which is zipped and the extension changed to .wgt. His main gripe is that at the moment wdigets are not allowed device level access, to things like GPS, address book etc, as it’s a massive security concern, but if this can be solved, it’ll be quite the revelation, apparently.

usTwo and a story of iPhone how not-to’s
Polls and Mills were the only iPhone specific talkers of the night, and they had some stories to tell! Completely self-depreciating, the lads put a very funny spin on all the things the did in terms of marketing that would do amazing things like generate sales of… 150 apps.

They build the apps out of pure love, as they don’t spin much money, but as a marketing tool, they get their name out and in the press and chip chip chip away at the media. The apps are cool toys to show current and prospective clients, and open the door to branding and promotional opportunities.

They openly admitted they from a design background, and didn’t talk technical, but their approach to everything was very funny, beating themselves up, but with the underlying current of “yeah, but we’ve learnt loads in the process”.

Comedy moment, when they were talking about their Ben10 MouthOff app, I had bought it a week earlier while sat on the couch on a saturday morning with my son. I fired the app up and had it ready when they asked if anyone had seen it, it was only right to respond with the MouthOff app over my mouth!

Conclusion
All in all, tx3 was great. Very insightful, very inspiring and an area that we as JP74 are actively getting into, very important. More of this please, Digital Sparks!

I seem to be on a roll with video games at the moment. I guess that’s for two reasons. My boy is getting old enough to play Mario Kart on the Wii, and the winter in the UK is made for gaming. Cold, wet and dark.

Anyways, there was a question on the gaming forum I use a lot for chatter and buying/selling, NTSC-uk, asking what your Top 10 Games of the Decade were. Wow, that got me thinking. It’s actually a pretty tough question, and it’s hard to date some games in your head, as when you look ‘em up they were too early in many of my cases. So we chatted about it at work and with friends on Twitter, but it’s taken me all day to get this down.

Here it is, in no specific order.

Phantasy Star Online (DC)
Crazy Taxi (DC)
Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3)
Call of Duty Modern Warfare2 (PS3)
Batman: Arkham Asylum (PS3)
Mario Kart DS (DS)
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2)
Katamari Damacy (any version/any system)
Orbital (iPhone)
Guitar Hero World Tour (Wii)

So, explain yourself, Smith!

Some of these are here because they were novel, or a breath of fresh air, like Katamari and Guitar Hero. Some are there because of the memories I have from playing at that time, Phantasy Star Online. Some are there because half way through playing I caught myself saying out loud “Goddamn… I love this game!”—Batman Arkham Asylum.

Notice there’s no Xbox games in the list, since I’ve never owned one, thus Xbox games simply can’t be in my top 10.

Try as I might, I could not bring myself to put Super Mario Galaxy in there. As Dan at work said, there’s no real difficulty curve to the game, it’s the same all the way through, which I think is true in many respects. Maybe it’s due another play.

I’m guessing a few of you will be wondering why I’m including Orbital on the iPhone in this list (and since a few people are linking here, including Orbital’s creators) I guess I’ll pen a few words about that too. The game is ridiculously addictive, which is always a good starter for 10. The graphics are neat, very like Galaxy Wars, and the controls are sublimely simple. You click the screen to fire the ball. It’s not an earth-shattering development in gaming, but it’s the a great example of crafting a great little game for the medium it’s delivered on, the iPhone. You can fire it up for a quick go, it saves it’s state when you hit the home button, and you end up simply blaming yourself when you cock up. You never feel cheated by the game. Orbital’s onsale for 59p at the time of writing, so get it bought if you’ve not done so already!

‘Artley asked me shortly after what my Top 5 Games of the last 30 years would be, which funnily enough I found a lot easier! Mine would be Bubble Bobble, Metal Slug X, Tempest2K, Crazy Taxi, Super Mario World!