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!

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.

I’m a regular at Northern Digitals, an event for like minded people involved in digital creative industries around Manchester, to get together, have a beer, talk about work, techniques or influences, ruminate and make new friends.

The popularity of ND nights prompted Matt Booth and Gavin to host a more formal event, which they called BLAB. Featuring a recognised figure from our online/creative industry, they’d do a talk, we’d all drink beer and everyone would enjoy themselves. Following this format, BLABMini was created, featuring 5–6 speakers, shorter talk times, slightly more informal.

I got an email off Matt asking me to talk at the latest BLABMini, on the 1st December at The Deaf Institute. The subject was on “Things I’ve Seen”, links you’ve been passed on twitter or via blogs, makes you stop and think “wow” or “why didn’t I think of that”. Quite an open-ended subject, so I pinned mine on inspirational things I’ve seen.

I also narrowed it down to be things I’ve seen on Vimeo, as most of the really cool/wow stuff I see is on there, and I hammer that “Later” button. Pretty sure I have more content on there than on my Tivo!

Anyway, it was my first time at the venue, it’s like an old school house or something, and hardly touched inside. It’s great! I met with the other speakers before it kicked off, @katiemoffat @katiemaymanc @VariousArtists & @JeffreyBowman. We decided on a running order, and said I didn’t mind being last.

The content from the speakers varied wildly, from 9/11 memorials, via brown bananas and spoof chef videos to keeping sane in a city. I showed three videos from Vimeo, a piece on calligraphy, an intro to a skateboarding video and a rock video. All talks were very well received, the audience were attentive and appreciative, and knowing the kind of crowd that goes to ND nights, it was a good feeling knowing where to pitch the talk.

Thanks to Matt & Gav, all the speakers and the audience. I really enjoyed myself.

As usual, the BLAB talks are filmed, and will appear over on the BLAB page on Vimeo when edited… I will post a link when it arrives!

Panoramic pic by Harry Bailey

One year ago I broke my arm in three places and needed surgery after the .Net Awards party.

I get an invite to go to this years bash. Of course I go, right? I mean, lightning can’t strike twice.

And it didn’t.

We had a great time. I did four client visits before the first beer, and one during. Hooked up with Phil Sherry and Tweedy, joined by Techie Rob and a few more, then off to the do. The theme this year was “Rock”, as if you couldn’t figure that out from the picture above (from l-r: me, Rob Ryan, Dan Oliver, Bruce Lawson, Chris Mills and Patrick Lauke.

The Iron Maiden cover band were excellent, Guns2Roses… well, I’m not a G’n'R fan… and the last band, Conquest of Steel, with legendary Opera Dev Relations dude Chris Mills on drums utterly rocked.

So no shocking x-rays this year. No tales of train-catching heroics while on morphine. No more stupidity… for now.

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!

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…

The rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven fascinating factoids about me

• I am a video game nut. I used to work at Sony in Liverpool and I collect Japanese Sega Mega Drive games.
• I have the dyslexia symptoms where you cannot tell right from left when pushed for an immediate answer. Obviously know my right from left, but if you ask me off the cuff, I *will* get it wrong. I wrote L and R on my hands when doing my driving test, for the instructors sake as much as mine!
• I’ve met one of my heroes. Trent Reznor. Only briefly, and he wasn’t a cock. Hero status upheld.
• I have titanium metal and 6 screws in my left arm, after breaking it in six places. No, they don’t set off metal detectors.
• I’ve studied five different languages in my time. French, Latin, Japanese, German and Spanish, the last being the only one I’m proficient in.
• I’m a big Star Wars freak. So much so that I have the original trilogy on Japanese LaserDisc…
• I do an awesome Yoda impression.

Therefore I decided to look at finally getting my very own hosting. Can you believe it? 15 years of making websites and I’ve never had my own hosting! I know a few friends use WebFaction, Melbourne Server Hosting and RackSpace, but I wasn’t convinced I’d need anything too big, or expensive. I run a few blogs, we keep all media on services like YouTube and Vimeo and average page impressions hover in the 30-100 a day per site, with exceptions for houseofninja.com and speaknspell.co.uk.

With this in mind, and already having an Amazon AWS S3 account, I did a bit of googlin’ about Amazon’s EC2 cloud hosting. We’ve all heard the phrase “cloud computing”, even my mum has, and it is very much the buzz at the moment. In brief, it’s about providing resizable, scalable, cheap on-demand computing. In my case, about letting me set up a server that operates on an “as used” basis, upping it’s processing power when called upon, pumping out bandwidth when hammered, and I only pay for those occasions.

At the moment on EC2, you can start a micro instance server, and not pay a penny for 12 months in terms of monthly fees. The first 1GB of transfer in and out is also free. Potentially, I get a years worth of hosting for nothing… and even without the free tier, it was working out to $1.08 for the month with 1GB in/out and an elastic IP. Yes, you read that right. one. dollar. eight. cents.

I tried a few instances out, one a Ubuntu instance with WordPress pre-installed, and was going to run one instance for each site… but thought better of that. One micro instance should be able to handle a bunch of sites. Time for more googlin’.

I ended up following this excellent tutorial from Caleb Ogden. Aimed at a mac user, clear, concise, I was up and running in about 30 minutes. There is little point in me re-dressing this for my step-through, just follow it. I have used Ubuntu/Linux a little, and am not afraid of the Terminal, but if you can follow instructions, you shouldn’t have any problems with the tutorial.

When done, you can then follow his walkthrough for configuring Virtual Hosts, so your instance can run multiple sites.

I will add that he doesn’t explain how you get Transmit/Filezilla/Expandrive working with your EC2 instance, due to sftp needing the .pem certificate. This quick reference allowed me in with my usual mac gui tools.

A quick config of my domain’s DNS and boom, this site is now hosted in the cloud.

Notes:

One thing to note, is that if you intend to let WordPress resize images to your defined media settings, you need to install the GD lib, like so;

# yum install php-gd

Then restart the httpd service.

Oh, and you’ll also need to edit the httpd.conf file (in /etc/httpd/conf) to allow the mod_rewrite rules for permalinks to work. Open the httpd.conf file in Vi, and look for this;

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
#   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
    AllowOverride None

Change None to All, then restart the httpd service again.

If you update to Lion OSX 10.7, you may not be able to connect with Transmit/Expandrive, so you’ll need to add the certicficate again…

ssh-add [yourkey].pem