I’m going to try to do a weekly round-up. Try to establish consistency and all that…
Retro Computing
As part of trying to do my small part in preserving Atari ST history, I figured that it doesn’t take too much time or energy to find batches of floppies out there in the world and see if there is interesting source code or software that needs to be preserved.
I recently won an online auction for very cheap that had 200+ disks. The shipment arrived this week. It looks like the majority of the disks are ST-related, with some being Windows/PC-related. I hooked up my external floppy drive/Greaseweazle enclosure and imaged the disks to my hard drive. I still need to go through each disk to see their actual contents, and from there, will determine if there’s anything that needs to be archived online.
The Adventures of Johnny Thrust
I’ve begun working on this once again. Nothing detailed to report at the moment, but I’ll update you soon.
Video Games
I’ve seen a rise over the last few years of independent programmers/studios making games for the ST. And interestingly, there are some who even make boxed versions of the games with disks, manuals, etc. This intrigued me enough to buy a few recently, even though they were a little pricey. I want to do my part to encourage developers to make boxed releases, especially for the ST.
I spend VERY little time playing games on my consoles. Even so, I’ve been a PlayStation Plus subscriber for several years, but have finally deiced it’s not worth keeping and have cancelled the auto-renewal.
For those who don’t know, the service offers up a few games each month that you can add to your library and play anytime. The catch is, those games will disappear if you cancel your PS Plus service. So, you’re renting. Since I have some time before that list of games goes away, I ran through it to see if there was anything I’d actually like to purchase.
The industry has pivoted to this “you don’t own your games” mentality for years, where, if your game relies on online services in any way, and the publisher decides they don’t want to have those servers online anymore, then the game becomes non-functional. A related issue is if you buy a game digitally from the online store. The publisher is still in control of whether or not you can play the game leading to another “you bought it, but you don’t get to use it” scenario. So, it seems the best way around this is to purchase physical media when you can. I’ve started grabbing some discs for the PS3 and PS4, even if I purchased it digitally years ago. For some reason, this makes me feel better; like I finally own the game.
Studio Infrastructure
Over the past few months I’ve been experiencing severe network congestion in the house and studio. As I was troubleshooting this, I found it was my core 1U, rack-mounted PC that runs pfSense. This has served as my main edge firewall as well as has handled my layer-3 subnet segmentation for a long time. After extensive research, I found that the OS was partially crashing, and that was leading to the congestion. Not a full-on kernel panic, but close.
So, I spent this past weekend retiring that device and replacing it with a new device that will serve the same purpose. Since then, everything is running very smooth and I’ve even seen my internet bandwidth increase.
Stanley Cup Playoffs
Been watching the playoffs the last few weeks, even though the Lightning didn’t progress past the first round. Currently, we’re in the finals, with Las Vegas and the Hurricanes tied 1-1 in the series.
Miscellany
Some physical video games added to my library this week:
- Atari 2600: RealSports Boxing | RealSports Tennis
- Atari ST: Shotgun
- PS3: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare | Gran Turismo 5: Prologue
- PS4: God of War | Star Wars: Squadrons
- Wii: Monster 4×4: World Circuit | Wonder World: Amusement Park
- Wii U: Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013 | ZombiU
Blu-rays added to to the collection this week:
- American Gangster
- Dante’s Peak
- Daylight
- Deep Blue Sea
- Desperado
- El Mariachi
- The Long Kiss Goodnight
- Once Upon A Time In Mexico
- Snakes On A Plane
Once again, a small stash of comics landed on my doorstep this month:
