AUSRETROGAMER

The Pop-Culture E-Zine

You are here: Home / Archives for retro computing

retro computing

Shadow Ninja – Awesome C64 Chiptunes by SID Ninja 64

By

What can we say, we are suckers for sweet, sweet C64 SID chiptunes!

We were recently stumbled upon the Shadow Ninja chiptunes concept-album on Bandcamp by the mysterious musician SID Ninja 64. What we heard was quite impressive and literally music to our ears. The original SID tunes on this album are stylised after great C64 maestros like Tim Follin, Jonathan Dunn, Matt Gray, Ben Daglish, Jeroen Tel and Chris Hülsbeck to name just a few – a pretty good darn pedigree.

If you are into SID tunes or chiptunes in general, check out SID Ninja 64’s Shadow Ninja album right now!

image source: SID Ninja 64



Recreated Commodore 64 User’s & Programmer’s Reference Guide

By

We all owe Iain Bennie a lot of gratitude for painstakingly recreating the Commodore 64 User’s Guide and Programmer’s Reference Guide (and the Quick Reference Card)!

We recently had a notification in one of the Commodore 64 Facebook Groups that immediately piqued our interest. It was a post by Iain Bennie that advised the 24,000+ members that after restoring his breadbin 8-bit beauty, he wanted to complete the set with new copies of the (old spiral bound) C64 User’s Guide and the Programmer’s Reference Guide.

Instead of scanning the original guides, Iain re-wrote them from scratch, reconstructing every graphic, including the front and back covers, every register map, block diagram, and every table to then have a wonderful and pristine final result.

This whole process took Iain a number of months, which clearly shows in the end product. Iain also had his re-written guides printed, which we must admit, look amazing – see pics and stop drooling already!

Not surprising, these guides have garnered a lot of interest from the community, which took Iain by (a pleasant) surprise. Iain has kindly made the PDF guides freely available (here) for all of us, which is darn awesome if you ask us. Oh yeah, he even has tips on getting them professionally printed! We and the rest of the C64 community thank Iain for all of his hard work and generosity in making these guides and proving them for free! What are you waiting for, go get them now!

source: Iain Bennie via Facebook



Sinclair Book of Remembrance (SBOR)

By

We received the following message from a friend on behalf of Jim (from SBOR – Sinclair Book of Remembrance) so we thought we would share with you all as we think it is a great idea for the community to share their memories of Sinclair’s computers and also remembering Sir Clive Sinclair.

The Sinclair Book of Remembrance (SBOR) is a project dedicated to the memory of Sir Clive Sinclair who sadly passed away on the 16th September 2021.

Moved as I was, SBOR has been a personal labour of love, to do something in honour of “Uncle Clive”. It is not a business project. It’s completely free and non-monetised.

The objective is to create a unique digital monument, composed of our shared Sinclair memories encoded together so that the final product represents each and every one of us.
For those thinking this is an NFT thing – it is definitely not! It is an opportunity for each of us to share a memory, and together create a unique dedication to Sir Clive.

I am asking that each of us contribute a Sinclair memory, by simply sending an email with your story (with up to 4 image attachments). By sending your email to [email protected] it will trigger the system to automatically create an entry to the SBOR site – for example: https://sbor.uk/m/1?code=41ce. You will receive a reply containing the link to your contribution, which I would urge you to share far and wide!

At a pre-determined date, say the 1-year anniversary of Sir Clive’s passing, all of the entries will be combined and encoded into a single unique value. This will be unique in the universe and will represent all of our combined memories of what Sinclair meant to us and something we can all share in.



The Rubber-Keyed Wonder: 40 Years of the ZX Spectrum

By

If you are fans (like us!) of the From Bedrooms to Billions film series then you will absolutely love their latest documentary film, The Rubber-Keyed Wonder: 40 Years of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. To make Anthony and Nicola Caulfield’s film come true, go and check out their Kickstarter!

Coinciding with the ZX Speccy’s 40th anniversary next year (2022), Anthony and Nicola are aiming to release the film by Christmas 2022 – make sure you let Santa know! The Caulfield’s are aiming to make a thorough and definitive film on the ZX Spectrum, going into all the finer details of how and why the ZX Spectrum was created, what impact the computer had as well as the various versions that followed right the way through to the latest iteration of the system with the ZX Spectrum Next.

The film aims to reunite as many of the original ZX Spectrum hardware team and of course many legendary game developers, artists and musicians, and also talk to fans of the ZX Spectrum as to understand the significance of the machine with the masses.

This Kickstarter campaign once again has some stunning artwork from Oliver Frey available as well as some wonderful posters and other add-ons to get your nostagia gland pulsating!

Now, we are Commodore fans, but we are also aware of the significance of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, so we are quite excited to support Anthony and Nicola on their new project!

image source: The Rubber Keyed Wonder – 40 years of the ZX Spectrum



The Amiga 500 Mini Is Coming in 2022

By

It was bound to happen! After the success of TheC64 Mini, Retro Games Ltd has announced that they will be releasing an Amiga 500 Mini in early 2022.

Based on Commodore’s iconic 16-bit Amiga 500 (A500), the new The A500 Mini will be able to emulate the original A500/A600 chipset and the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) of the latter Amiga model, the Amiga 1200 – pretty darn cool indeed.


source: Retro Games Ltd

The Amiga 500 Mini will come with a 2-button mouse and 8-button game-pad, as well as USB inputs to plug in a standard keyboard and the ability to add your own games (with WHDLoad support). Speaking of games, The A500 Mini will be bundled with 25 games, with the following 12 titles being confirmed at this stage:

  • Alien Breed 3D
  • Another World
  • ATR: All Terrain Racing
  • Battle Chess
  • Cadaver
  • Kick Off 2
  • Pinball Dreams
  • Simon The Sorcerer
  • Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe
  • The Chaos Engine
  • Worms: The Director’s Cut
  • Zool: Ninja Of The Nth Dimension

Other features include the ability to save and resume games, flick between 50Hz and 60Hz screen refreshes and various CRT filters and scaling options.

With a retail price of £119.99 / €129.99 / US$139.99, we won’t be expecting TheA500 Mini to be less than $200 Aussie dollars, which is quite a bit for a Mini, even for an iconic one like the Amiga!



Diary: Making of Mr. Do! for the ZX Spectrum

By


If you follow Mark R. Jones on Twitter, you may have come across his post about the Diary on the making of MrDo! for the 48k/128k ZX Spectrum.

Mark’s 50 page PDF is a fascinating read for any gamers that want to learn how Mark and co. converted the 1982 Universal arcade game and why it took nearly 2 years (Feb 2017 to June 2019) to complete! Oh yeah, did we mention it is free?!

source: Tweet link



 

C64 Minesweeper Written in BASIC!

By

UPDATE: Good news folks, Fritz has also informed us that Minesweep has been updated! The main updates include an ability to enlarge the playfield and the game now also has mouse support.

Fritz Philipp strikes again! This time we can enjoy the Windows 95 style Minesweeper game on the Commodore 64, Minesweep64, almost entirely written in BASIC!

Writing anything in BASIC is a chore (and labour of love), so Fritz Philipp’s efforts here can’t be understated! Grab Minesweep64 now!

Oh yeah, Fritz’s best time so far is 033 – can you beat it?



Commodore Computer Sales 1977-1996

By

We love these time-lapse sliding charts, so when we found this one based on sales of Commodore computers, we knew we had to share them with you all.

It is no surprise which Commodore computer ends up on top pretty much from 1982 to 1996, but the others were a bit of a surprise (which we won’t spoil).

Are you keeping up with the Commodore? 😉


source: Sven Dännart

NOTE: The creator (Sven Dännart) has advised that some of the figures are estimates, so take all of this with a grain of salt. It’s still cool though.



C64 Joystick and Keyboard Diagnostic Tool

By

Thanks to clever folks like Christian Rene Larsen (aka: CRL), the development of cool software for the venerable Commodore 64 continues, some 39 years after the greatest 8-bit system’s release!

CRL’s test and diagnostic suite of software tools now cover diagnostics for the most heavily used parts on the micro computer, the keyboard and its joystick. So grab the CRL Joystick and Keyboard Test and Diagnostics tool (it’s less than 5kb!) to ensure your 8-bit beauty stays healthy for years to come!

 

 



The Retro Gaming Vault – April 2021

By

We are excited to start a new monthly feature, which we hope becomes a regular on ausretrogamer.com.

So what’s this newfangled feature we are so excited about? Well, as the title suggests, we’ll be delving deep into our photo vault full of retro gaming photos from years gone by. The aim is to give you all a dose of nostalgia and hopefully connect with new audience members.

For this very first edition, we dug through thousands of our images from the last dozen years and came up with a swag of nostalgia inducing photos; from the best joystick ever made, board games based on classic arcade titles, to our Commodore 64 smart watches and playing classic games on our Game Boy Micro – it’s all easy money 😉

Enjoy!

Original image copyright: ausretrogamer