Mini book reviews.

I’ve added a bunch of book reviews to my site.

If you looking for books about retro games and gaming hardware such as; On the Edge, Computer Wars, Trigger Happy, Joystick Nation, High Score (2nd Edition), Arcade Fever, The Ultimate History of Video Games, The Xbox 360 Uncloaked, The Encyclopedia of Game.Machines, then take a look.

New fansite.

If you like your games retro like I do, head on over to www.thepixelpump.com/myth to see my tribute to one of my favourite ever classic C64 games.

Wim.

Codec grumble

As part of my work I’m occasionally required to convert video to flash and downloadable video files.

Creating Flash .flv’s are easy enough using Flash (or Free FLV Converter for those who cant afford Adobe’s premium).

But creating a downloadable video file can be a real pain. Let me explain why.

When it comes to computers, many of our clients are “old school” and dont know what a video codec is let alone how to upgrade/download/install the latest ones. This means we can’t expect them to have anything beyond the codecs that come with XP and Media Player 9 or (maybe) Vista+MP10.

Therefore, when I want to convert a video to something they can download and view on their “vanilla” XP machines, I have to stick with XP’s standard codecs. Unfortunately, XP’s (SP2) built in codec selection is pretty out of date and most of them produce results that even the oldest of the old-school find unpleasant to view.

This leaves me in a bit of a conundrum. I can either try to educate each client and their members to update their codecs or media player software, or find a “good enough” solution with what’s available. Educating them is a big job and will only work sometimes meaning we’ll still get people with issues. So I’m left with MPEG-1 or WMV encoding. MPEG-1 is long in the tooth and generates huge files, whereas WMV generates smaller files but leaves Mac users out in the cold.

In the end, we’ve settled on MPEG-1 for its broader compatibility, it’s a solution but not one I’m happy with.

Here’s some links to useful software I found while researching this issue:

-Free FLV Converter – http://www.koyotesoft.com/indexEn.html

-FLV player – http://download.cnet.com/FLV-Player/3000-13632_4-10467081.html?tag=mncol;pop

-Download Helper (Firefox plugin, download .flv) – http://www.downloadhelper.net/

-Handbrake – http://handbrake.fr/

-Pocket DivX Encoder – http://www.pocketdivxencoder.net/EN_index.htm

-DivX codec – http://www.divx.com/en/win

-VideoLAN – http://www.videolan.org/

-MediaPlayer Classic – http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/

Something to wreck?

I got fidgety around 3pm Sunday afternoon and decided to go into my shed to wreck make something.

I found my old Atari Lynx handheld and decided to open it up for the upteenth time to take a look at its gubbins, that would waste a few minutes while I thought up something more useful to do with myself. Once I had the thing open I remembered toying with the idea of swapping out the fluro backlight (which accounts for more than half of the Lynx’s power drain) for some white LED’s.

I had some used LEDs from another project that either failed or outlived it’s usefullness.

After a bit of farting about I managed to remove the fluro and replace it with two white LEDs fitted into the ends of a short length of milky white plastic tube. The whole thing acts like a fluro but drains about a quarter of the power. It’s not yet perfect but gets the job done.

I put the Lynx back in storage where it’ll probably stay till its next brush with being destroyed.

One Sunday afternoon used up.

Here’s a very good guide to doing the same thing to a Gamegear.

…and then the rain came pouring down.

There hasn’t been a lot of action on the prop design front lately, I think the Joy project is in temporary limbo?

Ive updated some of the ramblings on my site, head down Widdershins Way if your interested (see sundries).

We spent 10 days up at Exmouth, snorkeling with reef sharks and driving around trying to avoid kangaroos, it was a memorable trip.

8th of May and all is well…

Yup I’m still kickin’, word has it the Joy project is still happening but they’re waiting on a commitment from the distributors.

“We have some serious interest from a Bangladeshi
production house/distributor called Channel-i / Impress Films. Now we have
to wait to see if they will go to the next stage with us.”

I’m happy to wait, I’ve been busy lately with web stuff anyway and have been doing a lot of snorkeling every chance I get while the weather’s still warm.

In the meantime, check out my tribute site to Black Tiger, one of the best arcade games of the late 80′s!

Black Betty?

It lives!

“Black Betty” is finally complete, here is a stack of pics showing what Ive done.

I applied the black primer, then sanding and very fine filling, patching etc. One nice thing was the primer dried with a slightly rough spatter-texture finish, I decided to leave this in place on the grip area but sand and smooth all the other parts. Having used a black primer it was straight forward applying topcoats of matte black, I applied about 5 or 6 light coats until coverage was complete then one more slightly heavier coat over that to give it some durability. The whole thing was left to cure over about four hot days of 30+ degrees, hot weather is good for something.

After that, I just put it all together, there were no major dramas. Final finishing involved spraying the grip base a nice silver colour and adding some gunmetal effect to the gun itself using graphite powder applied to all the raised surfaces, this will need to be touched up now and then but I find it gives a more realistic dark metal look than using the dry brush and metal paint technique.

As you can see, I also made some “rock” bullets. These are made from black 6mm acrylic that I smashed into little sharp bits then glued back together in a rock-look-alike way. Some basic painting, gloss on the sharps and matte rusty-black on the base give them their final look. They can be removed from the brass cartridge in case we want to shoot spent cartridges or try another look for the bullets.

So, that’s that. I guess I will get on and build a simplified stunt version for the scenes where the gun gets handled roughly, this one is way to fragile to be thrown across a room.

Final parts photos.

Here is another stack of photos, this time showing all the parts that go in to making up the gun.
I wanted to detail these before hitting them with black primer which will obscure all my hard work.

Shortly after these photos were taken I primed all the parts, now they’re black, it looks good.

This is a beast of a gun!

Pictures, at last!

Greeble season is at an end and its time to put the glue away.

Here is a stack of pics showing some of the details that have been added to the gun. I make no promises that there wont be a few more tweaks and changes before my next post /wink. This is my favourite part when building props and I have to discipline myself not to go too far and end up with a baroque effect.

These pics should give some nice comparisons with the painted article. I’ve noticed in the past, people wont believe the prop is made from bits and pieces once it’s painted.
I’ve sourced some black plastic primer which should make hiding all the different coloured bits a lot easier.

Woo, it’s getting close to looking like the final thing now.

More Tweakage…

The Greebling continues.
I’ve added some bulk to the barrels, a lot of screws and some nice fittings here and there. They add visual interest and complexity as well as break up the flat featureless surfaces. I’m quite happy with the results so far. Filling and sanding is almost done.
I’ll take some detail photos before applying the base coat of paint, so we can compare later.

See what a difference a couple of cool days can make.