Sub Hunter: Because the C64 won’t die

I don’t think I have ever, in my entire life, written a review of a Commmodore 64 game — which is saying something for someone who more or less rode the entire 8-bit wave from start to finish. I won’t go so far as to call this a review, since it’s extremely biased and probably far too short. But I was skimming through c64.com the other day while looking for information on an older title, and the spotlight game was something I’d never heard of: Sub Hunter.

It’s an excellent piece of work, in every respect — graphics are smooth, beautiful and detailed, and press the architecture to its limit. Sound effects and music are likewise spectacular, if you remember what the SID could do.

 

Perhaps most of all though, gameplay is fast and fun. The storyline is fairly straightforward — government experiment goes wrong, poisonous stuff dumped in the ocean, giant killer fish are spawned, and your job is to scoop up swimmers before they are devoured. Stages include side-scroller action (with very impressive perspective effects in the background, I might add) and some vertical target levels, a la Depthcharge, if you remember it. (Oh boy, did I ever date myself on that one. )

 

I’ve run this in VICE 2.1 on two different Linux machines (Crux and Ubuntu, if you must know ) as well as a friend’s Windows machine using the 2.1 Windows binary, and it runs great on all of them. It’s a bit clumsy on my machines because of the keybindings in VICE, which trap them to the keypad and … well, I’ve been through this many times before.

I’d love to see it on an actual C64, but I don’t know if that’s possible. (By that, I mean the geography might make it … difficult for me personally.) I see elsewhere on the ‘net where it’s possible to order an actual boxed version of the game, which would be fantabulous. Either way, if get it running on a real breadbox, by all means post a video of it somewhere so the rest of us chickenheads can enjoy it as well.

Aside from that I won’t say much more. It’s a great piece of work for a machine that (technically) expired 20 years ago. I will be watching for sequels or other titles from that group. Excellent, excellent work. A big gold smilie this time:

A lightweight diversion

Since we’re on the subject of console utilities, like tty-clock, it’s only fair to mention a diversion or two. I could delve into the ubiquitous NetHack, but that’s a rather complex item and not the least bit underdiscussed, being a game with a 22-year (?) history.

Here’s one you might not have heard of before: MyMan.

 

Ah, it’s like 1980 all over again. Sort of.

I forget where I saw this first, or where it was mentioned, but it’s a very faithful clone … if you can call a text-based version of Pac-Man a “clone.” This is actually running under Openbox and Crux, mostly because the time to compile it is quite long for some reason. For me, a terminal window of 58×36 was exactly the right size. I haven’t tried it under dvtm yet.

Dependencywise it won’t require anything out of the ordinary. I see it supports sound, but I haven’t heard a peep out of it. I probably need to investigate a little further, for an answer to that. I’ll put it on my “action priority” list.

I couldn’t find this in a quick search of the Ubuntu package archives. Arch users have a AUR PKGBUILD available to them, but I compiled it without a Pkgfile in Crux and ran into no problems. I see the Arch version “requires” xterm, but I built it without that; I think you can declare the terminal you intend to use, and maybe get a few more graphic embellishments.

Yes, that’s what I need: More graphic embellishments for my console games.

tty-clock: 6.9 on the Geek-o-meter

This is a little something that everyone should have, if they even consider life at the terminal.

I went on a rampage searching for tty-clock after seeing it in a screenshot or two of some dvm and awesome setups. Or maybe they were xmonad. Or maybe. …

Anyways, it is ubelievably hard to track down an application by its screenshot, when you don’t know the name of it and there are no title bars to guide you. Luckily, somewhere along the line, the name tty-clock came up.

And for a terminal system, it’s pretty cool. The needle on the geek-o-meter tips way to the right when this is on your desktop, particularly if you throw in something like cmatrix at the same time.

Installing it is almost primitive; download the tarball, decompress and make. I haven’t bothered scraping together a Pkgfile for this, because it’s almost as easy as compiling an autologin. And once it’s made, you can stash it anywhere you like. Put it in your path, put it in your home directory — whatever.

Note that it has a centering option, a bouncing version, a 12-hour option and a few other minor adjustments. It needs a few things too — like a way to adjust the date display outside of editing the source code. (I prefer year-month-day, if you don’t quite get my meaning.)

It’s possible that this is already in some distros — I couldn’t find it in Arch or AUR, and those folks are usually riding the sharp edge of the software release schedule. If it’s out there under another name and I just don’t know about it, please fill me in. It won’t be the first time I’ve been late to the party, and it sure won’t be the last.

Otherwise, enjoy.

Two and a half epilogues

About a month ago I rereleased my OLPC back into the wild, with the original intention of it going to a deserving person who could put it to better use. I had an intermediary in the United States handle the actual distribution, because logistically speaking it was more convenient.

The intermediary tested it for a few days and thought it worthy of donating to a worthy recipient, but both of us were a bit leery of that sticky key issue. It would be a rather dubious gift if it were given away gratis to an underprivileged user, only to have it lapse again. And if the new user was a child, as we both originally intended, that would be disappointing for everyone involved.

Because of that, and because of the costs of relaying the machine between Japan and America, we both decided it was better to offer the machine for sale, with proper mention of its standing defects. It was auctioned on ebay and found a new home, along with many of its accessories, at a school in Connecticut. Judging by the buyer’s history, the school uses these for its students, and has plenty of experience working with them.

So I am satisified with that outcome. I am reasonably comfortable in the thought that it is being used for an educational purpose, and that there’s an IT staff on hand to manage it if the machine misbehaves again. Both issues solved.

The second epilogue is either heartening or disheartening, depending on your perspective and mood. The horrid K6-2 struggling with Windows XP which was pulled out of retirement — more like pulled out of the garbage, really — was supplanted this week by a giant eMachines J4482 armed with Vista Home Premium.

The staff is pleased again, since this moves exceptionally faster than its crudware-infested precedent, but of course, since it came with Vista, it took a technician — a professional technician, this time — two days to connect the thing to our network and our array of printers and copiers. I pitied him after the first few hours.

Which means by extension that the K6-2 has returned to its retirement home, atop a pile of papers on a shelf in the corner of the office. Whether I bring it home again or not remains to be seen. It might be needed once more, if the planets are not in alignment, if the temperature drops below 19C, or if any other random occurence interferes with Vista’s function.

(As a side note, I tried to convince the boss that he should give me the old desktop so I could rehab and donate it to charity, a la the Sony VAIO I gave away around the turn of the year. However, I think he wanted to sell it to a recycle shop, in hopes of recouping some of the price. Good luck with that.)

The last epilogue is really only halfway complete, and not much of an epilogue at all. That battered Thinkpad is in the shop now, having a new screen transplanted into it.

The final price for parts and labor will no doubt be much higher than what I would pay if I were to replace it myself, but for some reason I feel the need to support my local computer store. In this day and age, sending a little business his way might keep him afloat a little longer. And I enjoy window-shopping in his store, even if I never actually buy computers.

A bad idea gone bad

For as much as I bad-mouth Gnome, I should probably give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, I know for a fact that the Arch version of Gnome is quite speedy, as are some earlier versions of Debian’s Gnome desktop.

And if you put it together in pieces, rather than installing an entire preconfigured suite, it is possible to make one that does all the things you want, keep it simple, and avoid a lot of the extranous crud.

So while it’s not fair for me to direct 100 percent of my invective toward Gnome in particular, it does mean that occasionally, sometimes, it is possible to use Gnome without incurring a huge debt. It’s still vastly overweight when compared with the alternatives, but it’s not impossible to use.

And since I’ve never really given it the chance to perform under (what I consider to be) the best circumstances, I decided I’d try something completely bizarre, and compile the entire business from scratch.

Crazy, huh?

Well crazy is what it turned into. I don’t know if there are many people out there who install Gnome from source code, but in Crux, it proved ridiculous. Installing X wasn’t an issue, and the core system is of course, something I’ve done many times before.

But after the third or fourth sub-sub-subdependency spiraled out of control and exploded in a splatter of error messages, I decided it was a stupid idea. Chasing cryptic error codes and installing missing packages, all from source, in an effort to build a desktop I don’t even like … was a dumb idea from the start.

In the mean time if I know there’s something Gnomish I need to review, I’ll do it in Arch. It’ll be fast enough for my purposes.

Truly great stuff

I grabbed two or three torrents the other day, when I was testing my overworked, underpaid Pentium laptop in its role as rtorrent slave. I mentioned OpenGEU yesterday, which was disappointing because of its heavy Gnome underbelly and overdone desktop glitter. But this one is the complete opposite: function and speed combined with an appearance that underscores its efficiency.

There are a lot of revisions of Puppy Linux, and I don’t know one from the other. I happened to grab the IceWM/JWM “retro” version off Linuxtracker.org, and the results are what you see above, adjusted to my tastes.

Personally, I think this is fantastic. I used Puppy Linux a long time ago and liked it then; I like it even more now. And really, what’s not to love? This particular version (and again, I don’t know all the versions that are out there … I just download and install ) is lightning-fast, finds all the hardware on this machine without even trying, connects to an open wireless network with no more than two clicks, loads completely into memory, has Flash support, plays embedded videos through SeaMonkey and gxine (that’s the blue box in the screenshot up there ), has desktop widgets, takes up only 100Mb on a disc, is completely customizable, uses only a sliver of memory even while running, has more software than I have space on this blog to list, and has a mascot of a little blue puppy that glows while you browse.

Wow.

It puts me to shame, actually. This is exceptionally well done, and I feel a little embarrassed by that pear-shaped GTK1.2 thing that I occasionally bandy about. Not that there’s anything wrong with an Ubuntu-based live CD that’s intended for old machines and uses only out-of-date software. Oh no. Nothing at all.

It’s just that the Puppy crowd obviously has done a better job. It’s hard for me to find anything wrong with it at all. Coming off OpenGEU, it’s nice just to have tooltips and labeled buttons so I know what I’m pressing (I never did find the “shutdown” button in OpenGEU). But the variety of controls, options, applications and menus in this little distro is … amazing.

And speedwise it again embarrasses me. I spend days putting together a Crux system to run Openbox with an effective amount of speed. But Puppy Linux, like Slitaz, achieves nearly the same sense of performance without cryptic CFLAGS and hours upon hours of compiling. Obviously, I need to reassess my priorities.

But that’s enough talk. There’s almost nothing I could say that would be as impressive as trying it out. I strongly recommend it, if you haven’t at least tried it once. Put it on something old and tell me how it performs. I have a feeling we’ll both be pleased.

Another gold smilie for Puppy Linux: