Finally, a worthy parody. Everyone, meet Space Ghost Kid.
Newly Digital: Hack's Retreat
The following is my contribution to Newly Digital, a distributed writing project about early computing experiences started by Adam Kalsey. Read the other entries, and then write your own: Brad Choate, Steven Garrity, Anders Jacobsen, Dan James, Adam Kalsey, Cameron Marlow, Jeff Nichols, Chris Pirillo, Andre Torrez, and Bill Zeller.
The Transfiguration of Harold Maines
The Transfiguration of Harold Maines is a documentary about a man with a dream: to become a horse. Not sure what to think about this, except that there must be a market for films catering to the human-equine transformation fetishists. At any rate, the trailer is very odd. (Hat tip to the sorely-missed Mister Pants.)
The First $2.5 Thousand Is the Hardest
Last year, I wrote about the film adaptation of Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, a pre-crash novel about dot-com entrepreneurs trying to build and market a sub-$300 PC. If you missed the release of the movie, you weren’t alone. Greg Knauss informed me that it was released last year, but IMDB says it only opened on two screens, grossing a whopping $2,535 in its opening weekend.
Rather than keep it as a period piece, they apparently tried to write in the dot-com crash into the storyline and changed the invention to a sub-$99 device (because of the availability of sub-$300 PCs?). According to the reviews, this was the least of their transgressions. The movie is supposed to be terrible, but I’ll likely still rent it (if I can find it) because of this Onion review: “A sloppy, strangely fascinating footnote to the dot-com explosion, it would make for a terrific ‘Remember The Bubble’ double feature with the similarly misbegotten AntiTrust.”
Gameboy Advance Linkers
Originally developed for Gameboy Advance developers, commercial “linker” devices (like these) allow anyone to copy downloaded game ROMs from your PC to high-capacity blank cartridges, which can then be played on an actual Gameboy Advance.
Most Gameboy Advance ROMs are 32MB or 64MB, which means you can store and play multiple games on a single 256MB cartridge by formatting the cartridge in multiboot mode and using a boot menu provided by one of several software packages.
And since the Gameboy Advance is powerful enough to emulate older systems, you can now play NES, Sega Master System, arcade, and original Gameboy games on your GBA. The thriving Gameboy Advance emulation scene is close to releasing a functional Atari 2600 emulator (another attempt). Hand-held Pitfall or Contra, anyone?