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.”

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?

After debuting at E3 last week, Valve Software’s Half Life 2 is now the best-looking, most realistic, most highly anticipated game in the world. The lines were five hours long at E3, so I wasn’t able to witness the demonstration until yesterday. And after watching it, I’m in awe. I’ve never seen anything that comes close, and I’m giddy. I haven’t felt like this about a game since the first Quake was released. Needless to say, I’ll be in line to buy it on September 30.

If you have a high-bandwidth connection and have even a passing interest in games, you must download the 600MB Quicktime movie from Fileplanet, or possibly much faster by using BitTorrent. You’ll have to wait in an hour-long line, but it’s well worth it. If you’re on a dialup connection, you can read the play-by-play description of the movie on IGN. Go now.

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to the Star Wars Kid fund! In only seven days, 421 people donated an unbelievable $4,334.44. After Paypal’s transaction fees, that leaves $4,074.80. Here’s a spreadsheet with all the donations that I downloaded from Paypal, in case you’re curious. (At their request, the names of anonymous donors were deleted.)

In the next couple days, we’ll talk to Ghyslain and his parents to determine the best way to spend this money. As soon as we make the purchase, I’ll post the receipts. Hopefully, we can get Ghyslain to send a few pictures of himself with his brand new toys.

We’ll also mail out the non-cash gifts that people donated, including an Industrial Light + Magic t-shirt and a Darth Maul lightsaber replica signed by Ray Park (aka Darth Maul)!

The outpouring of support has been staggering, far beyond what I ever expected. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to raise enough for a 15GB iPod, but here we are. Thanks again to all who donated, and thanks to the Star Wars Kid himself for making all this possible. Geeks like us need to stick together.

The New York Times just posted an article about the Star Wars Kid and our fundraising efforts, with quotes from me and Ghyslain. Also: Wired News, The Globe and Mail, National Post story & interview, Cinescape, Chicago Tribune, the Lycos 50, and Yahoo’s Buzz Index. Listen to the radio interview from PRI’s The World. GeekCulture.com posted a great comic.

If you’re here for the first time, view the original video and the lightsaber and Matrix remixes. Then, read more about Jish’s interviews with Ghyslain and the fundraiser effort.