I've been stuck on the same boss on Metroid Prime for a year now - The Omega Pirate. I know *how* o beat him, but I just keep dying. Love the game. Hate the bosses.
Ironic isn't it. The only reason that the Commodore name is worth reviving is that dedicated fans have kept it alive by building a thriving community and archiving software and hardware that otherwise would have been lost.
That's so true. Ever had an MRI scan? Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Used to be known as NMRI - NUCLEAR Magnetic Resonance Imaging. They had to drop the Nuclear because of the stigma surrounding the word. Probably couldn't get people to go anywhere near the scanner otherwise.
The processor that controlled the lights went faulty on my car. The garage charged me the equivalent of $65US to just hook the car up to their diagnostic computer to diagnose the fault, then charged me another $330US to replace and fit the faulty unit.
And of course I'd tried an independent garage first when the fault occurred, and they couldn't diagnose the fault - only the official franchise dealers have the official equipment and circuit diagrams. So they force you to got to them, and to pay top dollar for repairs and parts.
I drew the loading screens for some of those games way back in the eighties, and still own the copyright. The company producing the C64 DTV used my screens without my permission to promote the unit in their initial press releases which I wasn't pleased about.
I have heard that the actual unit doesn't use any of my artwork, but if they did use my screens I'd require them to pay a license fee.
I believe they didn't realise that many of the different components of those games such as music and loading screens and box artwork were produced by independent contractors. Those contractors didn't always sign over copyright to the original game company, so they still own their work. In those cases simply buying rights to the game aren't enough - you also have to buy rights to the music etc. as well.
But SpaceShipOne is a protoype, a proof of concept vehicle.
Its cost of development will be offset against the sales of future spacecraft based upon its design and the licensing of its technology to other companies. In fact Virgin Galactic has already paid £14m / $25m to license the technology.
So Mojave Aerospace Ventures may already be earning a profit, having reputedly spent $30m and gained $35m in prize money and license fees, with undoubtedly more outside investment and sales to come.
I just bought a Kodak LS633 camera from Amazon.co.uk. for £99 ($175US)
It has a 2.2 inc OLED display, and it's amazing, much bigger and better quality than my more expensive Canon A70. It's still difficult to see the screen in bright sunlight, but much easier than the equivalent LCD.
The Commodore 64 remix scene is very active, in fact there was a live C64 remix concert in London, UK last Saturday (Sept 11th), and a fantastic event it was too.
It was organised by a guy called Chris Abbott, and his company C64Audio.com now represents many of original 1980's C64 musicians and licenses their music. To date he's paid over £20,000 in royalites to the original musicians.
So the C64 scene shows you can have a vibrant remix community, whilst giving credit to the original composers and paying them royalties.
I cleaned three friend and family PCs of spyware last week. In each case I installed Firefox and told them to use that instead of IE.
I didn't force them to use it, but I strongly recommended that they did.
Well we've got Slay Radio streaming C64 re-mixes, and the High Voltage Sid Collection distributing SID format C64 music, so not much need for C64 iTunes.
[Begin Shameless Plug]
I used to be an artist producing loading screens for games back in the C64 era, and for some more C64 nostalgia visit my
C64 Art Gallery website.
[End Shameless Plug]
AFAIK the model still exists. On the Directors Cut Star Trek: The Motion Picture DVD, there's a section showing how they added new CGI sequences into the film. (Actually they weren't strictly 'new' - they had been storyboarded for the original release, but there was no time to shoot them).
These sequences were designed to be seamless, so you couldn't tell the difference from an original effects shot to one of the new ones.
So they had the actual Enterprise model from the films shipped to the CGI studio so the CGI artists could model it exactly. When they weren't sure of the exact dimensions of a part of the ship they could simply walk over to the model measure it.
There are several shots of them unpacking the model from the storage crate, and it still looks stunning.
I also remember hearing that after one of the Star Trek films the model wasn't packed properly, and when they took the model out for the next film all the lovely laquered paintwork was peeling off, so it had to be re-painted and re-laquered.
Take a cylindrical spool of thin, clear plastic - a bit like a roll of kitchen cling film (but without the cling, obviously). Attach that to one side of the rover. Pull the plastic film from the spool over the top of the solar panel and attach it to another (motorized) spool on the other side of the rover.
The film is in contact with the panel so that no dust can get underneath. When the film covering the solar panel is dirty the motorised spool winds on a new section of clear plastic from the full spool onto the empty one.
That way you can keep the panel clean a lot longer. There wouldn't have to be a lot of plastic on the spool either to allow for serveral 'cleanings' of the solar panels, enough to extend the battery life of the rover quite a bit.
The solar panel would have to be designed so that the film can be pulled over it whout it snagging and tearing though.
Apparently the guy who won had run into some thargoids. That makes me suspicious, as they're quite rare, so he may have played the original BBC one and known of the 'witch space' cheat, where if you pressed shift while hyperspacing you'd be jumped into a thargoid ambush.
Unfortunately no. I started working for them a short while after Elite was released.
In fact I won a copy of Elite at a C64 show by making the second highest amount of credits in two dockings. I missed winning a 1541 disk drive by 50 credits...
Back in the mid eighties I was an artist working on the C64, doing graphics for games, mainly loading screens. I got paid to draw graphics, which was a pretty painstaking process, with only 16 colours, low resolution, colour attribute restrictions, and a very innaccurate analog touch tablet.
In those days games would take up to 20 minutes to load(!), so a pretty picture was put on the screen for you to look at while it loaded. I did quite a few of these for various games companies in the UK, including Firebird and Hewson, under the 'pen name' SIR.
I've got a website gallery of my old C64 art, together with a history and background of my pics.
http://www.ravenger.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/gallery
The C64 was the gateway into my career in computer games, so I owe a lot to this marvellous machine.
The Internet has been fantastic for finding all the old C64 work I'd lost over the years too. It's an amazing experience when you finally recover a piece of your work you haven't seen in 17 or 18 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been stuck on the same boss on Metroid Prime for a year now - The Omega Pirate. I know *how* o beat him, but I just keep dying. Love the game. Hate the bosses.
Ironic isn't it. The only reason that the Commodore name is worth reviving is that dedicated fans have kept it alive by building a thriving community and archiving software and hardware that otherwise would have been lost.
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!
That's so true. Ever had an MRI scan? Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Used to be known as NMRI - NUCLEAR Magnetic Resonance Imaging. They had to drop the Nuclear because of the stigma surrounding the word. Probably couldn't get people to go anywhere near the scanner otherwise.
The processor that controlled the lights went faulty on my car. The garage charged me the equivalent of $65US to just hook the car up to their diagnostic computer to diagnose the fault, then charged me another $330US to replace and fit the faulty unit.
And of course I'd tried an independent garage first when the fault occurred, and they couldn't diagnose the fault - only the official franchise dealers have the official equipment and circuit diagrams. So they force you to got to them, and to pay top dollar for repairs and parts.
I drew the loading screens for some of those games way back in the eighties, and still own the copyright. The company producing the C64 DTV used my screens without my permission to promote the unit in their initial press releases which I wasn't pleased about.
I have heard that the actual unit doesn't use any of my artwork, but if they did use my screens I'd require them to pay a license fee.
I believe they didn't realise that many of the different components of those games such as music and loading screens and box artwork were produced by independent contractors. Those contractors didn't always sign over copyright to the original game company, so they still own their work. In those cases simply buying rights to the game aren't enough - you also have to buy rights to the music etc. as well.
But SpaceShipOne is a protoype, a proof of concept vehicle.
Its cost of development will be offset against the sales of future spacecraft based upon its design and the licensing of its technology to other companies. In fact Virgin Galactic has already paid £14m / $25m to license the technology.
So Mojave Aerospace Ventures may already be earning a profit, having reputedly spent $30m and gained $35m in prize money and license fees, with undoubtedly more outside investment and sales to come.
I just bought a Kodak LS633 camera from Amazon.co.uk. for £99 ($175US)
It has a 2.2 inc OLED display, and it's amazing, much bigger and better quality than my more expensive Canon A70. It's still difficult to see the screen in bright sunlight, but much easier than the equivalent LCD.
I was lucky enough to be there, and it was a really excellent concert. The performances were fantastic.
It looks like there's a push to do another one in Copenhagen in 2006, so it may not be the last one.
The Commodore 64 remix scene is very active, in fact there was a live C64 remix concert in London, UK last Saturday (Sept 11th), and a fantastic event it was too.
It was organised by a guy called Chris Abbott, and his company C64Audio.com now represents many of original 1980's C64 musicians and licenses their music. To date he's paid over £20,000 in royalites to the original musicians.
So the C64 scene shows you can have a vibrant remix community, whilst giving credit to the original composers and paying them royalties.
I cleaned three friend and family PCs of spyware last week. In each case I installed Firefox and told them to use that instead of IE. I didn't force them to use it, but I strongly recommended that they did.
Well we've got Slay Radio streaming C64 re-mixes, and the High Voltage Sid Collection distributing SID format C64 music, so not much need for C64 iTunes.
[Begin Shameless Plug]
I used to be an artist producing loading screens for games back in the C64 era, and for some more C64 nostalgia visit my C64 Art Gallery website.
[End Shameless Plug]
AFAIK the model still exists. On the Directors Cut Star Trek: The Motion Picture DVD, there's a section showing how they added new CGI sequences into the film. (Actually they weren't strictly 'new' - they had been storyboarded for the original release, but there was no time to shoot them). These sequences were designed to be seamless, so you couldn't tell the difference from an original effects shot to one of the new ones. So they had the actual Enterprise model from the films shipped to the CGI studio so the CGI artists could model it exactly. When they weren't sure of the exact dimensions of a part of the ship they could simply walk over to the model measure it. There are several shots of them unpacking the model from the storage crate, and it still looks stunning. I also remember hearing that after one of the Star Trek films the model wasn't packed properly, and when they took the model out for the next film all the lovely laquered paintwork was peeling off, so it had to be re-painted and re-laquered.
Take a cylindrical spool of thin, clear plastic - a bit like a roll of kitchen cling film (but without the cling, obviously). Attach that to one side of the rover. Pull the plastic film from the spool over the top of the solar panel and attach it to another (motorized) spool on the other side of the rover.
The film is in contact with the panel so that no dust can get underneath. When the film covering the solar panel is dirty the motorised spool winds on a new section of clear plastic from the full spool onto the empty one.
That way you can keep the panel clean a lot longer. There wouldn't have to be a lot of plastic on the spool either to allow for serveral 'cleanings' of the solar panels, enough to extend the battery life of the rover quite a bit.
The solar panel would have to be designed so that the film can be pulled over it whout it snagging and tearing though.
Apparently the guy who won had run into some thargoids. That makes me suspicious, as they're quite rare, so he may have played the original BBC one and known of the 'witch space' cheat, where if you pressed shift while hyperspacing you'd be jumped into a thargoid ambush.
Unfortunately no. I started working for them a short while after Elite was released.
In fact I won a copy of Elite at a C64 show by making the second highest amount of credits in two dockings. I missed winning a 1541 disk drive by 50 credits...
Back in the mid eighties I was an artist working on the C64, doing graphics for games, mainly loading screens. I got paid to draw graphics, which was a pretty painstaking process, with only 16 colours, low resolution, colour attribute restrictions, and a very innaccurate analog touch tablet. In those days games would take up to 20 minutes to load(!), so a pretty picture was put on the screen for you to look at while it loaded. I did quite a few of these for various games companies in the UK, including Firebird and Hewson, under the 'pen name' SIR. I've got a website gallery of my old C64 art, together with a history and background of my pics. http://www.ravenger.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/gallery The C64 was the gateway into my career in computer games, so I owe a lot to this marvellous machine. The Internet has been fantastic for finding all the old C64 work I'd lost over the years too. It's an amazing experience when you finally recover a piece of your work you haven't seen in 17 or 18 years.