Am getting the Standard console from Retrocade, the games list didn't include a couple of my old favs
Space firebird & Phoniex, I emailed them & they assure me they'd add them free

Will report back

I've been racking my brains to remember a game which was an80's shoot me up?? There's enemy vessels under your ship & there's a line with spaces between & little green arrows which blow you up should one get under you & jab your ass!

That's all I can recall? Anyone help with the name ??

TaxiMark
Sheffield Wednesday Fan
Posted 23 February 2013 - 07:49 PM
I don't mind palace to be fair. Much better club than tinpot Charlton and Brighton

I'm thinking Iridium or Uridium perhaps (can't quite remember). Was on Spectrum and Commodore. I'm thinking of getting the ultimate edition so keep me posted. I have used emulators but find my computer does not like the DOS being mucked around with. I'm also tempted by the keyboard edition but it seems a little under developed at present. Anyone have the keyboard edition?: I loved my C64 and Spectrum 48k.

Red and Blue Army!

just bought the retrocade Odroid64 and it is excellent.

couple of faux PS controls, 15,000+ games from my favourite coin op thru to some classic amiga with all the consoles in between.

Personalised service if required.

"Everything is air-droppable at least once."

"When the going gets tough, the tough call for close air support."

I do remember the top game for the Oric 1, Xenon, which was supposedly a clone of Phoneix (which I've never played), had a level that involved something like this. You had two levels of things like Galaxians that involved shooting creatures called Aards, which divided in to two smaller ones when shot, like Asteroids; then you flew through a meteor swarm (easy peasy) and after that you had a level in which planes flew over and dropped paratroopers who, if they landed, marched backwards and forwards and tried to stick these spikes up your arse. That was followed by a traditional boss level and the cycle repeated.

If you were closely hemmed in between landed paratroopers with a bomb coming down on top of you you were goosed.

These were the Aards

[Link]

And you can see the level I mean if you look at about 2 minutes 25 in this video.

[Link]

Sadly that guy is too pony to get to the boss level but you can see it in this video at about 3 minutes 25:

[Link]

Edited by chateauferret (16 Dec 2018 8.35pm)

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The Ferret
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Now what you can do is make your own. The software for games emulation is free and open source (at least on Linux, don't know about Windoze) and it runs on pretty basic hardware; the computational demands of retro games are low by modern standards although you do have to feed the emulator platform and the modern system architecture.

You can use an old laptop for this: the only "modern" thing you need is an HDMI output if you want to drive a monitor or telly, but even that is optional. Often selected is of course the Raspberry Pi, which you can buy for a song, although I have found with these that the SD card they boot off is a bit flaky (it's a solid state storage device with very little write lifetime so it wears out quickly if you save stuff a lot; I tried moving everything except the operating system to a mechanical drive but it still packed up after a few months). A minicomputer which boots from a solid-state drive (SSD) or ordinary hard drive would be better.

Here's one modern open-source software solution:

[Link]

but equally you can install something like Ubuntu Linux as the OS and then install the emulator package on top of that. A typical choice is RetroPie and emulationstation:

[Link]

Of course if you're running retro games in some sort of emulator you'll be careful to make sure you own the original software since otherwise you are (in principle) breaching the copyright. I'm sure you're all whiter than white on this point :-) - other local laws may also apply depending on spouse.

Edited by chateauferret (16 Dec 2018 9.52pm)

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The Ferret
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I can't stand modern games.

Regular readers will know of my particular loathing for all things Micros***e, but everyone else is jumping on the same commercial bandwagons now; and in this area we have subscription pricing, in-game purchasing, enforced obsolescence (which you mention) but for firmware, hardware and operating systems as well as for application/game software - Windoze 9, anyone? - and the addiction factor and lock-in that is exemplified by Fortnite, a game so controlling that children would rather wet themselves than stop playing for long enough to answer the call of nature FFS.

I've also found that the XBox is an automated money-removal machine. We have (for some reason) one of these pieces of witchcraft in our house. One day we bought a game. Over the course of the following week, with no explanation, permission or warning, about £400 disappeared from my bank account in a series of transactions with "Micros***e" written next to them. Now if we want to buy anything for the XBox we have to key in all the card details, make the purchase, then go through a whole heirarchy of settings and menus to delete the card details each time. Incidentally it's an interesting exercise to compare the prices charged in the XBox Store with those on offer in high-street toy shops.

The other problem with modern games is that I'm s***e at them :-) - actually there's a serious point, they're too complicated and with too much to try to remember from the outset you just start, feel confused for about ten seconds then there's a big bang and a little demonstration of OpenGL particle systems and it's over. Anything later than SimCity 2000 or Transport tycoon is beyond me. And I'm not stupid - I could be writing code for these games.

Then though there are things like Minecraft. I don't like its blocky, coarse appearance and I have a near-obsessive insistence that the world is round and therefore should be modelled not as a grid but as a subdivided icosahedron, but that aside it is inclusive, allows (admittedly highly awkward) user additions and modification, doesn't cost the earth and although it has in-game purchases they seem to be useful rather than required-if-you-want-to-last-more-than-ten-seconds. There are options which allow a newbie to get to grips with it and endless variety in what you can actually do. Minecraft is available on multiple platforms although it was swallowed up by Micros***e a few years ago.

And so came to pass the saying that was written: the day shall come when Micros***e will sell Linux software :-)

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The Ferret
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