Tickets booked for Waddington Airshow.

Last week, I picked up our tickets for the International Airshow at RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire.

http://www.waddingtonairshow.co.uk/

The flying displays are always very extensive and range from vintage, civilian and military aircraft’s of  many nations. Our favorites are the the Battle of Britain memorial flight which includes the famous Spitfire, Hurricane and  Lancaster bomber. The air dance of the Black Cat Lynx helicopters team are fun to watch and of course, what airshow isn’t  complete without the Red Arrows flying display.

Here’s a few pictures I’d taken at the show in 2006. At the time I only owned a low spec 1.3mp digital camera but a friend at work had kindly  loaned me his Fuji5000 with 10x optical zoom. Just one day with this little baby and I was hooked on photography.

The last time we were at the show I was gutted we missed the flight of the Avro Vulcan XH588 which belongs to the ‘Vulcan to the sky’ trust and is said to be the only airworthy example in the world. It’s on the flight roster for this years show so hopefully we’ll finally get to see it in action.

http://www.vulcantothesky.org/default.asp

Image below is not mine, it’s from Wikipedia

Dukeries Rally 2009

This morning I visited Sherwood Pines Forest to watch rally cars compete in the 50th annual Dukeries Rally. The event offers 44 stage miles throughout the Sherwood Forest area of Nottingham.

I took both my lens but this morning I mainly used my 300mm telephoto as the spectator areas were still quite far away from the track edge.

It was also a very hot  morning and the stage were very dusty, thankfully I’d chosen a spot on the inside of a sharp corner so most of the dust and stones were being thrown away from me.

Here’s a small selection of the pictures I took -

I don’t remember taking the shot below but I certainly remember the stone that whizzed by my ear !

Collision with a hay bale

The historic rally car section was a little light this year and only a handful cars were competing.

This little Metro 6R4 didn’t half move!!

Come October, I’ll be back here for the Sherwood Pines Rally -  An event that I’ve been visiting for the past six years and being late autumn, the stages are very muddy and make for some great photo’s.

Mame arcade controls

I’m going to be starting on the control panel for my MAME arcade machine soon so I’ve dug out the box of control parts I ordered last year to familiarise myself with the various bits ‘n’ bobs. The following pictures were taken on my study window sill using some photo paper to act at a white background.

The main component is the Ipac keyboard encoder. With this I can wire all of the joystick controls and buttons, connect to the PC via Ps/2 port (or USB) and with the supplied software can map each control within Mame or whatever emulators I’ll be running.

The Ipac is only about 2″ long and is supplied with a wiring loom. All wires terminate into a block similar to a PC harddrive IDE connector and fits on the pins shown below.

The opposite ends of each wire clamp on to microswitches which is turn are fitted onto either a ‘+’ joystick or button terminals. Another wiring loom provides the ‘-’ connections. You can just seen the terminating block on the top right of the picture below.

Here’s a shot of one of two Sanwa balltop joysticks I have and a few of the joystick buttons. These will be mounted from underneath the wooden control panel although I’ll be using a longer joystick shaft as these ones are quite small.

Here’s a shot of the underside of the joystick showing the microswitch connectors. The clear plastic dial is a restrictor plate allowing the joystick to be set to either four or eight way directional control. The idea for this is that that some arcade games designed for four way control aren’t very responsive with diagonal controls.

Here’s the second joystick with yellow ball top attached. I also have green and pink ball tops so i can swap an change if needed. I think yellow one is my favorite. The 1up and 2up buttons will be mounted to the front side of the control panel.

I’m not sure which colour combination of arcade buttons to use yet. I’m thinking six buttons per player so maybe four red ones and two blue ones. The yellow one will be used for the ‘coin’ button to emulate a coin credit. For total originallity i’m aiming to wire the actual coin mechanism microswitch the the second coin imput on the Ipac as i like the idea of having to use an actual coin to activate a credit.

You can see here how the microswitch attached to the buttons.

I quite like this next shot as a PC desktop wallpaper

If you’re interested, I purchased all my parts from Gremlin Solutions. The guy who runs the shop is a really nice chap and is extremely helpful.

http://www.gremlinsolutions.co.uk/

Old laptop fun.

The rain hasn’t stopped since yesterday afternoon so I’ve been relaxing and tinkering with a very old Toshiba 320CDT laptop I liberated from work.

This thing is OLD !!

Here’s the specs -

• Pentium 1 -  233mhz

• 32mb ram

• 4gb HDD

• Floppy drive

• x4 speed CD-Rom drive.

• x1 USB port

• Running Windows 98 (1st edition)

Out of pure interest, I’ve been trying to research the original retail price but can only find a one listed  for the next model up. In 1999 it was around £999 and today, I found one on eBay  for £5

Once, this may have belonged to a member of our Sales team until no longer up to the task and thus given to us (IT Dept) for spare parts.

For the next few years it served as a monitor to report on traffic/up time between two of our office buildings joined by Laser Link/Wifi Link (Mawse, if you’re reading this, you might have to correct me here – it was probably you who set this up!

A few years later, the wireless/laser link was replaced by a more resilient fibre optic  feed and the laptop remained where it was tucked away behind metal shelf racking. I’d completely forgotten about it until I happened to spot it on Friday. A quick look at the log shows it’s been switch on and running for years without even a blip. Considering the dusty warehouse environment I’m surprised it’s lasted this long.

Back in my office I stripped it down and gave it a good blast with plenty of compressed air, dollops of cleaning spray and lots of elbow grease. Looked as good as new when I’d finished.

So………what shall we do with it?

Toshiba 320CDT in all it’s ‘chunky’ splendor

Chunky it is, but with only a 12″ LCD screen it’s actually quite light compared to my regular HP notebook.

First thing I did was to replace the existing small 4gb hard disk with something bigger from my parts drawer. I found a 30gb drive that should do the trick. The orange/grey card in the following picture is a Xircom PCMCIA network card. With this I can connect to the internet.

There’s not much I can do to upgrade the 32mb ram as these are a very old sort. I’ll still keep an eye out on eBay though. Anyway, 32mb should be plenty for my needs.

My first test was to see how useful it might be as a regular everyday basic computer. For this I’d need a very small O/S that’s nice and light on resources.

I tried various flavours of Linux including ‘Puppy’ & ‘Damn Small’ Linux settling on the latter. Testament to the coders, it ran very well and has turned this OAP into quite a nippy net book.

D.S.L

Next up was to try MS Windows as I’ve got a few old programs from the glory days of DOS that I wanted to try.

I installed Windows 98 which also seemed to run quite nicely although I had a job tracking down generic USB drivers for my pen drive. It’s a shame the drivers for my USB based Wifi card wouldn’t work but the minimum is Windows 98(SE). I tried it anyway & was greeted by a ‘blue screen of death’ – aaah happy memories !! Think I’ve got a Win98SE CD somewhere though so maybe I’ll try again.

Using a Windows 98 floppy boot disk (I can’t remember the last time I had to use one of these) I was able to install my favorite game from my college years…Doom II.

I forgot how addictive it was.  I started playing  around 3:00pm and you can see by my clock, I soon lost track of time

Next on my list was to run a few emulators – Maybe I could use it as a portable ‘retro’ gaming machine.  By far the best was Vice64, the Commodore emulator.

Here’s Californian Games running full screen at 60 frames per second.

My portable Commodore 64!

It’s been a fantastic afternoon messing around with this great little machine and looking on the web, certainly has given me a few more ideas.

Pong Clock and Picture Frame

Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition announced

Announced today at the E3 show, Lucasart will be releasing a remake of the classic graphical  adventure game – Secret of Monkey Island. It’ll be available for the PC and via Xbox live.

I’ll def be hunting down the PC version when it’s released later this summer.

Here’s a shot taken from Gamespot’s website showing the new graphic makeover.

You can read the review and watch the Lucasart interview here -

http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6210601/the-secret-of-monkey-island-special-edition-first-look

RCM Pictures uploaded to Flickr

I’ve decided to upload most of the RCM gaming day pictures to Flickr rather than upload twice. If you’re interested you can find them here-

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26527444@N06/