2010 April — Tardis.dk Remakes

Bought a new computer and now people are making fun of me.

April 28, 2010 By Sokurah

I’ve always been a PC person (unless you’re thinking of ‘politically correct’ – in which case I’m doing my best to be politically incorrect) and so I haven’t wasted any opportunities to tell the Mac OSX people what I’m think of their inferior platform choice. It’s the ZX Spectrum vs. C64 discussion all over again. 😀

Well, about a week ago I bought myself a nice and shiny 15″ MacBook Pro – the new core i7 model, and now everyone I know with Mac’s are making fun of me. Hehe, I guess I walked in to that one. 😀

So, why have a done it? A glutton for punishment?…very likely, but no. A while back I installed OSX on my HP laptop but it only works mostly fine – the USB ports doesn’t work and that’s a bit annoying – especially since the plan is to get into developing software for the iPhone and what good is a dev enviroment if I can’t get my software onto the phone easily, right?

…so I decided to buy a real Mac. Hopefully that means less hassle. 🙂

I won’t be switching completely to OSX though. The PC and Windows will still be my primary enviroment so the Mac will be mostly for compiling OSX and iPhone projects (when I get to that).

Hopefully I will also (finally) get around to making OSX versions of my games. I successfully compiled and played Omega Race 2009 on the Mac a few days ago but that also only works mostly fine. There’s a strange bug that affects the background picture, and my code for online scores doesn’t work on OSX and I’d like to sort that out before doing “re-releases”.

Let’s see what happens, and when…

Filed Under: Misc, News Tagged With: OSX

New (old) game released – Starbike

April 2, 2010 By Sokurah

Okay, this ‘new’ game has a bit of backstory. Hold on…

Do you know who Dr. Tim Langdell is? If the answer is ‘yes’ then I won’t have to tell you how nutty he is, but if the answer is ‘no’ then you may want to go here and read up on him.

In short: He used to run a software house back in the 80’s but hasn’t don’t much in the way of releasing software since then, because one day he apparently woke up and thought it was a better idea to run his company by using psychological terror and sue people left and right over the rights to games released through his company, instead of actually releasing software. The man is very protective of his trademarks…even if he doesn’t actually own them. Sometimes there’s a fine line between being eccentric and plain nutty, and he’s crossed that line by leaps and bounds. He calls himself a doctor, but he’s clearly more the patient type. 😉

Several remakes has been shut down due to his threats, so in a moment of defiance I decided to remake a game that was originally released by his company, which is something he don’t like, but I don’t take kindly to screwlooseyness(tm) and didn’t care. Well, I cared enough to invent a new author, Dr. Bacon (which is kind of a dual in-joke since Mr. Langdell calls himself a doctor and I’m currently working on a remake of Psycho Pigs UXB) and a new blog to put it on, but I’m now ‘coming out of the closet’ :), as I’m quite proud of my Starbike remake.

So, yeah, I did it and now I’m moving my remake from its old home to here.

The whole idea was to see if he noticed the game and would go on to sue me, so I could earn myself a cease and desist order, which I would’ve promptly awarded with a ‘p*ss off w*anker’ letter (which is why I used an alias as a buffer – y’know…deniability and all that), but it’s been 5 months now and he’s probably too busy with his Electronic arts lawsuit. Well, he could still notice it and sue me anyway, but then Ill just have to tell him the same thing – just as myself. 😀

So, grab the game while you can. Not that I expect it to ‘go away’ – even if I’m ordered to remove the game I can still send people a link in an email, right? 😉

One comfort I have, in case the nutty professor doctor decides to take his marital problems out on me, is that I’ve been in contact with Paul Curtis, the programmer of the original game, and he’s certain that the rights to the game belongs to him, and I have his blessings to release this game.

So there. 🙂

Click picture to goto the download link.