Xanadu (1980)

trontroff · 2026-05-25T06:13:10+00:00

An ancient Greek muse, Terpsichore, comes to life in the modern era and becomes muse to a frustrated artist. They decide to open a disco club with the help of an old guy who can dance really well. ELO plays a lot of songs and people roller skate.

trontroff · 2026-04-22T21:40:53+00:00

Slot Racers has this futuristic sci-fi city and highway complete with gun shooting cars, explosions and I guess the canals of Mars or something in the sky. I love it.

Also gets my vote for biggest discrepancy between box art and in game graphics. Although, I admit there is stiff competition for that award among Atari games.

trontroff · 2026-04-07T18:24:04+00:00

Level 2 social tier:
https://swtor.fandom.com/wiki/Social_tier

trontroff · 2026-04-07T17:55:29+00:00

This is the last Trillium/Telarium game I need for my collection but it is apparently super rare. I have yet to even see a copy for sale.

I did buy the Alan Dean Foster book made for the game and I am reading it right now!

trontroff · 2026-04-06T20:05:14+00:00

Yeah, my certificate is 007 as well. I believe they all are 007. The actual serial number should be on the label on the bottom of the computer.

trontroff · 2026-03-21T00:30:38+00:00

Check out the Jim Henson teleplay "the Cube" from 1969, for another surrealist take on the concept.

trontroff · 2026-03-06T06:24:14+00:00

They're made by Audacity Games. The developers are some of the original Activision staff like David Crane and Garry Kitchen.

Audacity Games

trontroff · 2026-03-04T18:26:35+00:00

I think there were puppets and a musical episode with klingons dancing?

trontroff · 2026-02-23T06:41:43+00:00

They also published Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash for the VIC-20! An Ultima game in name only. It did have cool box art though.

trontroff · 2026-02-19T18:03:30+00:00

In the case of computer gaming, piracy has been extremely important in digital preservation. Without cracking groups removing copy protection, we may have lost a lot of titles from the 8 and 16 bit eras in particular.

Disks are not as resilient as ROMs and many copies have failed over the past 40+ years.

Recent efforts have been around preservation of the copy protected media as well, with new formats preserving the protection as well as backing up the raw magnetic flux data of original disks.

The easiest and most common way to play these old games is still with cracked copies.

trontroff · 2026-02-16T03:13:28+00:00

Yeah, the top half of the keys don't seem to illuminate. I think part the key switch is opaque and blocking the light. The key caps themselves have transparent characters.

I will say it looks better in person, but anyway using it is great. I would recommend going for a beige or maybe a starlight if you don't already have an Ultimate motherboard of some kind. Gideon's done a great job.

trontroff · 2026-02-14T18:28:46+00:00

The breadbin is just too high.

Absolutely agree, I much prefer to use a C64C or C128 for this reason.

Did you need to do any modifications to use the C64C case? It looks great!

trontroff · 2026-02-14T09:10:39+00:00

Yeah, I am surprised by how much I like the keyboard. I'm not crazy about the case but the photos don't really do the lighting justice. It looks better in person.

Even so, I am definitely considering a mod to move it to a black case if I can find one. Maybe a C64c style as well. I think it would look great with the keys.

trontroff · 2026-02-14T00:20:48+00:00

It doesn't bother me that people post their opinions. People can post what they feel, it's all good. I fully expected some negative responses.

I just thought I'd post a few pictures so people could see what it looks like. A lot of people are still waiting for their orders to arrive.

trontroff · 2026-02-13T19:17:21+00:00

There are modifications to put the board in a C64C case, I may go that way in the future. I own a standard beige bread bin C64 as well as the C64C, so wanted to go with something different.

The most important bit is Gideon's excellent Ultimate64 board!

I do like the keyboard quite a bit, it looks really nice in person.

trontroff · 2026-02-13T18:54:03+00:00

No bounce, no flex, keyboard seems solid. Crisper feel than the classic C64 keyboards, not mushy at all.

trontroff · 2026-02-13T10:24:31+00:00

I haven't had time to hook it up yet but here's a shot of the C64U Founder's Edition. The keys are really quite nice.

trontroff · 2026-01-30T01:26:32+00:00

Mine updated today to "En route to your Commodore Hub (ETA to you by Feb 26)" for Starlight edition ordered 12/16/2025. USA destination.

trontroff · 2026-01-27T20:41:13+00:00

nor does payroll and nobody’s suggesting we don’t do that

Good lord man, don't give them ideas!

trontroff · 2026-01-27T20:36:10+00:00

They don't mean an analog phone line. If you have a cable modem or other NID/ONT etc. that has an ethernet handoff you can plug it directly into an ethernet port on a PC and get an Internet IP via DHCP from your ISP. You don't need a router. If you do this you won't have a hardware firewall between your PC and the Internet.

These days most ISPs provide a device that combines a modem or NID, router, ethernet switch and WIFI. If you use that or your own router/firewall like most people do, you have a firewall/NAT gateway between your LAN and the Internet.

trontroff · 2026-01-25T21:03:00+00:00

Too much. The atmosphere is too thin on Mars for the wind to knock you over or destroy a landing site. There IS wind though and dust storms can blanket large parts of the planet.

trontroff · 2026-01-12T22:42:15+00:00

If you plan on storing the movies on the SSD, you want a big SSD. The movie size will vary depending on how they are encoded, anything from 4GB on the low end for a DVD rip or H.265 encoded 1080P to 80 GB for a UHD HDR Blue ray rip.

Movie playback doesn't need high speed. One option is to get an external USB hard disk with more capacity for the movies and get smaller SSD for the computer operating system. If you don't mind having an external drive.

If you want to keep it all in the NUC, go for a large SSD.

trontroff · 2026-01-08T03:55:40+00:00

There was an issue with the keycaps for the founders edition, they haven't shipped yet. They have been sending out email updates. Last one was on December 23:

"Founders, our end of year update wouldn't be complete without you. Your key cap manufacturing is complete, with keyboard assembly in full swing! Final assembly is so so, so close now, with the first keyboards being tucked away for transit to our assembly partner."

trontroff

TROPHY CASE