Enlarge (credit: Loewe )

Move over, Microsoft. There's a new company out there peddling clothing evoking memories of old tech. Loewe, a Spanish fashion company that apparently makes really expensive clothing, is paying homage to pixelated graphics à la Minecraft with a recently released line of clothing that makes you look like you plucked clothing out of a retro game and slapped it on your 3D body.

2D meets 3D. (credit: Loewe )

If you're a retro gamer (and especially if you're the type of retro gamer who uses a modern TV), you may deal with pixelated graphics frequently. The low-resolution look is so popular that Minecraft and other modern titles swear by it today. And now Loewe is expecting people to pay thousands to dress like their part of a retro reality.

As reported by The Verge , Loewe previewed the Pixel collection at Paris Fashion Week in October. Now, it's listing the products—including a $2,500 hoodie , $3,400 purse , $2,500 pants , $1,850 T-shirt , and $790 denim skirt —on its website for purchase.

This was my first application written for work, back around 1987 or 1988, on a HP41CV programmable calculator. The problem it was solving, was for shift workers to be able to know what shift they'd be working on a future date such as Christmas Day, News Year's Eve, their birthday, etc. This was pretty important so they could arrange their social activities around whether they'd be working, or whether they'd have the whole day off.

Having written this program back then (before anyone had personal computers at home, a smartphone or Google, meant I was the go-to person to get this information really quickly. So when my work was starting to establish a computer unit in Cape Town, my then boss summoned me in, and basically said I was on my way to join the computer unit. And the rest, as they say, was history...

Watch https://youtu.be/0VoFcVH7Hr0

#technology #retro #HP41C #shiftwork #programming

Enlarge / A look at an alternate reality where vector displays never died.

Atari's new 50th-anniversary compilation is stuffed with historical filler, but one new game contained in the package won't let me go. I'm talking about Vctr Sctr , a retro-style arcade shooter that melds the addictive gameplay of classics like Asteroids and Tempest with modern gameplay concepts.

As a package, Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection sets a new high-water mark for retro video game compilations. The collection's "timeline" feature deftly weaves archival materials like design documents and manuals, explanatory context and contemporary quotes from the game's release, and new video interviews with game creators into an engaging, interactive trip through gaming history.

But while the presentation shines, the games contained within Atari 50 often don't. Sure, there are a few truly replayable classics on offer here, especially in the games from Atari's glorious arcade era. That said, the bulk of Atari 50 's selection of over 100 titles feels like filler that just doesn't hold up from a modern game design perspective. Dozens of "classic" Atari games—from 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe on the Atari 2600 to Missile Command 3D on the Jaguar—boil down to mere historical curiosities that most modern players would be hard-pressed to tolerate for longer than a couple of minutes.

Buck Up And Drive! is a fusion of classic retro endless racing with a few fun twists, like 1v1 car fighting mode. Previously only available via itch.io, it's screeched over to Steam now too.

Since we last wrote about it in the Summer of 2021, it's added a bunch of new content for the full release too and it's looking like it's quite amusing. I grew up with racers like this on the Amiga, so it speaks to me quite personally. The developer is quite funny about it too, saying "There is time to explain, I just don't wanna.". Not really selling us on it but the trailer below speaks enough for itself I think.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Game Features:

Continued from Part 7: The Arena Eternal

After completing all of the boxed Quake games for Linux, I was left with indecision. So if I could not settle on a single game to play, why not try one hundred? 100 Great Linux Games is a software compilation put out by Canadian publisher Global Star Software. Made for a time of slow internet speeds and limited storage, these kinds of retail collections allowed users to explore hundreds of freeware and shareware titles from the comfort of a single CD-ROM.

Even at their height at around the turn of the millennium the true value of these sets was disputed, with the moniker "shovelware" often being used to mock the tendency of these compilations to value quantity over quality. It also feels an especially odd fit for Linux, where having a wide variety of free software packaged alongside the operating system was already the norm dating back to the earliest Linux distributions.

Indeed, the vast majority of the games included here are free and open source software that were already available in most Linux software repositories. With the exception of the commercial game demos, all this compilation brings to the table is the inclusion of an interactive menu. Written in Python it allows you to select a game, visit its website, display the game's manual page, and then either install the game to the hard drive or, when applicable, run it off the CD-ROM.

This second option is more useful than it sounds if you consider the fact I am only running a six gigabyte hard drive. Being able to play the games without installing them first is a blessing, and almost justifies not just utilizing the system package manager. The compilation itself is RPM based with official support being offered for both Red Hat Linux 6.0 and Caldera OpenLinux 2.3, the latter of which is included in the set as a bonus alongside a variation of the Loki Demo Disc .

The box touts that support for other distributions is possible by compiling the included game source code, an interesting way of trying to make a sales pitch out of a licensing requirement. Thankfully my install of Red Hat Linux 7.3 is close enough to not offer up too many issues as long as you bypass the distribution version check by launching the setup script on the disc with "./setup rh" as root and then the menu system itself with the "./gss-install rh" command.

Even then I found that the install buttons would do nothing, although it would recognize if I installed the RPM packages off the disc myself. Most of the games included are straight X11 or even console based, often featuring basic graphics, unusual keybindings, and no sound effects apart from the PC speaker, typically being variations on old Atari or Commodore classics. Given that I will not be going through them all here, but I will highlight a few standouts.

The Ace of Penguins is a lovely hand crafted suite of card and tile games; I have fond memories of playing Taipei as a kid from Knoppix back in the day. Rocks & Diamonds and Mirror Magic by Holger Schemel are notable for their quality graphics and sound effects. XScavenger is a solid take on the game Lode Runner , while Lincity and Freeciv are ambitious remakes of SimCity and Civilization , albeit now heavily outdated. XEvil is a fun fighting game with a history all its own.

By far the game with the most flair however is the demo for the graphic adventure Hopkins FBI , one of the earliest sold Linux titles created by French developer MP Entertainment. I actually managed to get this to work on a more recent release of Fedora some years ago, but the game speed was off making the cat shoot around like a rocket among other things. The full version for Linux has become hard to find, so it is a shame that only the shareware is included here.

This was one of the many disappointments common to these shovelware sets, with them also being notorious for being cheaply produced. That rule also applies here, with the menus often featuring inconsistent text descriptions, mismatched screenshots, and a number of the games refusing to load even after running the setup script. It also appears to be coded to launch websites in Netscape, although this can be overruled with the BROWSER environment variable.

Although 100 Great Linux Games was the only official product from the company to support Linux, Global Star Software also published a wide variety of budget video game releases, some of which happened to come from developers that were also Linux friendly. This would place them in the curious position of releasing a game which, completely inadvertent to them, was for the longest time the only retail version available that could successfully be completed on Linux.

Carrying on in Part 9: Ancient Archealogy