Posts by Cihatari

More mute button mayhem.

Many years ago, an insurance call centre selling products for the over fifties market.

Cue a nice elderly gentleman of eighty five summers seeking a car insurance quote for himself and his nineteen year old female "co-driver".

Deano (it's always someone called Deano) is taking the call. He is amused by the massive age difference. Finger skims the mute button on his phone. Utters the immortal words "Bit of a paedophile, are we sir?"

Mute button was not engaged as assumed.

Cue explosion from the other end of the call.. (And trouser explosions two milliseconds later!)

Re: Amiga vs Atari ST and the Demoscene

It's still going on. It's still great!

Here's a current one for the Atari ST(E) - Second generation ST with enhanced hardware.

http://dhs.nu/video.php?ID=772

And for balance, one for the Miggy, (Note:- OCS chipset, none of that fancy A1200 malarky!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msRTT5f8BGg&feature=youtu.be

A mate's dad had got the 664 model. He was miffed when the 6128 came out..

On the other hand, it was a nice tool for playing Spindizzy and Sorcery Plus. The latter game definitely wasn't a Spectrum cheapo port.

I actually had one back in the day.

I was one of the people suckered in errr seduced by the Your Computer article. As other posters have said, it promised lots of cool stuff on paper. I even kept faith through all the delays. When I eventually got my Enterprise 64 I soon found out that a lot of the aforementioned cool stuff remained firmly on paper.

Still, there were a few nice things such as a neat version of the game Sorcery. More software was o the way but got held up in legal issues after the parent company collapsed. Encouragingly it seems most of these and other stuff besides escaped.

The afterlife was better than what came before as around 20, 000 units made it to Hungary. With its own captive market a lot of the promised extra hardware and software was developed. There were even a handful of games that went some way to making proper use of the hardware. Lately the Enterprise has proved amenable to running enhanced ports of some of the new wave of Amstrad CPC games.

The dearth of software during its commercial period did encourage me to code a bit. The sound chip was an interesting piece of hardware, somewhere between the mighty C64 SID and the bog standard AY/YM used in other micros of the era.

I had one then got into the Atari ST and sold it. I've now got two, one of each. If you get in contact with the Hungarian guys, their prices for kit are generally more reasonable. There is also emulation. Now I just need to find time to have a play with the floppy disk interface I got!

Am I the only one to wonder...

What the former Moderatrix, Sarah Bee would have made of some of the responses?

Methinks that a not so gentle tolchocking with a cricket bat would have been the least forceful response from her.

After all this time, there are still people making new stuff for it..

There is still a very dedicated following, and they even produce new software for the Oric. Have some nice links.

http://space1999.defence-force.org/

http://oric30years.defence-force.org/index?page=main

Definitely not a dead platform here. I've also met a couple of them in the past, nice people too.

It's a bleak day for Jimmy DiGriz. Rust in Peace Stainless Steel Rat.

(Just to save the pedant alert going off unnecessarily, yes I'm aware of the properties of the aforementioned material.)

BT Vision can relax for the next set of Ofcom results...

We have the YouView launch finally on the horizon you all know which ISP is heavily involved with that. I'll say no more!

Very nice, but...

When is David Braben going to issue an accurate solar systems fixpack for Elite?

Manpower requirements?

The other thing which might be worth mentioning are the manpower requirements to operate one of these things. A figure of 8-900 crew members is not untypical.

If we're to successfully recreate the Nelsonian Royal Navy in its full glory, including all the frigates, sloops and other smaller ships supporting the battle line, we're going to need some blummin' amazing incentives based around rum, sodomy and the lash for recruitment purposes, as the current RN personnel numbers won't nearly cover it.

Alternatively, press gangs lurking around the nation's job centres might be an interesting thought?

Turning your brown eye blue?

Hopefully it was not just me who was thinking at first glance that this article was all about a new form of anal bleaching, with lasers! FROM THE FUTURE!!

African or European Swallow?

1x Cadburys Dairy Milk has 35x the energy of a phone battery.

Are they referring to a 50g bar or the 200g fat b*stard special?

(Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know. )

I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this.

Ha Ha! - From the mouth of the Simpsons school bully, Nelson Muntz.

Not just hospitals either

I recall a similar story about this sort of thing going on in one or two prisons as well. Alcohol-based hand-gel in the visitors centre somehow mysteriously ending up in the main establishment.

Is Genial Harry Grout aware of this and alive to the possible profit-related ventures therein?

I hope this idea can scale up.

Otherwise all you erstwhile Dr Evil types can look forward to dominating all life within the domain of a dessert spoon! Bwahaha!

If Lewis looks in the mirror these days..

Does Richard Littlejohn stare back at him?

You couldn't make it up!

What if it's not dead?

"Operator here, there's a caller with a tinny robotic voice asking you to accept reverse call charges."

Might explain how our salespeople operate?

My job role includes tidying up and placating people after the more egrerious gaffes and blunders of certain rogue (and soon to be dismissed) members of our sales force. I guess a similar system of 'payments in kind' is included in their renumeration package as well?

If we do get as far as faster than light travel

With this information that the space between stars is as messed up as a teenager's bedroom, then interstellar travellers may well need some frikkin' awsome windscreen wipers on their craft.

One from some Italo-scottish-east european place in Edinburgh

I had the pleasure of trying this one out two or three summers back.

Ediburgh style cheeseburger and chips:

Take one frozen beefburger, one cheese slice, dip in batter, then deep-fry the resulting frankenstein creation.

Then when done, serve with chips. (The chips are properly beef-fat fried.)

http://www.lalbadoro.com/

But what if essential engineering works had closed down the line?

Would he have been able to try this one with the replacement bus service?

Just a thought.

Begging to be made into a movie

Surely there's a place for the 'Stainless Steel Rat' by Harry Harrison, several good un's in there.

On a related note, I'm pleased that there was a smattering of 2000AD related suggestions, although I'm not sure if Alan Moore would be too happy with an adaptation of Halo Jones. He's not a big fan of movie interpretations of his work.