Not just any old Arkanoid mind. I rediscovered the best version of them all: Megaball.

Way back in the day I got my very first computer. It was an Amiga A500Plus – and it was loaded! It had 2mb RAM, the ECS chipset, AmigaOS 2.1 and (get this) a 20mb SCSI hard drive. I even got a CD-ROM drive for it. Along with some random old dot matrix printer I had for it and a copy of Wordworth I could do all of my homework on it. Deluxe Paint 3, Brilliance 2.0 and Imagine let me paint and animate all sorts of crap. But that wasn’t what it was used for 95% of the time.

Oh no. You see once upon a time, I bought myself a copy of Amiga User International magazine. And on the coverdisc was an absolutely brilliant little game: Megaball by Al and Ed Mackey.

I must have devoted whole weeks of my life destroying my own high scores. It was absolutely addictive. My mother was partial to the odd go on it too – and the only game that had interested her at all before then was the classic Digger.

Fast forward to this evening, and I was feeling a bit nostalgic. I’d been reading some forums and came across a post saying that games these days don’t really push the hardware the way they did in the old days. After putting them to rights (Half Life 2? Not pushing the hardware? Ha!) I found myself looking back at all the old games I used to love. So I went searching for Megaball.

Well I never. Al Mackey has got a website, and you’ll never guess whats on there? Megaball 4! Yay! Woo! Houpla! Only one problem: I haven’t got an Amiga anymore, and I haven’t yet got around to installing WinUAE on this machine. Back to Google we go then…

Hooray!

What do I find next? A Windows tribute to the mighty MegaBall – DXBall. Its brilliant – not quite as good as the original, but still very playable and really really addictive. I seem to have been playing it for hours now. In fact, I’m going to pop back in for one last game…

« Loud Rumbling Noise »

I can see the dust cloud he’s kicking up behind him as he motors across the desert. He’s not seen me yet either. God knows how he’s missed me, I’m in a huge BMP – 2 Battle Tank! Maybe he’s ignoring me in the hope that I won’t unleash my mightly machine gun of fury upon him?

Sod that, I’ve got a missile launcher on here too! Right, trace him across the desert, put the crosshair right in front of his tank, right-click…

« SSCCCHHHHRRRREEEEAAAAAOOOWWWW … BOOMF!!! »

DIRECT HIT! Ace! How satisfying is that!?

Ooops, there’s a helicopter. Oh crap, its one of theirs and they’ve spotted me. Best try to do something about it then. Crosshair, angle up…

« WHOKKAWHOKKAWHOKKAWHOKKA … AKAKAKAKAK …. AKAKAKAKAK … SSCCCHHHHRRRREEEEAAAAAOOOWWWW … BOOMF!!! »

OOOH YESS! HAVE SOME OF THAT! I am on fire!

Oh crap, there’s another one! Oh crappety crap crap, Brett’s flying it. I’m a dead man.

« AKAKAK AKAKAKAKAKAK AKAKAK … BOOMCHUNKA!!! »

BBBEEEAAATTTCCHHH! Damn it, come on respawn, respawn. I’m gonna take you down!!!

I’ve just gone and got myself a new graphics card and monitor for my PC. I thought relying on seven year old technology was perhaps leaving me behind the times a little, so I purchased an Sapphire 9800 Pro graphics card (in a fetching red colour) and a nice LG 17″ TFT monitor (cheers for the reccommendation Simon).

The monitor is an absolute revelation. I knew the old one was on the way out, but I hadn’t realised just how far it had gone. All of a sudden white shows up as white, and I get a full set of greyscales without fading down to black about two thirds of the way down the scale. The colours are pretty damn good too, at least to my untrained eyes.

The video card is pretty sweet too. Its really rather quick (unlike its Catalyst control software, which feels like its running through thick, gloopy treacle) and is happy to go up to ludicrous resolutions should I feel the need to. Maybe its the retrogeek in me, but it seems faintly ridiculous that I should have 128mb RAM on my graphics card. The old one had a grand total of 4mb – and that seemed like absolutely loads at the time.

Now with all this stuff, I thought I’d give online gaming another go. So I fired up Unreal Tournament. Frustrating is the only real word that I can use to describe it. There are now so many new levels, skins, sounds, weapons and other mods out there that you spend more time downloading and installing them than you do actually playing. Then when you do you come up against players who have been practising for far far too long. I think I managed about fifteen seconds without getting killed once.

Sod that then, lets give Battlefield 1942 and Desert Combat a go. That’s more like it. I can play for whole minutes at a time without being killed. Again, people are just far far too good at it, especially those of them who can strafe the Apache gunships quite so well. More practise needed there too methinks. Its ace fun playing it cooperatively though. Myself and my housemate log onto the same server, get onto the same team and then attempt to use teamwork to capture the bases and so on. It rarely works out but its great fun and very rewarding when it does.

So, online gaming exhausted, I thought I’d fire up Photoshop. Huh? What’s this? You mean I’ve got space to have all of the palettes on screen and see all of the image? With only one monitor? Wow.

I’d best quit that before I start getting creative or something.

A friend of mine wants to get into this whole web-building thang — but doesn’t really know where to start. He asked me for some help, and I replied with something along these lines…

What do you think the best way to do things is? I’m guessing HTML as the basic groundwork — then onto XHTML and CSS, with Flash & JavaScript for the movey bits. then maybe onto XML and PHP?

I could write a whole book on this, but I’ll try to keep it relatviely brief for now. I’d do it like this:

First things first: Download and install Mozilla Firefox. Its generally a much better web-browser than Internet Explorer, and follows the standards much more closely, which makes it a much better browser to work with during development.

Now that you’ve got a decent browser, you should start by learning your basic XHTML. Don’t worry at all about how the thing looks at this point – its all about document structure, and using the right tag for the job. A few examples would be:

Use <div> tags to divide a document up into logical divisions, such as <div id="header">, <div id="navigation">, <div id="content"> and <div id="footer">.

Use <hx> tags for all of your headings, e.g. <h1>Level 1 Heading</h1>, <h2>Sub Heading</h2>, <h3>Sub-sub heading</h3>, all the way down to <h6>.

Pick up a magazine, or a diary. Look how they are set out and try to match up the XHTML tag with the content. <h1-6> for headings, <p> for paragraphs, <strong> and/or <em> to strengthen or emphasise text, <table> and its siblings for tabular data (and not for page layout).

Make sure that your code validates – upload it to http://validator.w3.org/ to check it out. Only then can you blame the browser if it gets things wrong.

I know that this bit isn’t in the least bit exciting, but its very important that you get this bit right. Do it properly and you’ve gone a long way towards getting accessibility issues and search engine friendliness sorted right from the word go. In this day and age, those are very important features in any website.

Once you’ve got a grounding with XHTML, you can start on your CSS. Start basic and get more complex as you get the hang of it. Make sure your code is correct over at the CSS Validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

One of the best places to start out with CSS is Mako4CSS. Some of the information is out of date and refers to Netscape Navigator 4 – you can safely ignore that these days. Once you’ve got the hang of the basics, take a look at places like CSS-Discuss and the Sitepoint forums. If you want to see just what’s possible with CSS, take a look at the CSS Zen Garden.

Try not to curse Internet Explorer for getting it horribly wrong. Its really not a very good browser anymore, but millions of people still use it. A good place for finding ways of working around its flaws is Position is Everything.

Once you’ve got this groundwork down, you might like to start experimenting with a bit of ECMAScript (its what they call JavaScript these days), Flash or PHP.

The important thing here is that you shouldn’t rely on client-side techniques (i.e. browser scripting and plug-ins) for critical site functionality. If the user has it switched off, or the plug-in isn’t installed, or they’re simply using an older browser, your site should degrade gracefully.

For instance, if you display some critical information using Flash, you should fall back to an alternative method (plain text is probably fine) for users who don’t have it installed.

Another example would be form validation – its helpful to have a ECMAScript alert telling you that the email field is compulsory for instance, but this should be backed up on the server side (for isntance with a PHP script), in case the user has disabled ECMAScript.

As for books, I’ve never used any, but I’m told the following ones are good:

• Elizabeth Castro: Creating Web Pages with HTML: Visual QuickProject Guide
• Zeldman: Designing with Web Standards
• Dan Cederholm: Web Standards Solutions
• Eric Meyer on CSS

I hope thats helpful, and let me know if you’ve got any further questions on any of it.

Cheers,
 
 
 
Olly.

Ina Fried, a c|net journalist, emailed me last night having seen my post about the Mac Mini.

Clearly they liked my reply so much that they’ve quoted me.

I R meeja whore.

I get home. I log on. I see that Apple have announced some very cool new kit.

I soon find myself in the Apple Store pricing up a new machine.

“Oooh, I’d like that … that looks cool … there’s no point in owning a computer if you don’t have the Creative Suite … an Elgato DVB PVR would be nice …”

And all of a sudden I was hit by “Order Total: £3,234.00”.

I closed the window and backed slowly away from the PC. Why does Apple gear have to be so very very tempting to a geek like me?

You know, I think I might well find myself buying a Mac Mini in the not too distant future.

I thought it had died. I really did.

It worked fine yesterday. It was working fine a few minutes ago. Now it won’t get past the BIOS splash screen! Oh crap!

I’ve taken the side off, I’ve made sure everything is properly seated, all the cables are properly plugged in — everything seems fine. It just won’t boot. Oh crap oh crap oh crap.

O.K. Calm down. What’s changed since last time I booted then? I’ve installed a new version of Java – but that won’t have done anything to the BIOS will it? No, can’t be that.

Think, think, think… Hang on, I plugged the printer in didn’t I? That can’t be it, surely? Lets give it a go anyway.

You are bloody kidding me? It won’t boot with a printer plugged into the USB port!? That’s ridiculous! Bloody computers…

I’ve subtley modified Visual Studio to better suit my current needs: