Retro Round-Up

Lordy have we got a lot of retro-geekin' news for you on this lovely Tuesday! Today's Retro Round-Up includes Amiga computers, acquitted murderers, new Star Wars and old Star Trek, what more could you ask for? Check out the links below before you get any older, gramps.

Lando Calrissian Returns in Star Wars: Rebels Animated Series
Dissed by Abrams but still loved by Disney, our favorite space-scoundrel-turned-malt-liquor-pimp strikes back!




The City on the Edge of Forever #1 Out This Wednesday
The classic Harlan Ellison-penned original series Star Trek episode gets its own graphic novel this week.




Turn Your Old Mac Into a New Amiga
Got some old Amiga software? Got a PowerPC computer you're not using? Well then, you're probably the only person you know who'll enjoy this.




It Was 20 Years Ago Today: The OJ. Chase
Relive the excitement of television's first combination live celebrity car chase and Ford Bronco commercial!

The new way to sound modern? Go retro! (AKA: Timbaland has SIDS.)

New discovery raises question, "What will become of the grand tradition of popular music causing parents to cry out in pain, What is that noise? That's not music!"

Schlock dance record producer, "Timbaland," responsible the backing tracks on hits by Nelly Furtado, and rapper 50 Cent (pronounced fiddy cen), has been positively identified as a Commodore 64 user ripoff artist. Loops stolen directly from C64 sound demos and the 1988 game "The Last Ninja 2" were layered with stock dance beats to create a hot modern dance sound. The millennial generation dances unknowingly to the retro sounds their parents first computer.

"Timbaland basically just phones it in," probably said some Norwegian guy.

None of this is in English, but you get the idea.

Commodore 64 Bass Guitar

Digital music. You can make it a ton of different ways. This lady turns diva into Devo with her modded Commodore 64 Bass Guitar. Very cool and worth a look.

Retro Computing on the Boob Tube

Keeping up on tech news these days is piece of piss. Push notifications, Twitter feeds and an increasingly large number of other digital enemas make it easy to forget that there was a time when people actually sat down to watch TV programs about technology, or more specifically, home computing. Two of the more notable entries in this genre were an unassuming and decidedly stilted tech-show called, rather unimaginatively, Computer Chronicles, and its more colloquially-monikered spinoff, The Internet Café, later retitled simply Net Café. Having enjoyed an impressively lengthy run on PBS from 1981 to 2002, Computer Chronicles played witness to many key developments in the home computing industry including the introduction of the Mac, Windows 95, CD-ROMs and even birth of the internet which prompted the creation of its sister show, The Internet Café, in 1996. While you can't just turn on your TV and hope to catch a rerun of either program, episodes of both can be found tucked away at the always awesome and always free Internet Archive. Click below to take a trip back to a time before corporations owned the internet and 512K was more than enough for anyone.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE COMPUTER CHRONICLES

CLICK HERE TO WATCH NET CAFÉ

BONUS VIDEO!!
PITFALL INVENTOR DAVID CRANE EXPLAINS HIS NEW GHOSTBUSTERS GAME FOR THE COMMODORE 64

21st Century Kids VS. 1980s Technology

I love kids. I have two of my own, and I am always amazed by the way they take to technology with such an unabashed sense of fearlessness (as opposed to my dad who is still afraid to click anything on his computer that doesn't say AOL). Of course, kids don't have to pay for the stuff when it breaks so maybe that's why they aren't as concerned about apple juice on the keyboard as I am. But sometimes I wonder if maybe they're not as smart as we parents think they are; maybe technology has just gotten so ridiculously easy to use that we mistake our little Frankensteins for little Einsteins when they suddenly figure out what the home button on our phones do. So with that, I present to you a fun little video that pits state-of-the-art 21st century children against some good old-fashioned 1980s entertainment technology. Enjoy!

Oh No! Not More Lemmings!

Nope it's not Lemmings, just an incredible simulation. It's called Caveman and if you ever got sucked into a three-hour game of Lemmings then this app is for you. Released all the way back in 1991 by British developer Psygnosis for the Commodore Amiga, Lemmings was a puzzle game in which you guided a herd of lemmings (although they looked more like Fraggles to me) across a treacherous path littered with traps and pitfalls with the ultimate goal of reaching an exit portal, which would invariably lead to another, more difficult level. The catch was, however, that the lemmings never stopped moving and would simply fall off of a cliff or walk into a spinning fan if someone didn't tell them otherwise, which is where the player comes in, assigning specific tasks to individual lemmings to help them overcome any obstacles or dangers that might otherwise get in their way. You could pause the game and plan your strategy, but assigning tasks was all done on the fly and since there was a time limit of just a few minutes, the game could get pretty intense as your cursor flew all over the screen trying to block one group of lemmings from strolling into a fire-pit while simultaneously keeping a builder-lemming busy constructing bridges over a chasm. The game itself was hugely popular and spawned several sequels and conversions for other systems up until about 2000 when the party stopped. Since then gamers have either had to make do with limited-release ports such as the one made for the PSP in 2006 or indie clones such as the excellent Pingus, which runs on Mac, Linux and Windows.

So in early 2010, when a little-known group called mobile1up took it upon themselves to bring Lemmings to the contemporary world of mobile gaming, I about pissed my pants with excitement. Working from a port of the original game that was made for the PalmOS (remember PalmPilots?) the folks at mobile1up managed to strip away the hacks and additions that had been bolted on to make the game work with Palm's unique idiosyncrasies resulting in a pixel-perfect rendition of the game while retaining most of the original source code. Development of the game was tracked on mobile1up's development blog with regular updates until June of 2010 when Sony, who somehow managed to pick up the property after the dissolution of Psygnosis, sent them a cease and desist effectively throwing all of their hard work into the trash. So in a big FU to the man, mobile1up released it anyway, but with all new graphics, sounds and a caveman theme, and it became an underground hit. Sorry, Sony, you had your chance. Caveman plays and feels almost exactly like Lemmings and features all of the same levels and even the same animations as its counterpart and is available for a multitude of platforms:

• iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad 
• Palm Pre / Pre 2 running WebOS 1.4.5 or later 
• TouchPad running WebOS 3.0.0 or later 
• BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0.1 or later 
• Mac OSX 10.4 or later (PowerPC and Intel)

Windows and Linux versions are currently in the works. I don't think there's an Android version yet, but you Android folks are used to not having any apps anyway, right? (just kidding, gawd!)

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE CAVEMAN SITE AND BUY THIS AWESOME GAME!

CLICK HERE TO READ THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF LEMMINGS!