Polski Fiat / Fiat 126p / FSM-Niki 650

You know, until recently I wouldn't have looked twice at a Fiat 126p (or FSM-Niki 650 as they were know in Australia), thinking that the were a wholly-unremarkable, sluggish small car.  That changed when I read an article in Top Gear magazine (also published on the web) about the Polski Fiat 126 Group 2.  Who would have thought that a company called 126 Group 2 is currently producing a Fiat 126-based rally car in their Poland workshop?  

A quick search on the web reveals that the Fiat 126 has a large following, with enthusiasts all over the globe, including Australia.  Witness the Martin Racing 126/Niki-rebuild video (and Australian Top Gear competition submission) below.  Don't miss the blast around Mt Panorama featured at the end!

And 4performance's 'Building a Fiat 126p Rally Edition' youtube video is quite interesting, showing each step of their rebuild in detail.

What makes cars like the Fiat 126p so interesting is that they are affordable and look to be very simple to work on, both of which are important to anybody wanting to build a car as a project.  

Perhaps the Fiat 126p is another car I should add to my imaginary future garage?...  :)

(image from topgear.com)

Golf GTI's in Canberra: Easter get together

Sunday 23rd of March, midday.  Telstra Tower car park, Black Mountain, Canberra.  This was the meeting place for an Easter get-together and drive for Canberra members of GolfMkV.com's Australian Forum. It was also the first chance for many new forum members to meet in person, rather than online using their pseudonyms.  Eight guys made it to the get together- one in a superbly-modified MkIV Golf GTI, with the rest in MkV Golf GTIs of various configurations and colours.  We expected a ninth-member to show up, but an unfortunate screw-in-tyre incident prevented him from attending.  Members who made the get together included: CiaranGTI / minigolf / GTI-racer / Kirium / thefullarchie (all the way from Brisbane :) / Bunty (couldn't come on the drive) and the MkIV GTI guy who's name escapes me for the moment!  Oh, and of course me, Ferris :)

Note: larger versions of some photos are available here.

Telstra Tower car park, chatting as we wait for forum members to arrive

On our way!  Ciaran's immaculate 'Black Magic' GTI close behind. 

 

First stop along the way, and a chance to snap some photos.  Good range of colours on display.

And a reverse-angle shot.

Across the bonnet of my GTI.  Motorcyclist looks enviously at gleaming GTIs...

The roads were great.  Mostly free of traffic, with some good bends and breathtaking scenery.

End of the road (well, at least the bitumen part).  Time for more chat and photos.

Couldn't resist taking a few more photos of my GTI, especially when it's looking so clean :)

Uh, my GTI again.  Did I mention how clean it is?...

All seven cars that took part in the drive.  Cool MkIV GTI bringing up the rear.

Ready to start the drive back to Canberra.

Model Cars: The Ferris Collection

I love classic cars. The shape and styling, the history, and the uniqueness of certain models really appeals to me. Of course the dream is to one day have a garage full of classics, each car in mint condition and perfectly maintained. The reality, however, is that I don't have the money to create such a collection. Come to think of it, even a large garage would break my budget! Not to mention the full-time mechanic required to restore and look after the vehicles. So, it looks like my dream is destined to be unrealised for some time. That's where model cars come to the rescue. Over the past year or two I have started my own model car collection. It's early days, but I am slowly purchasing new cars... particularly when I pass through Braidwood, where the excellent Car Models of Braidwood shop is located. I've included some photos of my model cars below. Apologies in advance for the average quality of the images- photographing small objects is hard! : )

Chrysler Charger E49

Austin Healy Sprite

Austin Mini Checkmate

Volkswagen Golf Mk1 GTI

Golf engine bay

I was a failed teenage game developer (part 3)

(..continued from part one and part two)

It had always been a distant dream of mine to be a game programmer. At the time, of course, it was possible for young coders to whip up popular games in their own garage and flog them off as shareware. This shut-in, computer-chained lifestyle seemed like the sort of one I wanted to lead.

My bedroom had cut-out magazine pictures of my gaming heroes.. a PC Gamer interview with iD Software back in the Doom days, a Commodore 64 magazine piece on Jeff Minter, a shoddily self-drawn System 3 logo.. I'd gaze up at them almost daily, pinned on my little bulletin board.

I tried somewhat half-heartedly to achieve that dream. After saving months worth of allowance money, I finally managed to gather enough dough to purchase Andre LaMothe's enormous book Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus. It was littered with code snippets showing how to do simple graphical tricks, play sound, and so on. It also weighed in at a rather imposing 600 or so pages, giving it definite blugeoning potential. I think it may actually feature as a murder weapon in Cluedo.

This sheer intimidation factor alone left me unimpressed, and I returned back to the comforts of my QBasic world.

During the last two years of high school, I also kept a running diary about how I was going to create a 3D SWAT-based game. I used pages upon pages to lay out the game design and describe how it would work. Looking back on it, some of it was rather cool, even though Sierra have since made a game franchise that was pretty much exactly what I had in mind. Here's my crazy mind at work in the diary's first entry, describing the sound design:

Sound will be a high priority, I want, no, I need
headphones/mics for the game. This would make for
interesting conversations between the players..

"RED ONE, THE PERPERTRAITOR IS IN THE SOUTH
BLOCK, LEVEL 12E. OVER"
"COPY THAT, RED THREE. I'M THERE. GET BACKUP."
"ROGER RED ONE. WE'RE COMING. OVER..."

and stuff like that. You could have conversations during
the game!! And you could chose which person to talk to as
well. No music - that would spoil the atmosphere. Cool.

Sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but as anyone with XBox Live and any modern FPS can attest, the only thing headphone and microphones have brought to gaming is the ability for anonymous twelve-year-olds to call you a "GAY N00B FAG".

Just like the Hindenburg, so too did the plans for "SWAT" begin to slowly crash and burn, with the diary turning into an often-hysterical fest of teenage angst. It wasn't all lost dreams and skipped opportunites, mind you. Oh no. I did make some games. Five of them, in fact. And after looking back on them tonight, well, maybe it was for the best that I didn't end up in the business after all.

It seemed so funny at the time.

My first three were all Grod games (see part 1 of this series). They were terrible text adventures which involved a series of picking random action choices (A, B or C), one of which was going to be the correct answer, with the other two basically leading to 'GAME OVER'. No clues were given as to the correct answer, and most of the time it was just things that a 14-year-old would find cool or funny. As in the following example taken from Grod 3:

YOU DECIDE TO GO TO LAS VEGAS. YOU WALK TO THE AIRPORT
WITHOUT A HASSLE. THEN YOU ARE FLYING. WHILE ON THE PLANE,
THE STEWARDESS WALKS UP TO YOU AND TRIES TO CHAT YOU UP.

WILL YOU GO TO THE LUGAGGE COMPARTMENT WITH HER OR STAY?
(A) GO OR (B) STAY: A

YOU GO TO THE COMPARTMENT AT THE BACK AND START TO
PASH EACHOTHER. YOU START TO GET REALLY EXCITED BUT THEN
SHE TRANSFORMS INTO OPRAH WINFREY AND MAKES A
SPECIAL ON YOU ON HER SHOW. THE TOPIC WAS
`MEN WHO RAPE FLIGHT ATTENDANTS. YOU ARE LAUGHED AT FOR
THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! HA HA! WHAT A LOSER! HA HA HA!

GAME OVER.

Ha ha ha indeed! At the time I was pretty proud of my creations. But one fateful day, my coding rival BISHTRONICS gave me a disk containing a solitary file: GROD4.BAS. Not only was it an unofficial sequel to one of my babies, it featured something the other Grod games didn't.. graphics and sound!

At the time, this was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.
Yes, even more amazing than Robocop.

My mind was blown. Once again, my dismal productions had been bested! The next few weeks were spent tirelessly writing what I hoped would be the ultimate Grod game, Grod 5.

Might I add at this point, that drawing graphics in Q-Basic is one of the most mind-numbing, suicide-inducing things one can ever hope to do. It's full of statements like:

DRAW "BL200 bd100 r50 u60 r300 l250 g50 e50 r250 u20 ....."

that draw each line pixel by pixel. I couldn't even tell you what the above does anymore. But hell, my reputation, BARGOSOFT'S reputation was on the line here, so if it meant nights of sitting there manually creating terribly simple graphics line-by-line, that was the price that needed to be paid.

Suffice to say, Grod 5, like all the other games, pretty much sucked. Although it featured such gameplay additions as secret rooms (during "A,B,C" prompts, you needed to type a phrase that no-one in their right mind would type without looking at the code itself), and non-linear progression (you can go via the left door.... or the right door! Cripes!), it was still the same crusty old Grod underneath.

It's all about the gameplay, not the graphics.. right..? RIGHT?

As 1994 drew to a close, so did my three-year career in QBasic programming, taking with it my desire and patience to write these terrible games. And so, during the warm summer months, I wrote my last hurrah: Snake Stone : Death of a Galaxy.

Spanning around 2500 lines of code split into three separate files, it was the Grod-style of "A,B or C" text adventure gaming pushed to its limits. A long introduction sequence, frequent graphical interludes.. I spent far, far too much time on this baby.

And yeah, it still pretty much sucked.

Snake Stone in action

There was a Snake Stone 2 planned, but I only managed to write the introduction sequence and the first "A, B, C" question. I think once I got to that point, I realized that it was about time I invested my efforts in something other than giving a piece of crap a new coat of paint.. like, playing Duke Nukem 3D for instance. Yeah. That'd do just fine.

One day I shall auction off the code to Snake Stone 2 and make millions.

And on that note, this three-part epic on teenage nerddom draws to a close.

Epilogue

Before BISHTRONICS and BARGOSOFT eventually crumbled into nothingness, a third competitor emerged. Word had spread through the nerd playground that Todd - the IT teacher's son - had written games the likes of which no-one had ever seen someone write before.

We begged to see what these games were, and when he finally showed us, our jaws dropped. He'd written an air hockey game with actual VGA graphics, animation and sound. I imagine we were feeling something akin to what the developers of Awesome Possum must have felt after seeing Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

Convined that he couldn't have made it himself, when we next were over at Todd's house for a party, both BISHTRONICS and BARGOSOFT decided to join forces to launch a corporate espionage attempt at finding out our new rival's secrets. Our attempts were stunningly successful. What did we find?

A copy of Andre LaMothe's Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus.

Why hello there, palms! Please meet my face. Repeatedly.

The end.

I was a failed teenage game developer (part 2)

(..continued from part one)

At around the same time that I was churning out crud like Quik-Ad Micro, I was beginning to take a healthy interest in the PC demo scene.  Mind you, the only exposure I'd had to the demo scene was a collection of MOD files contained on a PC magazine CD-ROM. So the only thing I actually understood about the demoscene was that you needed to have a truly awesome name for your 'group'. Therefore, if I wanted Bargosoft to be a QBASIC-powered force to be reckoned with in the elite world of "the 'scene", I would need to give it a suitably awesome 'scene name.

I pulled out a dictionary and started scouring the pages, looking for the perfect word. Something to rival Fairlight.. Future Crew.. Triton..  and so eventually I settled upon the rather dubious title of "HEATWAVE". It didn't take me long to realize that 'HEATWAVE' is actually a pretty terrible name for a demoscene group, so the search resumed for something cooler. For a brief period I decided upon "OPTICAL ILLUSIONS", but since that was too many letters for me to bother rendering in QBASIC code, I changed it to "ENTROPY".

A cool name deserves a cool logo.

Of course, what's a demoscene group without demos? With the name taken care of, I then proceeded to spend weeks producing awful, horrid demos, leading to what would be known as the Imphobia series. Actually, Imphobia is the name of some amiga 'scene magazine from years gone by, so I guess I was borrowing the title to lend it some sort of credibility. Viewing the demos now, of course, they almost seem like parodies of what a demo should really be.

Before the Imphobia series, however, were my humble beginnings as a wannabe demo writer. The first, GROOVY3.BAS, consisted of an seizure-inducing flashing background whilst the words 'PINK FLOYD' scrolled down the screen in alternating colours. In fact, just about everything I've ever written contains a section where the screen flashes random colours in a blinding manner. Perhaps it shall ultimately be my trademark as an artist once I've passed on.

The early fruits of my labour.

With my skills sharpened, it was time to move onto a real demo. The first Imphobia consisted of silly, mostly-random PC speaker music that played whilst the screen filled with basic ANSI graphics. Actually that's a half-truth, those two things didn't happen at the same time, since I had no idea how to do threading in QBASIC (or even if its possible). So the music would play first, then the screen would fill with ASCII, then another piece of music would play, then something else would happen, and so on. The grand finale was the display of the Bargosoft and Heatwave logos, followed by some crappy spiel about how awesome public domain software is.

In 1994, Future Crew released the legendary "Second Reality".  I released.. this.

The next three demos in the Imphobia series weren't much better, just featuring more elaborate graphics. In one of them I even introduced some goofy political point about how religion and nazism leads to nuclear war or something. Who the hell knows what I was thinking; to be honest, the only thing I can remember of my highschool years is the tragedy when I accidentally taped over my VHS copy of Fraternity Vacation with the Oprah Winfrey show.

It should've been called Imphobia 3-D.

Nuclear holocaust stunningly realised in QBasic.

I started inventing these stupid phrases to go along
with the gfx, thinking I was "deep".

In the next (and final) part : Bargosoft Game Studios is founded, but BISHTRONICS deals it a crippling blow..

(PS :Your reward for getting this far is yet another example of
 BARGOSOFT motivational imagery)

Call of Duty 4: Fight the Lag

If, while playing Call of Duty 4 on Xbox Live, you see me join a game only to leave 5 seconds later, please don't think I'm some kind of game-hopping n00b.  I have a good reason for visiting game after game like some kind of nomadic... er, nomad.  That reason is lag, which all Aussie online-gamers will be intimately familiar with.  Unfortunately Call of Duty 4 is not immune from this problem.  When I get a good connection (as represented by green bars) the game is fantastic, with the best players inevitably placing well on the leaderboard.  Once the connection drops to yellow- or even worse- red bars, all bets are off.  Skill has little to do with anything, and blind firing with a submachine gun on full-auto is the order of the day.  It's really very disappointing when you empty a full magazine into the enemy, only to see them stop, prop, and drill you through the forehead with a carefully-aimed shot.  All this could have been avoided if COD4 players were provided with some kind of connection filter, allowing us to filter out all games below a certain connection level.  I believe that HALO has this option, as do 99% of online PC games. As it stands, we Aussies have two options: 1. Hope that a friend is online and playing in an Aussie-dominated game (with a spare spot available to join), or 2. Spend 30 or 40 frustrating minutes searching for games, connecting to them, and then immediately leaving upon discovering that you have a woeful connection.  I'm sure that all it would take to end this misery for Aussie gamers is for a small patch to be released providing the connection filter option. In the meantime all we can do is hope and wait... 

(image from pregamelobby.com)

I was a failed teenage game developer (part 1)

Hi.  My name's MrPigeon, and I suck.  No really, I do.  At first, I wasn't sure why Ferris would let me post in his blog, because I'll probably suck at this too.  I figure I may as well write about what I'm good at, so my first three entries will be dedicated to how my inherent suckfullness got me to this sorry point in my life.

My passion for programming started at a young age, probably around ten or eleven years old. I remember that one of the first things I wrote was a text adventure game in BASIC (using the free GWBASIC that came with MS-DOS 3). It was loosely based around a freeware Commodore 64 game called Grod The Demented Pixie.

The game itself was quite terrible and only barely qualifies as being called a text adventure because:

1. It contained text.
   
2. I'm sure at the imaginative age of 10 it seemed like quite an 'adventure'.

It also contained my very first easter egg, in that if you typed in a secret phrase at the end (probably something like "ATARI LYNX RULEZ") you were treated to pages upon pages of a ten year old's wisdom. I would come back day after day to pour more words into it, transforming it from a simple "hello everyone this is a secret message!" to a epic record of my simple little life at that point. Sadly, I no longer have the game itself, but below is a 99% accurate recreation of what it would've contained.

I have been playing Double Dragon 2 a lot today and
it is really hard.  If you press punch and kick at
the same time Billy does a really cool jump kick it
is awesome. It gets really hard at the farm level though
and I can't get past it because of all the punk girls
with the chains.  Luke says that when you complete it
you get a picture of a naked woman which is pretty weird
and I hope my mum does not find out. Anyway it is a
good game and I give it 95.7 out of 100 and I hope that
they make Double Dragon 3 because that will be even
better.

In high-school, I befriended a guy named Tony. As far as high-school friendships go, ours was a fairly competitive one. Not out on the track, however.  Ours was a friendship fueled by the fury of QBASIC pogramming. I had just finished reading about billion-dollar maverick Bill Gates' founding of Microsoft, and now had a burning passion to create my own software company offering quality, QBASIC-written wares to.. well, no-one really. But that's beside the point. And thus, BARGOSOFT was formed on one dreary winter's day in June of 1994. Tony, meanwhile, had created his own 'company', BISHTRONICS, founded on much the same principles.

It was healthy and fun competition. Each day we would arrive at school with boxes of 3.5" disks containing our latest creations, for the other to drool and be jealous over. I tended to be caught behind the 8-ball a lot of the time, and as such it was often I who was left blinking in amazement as BISHTRONICS showed off its new software. I still vividly remember the day that Tony showed me his newly-implemented menu system featuring a 'highlight' bar that could be scrolled up and down using the arrow keys. I'd never seen anything like it.  All through lunch I was sitting in stunned silence, trying to figure out how it could be done.

Our competitiveness soon blossomed into all-out war.  We started doing early morning raids upon the classroom computers, unleashing our homebuilt DOSShell replacements upon them, hoping to hear the positive swoons of the teacher when they next turned on the computer - knowing full well how much it would torment the other.

The terrible software I invented during that period came thick and fast. There was "Bargosoft Quik-Ad Micro", which proposed to do the following:

Ever wanted to display your own ads for software? This
program will create your ad with a touch of colour and style.
Just type in your message after you choose to write your ad.
Unfortunately I haven't figured out what to do after that so
you will have to write that section by yourself. Anyway,
have fun!"

So ultimately if you typed in your advertisement text, it would display it in the middle of the screen surrounded by flashing, rotating ASCII asterisks. Who needs expensive PR departments when you can harness the raw power of Bargosoft Quik-Ad Micro FOR FREE?

Quik-Ad in Action!

There was also "Bargosoft Music Manager", which prompted the user to enter in an octave, tempo, and notes that they wanted played through the PC speaker. The most amusing thing in retrospect about this and many of the other applications is that they all featured huge video-game like introduction sequences, featuring flashy logos and overbearing PC speaker music. Music Manager itself was quite a stand-out, because not only did it feature the aforementioned logo presentations, it also featured about a minute's worth of fake magazine quotes (from equally fake magazines) praising it before it even got to the main menu:

`A powerhouse achivement!' - Computer Utility Magazine
`The best QBASIC utility we have seen so far!' - PD Monthly
`Definetly Bargosoft\Heatwave's best effort yet' - PC Domain
`Another winner for Bargosoft!' - PC Upgrading

Then there was also the ill-conceived "Bargosoft Homework Manager". This thing would ask you what subject the homework was for, what the homework was about, the due date, and any other "relevant information" you might have to offer. What might the program do next, you might wonder? Well, it sure as hell doesn't do the homework for you. In fact, all it does is send the following to the printer:

--------------------------------------------------------
**THE BARGOSOFT\HEATWAVE HOMEWORK MANAGER VERSION 1.0**
--------------------------------------------------------
Subject: <...>
Assignment: <...>
Due Date: <...>
Relevant information: <...>
--------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1994. Bargosoft\Heatwave.

How useful! Surely such a program would be the wildest dream of any overworked student looking for assistance in their studies.

The observant amongst you would've noticed the rather curious "BARGOSOFT\HEATWAVE" up above. What's that all about, you might wonder? Well, to find out, you're going to have to wait until tomorrow's update for part 2. In the meantime, inspire yourselves by witnessing the Bargosoft mission statement:

(PS: The **EDITED FOR SAFETY REASONS** bit was already there. I guess even as a fourteen year old I was paranoid of crazy internet people)

(PPS: Anybody willing to send me "a sample of their QBASIC skills" can still feel free to do so, and make me feel even more embarassed about myself)

In tomorrow's entry: Bargosoft becomes a force to be reckoned with in the imaginary "demoscene" of Stanthorpe.