Be Excellent To Each Other

Why stick a label on the box saying "Amstrad CPC". The strips of orange on the boxes are plain for all to see!

More than one C64 game, World Soccer is in there too.

So it is!

Had an interesting morning learning all about plastics.

You know how cheap DVD cases smell bad? Apparently they did some investigation into cheap Chinese DVD cases and rather than use pure plastic they were bulking it out with shit. Literally. Apparently baby nappies contain stuff that can be melted back into plastic so they's just throw used nappies in. Whole car batteries (including chemicals) are also excellent for bulking out plastic if you are running a dodgy factory in China.

If it has a bit of plastic in and you can grind it down and melt it, then you can use it to bulk out your end product.

Let's try it with Katie Price!

I got to handle pure plastic pellets and got to see the tooling for the injection moulding. Having mined Cliff Lawson from Amstrad for info on such things in the days of Usenet, I was terribly excited to see how they did it. It's exactly how the casings for all our old computers were made before metal became the in thing.

I've got more! This time the Commodore bucket.

It was a wonderful afternoon I tells ya.

Little Computer People!

That doesn't sound good!

I'm waiting for Joans, I have ordered a large coffee it comes in a bucket!

I now look at that game as a harrowing foretelling of the kind of shit that would infect computer gaming 20 years later.

For those thinking of jumping to the PC or Nintendo for their next gen console fun, chew on this. CPC games sell more units than the PC and latest Nintendo combined!*



* Data sample October 1992.

Oooh found more data.

UK games sales market share May 1992:

C64 26.1%
Amiga 19.8%
Spectrum 14.1%
Amstrad CPC 7%
Atari ST 7%
Sega Megadrive 6.4%
Nintendo 3.8%
Sega Gamegear 3.2%
Nintendo Gameboy 2.8%
PC comaptible 1.3%
Atari Lynx 0.7%

Any figures for the Master System? I would have assumed it'd had at least the same market share as the NES at that time.

Surprised that the Game Gear was ahead of the Game Boy.

Those are surprising stats. I'd have thought Amiga and SNES would be walking away with it at that point.

What was the biggest selling C64 game in 1992?

To be fair, the Super NES had barely been released in the UK officially at that point, and the 7 games available for PAL machines were expensive.

SNES was only launched in April of 92 so the only games available at that point would have been f-Zero / Pilotwings / Soccer .... and something else (castlevania?)

The Master system is not listed for some reason.

Nor the Beeb/Elk/Archie. Fix!

It's interesting that the ST is doing so poorly. I'd read and heard things in the past but that's the first time I've seen actual figures in context with the other formats.

The Spectrum is also not top dog. 1992 was the Speccy's Annus horribilis. You can look at how YS's circulation and pagecount was suddenly nosediving. The number of games released was drying up at a very fast rate. A couple of years earlier the Speccy would have been top dog. Even a year before when Turtles was released on the Spectrum only a few weeks ahead of the other formats it went to number 1 in the All Formats Weekly Chart on the strength of the Speccy sales alone!

The consoles in the chart are also significant. The market shares are small but the games were enormously more profitable than the 8 bits. 1992 was the year WH Smiths dropped all home computer games from it's stores and just sold console games.

I think one of the issues of Computing With The Amstrad I sent Dimrill lists the sales figures for one month in 1987 and even then the BBC was nowhere.

Can't remember the percentages but it went Spectrum, C64, CPC, and then I think it was the ST way behind the main 3 with the 8 bit Atari bringing up the rear.

We didn't get Pilotwings until a bit later. Super Soccer, Super Tennis, Super R-Type, F-Zero were definite UK launch titles. Super Castlevania IV was one of the first third-party releases. Still one of my favourite Super NES games actually - any game with trilobites on the title screen could never be bad.

If you look at the figures and add them all up, 7.8% isn't accounted for so could be "other" formats. One of which could be the SMS but will also include Acorn machines, Amstrad PCW, MSX and Atari 8 bits and consoles (Argos were still selling the XE).

I'm guessing the majority of that share though will be the SMS and the various Atari 8 bit machines.

Re-enact Ghostbusters with your very own 33 foot tall Stay Puft Marshmallow Man:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/GHOSTBUSTERS-MR-STAY-PUFT-LIFE-SIZE-33FT-TALL-INFLATABLE-WORTH-20-000-ECTO-1-/181155127697?pt=UK_Collectables_SciFi_fantasyCollectables_EH&hash=item2a2dafe191

Ah yeah, I got my SNES in 1993.

Super Mario World!

Want!

I'm playing through Super Metroid at the moment for the first time ever and it's brilliant!

Most likely explanation. Just seems... Odd that the Master System would be selling the level of the Atari 7800 or XEGS in 1992. The SMS had games released in Europe up until the end of 1994, and companies like Domark did some pretty impressive (technically speaking) conversions of 16-bit games solely for the European market.

I didnt list it as it came packed in with the console (so it wasnt one you could buy to show up on the charts

They didn't need to sell lots of consoles though. The games were highly profitable to sell. As AA pointed out at the time, how many £3.99 tapes do you need to sell to match the margin on a £25 cartridge (which also has the benefit of virtually zero returns to manage). It wasn't that the consoles were more popular, it's that they were extremely profitable to produce games for.

Or it could equally be that the guy who transcribed the figures missed out the SMS.

Fascinating (colour!) video footage of London in 1926. Amazing to think that most of these people are now dead, very haunting.

Both explanations make sense and are even mutually compatible.

Wonder how much the effects of software piracy were an added incentive at the time for software companies to move to producing console games. That would've been a factor, I imagine.

now I am not a weather we expert, but an inch of rain in an hour sounds like quite a lot to me!

Drinking heavily on a school night twice in one week is the best idea ever. No, wait - the other thing.

Mrs B and I used to do that pretty regularly a couple of years back due to the shittiness of the project we were both working on but these days I can't think of anything worse; the very thought of sitting at my desk with a stinking hangover makes me feel sick now. I must be getting old.

And I'm asking IT to make something work for me again... This time it is "If the printer I have to log into using my network acocunt, the details stored on an RFID card, why can't it email me a document that I've scanned?".

Presumably you know that the printer in question actually has this functionality built in?

Yes, there's a big button marked "Scan" and it feeds the paper through, and then emails it to the email address that I can only see half of and not change. Also, a note on the top saying "Writing side facing upwards when scanning" which tells you quite a lot.

I used to go out with a lass from Newcastle, so I know how the coffee feels.

Anyone else on snapchat? Would you like to be my friend on there? I don't really see the point of the app so if anyone can shed some light on it... Feel free.

I'm TheXboxVision

It's the picture you all wanted to see. Richard Blackwood getting his arse fingered on live TV.

not the first time he's made an ass of himself. A hahaha

FATHER'S DAY!!!

A short, totally fictional, not at all based on real life, play I have written for you to enjoy during your lunch hour

I'm looking forward to having 5 fingers inside me, that's for sure.

That reminds me of an old campfire song...

[/quote]
At least she was quick.

Did you die of shock because she got back into the car as she got out of it?

oops. it was 20 minutes.

Gargh. Trying to play with ASP.net. I have a dropdownlist which fires an onselectedindexchanged event. Works fine on my local machine running Visual Studio, but when I deploy it to my personal server the even never fires. What's worse is I chucked it on a machine here at work and it DID fire.

I've Googled around, and changed things like enabling viewstate, setting autopostback to true, changing the page autoeventwireup to true, and the result is that it works locally but not when deployed.

How annoying.