Darren Steele

For a long time I’ve been an avid Facebook user.  Posting several times a day.  Slavishly checking for new updates every second of personal downtime.  I even realised there was a gap in the Android market and wrote a Facebook Android App before Facebook got around to it.  I got a cease and desist letter from FB lawyers but that’s another story.

Well, today I de-activated my account.  Lost interest.  Really can’t be arsed with the banality of it anymore.  If I have anything exciting to share with the world then I’ll post it here…and the world won’t actually see it 🙂

I deleted my twitter account a few months ago too.  So I appear to be following in the footsteps of Eric Cartman and dropping off all social media…well, it is all a bit shit really isn’t it?

 

 

A beautiful day in the Lake District at Martin and Alison’s wedding. 

On my second tour of duty at Sky and I’m back where I started with a view out of West Cross House. Apparently this is only a temporary move. We’ll see

We believe that robin redbreasts are people coming back to visit us. I rescued this one from the shed, and it took a turn sitting on everyone in the family. 

My darling wife, in one of her many ploys to kill me, got me a flyboarding experience for my birthday.  It took me quite a few attempts to get to the rank of complete novice that you see above, but it was a fantastic experience and one that everybody should have a go at.

I managed to convince Dragan and Tom that they should join me for my monthly trip to the theatre for July.  We saw the 26543rd performance of The Mousetrap.

It was awesomely awesome and I now understand why it’s the longest running play in London

We had loads of sticks on the garden after some tree surgeons came by to chop our trees back, so we went from this…

to this…

to this…

 

Next step, chopsticks or Fur Elise or something

In 1981 Konami released Scramble.  A little like Image Fight a lot of my money went into this machine.  Never got to finish it back then.  Roll forward 35 years and after building my own cabinet, installing MAME, finishing the Metal Slug series and then Image Fight I set my sights on Scramble.

As you can see from the video I finally managed it.  It was my last life, I was running out of fuel but boom.  Got it.

Next up…..probably Ghosts ‘n Goblins

 

A little while after building my arcade cabinet I got to hear about “Metal Slug”. This game is just all kinds of awesome.

Two-player co-op…check
Machine guns…check
Rocket launchers…check
Getting into tanks and blowing stuff up…..cccchhhheeecccckkkkk

But it didn’t work with my advmame due to the ridiculous situation that MAME is in with different versions of emulators and ROMs and all sorts of crap.

I’d pretty much given up on getting it to work when I thought I’d try one last time with RetroPie. After a bit of tinkering and working out which of the several supported emulators to try it in I got it working. I had to use the FBA emulator but it works perfectly. I’m now a happy happy man – especially since I have ROMs for Metal Slug2, Metal Slug3…..