hiidenkonttibeta

Here’s my collection so far to show the differences in sizes of old and new devices:

I may occasionally update the entries for the individual consoles I’ve already covered (listing games, replacing photos with better images) but I won’t make new entries about them unless I think there’s something especially interesting to write about (obtaining a rare game or accessory).

Last week I received Atari Lynx, the first hand held games console with colour screen. It’s the revised model, a bit smaller than the original, but still quite big compared to modern devices:

It has a 16-bit CPU, 160×102 pixel screen with backlight and 16 colours (out of 4096), and it runs 4-5 hours on six AA-batteries. It was sold from 1989 to mid-90′s.

There’s a period of complete darkness during which the sun does not rise above the horizon in Northern hemisphere. All locations above the Arctic Circle (latitude 66° 33’) encounter it between Autumnal Equinox and the Vernal Equinox – not for the whole 6 months elsewhere than at North Pole, but at least on Winter Solstice. In Finnish this period of darkness is called “kaamos”.

We don’t have kaamos in Oulu (being about 1° 32’ below the Arctic Circle), but we have a pretty good simulation going on right now. The sun rises at 08:39, an hour after I’ve gone to work, and sets at 15:25, before I return home. And we still don’t have permanent snow. Snow would lighten up the world a great deal.

Last week a selection of seasonal beer appeared in Alko. A selection of interesting tastes to try out! One of the first ones I got is Young’s Christmas Pudding:

The bottle says it’s got “flavour of dried fruit”, and it certainly doesn’t taste like your ordinary lager.

Spent the weekend in Helsinki. We visited Talvipuutarha, an “indoor garden” first opened in 1893. I was told that once there were birds living inside, but now there were only some fish in addition to plants and flowers.

Bandai is probably best known (in Western hemisphere) for their anime releases, including such masterpieces as Cowboy Bebop. But they do a lot more, portable game systems for example.

Their game system is officially released only in Japan. Because of that, all the games are in Japanese (as far as I know). SwanCrystal is the latest of WonderSwan portables (first released in 1999, so it’s a pretty new system), released in 2002. It looks like this:

It has a 16-bit CPU running at 3.072MHz, 224×144 resolution display with 241 colours (out of 4096), and it runs 15 hours on a single AA-battery. There’s a lot of interesting games for WonderSwan, e.g. some Final Fantasy games and several anime-related titles.