hiidenkonttibeta

Stockmann stores decorate a “christmas display” window for every christmas. There’s dolls which some simple mechanism moves using wires tied to their limbs. We stared the one in Oulu for a while today. At the first glimpse it looks like a nice christmaslike scenery with reindeers, small furry animals and Santa Claus. But careful inspection reveals all kinds of hidden, absurd, details.

First, there’s this happy little Santa Claus watching a zombie reindeer being tortured. It is lifted upwards by pulling from it’s head (which is only barely still connected to the rest of it’s body), then dropped so that it’s head swings loosely from side to side:

Then there’s this small furry animal (a mouse, I’m told) which is forced to try skiing on a roof which is covered with gingerbread cakes. Everybody should be aware of the dangers of skiing on roofs, but still they’re showing an example of this for all kids to see. Now, the friction between your average gingerbread cakes and skis is a bit too much, which is obvious when we watch the poor mouse’s progress. Apparently it gets a good starting push, and then stops so fast that it slams it’s nose into the roof:

Then there’s a herd of unrecognizable small furry animals attached to legs of bigger animals (and Santa Claus). The only explanation we could think up for their movement was that they were humping the legs like dogs:

What a strange christmas scenery.

There were two reindeers along with a Santa Claus in Rotuaari’s non-Decemberlike weather (+2C and raining) today:

The reindeers were just losing the skin of their antlers and didn’t look very majestetic for that reason.

Saturn is Sega’s 32-bit gaming console from mid-90′s. Between 8-bit SMS and Saturn there’s 16-bit Mega Drive (called Genesis in the US). Games are stored on CD’s instead of modules. Here’s the picture:

Saturn is apparently pretty hard to program – it has 2 RISC CPU’s and several other processors. It has “modern” graphics processor with 24-bit colours, polygons, texture mapping and such.

There seems to be many good RPG’s for Saturn. So far my collection has mostly fighting games; there are quite a lot of those for Saturn.

Sega Master System / Power Base (SMS for short) is an 8-bit gaming console from mid-80′s. It was a competitor for Nintendo NES, but apparently didn’t do too well except in Europe. Sega Game Gear is basically a portable version of SMS, and there’s an adapor which allows SMS game modules to be used in GG. This is what the device looks like (Shinobi module insterted):

Big chip on the bottom right is the 3.6MHz Zilog Z-80. It can display up to 256×240 resolution, with 32 colours out of 64 on screen.

This device has one surprising feature on the video side – it can output video in RGB. Nintendo’s can’t do this! Of course the devices always come without the A/V cable (with RF modulator and a piece of coaxial cable instead) required for getting good quality picture into TV.

After some googling I found two schematics (a bit different, but nothing some probing with a multimeter couldn’t solve) for the cable, but the local electronic components shop didn’t have the correct kind of 8-pin DIN-connector. Before I got one of the horseshoe-shaped ones (thanks to #pelikonepeijoonit guys for helping me out!) I took the device apart to find out if it would be possible to change the socket. I think it would, but it’s unnecessary now. The picture via RF was totally horrible mess of picture and snow. With the A/V output -> SCART cable it’s wonderfully clear.

So far, I’ve got 4 games:

• Shinobi
• Speedball 2
• Xenon II Megablast
• Heroes of the Lance

A long time ago I played Xenon II pretty much, so it was nice to try it again. There’s also a built-in game called Hang-On (a basic motorcycle riding game). The built-in game depends on the model of SMS, some have Alex Kidd which should be pretty good.

R4 version of Slayers Try DVD collection (3rd season of Slayers) was released a couple of weeks ago. I had made a preorder as soon as it was possible and received it promptly (in theory, I had to fetch it from the customs) – only to find out that disc 1 was actually the first disc of Slayers Next (the 2nd season) box, except for the printing. I complained to the mail-order compeny by e-mail right away, and again a few days later since I hadn’t received a reply. They replied to the second e-mail and told me they hadn’t received my first e-mail and also that the distributor (AV Channel) knows the problem and I’ll receive replacement disc soon. And I did. Twice, actually, so now I have a backup copy too.

With the first few episodes of Try, スレイヤーズ has already re-established it’s place among my favourite anime series. This time it’s Lina, Gourry, Amelia and Zelgadis with Xellos and a new character, Filia, exploring an unknown continent. Oh, and they’re supposed to be saving the world, too, since the world’s #1 sorceress didn’t have time to do it because of her part-time job. Wonderful fantasy comedy, I wish there were more than 3 seasons (and a few OVAs) of it.

Lighting up a set of candles somewhere in the city seems to be popular nowadays. Today I found the following setup by the Laananoja:

I don’t have a clue what they’re about this time, either. But I do have The Return of the King Special Extended DVD Edition.