life ends at 27
Tonino Lamborghini is launching a series of luxury phones in Russia this coming August “which includes two gold-plated feature phones, a tablet, and an Android smartphone”. Pictured here is the Android smartphone. Ugly even as a gauche status symbol. Add to that anemic specs and very, very outdated Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). Never mind it costs almost USD3,000.
Makes the Nokia ORO an exercise in taste and restraint.
MAME, for the uninitiated, is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, a project to preserve the inner workings of arcade machines of the past. A curious side-effect is that the games are (mostly) playable.
I’ve been a fan since the late 90s and have almost continuously kept my ROM collection up to date, recently with the help of Pleasuredome, but I’ve not actually been playing any games in a long while, neither have I been keeping up with new developments.
Recently though, I find myself tired of HD gaming (I’ll get back to you Skyrim, when the DLC is here) and found myself wanting to get some MAMEing done, so I went to grab my old go-to MAME variant MAME32 (been using the official builds in conjunction with clrmamepro) and… turns out it has been renamed MAMEUI, and that it has been EOLed.
It still works, but with the explosion of the number of games by MAME supported the ancient controls it uses just cannot cut it anymore. UI refresh is annoyingly slow.
Despite working with and liking the command line for most other things, I just don’t like using MAME from the command line. So, the search for a front end goes on.
IV/Play is a minimalist front end commissioned by John Hardy IV (long associated with MAME32/MAMEUI) and it is not quite what I’m looking for. A tad too minimalist, maybe.
Next I found QMC2, successor to the venerable QMamecat. QT4, so it’s cross-platform. It also supports MAME, MESS and UME*. Plus, it looks like the old MAME32 which I’m immediately comfortable with. Great.
I also found Emu Loader which looks fantastic, plus it supports multiple emulators (Demul, Daphne, ZiNc etc, apart from MAME). Together with its sister app EmuCon which handles console emulators, you’ll just need two front ends to rule them all.
I’m leaning a little towards QMC2 at the moment, since I really only dabble with other emulators, but both should be great choices.
* UME is an effort by David Haywood (maintainer of MAME from 2003 to 2005) to combine the code bases of MAME and MESS, without stripping any functionality out.
I’m a pretty big fan of Mozilla Thunderbird. The project has adopted the multi-channel development model of Firefox (which was adapted from Chrome’s) which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. Instead of the nightly, Aurora and beta channels, though, Thunderbird’s channels are named Shredder (ha), Earlybird and Miramar. With the new names comes new logos, courtesy of Sean Martell, Lead Visual Designer for Mozilla.
I’m almost tempted to use the Earlybird builds just for the logo.
For only €800, you, too, can put a fine piece of gauche consumerism into your pocket! Features: a sapphire crystal home button and 18-carat gold trimmings backed by Scottish leather from the “finest Caledonian herds”! Oh, it also has some trifling nonsense like 3.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen and an 8-megapixel camera with 720p HD recording.
Introducing the Nokia ORO. Oro being Italian for gold in case you have the observation power of a mollusc and fail to see the sheer blingyness.
While the technical specs aren’t poor by any means, it is “powered” by Symbian. Which was a fine mobile OS in its day back in the mid 00s. So, something for the more money than sense crowd.
Photo source: CNET UK
Classy, really classy Apple. But then this is simply business as usual for the Cult of Steve, so anyone who is familiar with Apple for the last ten years shouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprised. As for the general security implication, that old saying by Rich Cook never fails. The PC might be an idiot savant, but the wetware is just plain idiot.