Instead of rushing and buying replacement motherboard and cpu I’ve taken the more economic response and a) done without the pc and b) investigate my options for fixing it. During this time I was offered an old celeron micro ATX that Dave (of Dave’s Occasional Brainfart) had lying around. It gave me the chance to at least have a second internet access point around the place (I’m down to 1 laptop and 3 carcasses lying in the corner).

The original pc use to run windows xp home (I know, I know….) purely because i used the awesome tv recorder DVB Web Scheduler. Web Scheduler was originally and open source application but it is now closed (as of version 5 i think). The news that someone ported the older version 4 code across to Linux means that if I did want to continue with Web Scheduler I wasn’t necessarily bound to windows, so I decided, while I’m looking at moving my media needs to Linux I may as well take another look at MythTV.

To be honest the last time I tried MythTV, the problems I had were with getting the DVB capture card up and running not MythTV itself. I have DVICO Fusion Pro, great card but at the time its Linux support was limited, now however the setup went very smoothly. The distribution I’m using is Ubuntu Gutsy and using the instructions here and here. The basic steps I took were:

1. Make sure required software was installed
sudo apt-get install mercurial linux-headers-generic build-essential
2. Obtain source code from Chris Pascoe’s branch of repository
hg clone http://linuxtv.org/hg/~pascoe/xc-test/
3. Compile and install driver
cd xc-test
make
sudo make install
4.  Download and install firmware
cd /lib/firmware
wget http://www.linuxtv.org/downloads/firmware/dvb-usb-bluebird-01.fw
wget http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/Linux-DVB/DVICO/xc3028-dvico-au-01.fw
wget http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~chrisp/Linux-DVB/DVICO/dvb-usb-bluebird-02.fw
I then used the LinuxTV.org instructions for testing the card. All went smoothly and I could scan the channels.

Installing MythTV was a breeze, just use Ubuntu’s packages (instructions here), I had some trouble with setting up my xml electronic program guide. Even though xmltv was install, no xml grabbers whereappearing in MythTV for me to select. The problem ended up being that becasue the cpu was so slow the script to find all of the xml grabbers was taking too long and MythTV was discarding the process and continuing. My solution was to delete all of the xml grabbers except the one I wanted.

I did most of my playing with the myth-web plugin and basically it does everything I wanted, you can schedule recordings, apply jobs to the recordings (transcoding etc) and download the recording and its all password protected. The music interface didn’t impress me that much but I have yet to find a network music solution I’ve settled on yet (although now that its a Linux system I will play around with Xmms some more).

So bottom line, MythTV looks like my solution for a media pc with digital tv recording for now.

Anyway, I thought I’d search for a remake today, there are a few around for other favourite games of mine and lo and behold, not only is there a remake, but it has also just been finished, 5 minutes later its install and I’m bouncing around the screen chasing red droplets (play the game, you’ll get it).

What was the Wizball remake verdict? Well apart from the upfront “There is no momentum when rolling along and all bounces off curved objects are even” its pretty impressive. They done a great job on the artwork and the sound track keeps the awesome music of the original albiet remixed. It may replace my emulator for a while ….. well for Wizball anyhow.

For those interested in finding remakes, there are plenty of sites out there, here are a couple that I normally browse

1. Retrospec
2. Retro Remakes

Be sure to checkout Head Over Heels and Ghostbusters, another couple of C64 classics.

All in all when i finish it I’ll have another not entirely useless tool that will hardly be used

For people who’ve never seen Planimate I highly recommend a look

I lost count of the number of humpback whales we saw during the day but we got the full experience of whale activity, breaches, tail and pectoral slapping and spy-hopping. There were also several curious whales taking an interest in the boat and getting up close and personal.

Managed to get some greats snaps too (whales and the bay) a couple of which you can see. I’ll be adding more to the gallery on chuckles34.net so keep an eye open.

All in all a Great way to waste some time