Mastertronic - What if?

I've been meaning to add these to my blog for several months now. Those of you who are my friends on Facebook may have probably already seen them. Because I have WAY too much time on my hands, I thought I'd mess around with putting together some fake Mastertronic covers for modern computer games.

Incase you are not aware (or can not remember), Mastertronic were big in the mid to late 1980s and were a major budget software label in the United Kingdom and produced a large number of cheapo games and re-releases for the Commodore/Spectrum/Amstrad/Atari 8-bit computers (and some 16-bit too) - most at a pocket-money-friendly £1.99!Just a bit of fun really, but what would modern games look like if Mastertronic still released games like the good ol' days? Well, here you can find out!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can view more of my fake Mastertronic covers by clicking here





A week in the life of an IT Manager in a school!

Well, the kids are now back in school, and everything is pretty much back to normal. 6 weeks of upgrading the student and staff workstations from Windows XP Professional to Windows 7 Professional has been a rather stressful time which I am happy to say has proved to be quite successful (thanks to having a fantastic team). On top of that, two classrooms have been kitted out with brand spanking new PCs with Intel I5 processors - Lucky kids!!!!! (I had to make do with RM Nimbus PC-186s when I was at school - oh and some BBC Masters), in additon to upgrading one of our servers to MS Server 2008, migrating user accounts and printers and many other things.

Now one week in to the term and school year, I am knackered, counting down the days until half-term, but less stressed (now knowing everything has worked reasonably well) - infact, this picture of Sophie pretty much sums up how I am feeling at the moment!

What will the next week bring? Who knows, but for now I'm going to sit and watch Back To The Future with Kieran (again) while I recuperate from cleaning out our two garden sheds. I'm then going to have a retro-fest with some Commodore 64 classics, before playing some more Resistance 3 on the PS3 - I've got my weekend sorted!

On so begins a new term, and new year!

And so ends another summer holiday, and the start of a brand new school year. What fun and excitement will it hold? How many students will come up to me this week saying that they've forgotten their passwords?

I've got to give a shout out to my excellent team (Ben Drewery, Ben Plawustiak and Adam Gisbourne for all of their hard work over the holidays - oh and of course Mike Ibbotson) Well done guys.