Gaming Memories - December 1989

Looking back at what I was reading and playing exactly 30 years ago this month, December 1989 was a good year for racing games on the Commodore 64. My Amiga owning friends might have had the eagerly awaited home version of Hard Drivin', but I had the Commodore 64 versions of Turbo Outrun and Stunt Car Racer, both of which scored higher than their Amiga counterparts between both Zzap and Commodore User reviews.

It was however around this time when I decided to ditch Commodore User in favour of the more C64 friendly Zzap 64/Amiga as my primary source of C64 news and goodness since Commodore User was aiming more for the Amiga market. Shame on them, as the C64 still had plenty of life left in it to last a few more years.

Retro Gaming Trekkie Dad (Episode 1) - Castle Master for the Commodore Amiga

The first of (hopefully) many new videos from me, reviewing/playing old and new computer games, with the occasional smidgen of Star Trek thrown in here and there. 

This episode is devoted to the classic 3D adventure game Castle Master by Incentive Software.  Released back in 1990 by Domark Software, it was the fourth game to utilize the revolutionary Freescape solid 3D system and is an excellent example of early virtual reality on home computers.  So be prepared to spend the next 1 hour 30 minutes watching me wandering aimlessly around Castle Eternity, getting lost, destroying spirits, and getting even more lost before finally defeating the evil Magister once and for all.

 

Star Trek Shuttles

Years ago, I made a very basic diorama for my ERTL Galileo shuttlecraft, made up a few pieces of wood, paper mache, and some bits and pieces leftover from a trainset I was building.

Anyway, I thought it might be a good idea to see what my Star Trek shuttles from the Star Trek Starships Collection would look like on it, and well...  Here are a few.

Galileo 7 Shuttlecraft (Star Trek The Original Series)

Galileo Shuttlecraft (Star Trek V The Final Frontier)

Type 6 Shuttlecraft (Star Trek The Next Generation)

Starfleet Runabout (Star Trek Deep Space Nine)

Type 15 Shuttlepod (Star Trek The Next Generation)

Giving the Amiga a clean!

So yesterday, I decided to give the Amiga 500 a clean.  I tend to use my A1200 more for general use, so this has been the first time I've fired up the A500 in quite a long time.  Glad the GVP A530 is working fine and the hard drive still contains lots of graphics, music (and very basic 3D renders and objects) I created in the mid-1990s.  Ahhh, the memories.

The case wasn't too yellow, so no need for retrobrite, however, I was able to blow out a considerable amount of dust, dirt, and lint from under the keys and on the motherboard.

Musical Kayleigh

My daughter Kayleigh is really getting into writing music on the keyboard lately, especially now that she is doing music at her new school. Here's a couple of her masterpieces, including a lovely rendition of Harry Potter. She picks it up so quickly!

Techie Post - Nested If in Excel for converting month to a number

This post is more of a reminder for me, but may help someone else in a similar situation.  Every year in August when I need to create the new user accounts for the students starting in September at school, I need the student date of births to be in the format DDMMYY so that my custom powershell script can create the accounts in Active Directory

Sounds simple, but alas our School Information Management System exports the data in a weird format, so I am always having to modify and fix the exported data in excel before I can import the completed csv file.

Most can be accomplished using the excellent left, mid and right formulas, but the date (more specifically, the month) always causes me issues.

So, where I a have a cell where the month is "Jan", or "Feb", I need it to be "01" for Jan, "02" for Feb and so on.

So.... assuming cell F2 is the cell with the month in it, the following nested If formula will do the job

=IF(F2="Jan","01",IF(F2="Feb","02",IF(F2="Mar","03",IF(F2="Apr","04",IF(F2="May","05",IF(F2="Jun","06",IF(F2="Jul","07",IF(F2="Aug","08",IF(F2="Sep","09",IF(F2="Oct","10",IF(F2="Nov","11",IF(F2="Dec","12",))))))))))))

Once I have the month as a number, I can easily combine the 3 numbers making up the day, month and year (ddmmyy) in to a cell for my script to accept.

I'm sure there's a better way of doing it, but hey ho...  This does the job for now.