Robotron was an arcade game that came out in the early 1980's. I believe it is fairly well known, but I don't think it was very popular. The reason is that it was extremely fast and difficult for a new player. If you didn't know what you were doing, the game would last 2 minutes -- if you were lucky.

The year is 2084, and the world has been taken over by robots. You are the last hope -- you must save the people from the evil robots before they destroy you. Unlike todays 3D games, this takes place all on one screen -- no scrolling. On every level your goal is to destroy all of the robots, and for a bonus you save the humans before the robots destroy them. Even though destroying the robots (and not rescuing the people) will advance the game another level, it turns out "being greedy", as my friends and I call it, is worthwhile in this game. Meaning, you want to rescue as many people as you can. The reason is that the people are worth a large amount of points, and every 25,000 points gets you an extra life.

The reason I hated this game in the 80s was that it was so hard -- what we called a "quarter eater". When you are a kid and you have $1 to spend, you don't want to lose it all in 5 minutes.

Now that you can buy Robotron for most home machines and basically play it for free... It has become one of my favorite games. If you play 5-10 games of Robotron, it's like drinking 5 cups of coffee. It's an amazingly fast paced game. The other interesting part of this game is the controls. The original game actually had 2 joysticks -- one for moving and one for firing. So this game has your minds full attention.

Definitely check it out and give it a chance if you like old games.

More information can be found at this site.

You can play Robotron online here. (It's just like the original except harder since you don't have the two joysticks)

This has been around for a few years, but if you have not seen it yet, check it out.

It is a free software program for your PC or Mac that allows you to "emulate" (play) old arcade games from the 80's and 90's. It actually lets you run the original game exactly as it was written!

A great site for this is Arcade at Home. You can locate the latest Mame code there and then you just need to hunt the web and locate "rom" files. These are the software code that makes the original games work. You can play virtually anything: PacMan, Ms Pacman, Missile Command, Centipede, DigDug, and even my latest favorite... Robotron. I'll write about that later. :) They even have extremely rare and old games that you may have never seen... there are THOUSANDS of games this program can run.

People who really get into it have converted old arcade cabinets into Mame machines. Remove the old hardware of the cabinet and hide a computer inside.. then hook up the joysticks to the computer (they sell interfaces to do this). You can find people selling these on EBay, just search for "mame" or "mame arcade".

This site is amazing... it's one of the greatest projects ever created on the Internet.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. What is so amazing is that it is created by anyone and everyone. Know all about cats? Just pull up the wikipedia page on cats and click the edit button. You can add, edit, or delete any of the information. Everyone works together to build the "perfect" information page on a subject.

It sounds a little chaotic, but it works out rather well. The quality of the writing after enough people have edited it is superb. Also, you can find topics that go way beyond a traditional encyclopedia, and topics that are current. For example, there is already a Hurricane Katrina entry at Wikipedia.

The other great thing is that Wikipedia documents are not 'owned' by anyone. They are listed under something called GFDL - Gnu Free Documentation License. That means you are free to use the content with minor restrictions. (This comment is only provided for information purposes - you should read the actual license agreement on the Wikipedia site before you use anything from there.)

Anyway -- check this site out. It's really an amazing project and is fast becoming one of the best and most popular sources for research on the web.

I don't know how I could ever watch TV without TIVO. I've had a TIVO for quite a few years now, I was an early adopter. We rarely watch TV live anymore -- if we want to watch a show when it is on, we will actually wait 15 minutes. For example, if a show runs from 8-9 PM, we start watching at 8:15 -- and skip the commercials. You still end at 9 PM but you get to watch a continuous show.

If you don't have a TIVO, get one! Most cable companies have their own versions now -- our cable company offers one for $5 a month. Those are usually not as easy to use or feature rich as TIVO, but they do the job. They allow you to see so many more shows than you would normally watch... and there is always something on.

It's not perfect though -- the reason I wrote this is that I was thinking about Prison Break, which I talked about in a previous blog post. I came home late last night hoping to watch PB on TIVO and it wasn't there :(... my fault though, most TIVOs can only record one show at a time, and apparently I had given priority to "Las Vegas" on NBC which runs at the same time as PB on Fox. Luckily PB is re-running Tuesday nights it seems -- maybe due to the Labor Day weekend?

Unknown to a lot of people, Google has many more products than just search and advertising... and most of them are free.

One of Google's products is called Picasa. It is a free image editing program, mainly for digital camera users. It scans your hard drive for any photos and allows you to perform common functions such as red-eye removal, sharpening, cropping, brightness/contrast adjustment, etc.

One of the best parts of this program is that it does not alter your original image, it leaves it alone. It keeps track of any changes you request and applies them to the image whenever you view it through the program. The reason this is great is that every time you edit a picture with regular programs, you lose quality. With this, you don't have the quality losses you would normally have, and you also have the ability to revert back to the original image or undo individual steps.

The program is available at www.picasa.com for Windows users. Check it out!