We have done the Etihad already...many years ago!

Another fun day out with my family. This time we went on a tour around Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium. Not an easy one for me, being a City fan, but everyone else supports United! A very informative tour that I would recommend to any football fan. The Etihad stadium is next!

Here's a real one. In the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Manchester has changed so much over the last 20 years. The skyline is quite amazing, lots of development is still taking place.

We went on a short River cruise in Manchester recently - up the Irwell from the Media City area. A pleasent hour on the water giving a great view of the city and its history. The Mark Addy pub was the turning point for the trip. The Addy flooded back in 2013 and the pub has been shut since then.

Possibly the most surreal video you'll see today. Pipers playing The Imperial March followed by a procession featuring The 501st UK GARRISON. Taken at MEGACONLIVE, Manchester today. Thanks, Charlotte, for the video.

Had a great day at MEGACONLIVE ( Manchester ) with three of my daughters. What an amazing experience - a bit of everything including retro gaming, modern day Indie games plus all the usual Anime, COSPLAY, Steampunk etc. I also had a catch-up with former TT Fusion colleague @robhewson.bsky.social

SabreMan / Wulf artwork for the BBC Micro version of Knight Lore. Found on Paul Proctor's original development disks. I believe some of the Spectrum animation frames were removed to save memory as the BBC Micro only has 32K RAM vs the Spectrum's 48K RAM.

No idea. Most museums just take donations rather than buy from expensive autoin sites. I'd gueess its an Acorn / ARM collector. I wish I'd kept hold of the ARM EVAL disk set I once had....

Wow! Two small manuals that shipped with the Acorn ARM Evaluation System 2nd Processor just sold for £253! That's not a full set of manuals either. I was guessing they might hit around £50. BBC BASIC and TWIN ( text editor ) software were both written by Sophie Wilson...just missing her signature!

The famous Jim Belushi 'Aw, come on!' animation being put together for SNES Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. Video by @chunwah.bsky.social taken at Software Creations' Park Place building in 1993.

Here's a pre-visualisation video for SNES Maximum Carnage, created by animator Alan Moult ( Software Creations ). He made this video for the game programmers to demostrate how the animations were supposed to work in the game. Thank you to Alan for keeping hold of the video and allowing me to share.

And of course there was the huge, Osborne 1!

A couple of photos I took of Jamie Urquhart's presentation at Steve Furber's ( SBF ) Festschrift at Manchester University. I rather enjoyed the story aboout the lost ARM simulation BASIC program that was re-constructed from a print-out using OCR and then manually fixed by Sophie Wilson. RIP Jamie.

Wow, another BBC Micro portable/luggable has popped up on ebay. There was another one sold a good few months back. Very rare item - not too sure how many were actually made. You need strong arms for this one!

This....

A frame taken from 'Back to the Future'. Manchester folk, of a certain age, may recognise those window stickers which many of us had back in the 1980s. Apparently, the house owner was from Wythenshawe, Manchester. Stolen from FB.

That motherboard is in a really bad way! It should look something like this...

I so miss the videogame artwork of the 1980s and 90s. Here's a classic example, Anirog's KONG!

Here's one of the few images showing the Software Creations NES development kit - created by Mike Webb ( centre ). Left is Tim Follin, Right is Richard Kay ( MD ). Taken from NES Solstice promo video about the making of the game.

Here's a flavour of the Software Creations IDE we used for NES/SNES development. This shows NES Wolverine 6502 source code being assembled then disassembled from the output buffer in PC memory ( normally this would be the target hardware, but we don't have a dev kit anymore. )

An early SNES Vince and Larry prototype that I worked on at Software Creations - full of bugs and issues. The game didn't get any further than this and was abandoned. I can't remember the full details. Myself and Lyndon Brooke worked on this for a few weeks and then went to work on other projects.

That reminds me, I have a PET 2001 restoration project I need to start! Mine looks like this...

I just spotted this poor, neglected PET 2001 on ebay. A crime to let it get this bad. Looks like it's been in a shed or garage for a long time! I'm sure it'll buff up nicely. No, I'm not bidding on it!

I get a brief mention in the new edition too. Thanks, Martin.

Here are the contents pages from the original edition and the new Gold Edition - original first then the gold.

I couldn't resist buying the updated 'OCEAN the history' ( Gold Edition ) with additional interviews and updates. I also went for the ''Extras' edition in the form of an extra booklet of Ocean titles and a nice fridge magnet. It's a shame it got a nasty 'dink' on the corner.

My programming career started here...This is my A level Computer Studies workbook from 1983. My first commercial game was published in summer 1983 - Atomic Protector for the BBC Micro. Huge thanks to my amazing CS teacher, Pete Davidson. I owe him a pint or two.

A day late, but that doesn't matter. Happy Solstice for those in the Northern Hemisphere! We should celebrate the amazing NES game of the same name created by Mike Webb and Mark Wilson with music/SFX by Tim Follin. Developed in Manchester by Software Creations. It had the working title 'Dark Child'.

Had a great catch-up today with former TT Fusion / TT Games colleagues Roy and Wiz. It's been over 6 years since we last saw each other so there was lots to talk about. If you've played any LEGO handheld videogames then it's very likely we were part of the development team that created it!