Posts by James Reed

Happy 25th birthday, Game Boy!

It was the battery life wot won it

The relatively low spec hardware had one massive advantage over the rivals (Game Gear / Lynx etc) which was the battery life. You could easily get several days of solid play out of a set of 4 AA batteries, and even as they started to die you could still play by judicious use of the contrast control.

I vividly remember the craze in these at school. One friend proudly brought in a Game Gear (I think he even had the fabled TV tuner attachment) but the thing was dead by lunchtime, whereas those with Gameboys could play all through lunchtime and still be playing on the way home!

The other big plus was the multiplayer mode, and a stroke of genius was making Tetris (which you wouldn't think of as a two player game) multiplayer, so everyone could try it. It was the first time I'd ever really experienced this and it was great fun.

MSI mobo ditches Bios for EFI

WinBIOS - been here before?

Am I the only one to remember the AMI WinBios which was popular in the late 1990s? Although lacking all the EFI cleverness, this did implement a pseudo-windowing interface to the bios, complete with mouse support. It drove the screen in graphics mode and lots of nice icons for all the various options. I always liked it and it was disappointing when it suddenly disappeared from AMI motherboards.

Or perhaps there was some reason for this that I'm not aware of?