Total Commander 7.01 released

A new version of Total Commander, a popular file manager, was released on June 21, 2007, shortly after the release of version 7 final. Total Commander 7.01 is available for download here.

What's new?

Flea Market Finds #1

I visited the flea market this morning and it's a good thing I did because I stumbled upon a mini version of the popular Competition Pro joystick. If you were into computers in the 80's, you should know what I'm talking about. Anyway, the mini's not very common around here so I must say I'm happy to have found it. It looks brand new and it's also fully functional.

Feast your eyes!

Side-by-side with the 'normal' version.

And in case you've been living in a cave for the past couple of years, there's also a USB version of the legendary Competition Pro. You can read a review here.

Update: Prince of Persia

As it turns out, you can't assign 'Walk toggle' to a button because it's bound to the analog stick by default. All you have to do is push the stick half-way and behold, you walk instead of run. Good idea actually!

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones SE

Just recently I decided to give the "old" Prince a try so I bought it brand new on eBay for under 20€ (local shops sell it for about 40€). I'm talking about Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones Special Edition which also includes both prequels, each on a separate DVD disc. The discs are nicely stacked one atop the other and I find this the best system so far for packing multiple discs in a standard DVD case.

I decided to start at the beginning with The Sands of Time and I must say the game really got my attention right away! The graphics and animation are great even for a game that's almost 4 years old and the Prince is a real acrobat. Some of his stunts strongly remind me of various Jackie Chan movies. At the same time this presented me with an excellent opportunity to test my Logitech Rumblepad 2 gamepad which was sitting on a shelf collecting dust for the past year or so. After the initial confusion and some help from Google, I managed to get my gamepad to work. You basically have to manually assign all commands to the gamepad in the 'Controls' menu by double-clicking each command and then pressing the gamepad button you want to use (a tad annoying but you only have to do it once). The only command I couldn't assign to any of the buttons was 'Walk toggle'. No idea why...

To conclude this post, the game plays great with a gamepad and best of all, you don't need a Core Duo and a GeForce 7900GTO to play it :)

BBC Live Micro - Computer Music (1985)

An interesting extract from BBC program Micro Live from 1985...