I am typing this on an Amstrad Notepad Computer NC100. You may remember this machine being sold in the early 90's as User-Friendly. It cost £199 and Amstrad promised you your money back if you couldn't use it within five minutes. It featured coloured keys which were pressed in certain combinations to select things like the word processor and calculator. I picked mine up in about 1995 for some reason. Mainly because by then they were very cheap and I thouht it would be fun to play with. It has some extra features behind the user friendly stuff, a full implementation of BBC Basic and a serial terminal were the interesting things. Some guy has also worked quite hard to port CP/M to it. It's a very humble machine, powered by an 8mhz Z80 processor with 64k memory, and a cheap low-contrast LCD which can display 8 lines of text. However, it does have a surprisingly good keyboard. I used it mainly to jot down ideas and write things on, the serial port allowing the transfer of the text to a desktop PC.
So why should I be impressed by this very humble machine? Because the last time I did anything with it was about four years ago. Since then, it's been stuck under my bed. I dug it out the other day and pressed the power button. To my amazement, it turned on, admittedly to tell me the batteries were low, but it still turned on. I put a set of fresh batteries in it and found that all those old files of random jottings were still there. Even the clock was correct. It's somewhat ironic that those files were originally backed up from the NC100 to a PC that died and was scrapped about six years ago.
I've always had a fondness for portable machines that don't require a huge lithium battery to run, and that will last for months on AA batteries. It may not be very powerful, but for stuff like simple text entry and stuff like that, you can't beat it. As I type this, I'm sitting in the field in the sunshine. Yes, I could do that with a modern laptop, but I'd be worried about dirt getting into it, and most laptop screens are very hard to see in the sunshine. A similar and far more popular machine like this was the Tandy Model 100, which was practically indestructible. I also have a Cambridge Z88 somewhere, which had a practically silent rubber keyboard, that was very usable. That one was a bugger to connect to a PC though, so I never really used it for anything.
There's something about a machine which allows you to concentrate on a particular task with no Internet, MP3, or anything to distract you. A modern equivalent is the AlphaSmart machines, portable word processors which allow you to simply enter text. The clever part is that you hook them up to the keyboard port of the PC, and the data just comes across as keystrokes. Sadly the modern versions that support USB are quite expensive, so I'll just have to hook this Amstrad up to the legacy serial port on the Dell. It's been a while since I had to set up a serial link, but it soon came back to me.
So, in other news, the phone line has been reconnected. That means I was able to get my Xbox 360 connected up to Xbox Live. It's interesting. I got one month free of the Gold service, so I'm carefully evaluating it. A year costs œ34.95. The game linkup service is pretty much spot on - Crackdown was even synchronising up dead ragdoll pedestrians perfectly, which was impressive. You can send messages, which is infinitely easier with a USB keyboard, and even do voice chat. Things I don't like about Xbox Live are the adverts it puts on the Dashboard, and the fact that complete strangers can see that you're playing a particular game and ask to join you. I was happily trying to complete a race in Crackdown, when it said 'PennsylvaniaButtocks95 would like to join your game'. I can't remember exactly what the name was, but it was something like that. It's plausible, considering some of the weird handles that people use on there.
Being able to download game demos is pretty cool, although it takes a while as they are pretty big. I'm currently downloading the Command & Conquer 3 demo, which is 1gb. I was quite surprised at the sheer number of demos that are available to download, and it's good to know that if I ever get bored of the games I have, they are there.
I also picked up a couple of games the other day, Saint's Row and the original Halo. Saint's Row is based on the same engine as Crackdown, but somehow manages to look a lot less interesting, and more like a good last-gen game. It's also much less fun. The best thing about it is the Player Pratfalls cheat. I think I added a link to a video of this a while back, and it's very, very funny. Sadly you can't do this in multiplayer games.
So all-in-all, I'm quite happy with the Xbox 360 experience. I just wish the hardware wasn't so noisy and hot. It makes a fair bit of noise. It chucks out quite a lot of heat when it's running at full load, but nothing much worse than a typical PC under the same circumstances. The 360 controller is one of the best, and it even works very well with old Xbox games. It's a world away from the giant original Xbox controllers.
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