Holidays
I had a delightful break over the last couple of weeks. Shame it didn't last as long as I would have liked. However, major highlights include:

• Spending a few days up on future-parent-in-laws farm at Clunes.
• Playing lots of board-games with friends (something I rarely have time to do).
• Role-playing with friends (something I haven't had time to do for a long time).
• Purchase of a new bed-frame and pocket-spring, queen-sized mattress.
• Order of some rather kickass 16ms refresh 17" LCD monitors.
• A friend's wedding.
• Not taking support calls.

Games - Transport Tycoon Deluxe
I've always been a big fan of the game Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD), which is an excellent and engrossing game. For many years, there's been talk of many things that it would be "nice to have" in the game (bugfixes and features), and some lamenting that it's no longer actively maintained.

Well, imagine my surprise and great joy when I discovered The Transport Tycoon Deluxe Patch. Bugfixes, new features, new vehicles, improved signals, helicopters that don't obsolete, Win2K/XP compatability -- a whole bunch of things that the TTD community was talking about a few years ago. All this written in assembler, under an open source license, and without the original TTD source code. From my extensive testing, it's also very stable. Wow!

Games - Frontier: Elite II

On the topic of games that Chris Sawyer (creator of TTD) has had a hand in, both Frontier: Elite II, and Frontier: First Encounters have been released as shareware by the copyright holders. There's also talk of providing access to the source code so that the games can continue to be extended and updated.

But, it gets even better. Normally, Frontier: First Encounters completely refuses to run under anything other than "DOS Mode". However, there now also exists a Windows Port (JJFFE) of the game, courtesy of John Jordan. There's even instructions on getting the game running under Linux!