New Fun Blog – Scott Bilas

I’m excited. The classic Sword of Fargoal has been remade for the iPhonepod platform!

Sword of Fargoal is an ancient Rogue-style game for the C-64, written by Jeff McCord in BASIC (I remember curiously walking through the source code) and published by the long-defunct Epyx, one of my favorite publishers from back in the day. When I was a kid I played the hell out of this game and I’m excited to see some game developers who are even bigger fans than me have gone and remade this awesome game.

I’ve been playing Fargoal LLC’s remake on my iPhone (available here at the App Store for only five bucks!) and it’s clearly a labor of love. Most remakes of classics are disappointing. Someone writes an emulator and they just run the old game on new hardware. It’s 100% authentic and all, but that’s not necessarily a good thing.

You’re all excited to play the game you loved as a kid, and then, five minutes in you realize that..oh..this game is kind of frustrating, annoying even.. It’s not because the game is bad, it’s because the world of gaming has changed since then.

As an industry we’ve moved far past the primitive control techniques and UI’s of the past. We expect to have tutorials and hint screens, auto-save and context-sensitive UI gizmos that help us out.

Old games just didn’t have room for any of that in their 8K or whatever of ROM. While this gave some insane replayability, and created a small sub-industry of invisible ink cheat books, learn-by-dying is just a thing of the past. It’s no fun.

I’m happy to report that the developers of the new Sword of Fargoal did more than just slap some upgraded graphics on this game. They’ve added help, auto-save, and a great control scheme (moving diagonally on the C-64 joysticks was always a dicey affair). But my favorite is a great new feature called the “Smart button” that gives you context-sensitive actions, such as using a teleport spell right when the ceiling is about to collapse on you.

Fargoal LLC has big respect from me. I’m already in love with this game again and now I can bring it everywhere with me. All I need is some OpenFeint (or similar) integration to compete with my brother.

Anyway, go buy Sword of Fargoal immediately. Swoosh! Clang! Thud!!

I keep forgetting all the steps on how to do this. Here’s a post so I can look it up again without drowning in the noise on the Googles.

1. Tell iTunes about the MP3’s using File | Add File/Folder To Library.
2. Go to those MP3’s in iTunes by clicking on “Recently Added” playlist.
3. Select all the MP3’s in the audiobook set.
4. Right-click and choose Create AAC Version.
5. Put in background and check back in an hour.
6. Right-click any of the new AAC’s and choose “Show in Windows Explorer” to go to the newly encoded files.
7. In Explorer or a command line or whatever, rename them all from their .m4a extension to .m4b.
• That’s all that you need to have iTunes think it’s an audiobook, just being AAC and having .m4b.
• (It would be nice to also attach the book’s cover image to the .m4b, but whatev…)
• I use the 12noon Rename Regular Expression tool from the context menu in Explorer to make the renaming easier.
8. Move the .m4b files where you want them. I usually put them back where the MP3’s were originally. iTunes will have placed them in some screwy folder structure based on author name or voice actor name or something.
9. Delete the MP3’s and (nonexistent but still linked) M4A’s from iTunes, sending files to the recycle bin (don’t need them any more). Have to do this from the Music selection in Library instead of the Recently Added playlist btw.
10. Add the folder again to pick up the M4B’s.

They will show up in the Audiobooks pane now. Yay!

I do this when I download MP3 audio books from the amazing and totally free Seattle Public Library. MP3’s are great in that they aren’t protected, so I don’t have to deal with goofy software (like my Audible account requires) to play them wherever I want. When I’m picking out my monthly Audible book to get, I’ll always check SPL first to see if they have it too. They often do! So my Audible account is more for the exclusive stuff, whereas Jules Verne and Michael Pollan can come from SPL.

Optional Pre-Step 1: join all the MP3’s together into a single file using a lossless MP3-splicing utility. SPL audio books are apparently ripped from CD’s, as each MP3 is about an hour long. Doesn’t bother me to have a bunch of one hour sections, though. Especially given that the stupid iPod software still has a bug that forgets and resets my place in audiobooks sometimes.

I probably ought to automate this all with a script but I don’t do it often enough (~once a month) to want to bother.

I just figured out the right way to set up Gmail on an iPod Touch or iPhone. The right way is not to set up Gmail using the built-in Gmail template. It’s to use the “Other” option – no mail template.

I’ve been wondering why stuff has mysteriously been showing up in my Trash on Gmail. Items in the trash get permanently deleted after 30 days. Maybe you want that, but I don’t. On all my other mail apps I’ve set “delete” up to do the same as Gmail’s “archive” feature. Just move stuff into Gmail/All Mail.

The problem is that on the iPod it ignores you when you try to configure where the Trash goes. When I select All Mail it actually just sets it back to Trash underneath. The text in the advanced config says All Mail, yet if you hit it, it turns out it’s really pointing at Trash.

Weird. Bug, Apple?

Anyway, the solution is just to set up Gmail as a vanilla IMAP server (the “Other” option at the bottom of the list of Exchange, MobileMe, Gmail, and so on), and not using the built-in Gmail template on the phone. Then tell Drafts, Sent Items, and Trash to all go to Drafts, Sent Items, and All Mail. If you do this, then the iPod actually obeys your wishes and does not lose your settings.

Now, I want to move all the stuff the iPod has trashed (at least the last 30 days’ worth that are remaining) back out of the trash. And I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I can’t figure it out. All I can do is empty the trash or delete items in it. Gmail Help says to hit “Move to Inbox” but there’s no such button for me. Am I blind?