BigTime Consulting posted a comic related to the general work conditions of working in the I.T. industry in Portugal. In other words, it clearly expresses my working conditions.
I really like the 2nd point of the reader’s letter which says:

“We don’t get overtime. Well, let me elaborate: we never, *ever*, get overtime on weekdays, no matter how late they make you stay, and we don’t earn it on weekends and holidays either, unless the project was sold with a specific budget for overtime in the first place”

So enjoy the full comic (and many other humorous strips) at BigTime Consulting and take some time to read the letters which inspired the drawings too. :)

Xbox 360 gamers rejoice, Microsoft has released another update to the list of backward compatible games with the Xbox 360. There’s 20 new titles, including:

“4×4 EVO 2 ; Amped 2 ; Bad Boys 2 ; Big Mutha Truckers ; DOOM 3 ; Dreamfall: The Longest Journey ; Fatal Frame ; FlatOut ; Grabbed by the Ghoulies ; Intellivision Lives ; LEGO star wars ; Minority Report ; MLB SlugFest 20-04 ; The Punisher ; RalliSport Challenge ; Silent Hill 4: The Room ; Spawn Armageddon ; Spider-Man ; star wars Battlefront ; State of Emergency ; Zapper”

That’s great but when do we get to play X-Men Legends 2? [sarcasm] oh well, at least there’s “Zapper”. [/sarcasm]

On another note, it seems that the latest patch for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which cleared a bunch of nasty bugs and prevented you from using some clever exploits to

One of the main advantages of owning a Nintendo DS (and a SuperCard) is the ability to run several homebrew applications and games. I’ve been fiddling with some of them for quite some time and one of my favourites is the the ScummVM port.

So what is ScummVM?

Quoting the site: “ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the game, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!”

What games can I play?

ScummVM let’s you play games mostly from LucasArts‘ SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system, famous for such games as Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max and many others. You can also play games from other companies like Revolution’s Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword and Flight of the Amazon Queen (all available free) or Coktel Vision’s Gobliiins. All great retro point-and-click graphical adventures.

So what do I need to play these?

In my case I got my Nintendo DS already flashed, so I can run software from my Supercard at ease without the use of an external booter like the PassKey. So first, all I have to do is head over to the ScummVM DS website , download the latest version of ScummVM (binary) and decompress it somewhere on my hard drive.

Next comes the games, you can download demos from the official ScummVM site or full versions of the Beneath A Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen games. LucasArts games are still commercial and being sold on special packages on their website. You can also buy some of these on E-bay I suppose.

So next we assemble everything in 4 easy steps:

• I created a folder called scummvm (or whatever you want to call it)
  
• copied scummvm-b.ds.gba and scummvm-b.ds.gba inside
• renamed .ds.gba files to .nds files
• created individual folders for each game I had

So why do we have two .nds executables?

It’s kinda like two branches of ScummVM, on the “a” branch you can run games from the LucasArt collection, in the “b” branch you run games from the Revolution and other companies collection. It’s really simple. On the ScummVm DS website there’s a compatibility list.

You don’t need to apply any patch to the .nds files, just copy the scummvm folder to your SuperCard and that’s it.

So what now?

When the start screen appears you can add games to the menu by doing:

• use the stylus and click on “add” button,
• browse to the root of the folder of the game you want
• click on the “Choose” button.
• There’s some options to customize the game but you can just skip this step and run the game.

So now you can enjoy (re)playing great classics like Monkey Island 1, Loom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Beneath a Steel Sky. Some of these games even have versions with full sound dialogues and cd music. You’ll need some extra steps to convert these to a format readable by ScummVM but these are casual cases.

Hope this tutorial helps out some people, I’m off to play some Maniac Mansion.

Btw, did anyone count how many times I’ve used the word ScummVM in this post?