Hi all

I buy, yes from a shop, the Computer Active magazine and have just noticed this good offer for anyone still thinking of installing Win10, especially if you want to get a copy for later.

On page 70 issue576 25 March - 7 April is this offer. Its 1 PC, unlimited lifetime licence. Go to http://www.snipca.com/33839 and click the red Buy Now button on the right. £29.99 instead of the normal £119.99. The snipca code leads to the CA Software Store.

I just looked at that page and you can get Win10 Pro for £34.99 just £5 extra.

Ordered a copy for myself, just in case.

Take care, keep safe.

Just bringing this back to the front page as we have just been given a Shmup (Sat 1st sept 2018. :)

Cancel that request folks, I just found out that smaller ata drives need to be switched on after being plugged in to the adapter and left on for about a minute before connecting to the usb port. After that no problems. If only the suppliers of these things would add that to their advertising and user info.

Something about loading driver or whatever..

Problem over.........................
:)

Hi all, I have a 160Gb ATA hd that I need to copy files from to a new drive. The drive was working when taken from my last system but I now have a SATA mobo in my new system and cannot connect the drive to it of course. The old system went bang when the mobo's memory slots failed.

I have bought a couple of external drive adapters that use USB and claim to work but have since found after testing that ATA drives under 500G do not work with them, something about missing code or drivers in the interface?

My next option is to try and buy an old v cheap ATA based desktop and use that to do it as I cant find anyone who has one that I could borrow. I'm not fussed if there is an OS installed on it as I can use a boot cd with linux or similar.

Now the question:

Is this now my only option apart from professional recovery as although the files on the old drive are mainly photos they ARE important but at what cost :)

Any help would be MOST welcome, Thanks

Great!
Thanks!
:)

Have just installed this and am pleased to say that it makes a noticeable difference to the sound when I am using headphones. Although the sound was already quite good to my ears it now has more depth and range to all music and sounds. I have not changed any settings from the default regarding bass etc, but I don't think I will.

The download is only 6.44MB and unzips to 1 exe of 6.96MB. After installation there is a very simple and easy setup routine to go through, then do a test with music, video or a game and hear the difference. No registration step as it comes already as a full version and not needing any further steps. Very easy all round and does sound better on my system.

So grab it while it's free and try it, if you don't like it then there's no harm done. :-)

neowin[.]net/news/update-bongiovi-acoustics-dps-audio-enhancer-full-version-limited-time-offer

I have not tried this -- with my hearing currently I couldn't accurately gauge its performance if I had. ;) Nonetheless if it works at all there are likely to be folks interested.

:)

Thank you, WhiteRabbit.

Here's more Shmups and similar games to find on Steam. most are decently priced. With the changes made to the giveaway site, to get to the correct Steam page you will need to copy paste the links I've provided. Hyperlinks no longer work properly. some security measure I think.

Gal-x-e http://store.steampowered.com/app/473510/ £1.59

Lew Pulsipher's Doomstar
http://store.steampowered.com/app/504750/ £6.99

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Zenodyne R http://store.steampowered.com/app/466820/ £6.99
[center]

RX Squad http://store.steampowered.com/app/494120 £1.59

Galactic Fighters http://store.steampowered.com/app/513960/ £0.79

Bitmaster (itch.io) https://comigo.itch.io/bitmaster $0.99

Solar Shifter EX - http://store.steampowered.com/app/363940/ - £5.99

Starship Command (Itch.io) - https://evglabs.itch.io/starshipcommand $5 or more

Starship Corporation - http://store.steampowered.com/app/292330/ - £14.99

Star Drifter - http://store.steampowered.com/app/485330/ - £0.79

Super Space Pug - http://store.steampowered.com/app/466840/ - £0.79

Stardust Galaxy Warriors: Stellar Climax - http://store.steampowered.com/app/389650/ - £6.99

Space Codex - http://store.steampowered.com/app/469890/ - £079 (£0.39 till Oct 3rd 16)

Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant - http://store.steampowered.com/app/383330/ - £0.79

Space Pirates and Zombies 2 has just gone on sale for the next 48hrs on steam. You can find the deal HERE.

The game is still in early access, so what you see in the following videos HERE, HERE and HERE, is not the final game. I have not checked through all of the content of each video so cannot guarantee any inappropriate language that I may have missed.

In SPAZ 2 you must survive in an evolving post apocalyptic Galaxy. The zombie threat is defeated, infrastructure has collapsed, fuel is scarce, and scavenging means survival.

Initially the Galaxy contains hundreds of fleets, each trying to survive. AI captains do everything the player can. The player is not special and is not the center of the Galaxy.

As resource scarcity becomes critical, ships come into conflict just to survive. Factions may form for protection or split due to starvation. Old friends must become fodder.

Stronger factions establish and defend territories, set up resource hubs, and establish star bases. Weaker factions may resort to banditry. Each captain is unique, persistent, and shapes the Galaxy.

When factions meet, combat is usually the result. While the strategic side of SPAZ 2 is about exploration, territorial control, and faction building, the action side of SPAZ 2 is about ship construction, tactics, and salvage.

Combat creates damaged ships and dead crew, but it also provides new salvaged parts. All the parts in SPAZ 2 are modular and randomly generated. If you see something you like, break it off an enemy, grab it with your tractor beam, and connect it to your ship. Ship construction can be done live during battles, though sometimes beating an enemy to death with their broken wing is also fun.

Back on the star map, battles will attract other captains looking for salvage. Take your new parts and run. Upgrade, repair, and prepare to fight another day, for darker threats are about to emerge.

Key Features:

1) ... Two hundred persistent Captains that are able to do everything the player can, including forming dynamic factions, building structures, controlling territory, and going to War.
2) ... A true living galaxy that is not player centric. It will develop differently each game through the interactions of the agents.
3) ... Build your own faction from nothing.
4) ... Randomly generated modular parts. Build the mothership that suits your play style, on the fly, in seconds. Every part has its own unique stats that contribute to the mothership. Every part has its own hull integrity and damage states. Every part is a real, working, ship component.
5) ... Strategic ship building. The mass, location and shape of parts all matter. If a part blocks a turret, it will not fire. If a ship is too long, it will turn slowly. Too many engines will mean too little power for weapons. Every design choice counts.
6) ... A fully physics based 3d environment where everything is destructible, takes damage from impacts, can be grabbed and even thrown at enemies with the tractor beam.
7) ... Natural movement and controls. Movement is on a 2d plane and screen relative, much like an FPS. The combat feels like huge pirate ships battling on an ocean. Focus on tactical positioning and manage system power to unleash hell at the right moment.
8) ... Epic ship to ship battles. Tear the enemy apart piece by piece over minutes, instead of seconds.

You can actually get The Renegades of Orion 2.0 via the Otakumaker Bundle 17 at the moment, which is available HERE till 26th October next month. Also included in the bundle are five other games:

Pills4Skills
The Grandfather
The Lady
Volstead
Alien Run

The total cost of the bundle is less than the cost of The Renegades of Orion 2.0 at only $1.49 whereas on Steam the game is $1.99 pl;us you get the other games. If you are into giving games as presents to friends and family, Otakumaker have some very generous offers. You can get two keys for each game for an additional $0.50 and 5 keys for an additional $1.50 and 10 keys for each game for an additional $3.50.

I'll be giving away a lot of games once the review site that Whizzy (giveaway name) Mavadelo (Steam name) has created for me is ready. So such deals are perfect for me. I've already been purchasing bundles from this site, but only recently started to get 5 or 10 bundles. I have over 10 000 spare Steam keys, so it's going to take a long time to give them away. :)

Renegades of Orion 2.0

You can check out Renegades of Orion 2.0 via the Steam store by copy and pasting the following link into your browser. Clicking on hyperlinks now only take you to the home page even though the address is correct for the games page:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/434780/

A long time ago in another dimension called the astral plane, began a great battle. The battle was between Forces of Light against Renegades of Orion.

The Black Magicians and Reptile Creatures. They fight to be the kingdom of Earth. During this battle there was a transfer of consciousness of a fighter who had the most power of cosmic light. He's called Shen!

With intention to join the troops of Orion and to fight the renegades. Take the divine crystal to raise its power. If you falter the devil catches you!

In the new version The Renegades of Orion 2.0, Now there is a crystal (Divine crystal) which guarantees more power. He appears randomly.

There are more demons, some totally take your power. Other makes you go back to the beginning of the stage or even before that.

The dynamics to remain free of these demons and gain power through the crystal to make sure you skip the level.

"Another good detail of the game! Enemies and obstacles (except bosses) always arise from random and unpredictable in every time you play."

Here are some more Shmups and other related shooters that are on sale over on Steam until the 3rd October. I'll be leaving these up even when the sales end as they are related to this post. I may consolidate the whole thread once I've added the shmups released over the last several years. At least those available on PC.

For some reason, linking directly to the Steam page from these forums no longer works, so I've had to remove the codes that allowed you to click on the name of the game. instead I've had to post the direct links, but clicking on these will only take you to the sales page and not the actual game. To do that you will have to copy and paste each link into your browser to see the Steam page. The giveaway site have added something to the forums that won't allow direct links, but only to the home page.

I will see if I can find an alternative method when I have time.

Shmup Love Boom - 70% off £0.59
http://store.steampowered.com/app/387110/

Renegades of Orion 2.0 - £1.59
http://store.steampowered.com/app/434780/

Void - £3.99
http://store.steampowered.com/app/503710/

1917 - The Alien Invasion - £3.99
http://store.steampowered.com/app/470060/

War Birds: WW2 Air strike 1942 - £1.39 (50% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/451670

Bladestar - £2.44 (65% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/424760/

Infinity Wings - Scout & Grunt - £0.99 (50% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/448790/

Freespace 2 - £3.49 (50% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/273620

Uriel's Chasm 2: את - £0.99 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/414580

Zotrix - £2.49 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/343280/

Zotrix - Solar Division - £6.99 (Tower Defense in space)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/351720/

CDF Starfighter VR - £8.49 (15% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/433190/

Naval War: Arctic Circle - £3.74 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/200050/

Fair Strike - £0.69 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/352120/

Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War - £3.35 (30% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/273600/

Space Codex - £0.39 (51% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/469890/

LUFTRAUSERS - £1.74 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/233150/

Hi Delenn, yeah, sadly Scubaguy passed away some years ago (not sure if you knew), though I don't know what happened to Lockett or Webmaster?

I so miss Lockett, webmaster and, especially, Scubaguy. ;(

P.S. See, StrayCat, it worked. Thanks!

It's about time I started to update this thread; especially considering Shmups are still one of my favorite arcade genres.

Just found the following bundle called Fall Gamebundle, that includes 3 space based games two of them shmups and one strategy game. They are Battlestorm, The Fleets of Sol and Astrokill. You can pick all three up for a little over $3.50. I've added a few more space oriented games to the Shmups thread, all from bundles that are live at this time.I've only checked the indie Gala and Game Bundle sites so far. There are at least 60 bundles live at the moment. most bundles retails for much less than $5, so you may find some excellent shmups if you check through the indie bundles that I've linked to in the Weekly round up of games thread over in the Game discussion sticky section. The three space games are worth more than that the cost of the whole bundle alone, in fact, the cheapest of those three games Battlestorm costs more if you buy it directly from Steam. All games come with Steam keys. You can find the deal HERE.

The following are several other space oriented games you'll find in one of the several Indie Gala bundles that are available at this time. You'll find Indie Gala
Idie Gala Prime Bundle includes Nightork Adventures - Beyond the Moons of Shadalee - Pilot your spaceship through procedurally generated dungeons Fight against evil demons, to save the galaxy in 30 missions, or IACTURA - It is your job to save the planet from its decay. Only you can prevent an extraterrestrial species from taking over all of humankind. G Prime - a gravity gripping steampunk slingshot simulator. Space Ranger ASK - a classic arcade shoot'em up game, featuring asteroid blasting, spacemen rescues, UFO destruction, asteroid mining and Boss fights! Two excellent real time space battles waged with waves of fighters and massive battleships are available in the form of Haegemonia: Legions of Iron and it's stand-alone expansion Haegemonia: The Solon Heritage are available via the Anuman Interactive bundle and you'll find even more space oriented games in the The Indie Gala Mogul bundle for example RX Squad a side scrolling smup (ground based). You can find the Indie Gala bundles HERE

There's another bundle on the Game bundle site that is soon to end called The LaborDay Bundle that also has a decent Shmup called Nordenfelt, which you can find HERE and see on Steam HERE. The usual cost of that game is £5.99/$8.99 but you can get it and nine other games for $3.73 (approx £2.88)

AStrokill

Battlestorm

Fleets of Sol

Haegemonia: Legions of Iron

Haegemonia: The Solon Heritage

I've been reinstalling every week, but still show Sprill. I probably need to delete all the registry entries and start again. I'm not bothered about this months though. I 'm sure I beta tested it, so will probably have a key somewhere (If I've not given it away. I gave quite a lot of my Alawar games away a few years ago.

Alawar finally updated the Free Game of the month for this month (but I admit that I hadn't checked for a week or so).

It's Sunshine Acres (Time Management).

I had to play the game with the config files AND the temp files AND run the Gamebox Updater to get it to change.

I have no idea why some people cannot see some of the files I see, and even more so, why it doesn't update itself monthly like it's supposed to do!

I tried that AAUpdater and got no error. Maybe there's an error in your install. However, after doing that the free game was empty. I finally played my game (described previously) to change the conf.xml file in the Gamebox folder and got a new game I haven't seen before - Fashion Craze. I think it's Time Management so I will skip it but at least I found it.

Fashion Craze is available 24/7 from Jenkat Games and MyPlayCity. Jenkat installs to 2 places in Program Files (x86) and MyPlayCity also installs to Program Files. Jenkat does no hijacking, though.

As for the other issue - my link to the gamebox on the site still works. It's the old format so it appears that they are phasing it out. The link is here: http://www.alawar.com/item/alawar-game-box/

It would be a shame to lose the gamebox because installs from the site do not allow you any choice as to where to put the game. It assumes Program Files (x86)\Alawar -- ignore the (x86) if you are running 32 bit. However, if you can download and install through the Gamebox, you can specify where to put the download file and where to put the final installation.

There's a funny little trick that works for SOME games but not all. If you cannot download and install through Gamebox (cannot find it listed), you MIGHT be able to get Gamebox to control the location of the installation by doing this:

1 - Download the game installer

2 - Move the installer to wherever you have specified in your Gamebox options for the downloads to be placed.

3 - Load Gamebox

4 - Look for the new game in your list of game.

5 - If you find it, click on "Play" and it will install it where you have told Gamebox to install games.

If it's not there, this trick won't work. I have no idea why it works in some cases but not others. I found it by accident when I was transitioning to a new computer a few months ago.

I think I found out why my gamebox isn't updating but I still don't understand it.

In the folder there's an entry named AAUpdater. When I doubleclicked it, a text file appeared in the folder. The file says:

info:Updater started (should be written on exe path)
ERROR:LastErr:Can not create file "exe_path.txt"(The system cannot find the file specified.)
debug:exe_path.txt not found

Because I don't understand this sort of thing, I made a blank txt file and named it exe_path.txt but got the same message.

Walthomas, I tried the link which worked for me last month but that one is gone too. It looks to me like they might be trying to phase it out and so doesn't update. Actually, this doesn't really make sense because it updates for some people and not for others so I have no idea.

Try switching to the "old" format of the Alawar site and try again.

Can you post the link for Alawar Game box> I get a 404 error.

It does sometimes say that if you try to play before the install is completed. However, if it's not the right game and your newly downloaded copy of the gamebox is wrong, I would complain to Alawar. They will usually give you a code for the game in cases like this.

I just downloaded the gamebox today, and the free game for the month was shown as Sheep's Quest. I downloaded that too, but the game is showing as a 60 minute game only, and then I have to pay. How do I get the full free version?

Mine says free game is Finding Doggy.

WR, did you uninstall the gamebox first?

Never mind. I just downloaded and ran the installer. Took about 10 seconds, lol. Said free game was Sprill. Said I already had game. On to something else now. :)

If it's Sprill: Aqua Adventures, then it's definitely a repeat.

I'm stuck on Sheep Quest. I tried my swap trick several times and even tried to re-download it and it still insists on Sheep Quest.

I just reinstalled the gamebox and it fixed the issue with it freezing on one game. It had been stuck on Treasures of montezuma for saome time. I missed Finding Doggy (which didn't matter becasue i#I already had it from beta testing it a few years ago). Now the new game is Sprill, which I'm sure has been given away before.

I haven't tried it but maybe the key isn't the config files but deleting the temp files and letting them rebuild that gets it to update itself.