A Time of Magic

Aside from a rapidly growing pile of assorted unused or broken toys our little guy produces quite a mountain of waste products in the form of disposable diapers.

We’re in the unfortunate situation of needing to move to a smaller house in the not too distant future (almost any house would be smaller than the small hotel that’s our current “house”). That means that we’re going to have to tackle several of the mountains of toys that have accumulated over the last five years that this has been our home… not something to be undertaken lightly!

Of course, there’s our own stuff that’ll need looked at too but I suspect that the mountains that junior 1 & junior 2 have created whilst we’ve been here. As with all parents, there’s a lot of stuff that we’d notionally consider them to have outgrown but as with all clear-out operations I’m sure that we’ll find a lot of favourite toys that they still can’t do without!

Over the years since electronic games first came on sale there have been untold thousands, if not millions of games written to be played on various platforms that have long since died.

That doesn’t mean that the games are dead though as it’s still possible to run a great deal of those old games on your PC courtesy of the enormous number of emulators that have been written in recent years. Now in times gone by you’d have needed a fairly high spec PC to run the games at a sensible speed but PC speeds have taken a massive leap upwards of late and therefore even seemingly modest computers can run the old games at quite respectable speeds.

Ah, but how do you get the old games? Well, thanks to collectors growing numbers of the games are available for free download eg EmuParadise has loads of ROMs for many of the popular gaming platforms along with links to the various emulators that you need to run them. Juniors 1 & 2 are currently enjoying a rival of Super Mario 64 on my trusty Aspire One which is one of those netbooks for those that don’t know ie it has a fairly underpowered processor yet, aside from iffy sound, the game works just as fast as it did on the Nintendo 64 (which finally bit the dust last year).

Now the 64 is around 10 years old so its 93MHz (yes, mega hertz) processor is a whole lot slower than the GHz processors of today so emulators are obviously going to be viable. What’s not viable, yet, are emulators for the likes of the XBox as current PCs are running at a comparable speed but give the PCs a few years and you’ll start to see viable XBox emulators too.

Still, while you’re waiting for an XBox emulator for your PC you can feast on the thousands of games available for the older gaming consoles.

When you’re planning on moving after you’ve been in a house for a long while and sometimes it can seem like it’s moving kitchen sinks and all!

It needn’t be like that if you’ve only been in a home a short-ish time of course. Typically you’ll have done the clearing out process prior to your last move and therefore have, to a large degree, only the essentials in your current home. Not only that, but chances are that you still have some of the stuff still sitting in the boxes which obviously simplifies the packing process somewhat (arguably that stuff should be making its way into the garbage though).

What is essential is that you don’t try to take everything that’s not nailed down. So, forget about the likes of carpets and window blinds as 1) they’ll not fit in with the decor in your new home and 2) they’ll almost certainly not fit in your new home fullstop. Sure, you’ll be expected to negotiate a little with these but realistically you ain’t gonna take them and both you and the buyer know that.

If you’re moving soon, good luck!