Skytopia Links - best of the web

Turrican download archive - Turrican 2 has some of the best videogame music of all time, so what better place to start than this archive. Look for "Turrican SETA", and find any files beginning with "t2-" or "t2_" to start with.

Klass of '99 - Just got round to playing this. A remake of the classic spectrum game "Skool Daze". Very original and unique concept - download and play today for free! Also, try Blazing Trails - a fantastic remake of the original Trail Blazer game. It's a pity there aren't more levels, but I can't imagine anyone /not/ to enjoy what's there. If that's not enough, then visit this site or this site for many other classic remakes.

List of game music composers - Gigantic list of game music composers and what they made. Just as well I kept this link - the main site seems dead, and only Archive.org holds it now.

Pandora - You probably already know about this incredible music radio service which plays a nice variety of music to suit your tastes based on what you've already listened to. Pity it's currently banned in the UK.

Spheres of Chaos - I've grown to love this game, which is similar to asteroids, but with amazingly psychedelic sound and graphics, and gameplay variety (e.g. gravitational black holes, powerups and other weird stuff). Sort of like a cross between Super Stardust (Amiga), Xzap (C16) and a Jeff Minter game!

Twin Galaxies - This site aims to record the greatest video game achievements. See if you can be a part of history, and break the records! Also visit the MARP site for arcade-only accomplishments. Both sites include forums, charts, competitions and much more.

Back to the Roots - Free Amiga ADF games, music downloads and other information. Permission has been obtained from the game publishers for the games featured.

The Underdogs - The PC equivalent of the Amiga's 'Back to the Roots'. Also featuring an interesting article on the state of the gaming industry - the Scratchware Manifesto. For the game music side of things, also try this article from Armchairarcade.com. It misses out on the Japanese side of game music a lot, but otherwise, this is a great overview explaining how game music is veering sadly towards either uninspired 'film-style' music or repetitive 'techno/dance' music.

Sideload.com, espew.com, kohit.net, usichunter.net - Good SingingFish (RIP) alternatives for hunting down those super rare MP3s.

SHMUPS - The premier 'Shoot 'em up' site - including coverage and reviews of virtually every shmup ever made. Visit their Aural 6 section for some Shoot 'em up music (mp3 format). Also try the extensive Destroy All Monsters site for more SHMUP reviews and trivia.

Flat Batteries - The most overrated games ever - A look into why some of the most popular games ever made, are in actual fact, not very good at all ;-)

Nintendo Land - Attractive site with articles, reviews, news, trivia, secrets - and much more on Nintendo's classic video games

Hardcore Gaming 101 - Tons of great games reviewed with many screenshots, trivia, downloads, and comparisons between different arcade and home versions. Also check out GamingSanctuary - a site which has gone from strength to strength, and host to game reviews (many rare), scans, trivia, and guides.

GameFAQs - A giant collection of video and arcade game FAQs. Many really go into depth revealing trivia and secrets from new and old games alike.

Bubble Bobble HQ - Dedicated to the Bubble Bobble Series - one of the greatest arcade games ever made! Site also includes numerous other Taito classics, trivia and an active forum. Also visit The Bub and bob page - once again dedicated to everything Bubble Bobble and Taito.

The New Zealand Story Fan Page - Dedicated to one of the finer arcade classics - "The New Zealand Story". Includes trivia, guides, screenshots and downloads.

Joseq's Emuviews - The top voted game lists at Emuviews for a hosts of systems. Ratings, for Graphics, Sound, Play Control, Challenge, Replay Value and Performance.

Amiga Power on the net - A tribute to the sheer brilliance that was Amiga Power. This site aims to catalog and store the popular games magazine into web format - a truly gargantuan task. Old magazines usually scrapped every issue they created so as to make for more hard drive space for the current issue. A real shame if you ask me...

SuperPlay - The largest SuperPlay site on the net - dedicated to the classic SNES magazine. It even includes an interview with Matt Bielby. Also visit this site for a tribute to Super Play.

Thalion webshrine - A site containing many classic Thalion Amiga games for download. Site also includes some cool MP3 downloads by Jochen Hippel here.

Game and watch Central - Remember those cool handheld games by Nintendo - 'Mario's cement factory', 'Fire attack' and 'Parachute'? All of these, and many more are covered at the premier Game and Watch site.

Green Hill Zone - Information and trivia about the games created by Sonic Team. Includes excellent Sonic the Hedgehog section and creator profiles.

Killer list of video games - The title says it all; every arcade game under the sun is provided with a variety of screenshots and info.

MAME arcade emulator - Dedicated to the preserving the vast universe of arcade games. You might find your favourite game of all time here!

Raine arcade emulator - The official Raine site. Great emulator for all those arcade classics, and somewhat faster that MAME too.

X68000's MDX Arcade music - At last - a special format for arcade game music. First check out the "Puli-rula" music, no doubt the best of the 101 games so far there.

GMI Rocketbaby - Featuring Interviews, CD game music pics and an impressive list of game music composers and their works.

Alpha-ii SNESamp - More than just nostalgia, there were many great musical masterpieces for the Super Nintendo. This site contains full tune sets for download, including information such as the composer and publisher. Also visit Zophar's Domain for many other SPC sets, and play them all with the excellent program Super Jukebox (Updated link that works better with WinXP).

Autofish - SNES music box - Autofish's collection of favourite SNES music - with music available for download. Also check out ReyVGM's Magnificent Super NES Soundtracks and Cybergoth's SPC section for more personal favourites.

High Voltage SID Collection - Archive of virtually every C64 SID tune on ever made! Nuff said. Also visit Lemon 64 for music, reviews, graphics and reader's comments for every C64 game.

VORC - A great resource for video game music news. Updated often too.

Scene music - Nectarine - 24/7 internet radio playing module/game style synth music. Includes voting system, chat, forum and much more. You can even submit your favourite track to be played using a queue system (go, go Turrican 2 and Phenomena Enigma!)

Yesterday Land - A massive site, dedicated to classic games, movies, toys and more. Find users who share your past interests and tastes. Visit here to see people reminisce about the greatest arcade classics from the 80s.

Gamespy - Top Ten Pinball Games of All Time - Reviews and pictures of the best arcade pinball games of all time.

BoardGameGeek - Everythng from Downfall and Chess to Carcassone and Puerto Rico. See tons of reviews and ratings for all the classic games.

Video game music: not just kid stuff - This great piece of research from Matthew Belinkie speaks of video game music, it's history, and its place in modern society, and contains lots of interesting trivia.

ABFUKU Original Music - awesome music from this talented Japanese composer.


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Hollow face illusions - Created by Michael Bach. One of the better optical illusions out there. Hard to know whether the face is inside out from one moment to the next.

ZoomQuilt - This was stunning when I first saw it, and it's still stunning today. Seamlessly zoom through incredible works of art, to arrive where you started. You just to try it to see what it's all about.

Reel3D - Some kind of 3D stereoscopic pictures don't need glasses, but for the other type, here's a site where you can buy the things.

Microscopic life in 3-D - Excellent collection of microscopic life in full 3-D. See a spider's jaws close up, or the bulbous shape of a bee's eye. It's amazing how the ordinary 2D shots pale into comparison after glimpsing this lot. Requires red/green specs.

Planet 16 - Unusual and clever collection of 3D stereoscopic pictures from this cool Japanese site.

Vision 3D - Train how to see those cool dual stereoscopic pictures (the ones where you need to cross your eyes.

Stereoscopy and Illusions - Lots of unique optical illusions covered on this site. Also try the unique illusions from freshgasflow.com. Finally, V.S. Ramachandran presents some unique illusions - worth a visit.

Rainbow Symphony - A unique site with a great 3D gallery, shop and plenty of other 3D related stuff. In particular, take a look at this page displaying a variety of vision-changing 3D glasses - never seen anything quite like it!

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www.whynot.net/ - "How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small". Nice site where a community ranks and proposes various ideas to improve technology or everyday devices. For examples, why can't cars have an audio in socket so you can play music from your own music player?

The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles - An weird, wonderful and ultimately encouraging article of one man's quest to commericalize these amazing colored bubbles. Sad bit about how he lost the formula to the bouncing bubbles though.

Green tritium glow sticks - These are one of the few suppliers who stock 'radioactive' glow sticks. And no, you needn't ask - it's the safe type of radiation based on tritium. Research a bit before coming to any negative conclusions :)

Color mixing - A clear introduction to the basics of colour mixing. Also demonstrates why the subtractive colours of Cyan, Magenta & Yellow are better than the often used Red, Yellow and Blue.

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality - Article discussing how in all social setups (blogs, stars, website popularity), the math's power law will usually dominate. For example, the first posisiton will get twice as much popularity as the second, and three times as much as the third. Perhaps in an ideal system, the distribution would be closer to linear, at least near the top end.

Cool Physics movies - Animations of jets breaking the speed of sound, and what you would see if you travelled past Saturn at 99% the speed of light...

Mike's Electric Stuff - Some very interesting experiments. Fun with Plasma, Xenon flash tubes, Neodymium magnets, Laser reflections... and the effects of microwaving a CD! Good science fair project ideas... ;-)

House of Dave - Many interesting articles and opinions about astronomy, gravity, science, maths and more - presented in a such a way to make for an enjoyable read. Also see this page to see how something artificial looking can make its way into the natural world.

How Stuff Works - A very expansive site, giving the low-down on how everything works - the science behind the magic.

Lucidity institute - Covers the amazing phenomenon of Lucid dreaming. Lucidity is a state in dreams where you are fully conscious inside a dream. According to the level of lucidity, this can be a wonderful experience - and very exhilarating allowing you (for example) to fly above an amazing star-lit city dreamscape or whatever. The limit is your imagination. Also see the site's FAQ for the frequently asked questions. Further information is available at this other brilliant site here.

Ask Dr. Math - A giant archive of math questions for all levels and abilities. Search for a specific question or browse the online archives. Here's another great resource too.

New Scientist - Last word - cool Q+A section - for all those 'small mysteries of everyday life'. The site itself is very comprehensive too, with up to date science news and much more.

Madsci - A brilliant site dedicated to answering all your questions about science. This one contains over 25,000 questions, a comprehensive search feature and a forum-style approach to the answers.

Magnet FAQ - Everything you ever wanted to know about magnets - and then some.

Just Intonation - What exact pitches comprise the music scale? According to the site, pure ratios such as 5/4, 6/5 or 3/2 are. I completely disagree as mentioned in my Music Scale page, but I'm willing to admit there's a chance I'm actually wrong.

Pickover - A mega-vast resource of creative science, math, mystery, computer art, educational puzzles and much, much more from renowned scientist Dr. Cliff Pickover. Also visit his massive links page - you could spend a whole life-time going through this lot.

Powers of Ten - Universe zoom in - An interactive Java applet. "View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth" ...and then gradually zoom in, passing our solar system, then Earth... a city... tree - all the way down until you reach a tiny atom's nuclei.

Microwaving random stuff - What happens exactly when you microwave a bar of soap or a light bulb? This site has all the answers and includes photos of the experiments. Also see this page which includes movies for download and this site which contains a FAQ on everything you ever wanted to know about Microwaves. Finally, for those who just can't get enough, visit this site for numerous links.

The Dozenal Society of Great Britain - The numbering system that everyone uses - based on 10 - is a somewhat arbitrary kludge. Everyday calculations and world economy would improve if we all switched to the dozenal numbering system - based on the brilliant number 12. Also visit The Dozenal Society of America for more information.

Edge asks scientists "What is your dangerous idea?" - Everything from free will and artificial intelligence to the shape of the universe is discussed by many top scientists.

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Clusty search engine - Formally called Vivisimo. Apart from Google, this is the search engine I would really recommend. Results are like Google, but on the left, there are clusters which can really help to narrow down your results.

BartPE - The perfect way to create a Windows bootable CD - ideal for those times when Windows won't boot up, and you need to get at your data. Use this together with DriveImage XML (also free) which you can use to back up the whole hard drive. Together, they can't be beat.

I can also recommend SyncBack. After an exhaustive search, this seems to be the best freeware backup program. Great for syncing between PCs, or for just a mirror image. It's intelligent enough not to copy the whole thing over, but just the modified or newly created files.

Siren rename tool - I remember trying tons of file renamers at one point. This one is one of the very few that did everything I wanted. Very powerful, yet easy to use, with undo and easy preview mode.

Unlocker We've all heard it before "Cannot delete file: Access is denied", "The file is in use by another program or user." etc. This nifty program takes revenge on Windows and forces a delete or move ;-) It's actually nice to be in control of my OS again.

Googlism.com - Find out what Google thinks of any topic under the sun with this weird tool.

ColorPic - Pick colors from the screen, create new colors and palettes in this unusually powerful freeware utility.

AviScreen screen capture utility - This free utility will capture your desktop screen in movie format. Lots of options, though it can't save out to GIF animation format yet.

Console Calculator v2.4.3 - Best PC calculator ever, and I've used quite a few. Tons of features, but most importantly, it features a shell style interface so you can copy/paste, and set up variables etc.

Media Player Classic - Do you think the RealOne, Apple and Windows Media players are too slow, cumbersome, bloated and sluggish? Media Player Classic is an unofficial update from WMP 6.0 maintained by Gabest.org. It has many features missing even from Windows Media Player 9, handling real media and Quicktime files if the appropriate codecs are installed.

Edit Pad - A replacement text editor to Notepad. Features multiple documents (easily accessible via tabs), unlimited file size, undo feature and much, much more. The original 'classic' version is still available for free download at sites like this. Also check out the even more advanced EditPlus or NotePad+ which both have multiple undo as well as a host of other features.

Webmaster World - Excellent site featuring guides, articles and forums dedicated to every aspect of designing and maintaining your own website. Find out how to work your way up those rankings in Google or at least see the excellent Google FAQ.

Art Gem - One of the most fantastic paint packages ever available for the PC. No, I'm not talking about Photoshop, or Illustrator, or the myriad clones - but the versatile program 'Art Gem'. I have just been to the site, and have found that due to the fact that so few people registered the program, it has been discontinued =( ... Personally, this is a sad occasion for me. A reminder also that great shareware should not be taken for granted, for the benefit of all.
Also check out Pro Motion 4 - a package very similar to the classic Deluxe Paint software of the Amiga.

The Google Toolbar - Search instantly via Google, see the PageRank of any site, or translate a page to another language on the fly. Also see Google's cache of a page, if it is currently inaccessible. Certainly the most useful add-on to Internet Explorer you can get.

Babel Fish Translation - A tool specially designed for translating web pages from one language to another.

Xrefer - Contains a thesaurus, dictionary and specialist dictionaries (such as music, technology and philosophy etc.) all rolled into one! Combines reference books from the world's leading publishers, and is fully cross-referenced.

Alexa - See any site's traffic in relation to other sites! Gives a rough indication thanks to the many Alexa toolbar users. Amongst many other stats, it supports the chance for every web site to be reviewed.

Wikipedia - A multilingual project to create a complete and accurate open content encyclopedia. An amazing accomplishment, especially considering any person can edit any page at any time.

Oveas Web Poll - The fantastic script I used to create the polls in this site. Ideal for surveys, multiple answers and much more.

Probert Encyclopaedia - "A British encyclopaedia of over 100,000 entries interlinked and illustrated, covering all world knowledge and complementing other encyclopaedias".

CoolText - Produce colourful fonts for your own site with this amazing realtime online text producing tool.

Multimap - One of the best, if not the best, universal map site. Throw away that old dog eared paper map-book :) Also try www.uk.map24.com for realtime zooming!

TG Google Browser - Visualise your site and its place on the internet. This site provides a graphical 'web' display of links to your site, and their links etc. Often, you can find sites leading back round in a circle.

Anfy - Amazing array of customizable effects that you can use on your site. Applets for your text, graphics, navigation and more.

Visual Thesaurus - An amazing interactive way of finding that perfect word on the tip of your tongue. Words with similar relationships are presented in clusters branching off from the original word. These can then be clicked on for their relationships. Hard to explain, easier to visualise!

The Universal Currency Converter - Says it all really. Simple and easy to use currency converter.

TypingMaster Online Test - Probably the best online test there is to gauge your speed. See if you can beat my rather poor 51 words per minute.

Registar ratings and list - A good index of registars so you can register a name for your new web domain (e.g. myname.com). Dynadot, NameCheap or RegisterBird seem like the best to go for (Dynadot seems best).

Metagovernment - Perhaps this is the way politics and government should be done. The site promotes opportunity for everyone to participate in creating law, but the influence of any one person is decided according to how that person ranks according to other people. Think of PageRank, but for people's opinions.

Groogle - No, not anything like Google, but instead a web based peer code review tool which provides subversion integration, working against live repositories; Syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages, and much more.


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Text-To-Speech - Convert text to audio speech. Great fun.

World of Iblard - Some of the most inspirational art I've ever seen. If you want to see just two examples of this genius - try this, this or this.

www.everything2.net - This is a bit like Wikipedia, except semi-random thoughts are given by different people on more 'arbitrary' concept based entries such as "light bulb stress" or "The common man's view of technology" or " "The Simpsons" has become too mainstream". Brilliant stuff.

Harbin Snow and Ice Festival - Georgeous pictures of snow sculptures and neon-lit bridges, ships and other designs outdoors.

Annoying software: a rogues' gallery - A brilliantly funny article moaning about the shortcomings of software such as Adobe Reader, iTunes, RealPlayer and many more!

It's the End of the World as we know it... again - Humorous website detailing man's fascination with all things Armageddon.

Uninstall America Online 9.0! - It's easy and fun! Not.

Review: Windows XP - A very funny article describing how one user 'took the plunge', and upgraded, not downgraded from Windows Vista to XP.

How to kill a mockingbird - Bizarre and funny video spoof of the original book.

Filesystem Sacrilege - A nice short read to say why metadata filesystems are good. We've done a similar article ourselves. Neopages - My current host =) Offering a 5GB monthly transfer and 50 megabyte of space (upgradeable), Neopages is an amazing free host with great support and a friendly community. The only 'downside' is that you need to be voted in to get hosting, but once in, you get a better deal than most paid hosts!

MidiNotate Musician - Simply the best program from converting from MIDI to tradtional music notation. I also have an article here comparing the differences in quality of note transcription for 24 different programs.

IE PNG petition - Internet Explorer still doesn't fully support variable levels of translucency in the PNG format. Sign this petition and help us convince Microsoft!

Greater Good - Shop where a percentage of everything bought is donated to the poorer countries. Also visit The Hunger site - where a few clicks cost nothing, but help generate food for the third world.

Agent Ruby - A front end for one of the most advanced artificial intelligence engines on the web (site uses flash). Also try this site for a slightly different 'personality'.

The facts about evolution... Giving a wealth of information in support of human evolution.

...Or are they? Giving a wealth of information in support of intelligent design (i.e. against (macro) evolution). Also try the Access research network - another ID site containing various articles, news and possible the most active discussion board. Posts are sent by the minute at this place!

The Simpsons Archive - Not the official site, but one of the biggest and best Simpsons pages I've seen. Giving FAQs, trivia, guides and full reproductions of the episodes in text format with ratings and opinions on each episode. Also see the writers' fave episodes here.

The illustrated guide to breaking your computer - Without a doubt the funniest page I have ever encountered on the web. End of story.

Joy Greetings - At first looking like some kind of portal, this site provides some classic humour - in picture and text format.

Ready.gov sign translations - A parody of a section from the Ready America site takes advantage of the somewhat ambiguous signs.

The Fruit Pages - A comprehensive site, with a wealth of knowledge, facts and trivia about fruit. Also includes message board, nutritional information and more. Also visit this site for further technical information about fruit.

Yesterday Land - A massive site, dedicated to classic games, movies, toys and more. Find users who share your past interests and tastes. Visit here to see people reminisce about the greatest arcade classics from the 80s.

Aminet - A gigantic archive of quality Amiga software (also, here's an Aminet FTP archive with 5 Meg index file). Whilst on the Amiga side of things, visit the Amiga News Network or Amiga World for the latest news. Also, the Amiga History Guide is a massive site dedicated to preserving the different models, magazines, interviews, and other trivia regarding the Amiga. Finally, Deniil's homepage contains some of the best Amiga utilities I've seen (including possibly the world's best renaming utility and echo generator).

Sodaplay A very original concept - Build your own miniature computerised robots online. Watch them roll over, walk and interact in amazing ways. Also check out the amazing Falling Sand Game.

Near Death - An NDE is when someone is on the brink of death, but before coming back to life, they have a (usually positive) spiritual experience. This site is a huge resource of information in favour of the reality of the Near Death Experience, with many people's own personal accounts. Also see this article for some fairly convincing evidence.

The MegaPenny Project - Ever wanted to know what a trillion pennies looked like? This site takes you through 1, 16, 1000, 50,000 all the way up to a quintillion pennies. Includes 'special bonus section' - "Megamoo". Mad.... mad I tell you...

Bored.com - No actual content as such, but an inexhaustible collection of interesting links to visit when you're feeling bored.

Fight Spam on the Internet - One of the premier web sites against the onslaught of SPAM. To help ensure you don't get spam yourself, also visit here for automatic encoding of an email. A slightly longer, but maybe 'safer' technique is available here. For an even more advanced, but page-long piece of code, try here. In my opinion, the safest but most time-consuming method is to create a picture with the email text in; - I doubt any spam bot would try and harvest those. Finally, a way to fight against the spammers, try this: Spambait. I don't believe in revenge, but this program will create a list of invalid email addresses and wait for the unsuspecting harvest bot to feed off them, thus 'infecting' the email spam lists with worthless data. A very good deterrent for any would be spammer! ;-) ...This site will also do the same thing.

K9 spam filter - If you're already receiving a lot of spam, then filtering software based on a Bayesian filtering algorithm is your best bet. You'll need a POP3 account though (not Hotmail, AOL etc.). The Bayesian algorithm is amazing, because it learns what spam is - according to what you define as spam. It adapts to suit your email, and the more 'training' it gets, the more accurate it is over time. Around 97% up to 99.9% of spam is filtered this way. For more information, see Paul Graham's excellent A Plan for Spam and Better Bayesian Filtering articles. Finally, the SpamBayes program looks like another very good algorithm.

TV Cream - Vast archive of TV theme tunes in WAV, MP3 and RM format. Listen to the themes for classics such as Blockbusters, Dr Who, Grandstand, Mysterious Cities of Gold, Dogtanian, Inspector Gadget, Terrahawks, and many, many more. Also visit TV Ark - containing (real media) video clips of UK television - past and present.

Knightmare - One of the best 80s children's programmes ever made. See trivia and movies behind this legendary adventure game show

Mysterious Cities of Gold - An animated classic of truly epic proportions shown on UK TV around the time of Knightmare (80s). The site contains trivia, pictures, links and brilliant music from the episodes. Also visit the Cities of Gold site for another site dedicated to the series. In fact, even if you've never heard of the MCoG, I recommend that you track down and watch an episode of two - you won't regret it.

Tentmaker.org - Amazingly, research suggests the words 'forever', 'everlasting' and 'eternity' for example to be a misinterpretation on the original Hebrew word 'olam' and its Greek counterpart 'aion'. It actually means something along the lines of "ages" or "age-lasting". The site explores this and other evidence in more detail - and reasons how everyone will (eventually at least) go to 'Heaven'.

Classical Archives - Well presented site with music from all of the greatest classical composers. Music for download in midi, MP3 and WMA format - with collections of the best works in convenient zip format.

Acidics - You've no doubt seen them - those 'get rich quick' money scheme sites. Some of them look very tempting too, and it's this site's job to explain how the vast majority are generally scams. Either that, or they're not worth the time and initial money investment to even bother thinking about.

High IQ Society - Test your IQ at this web site for free. These are officially the hardest IQ tests on the web, so be prepared for some tough questions!

Roger Dean - Exquisite fantasy landscapes and architecture from this superb artist. Also check out Art of Greg Martin and Fantasy-Graphic.com for more amazingly detailed and colourful art.

Hollow Sun - A great collection of free samples taken from high quality classic vintage keyboard/synth/drum machines.

Creative Commons - "Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work."

The speed, size and dependability of programming languages - Nice comparison of the various programming languages, putting each on a graph where speed Vs verbosity is the criteria.

SolaSpecs - Glasses at drastically reduced prices, and I know the guy who does it all. Buy them here instead of at the high street chain - I'm getting my next pair from here myself!

Glowhouse - For all things glowy and luminous, this seems like a good place to shop (largest selection of items, and cheapest afaik).
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