exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

wub wrote: 16 Sep 2026 23:41 What an amazing game! It's so addictive and I've got nothing else done tonight :D

:thumbup:

I'd love to know how you did that game over song, is it AI generated?

Yeah music is AI. Always takes a bit to get it sounding good but both music's came out really good in the end :)

Yes, I played it again today. :D
My girlfriend thinks it’s brilliant too.
We have a competition to see who can get the furthest...

kohli79 wrote: 16 Sep 2026 23:59 Yes, I played it again today. :D
My girlfriend thinks it’s brilliant too.
We have a competition to see who can get the furthest...

:bravo: :2k2:

exxos wrote: 16 Sep 2026 23:57 Yeah music is AI. Always takes a bit to get it sounding good but both music's came out really good in the end :)

I must have missed the intro music the first time round, it's great too! It's really crazy that this is possible with AI, I haven't been paying enough attention to it all. I knew it could do graphics and video but I had no idea it could do music like this :o

wub wrote: 17 Sep 2026 00:26 I must have missed the intro music the first time round, it's great too! It's really crazy that this is possible with AI, I haven't been paying enough attention to it all. I knew it could do graphics and video but I had no idea it could do music like this :o

Yeah it can do all sorts these days. My YouTube channel has my experiments with music.. I only upload the best ones which I like :)

https://www.youtube.com/exxosuk

The YouTube short films have gone AI now as well. They getting better all the time.

@exxos thanks for the link, I'll have a listen :)

Another cheerful update from Google Play

So on top of the annual API level treadmill I moaned about last time, there's the other side of the same coin that hits users rather than developers. If your app's target API is more than a year behind the current Android release, you can't update it at all. Frozen where it stands. No bug fixes, no security patches, no new features. And eventually it gets hidden from the store for anyone on a newer device too.

The flip side of that from the user's chair is even worse. Got an older tablet that still works perfectly well? Tough. Half the software on the Play Store either won't install or won't run because it now demands a newer Android than the tablet will ever get. Not because the tablet can't handle it, but because Google decided a device more than a few years old shouldn't be running current software, and the OEM stopped shipping OS updates before the paint had dried on the box.

I've hit this myself. I'm on my third tablet now, and I've decided that's the last one. Not buying another. The whole thing is an endless treadmill of buying replacement kit for perfectly good hardware, all dressed up as "security". I wanted to install one of those little fish games for the cats to poke at, since the tablet's not much use for anything else these days. Nope. Can't install it. Play Store won't let me.

The thing is factory reset. Nothing on it but a crossword and a spot the difference. Hardware is perfectly capable of running a fish game. I don't even care if it got hacked, honestly, there's nothing on there to hack. I can easily judge for myself whether a small game is worth the risk of downloading. But Google have taken that choice out of users' hands entirely. You don't get to decide anymore whether the risk is worth it. They decide for you, and their answer is always "buy a new one".

If the OS didn't bloat itself into oblivion between versions, none of this would be necessary. The same hardware that ran Android 8 fine crawls under Android 14 because every release piles on more junk that most users never asked for and don't use. Then when the tablet inevitably slows down, that's presented as the tablet being "old" rather than the software being greedy. Classic sleight of hand.

Planned obsolescence really needs to be illegal. Perfectly good kit getting junked because Google have decided you should have another one. Landfills filling up with tablets that would happily run a crossword for another ten years. Nobody in charge cares because the manufacturers make more money, Google keeps the ecosystem "current", and the e-waste angle just gets quietly worse every year.

Might have a poke at the boot loader on one of the older tablets and see if there's a lightweight Linux that'll take. I'm certainly not staying on the buying treadmill, and the tablet's basically unused now because everything on it moves like treacle. Might as well see if it can be resurrected as something useful rather than sitting in a drawer.

I don't remember voting for any of this.