Noodle Review: Samyang Sutah Hot n' Spicy

Like a nice minestrone soup, mixed with napalm.

Make sure you have plenty of tissues handy.

Noodle Review: A-One Pho An Lien

Vietnamese pork glass ribbons + Three packets of "stuff" = nom!

Noodle Review: Samyang Korean Kimchi Ramen

Spicy. NICEY

Another SKX007 from Creation Watches

Another great sale from Creation Watches. 

From Singapore to the UK in 4 days, as usual, with no customs charges.

I'm so addicted to the Seiko SKX007 / SKX009 divers. 

Pity I always have to modify them :D

Noodle review: Jin Ramyon - Hot Taste

Another Korean entry.

Packet of dried onions, seaweed and beefy bits.

Packet of paprika and shellfish powder.

NOICE!

Noodle review: Nam Vang Phnom Penh style

A monster 4 sachets bodes well.

I can't identify the flavour, not sure if it's supposed to be meaty.

Loads of garlic and onion anyway. Glassy ribbon noodles.

Nice!

Pot snack review: Gallo Risotto Box - ham and tomato

A weighty microwaveable item. Promises Ham and Tomato goodness.

"Must be good", thinks I. The Italians wouldn't put up with crap, right?

Tastes of packing material marinated in cheesy cat puke.

Noodle review: Samyang beef ramen

Lots of floaty "beef" soya balls in here. Warmish heat, generally yummy.

Sachet count: 1

Foam pot. Naughty Samyang.

Noodle review: Jin Ramen Hot

Bland heat, chewy noodles, and generally quite nice.

Sachet count: 1

Would have again!

Buying a GCW-Zero in the UK

Just a heads-up for those in the UK who want a GCW Zero.

I just bought one from Ithic.Com.

Item plus shipping to the UK was 195 dollars, which is £116 at today's exchange rate.

Sadly this item also incurs an extra customs charge of £26 when it gets to your local post office, so you'll have to go and pay that to pick it up.

Shipping via USPS took exactly 14 days.

FLASHING THE FIRMWARE

Turns out this Zero came without an initial flash of Dingux firmware - all it would do is show a red screen and then run a hardware test - white screen with green writing on it.

However my disappointment didn't last long, as I found the excellent IRC channel where many of the GCW devs hang out. They quickly pointed me in the right direction - I needed to flash my Zero, but this can only be done from Linux. I only run Windows 7 here, so here's what I did.

1. Download an Ubuntu DVD ISO: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop
2. Burn the ISO to a DVD
3. Boot the computer from the DVD and run Linux without installing.
4. Install required libraries: At the shell, run: sudo apt-get install libusb-dev libconfuse-dev
5. Follow the instructions here: http://www.gcw-zero.com/flashing . Note that the key command to flash the Zero is $ ./ingenic-boot ... but you may have to run it as root i.e. do this instead: $ sudo ./ingenic-boot ...
6. If you have trouble flashing, try resetting the Zero using the reset button next to the USB socket.

After getting the firmware installed, you want to install emulators and games. Here's some tips.

INSTALLING EMULATORS AND GAMES

1. Surkow's wiki is great. Start here for essential info: http://wiki.surkow.com/Quick_Start_Guide
2. Download the emulators to your computer. The start repository is here: http://www.gcw-zero.com/downloads . Note that sometimes this doesn't contain the latest version of software. You should always check for the latest release here on the Dingoonity forums: http://boards.dingoonity.org/gcw-releases/
3. Get your game roms from a place that doesn't suck: http://www.freeroms.com
4. Download the GCWZeroManager: http://www.harteex.com/?page=gcwzeromanager . Use this to install your emulators and games. If you have any problems, look at Surkow's wiki. I ran into a problem with my computer not seeing the Zero - I had the common NDIS driver issue mentioned in the wiki and here: http://boards.dingoonity.org/gcw-help/win7-network-driver-failing-to-recognize/

In case you're wondering what are recommended emulators, I like:

• Fceux : NES emulator
• OhBoy: GameBoy / GameBoy Color emulator
• PicoDrive: MegaDrive / Genesis emulator
• PocketSNES: SNES / Super Famicom emulator
• ReGBA: Game Boy Advance emulator
• Mame4All: Arcade Game emulator - I found it better than Final Burn Alpha for the type of old games I enjoy like 1942, Pac-Man, In The Hunt etc.
• Unreal Speccy Portable: ZX Spectrum emulator. Hard to track down. I found the OPK here - https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9EgGumkJaabSE9TaEdFbVVBSlU#list

I do like a bit of speccy action - Unreal Speccy isn't really targeted at the GCW Zero, and you can't map the Zero's buttons to speccy keys as I'd like. Shame. An alternative I've found is to use the FooN injector to convert speccy Z80 files into Game Boy Advance roms, and run those in ReGBA. FooN is great 'cos it lets you map specific GBA buttons to Speccy keys. http://www.codepuppies.com/~ben/sens/gba/about.html

AND FINALLY

I did a little video review, please check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZxVNBu3hJs