Remembering… Ocean Software Ltd

This week, David Hayward takes a look back at a much loved software house

Last week, we took a look at one of the great videogame publishing houses from the 80s, Durell Software Ltd. But as great as that was, there another name that truly dominated the computer gaming scene in the 80s and 90s: Ocean Software Ltd.

The names of Jon Woods and David Ward are carved into the British gaming industry under the legend category, along with other such notable Ocean staff as Gary Bracey, Paul Patterson and Dawn Hollywood (nee Drake).

Top 5 Things About The Nokia 3210

Was this the best phone ever? Maybe…

1 Predictive Text

These days, predictive text has combined with autocorrect to become a technology that’s all too often the source of mirth, rather than admiration. People laugh at memes that show autocorrect making innocent messages sound rude or inappropriate. But back in the days of the 3210, predictive text was actually really useful. No longer did you have to press each number key several times to find the letter you wanted. Instead, you just tapped the key once, and as you progressed through the characters, the phone would guess what you wanted to type. It might seem run-of-the-mill now, but at the time, it was a huge time saver.

WavePad v6.8

If you need to edit audio files, clean them up and apply special effects, this editor can do the job

WavePad is an audio editor that runs in all versions of Windows from 32-bit XP up to 64-bit Windows 10. Aimed at both home users and professionals, it can be used to edit music files and podcasts, to clean up tracks converted from old vinyl records and to mix your own music.

Cocktail Audio Pro X100

A customised Linux-based media streamer with some interesting features

Just when you thought CD ripping had gone the way of the dinosaur, along comes a device that manages to combine it with network audio streaming.

The Cocktail Audio Pro X100 is an interesting marriage of technologies. It’s a compact unit measuring just 204 x 240 x 80mm, and it looks similar to the previous generation of Shuttle media cases.

Within its black chassis lies a 2GHz Intel Trial-D quad-core processor and 4GB of DDR3 memory. On its 1TB hard drive, you'll find a copy of Fedora 22 running in console mode, with a selection of pre-installed audio apps, Samba and a selection of other networking media programs.

NZXT Manta

Sleek lines and clever engineering abound in this marvellous PC case

We recently had the pleasure of reviewing a couple of NZXT cases: the Source 430 and H440. Both are superb and offer system builders a solid foundation on which to design their creations.

This week, we have a new case from NZXT to review, the Manta. This is a mini-ITX chassis that manages to pack in so many features you begin to wonder whether it's actually a full tower server chassis.