It's been a little while since my last post. But that doesn't mean I haven't been working on my good 'ol Commodores; not at all. I've been up to my elbows in databases for the past little while.

Over the Christmas holidays, we were on a bit of collecting frenzy, looking for any deals we could find in regards to movies on VHS to add to our collection. We were fortunate enough to find a couple of really inexpensive lots on eBay, which added greatly to our VHS movie library.

I also decided to start archiving our library of movies we've recorded in MP4 format, so that we had them backed up in the even that any of the six hard drives we have them stored on up and fails on us. So, over the last couple of months, I've been busy encoding these files into DVD format, so we could play them on our standard DVD player.

As we've been adding to our collection and I've been encoding DVDs, I also wanted to make sure I had everything logged so we could find these movies easily, then next time we want to watch them. Sure, I could have just made a spreadsheet of the information on my Linux laptop. But, I'd much rather make use of my C128 for this task. So, I set out to build a set of databases using Master File II.

It's been working out really well. Because I'm not recording anything but the movie title, it's format (VHS, DVD, LaserDisc) or hard drive it's stored on (for the MP4 movies), and whether or not it's been encoded to DVD (for the MP4 movies), a single database file can hold over 1,100 records in the C128's memory.

Although it takes a little bit of time for the C128 to process search and sorting requests with so many records (right now the database has about 600 records in it), being able to do this job on my C128 is really satisfying to me. It's actually working out really well. I wish I had Master File II in my library of applications, back in the day. I could have done so many things with it.

That's what I've been up to lately, in the way of Commodore related activities. I haven't gotten around to playing any new games, and I've kind of given up watching the progress of Retro Game's release of the full sized TheC64. With still no apparent release date for North America, my attention has moved on to other things.

At the moment, my attention is on the upcoming release of the new Amico Intellivision. I still have my original Intellivision and I like the idea of revisiting some of my favorite INTV games in their modernized versions. I think if I were to spend money on a new system/console, it will be on the Amico Intellivision and not TheC64.