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A long time in the making. This is a reworked and polished version of the 1970's Weetabix Doctor Who board game. Feel free to download, share, host, whatever, but please take note of the read me file in each zip.

Recently found this site. it shows about every spaceship you can think of and there relative scale.

There have been a lot of reports since the New Year that the HD war may be over.

Well, let's see. Here are some quotes from respected people and sites:

This from last week by Stuart Miles,

5 January 2008 17:28 GMT - The format war is over, we can all get on with our lives, buy a Blu-ray player and all be happy about it.

Well that's what looks likely to happen following the announcement from Warner Bros. that it would be ditching HD DVD support in favour of an exclusive agreement with Blu-ray.

HD DVD might have the better interactivity, might have had the cheaper player offering, but it seems that wasn't enough when it came to wooing the movie studios.

And so Toshiba, who've been singing the praises of HD DVD for over four years are left holding on to just handful of studio's still supporting the format. But for how long?

The HD DVD format might have big players like Universal, in from the beginning, Paramount and DreamWorks who recently switched, and New Line, but even these alliances now look shakey as well.

In an exclusive interview with Pocket-lint last month, Rachel Banin, product manager of the home video business group at Sony said "We understand that it was only for a set period of time. I think that if the progress of the Blu-ray format continues, Paramount will have to come back."

New Line is owned by Time Warner, who incidentally owns Warner Bros, and therefore likely to switch as well, leaving just Universal and DreamWorks out in the cold supporting the format.

Compare this against movie studios 20th Century Fox, MGM, Lionsgate, Disney, now Warner Bros and of course Sony Pictures plus hardware makers such as Dell, HP, Hitachi, LG, Samsung, and Apple and you can see why HD DVD looks set to fail.

We would love to say it's a shame, that poor Toshiba has been beaten by Sony in what has to be its first format war victory; UMD, MiniDisc, Beatmax, ATRAC anyone? But in reality consumers should be pleased that finally one format has been victorious and that Home Cinema fans can now concentrate on buying a Blu-ray player and getting on with investing in movies.

Of course if Blu-ray has won the victory and the battle, there are further consequences to consider.

What of Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD drive? What of Toshiba's line of HD DVD players. Without movies to play what will become of the players and what will Toshiba do to bring High-def content to those who want it? Opt for Blu-ray? It would be an amazing move and show that the company has plenty of heart, but lets face it, its unlikely to happen.

As for Microsoft, the idea of including a HD DVD player in their console will most likely have been shelved overnight, if they even existed of course.

We will have to wait and see, but one thing for certain, we won't get a response at CES this week. The HD DVD group has cancelled its keynote speech at CES.

Rumors just won't stop about the future of HD DVD, and while we try not to post all of them, some seem too believable to pass up. Our friend Bill Hunt, at the Digital Bits, -- still waiting on those permalinks, Bill -- is reporting that his "second to none" sources informed him that both Universal and Paramount are in the process of going blu. But don't bother asking 'em, because the same contracts that prevent them from switching now, prevent them from confirming the rumor. In addition, Bills sources tell him that while Paramount could make an announcement any day now, Universal's won't come until February -- at the earliest -- because "their contract period with the HD-DVD camp expires at the end of January."

The sprawling consortium of technology and media companies assembled to promote the HD DVD format of next-generation, high-definition discs could be close to collapse after a spate of defections to the rival Blu-ray Disc consortium.

As many as 20 companies that are members of the HD DVD Promotion Group could be preparing to remove their names from the alliance’s 130-strong membership list, The Times has learnt.

The defections could, one Tokyo-based analyst said, represent the final nails in the coffin of Toshiba’s HD DVD standard after a bitterly fought “format war”.

Eiichi Katayama, of Nomura Securities, said that the battle between the formats, which display films and video games more sharply in an era of ever-larger television screens, was now “entering its final phase”.

The threatened exodus from the HD DVD format comes after the decision by Warner Bros last week to back the rival Blu-ray Disc format, whose main technology backers include Sony, Apple and Dell. Apparently encouraged by the strong momentum behind Blu-ray, Paramount emerged yesterday as the latest Hollywood studio poised to switch allegiances.

Pony Canyon, a Japanese music, animation and film studio and part of the Fuji Television media empire, said that although it was a member of the HD DVD Promotion Group, the decisions taken by American studios meant that it would “choose Blu-ray in the end”. Several other Japanese companies, including content producers and electronics component makers, said that their support of HD DVD was “under review”.

Backers of HD DVD point to the relative ease of producing the discs and the lower cost of building machines capable of reading them. Unlike previous format wars, particularly the Betamax v VHS skirmish in the 1980s, the Blu-ray v HD DVD war effectively has been decided in board-rooms, rather than in electronics showrooms. The decisions of the big studios have come well before those of customers, who generally have held back from picking one format for fear of backing a loser. Paramount has turned out to be a pivotal figure. Its decision in August to give exclusive backing to HD DVD was seen as a potentially devastating blow to the prospects of Blu-ray and to the strategy of Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s president. Sir Howard argued, however, that the PlayStation3 games console, which includes a Blu-ray disc player, would put the format in people’s living rooms more quickly than HD DVD players would be adopted by consumers.

Paramount, like other members of the HD DVD group such as Fujitsu, Lenovo and Kenwood, has hedged its bets. It offered exclusivity on the basis that it could reverse the decision should Warner Bros switch to Blu-ray.

Facing a future with only Universal Pictures as its big Hollywood supporter, analysts at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas said that Toshiba and HD DVD could quickly be isolated.

Hello all. 

happy new Year. Here's a small pic of me that my boy Nathan took whilst I was working on an image called "They fell To Earth".

It was a traumatic Xmas. My Mum died on the 23rd, I was there with her when she passed away. She's missed very much in our house.

 Hope to have some interesting posts this year on the usual subjects.

Kind regards

Chris