The Awesome Activist

I have a rule that I won’t get into a computer game until I can play it on my computer for free (I am a passionate advocate of both Free Software and piracy, so the idea of paying for anything is anathema to me). I grew up playing ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 games on an old PC, then I moved up to a SNES emulator when my hardware improved. Recently, it struck me that my computer was probably capable of emulating a Playstation.

I thought I’d make a post about how I got it to work, in case it could be useful to anyone else. I use Linux Mint Debian edition. I imagine a lot of these instructions will be applicable for other Linux distributions (especially Debian and Ubuntu).

Installing the emulator was the easiest part. I used PCSX Reloaded, which is, helpfully, in the Debian repositories. So all I had to do was type:

sudo aptitude install pcsx

at the command line, and it popped up in my main menu. If you are using a different distro without the emulator in the repositories, there are instructions for installation on the PCSX Reloaded website.

Getting the game I wanted to play was a bit more annoying. Emuparadise is a great website for ROMs and things. I wanted to play Spyro the Dragon, since I was always a bit jealous of my friend at school who played it. I downloaded the .rar file and extracted it by opening it with the Archive Manager (you might have to install the “unrar” package to do this).

The game file was called:

Spyro the Dragon [NTSC-U] [SCUS-94228].bin.ecm

I renamed it Spyro.bin.ecm for the sake of ease of use. The path to this file in my case was:

/home/user1/Spyro.bin.ecm

Now, PCSX can use .bin files, but I need to un-ecm it first. Someone’s made a handy group of tools for this, which you can download from here. Download the source code and unpack it all into a folder. Navigate to the folder in a terminal window and type:

cd src
gcc -o ecm ecm.c
./ecm d /home/user1/Spyro.bin.ecm /home/user1/Spyro.bin


Then you can open the .bin file by starting PCSX and going to “File > Run ISO”. Use the arrow keys for directions, and the other keys are:

v = start
c = select
z = cross
x = circle
s = square
d = triangle
w = L1
r = R1
e = L2
t = R2

And just like that, you’ve reached the dizzying heights of 1998 gameplay. Whee!

Abort67 is a fundamentalist Christian anti-choice group that operate in the UK. Recently, they have been staging bi-weekly protests to harass women entering a reproductive health clinic in Brighton. Members of this group have been physically encircling women, filming them on cameras, and calling them “murderers” – as well as showing them extreme graphic images of late-stage aborted foetuses, and giving out medically incorrect information about abortion. They also set up displays at sixth form colleges, just to reach the largest possible audience of young, vulnerable women with their particular brand of “education”.

The group is funded by American far-right group The Center for Bioethical Reform, who use similar tactics over in the states, but the group was founded by members of the Jubilee Church in Worthing. The church leader also supports the intimidating actions of Abort67, and agrees that abortion is, in his own words, “worse than the holocaust”.

Activists from Worthing, Brighton and the surrounding area joined together on Sunday 15th April to offer their congregation an alternate viewpoint. We handed them a 3000-signature petition asking them to remove their support for Abort67, and maintained a presence outside during their service. It was a really long service and it was pretty cold out, but fortunately since this was billed as the “Carnival for Choice*”, we entertained ourselves by dancing around to music and chatting. A nice lady from the SWP tried to recruit me. At one point there was a tombola. It was great.

Some of the older members of our protest were telling stories about women they knew who had back-alley terminations before the 1967 abortion act. One nearly bled to death in her own living room when she was just a teenager. These stories remind us what we’re fighting for – the kind of world that groups like Abort67 want to bring back.

I hope Abort67 takes note of our tactics – we showed good practice by remaining at a safe distance, refraining from showing them disturbing images, and not bothering people who were using the building for other reasons – and at no point did we intimidate them individually. They had a police presence at their service to help them feel safe – the vulnerable women they harass don’t have such a luxury.

*n.b. I would recommend reading Tech Tools for Activists for alternatives to Facebook for organising.