Most of the pokie/slot machines in Australia are made by a company called Aristocrat. They make interesting games which are lots of fun to play. Their games all include special features, lots of playable lines, great animations, and an amusing soundtrack. All of these things make them very popular.

Evidence of this popularity can be seen in pubs around the nation, which almost always have a dedicated pokie room. The only problem is that it is against the law to get one of these machines installed at home without a license.

We can now play these games in the comfort of our own home, and there’s no need to spend a cent. This is supposedly thanks to someone internal to Aristocrat releasing these ROMs to the public. These are not remakes, but the actual ROMs that are used in the machines that are played in clubs all across Australia.

There are 4 ROMs in all to download. These include 50 Lions, Atlantis, Orchid, and one of my favourites, Indian Dreaming (shame about the included link feature). Each ROM comes with an emulator which represents the buttons on a real Pokie machine.

The ROMs are downloaded from RapidShare, so if you are not a member, you may need some patience for the download to be made available to you.

Read more, see more screenshots, and get the links for the ROMs from the Reproserv.

Remember those hand held games that we used to play like Donkey Kong and Turtle Bridge. You know the ones, they were the games that you could never find batteries for.

I used to play them a lot on camping trips with the family, so they bring back lots of memories. Unfortunately, these games are hard to find these days, and if you are successful finding them, you will need to pay top dollar.

I was very excited when I came across a site where quite a few of these games had been recreated for you to play on your PC. There are around 20 of these classics for you to enjoy.

Everything that the original game gave us is included in these packages. The sounds have been recorded and the graphics have all been scanned and touched up. The only main difference is that you control your character with your keyboard.

While most programs used to play old games are emulators, the programmer of these games was not able to get his hands on the required processor information that could have been used to make an emulator. I read on his site that each game has a unique processor. Instead of making an emulator, he recreated each game by hand. Each game is a separate entity. What this means is that the game may not run exactly the same as the original. Saying that, I couldn’t tell the difference in the games I tried out.

The site also contains a lot of interesting information about converting your hand held games to the PC format, if you would like to give the programming a go yourself. I might have a go at remaking Fire!

Get your favourite games from Madrigal Design.

Joystick 2 mouse lets you use your game controller to move your mouse around the screen, and a whole lot more. You can do just about any Windows function with this program, including typing (though this would be a nightmare), all from your game controller.

The reason I looked into this was so that I could control Windows Media Centre from my couch. I had all sorts of problems finding a suitable tool. Eventually I came across this gem. After installing it, I found out that it could do much more than I initially wanted. There is no reason why it could not be configured to control first person shooter games.

It is highly configurable, allowing you to change almost every aspect of it. You can use it to control any application. The only drawback I found was that there was no option to disable/enable this utility from the controller. Disabling it is possible by exiting the program, but without the program open, you can no longer use your controller to re-launch the program.

Logitech users would probably be best using the profiler software which can be downloaded from their website. This will allow similar functionality.

Joystick 2 Mouse 3 is available for free from the authors website, or get it from Tucows.

UFO was a huge hit when it hit the PC world 13 years ago. Now you are able to play the entire game in all its glory on your Pocket PC. To make the game work on Windows Mobile devices, there are minimal changes from the original version but nothing which will effect the gameplay and your enjoyment.

The graphics and audio are fantastic for its time and the game is quite easy to get the hang of, even on our small screens.

There is a lot to the game and it will keep you tapping away very busily to work your way through it. There is so much going on in this game.

The install is straight forward, just double click on the installer and your computer and device will do the rest. The game worked flawlessly on my Ipaq rw6828. It is well worth giving this game a try.

This game is available for free from SMK Software where you can also read up on a bit more about the game.

We all know what Tetris is and have probably played many various versions over the years, each with their own good and bad points.

In comes Kevtris 2.0 for Windows Mobile. I have played this a lot in the last few hours and love every aspect of it, and am unable to find any bad points at all. Where do I start the praise?

The game has great graphics and nice sounds. The blocks flow very smoothly which is often a problem with Windows Mobile games. You can even upload your scores to an online rankings chart.

There are multiple skill levels, and the progression of levels is done very fluently. Some other Tetris games I have played, work fine at level 9 but then when level 10 bears its face, it becomes unreasonably hard. Kevtris allows you to keep going past level 10 without any huge speed jumps.

You can change which buttons on your device move and rotate the pieces. If you press the wrong button, the game will pause ensuring you do not lose where you are up to.

This game will be very well used on my phone. Move over Gameboy!

Download it from Inspect My Gadget.