Due to the number of features available, we would normally recommend PayPal Express Checkout or Google Checkout.

There are different levels of integration you can carry out on a website, while there are many variations, broadly speaking your looking at three basic setups:

1. Blind integration – your website has some simple forms and NO database backend. In this situation, you just use your payment gateway to take a payment and manage who has paid for what. This is a simple to understand option and means that the shop operator can manage there orders entirely with the gateway provider, only needing to update the website when their prices change.
2. Callback integration – your website has a database and manages order data. The payment gateway makes a callback (hence the name!) into your system to keep the order status up to date. This option is more complex but is useful if the shop operator needs the ability to manage the order data on the website. Why would you want to do this? Hosting order data in your website enables you to provide a more services to your customer such as order status, history and enables you to perform statistical analysis for other business functions such as accounting or marketing.
3. Full integration – your website takes credit card details and performs the payment with the gateway directly. Your server must be PCI compliant and undergo regular security audits. This option requires a lot more work as it means the whole card verification procedure must be handled on the web server.

PayPal offer all three options whereas Google Checkout only offer the first two.

Both gateway systems are good however Google checkout will – being Google give you better quality marketing data with its tie ins to Google Analytics and also, you can advertise you’re a Google Checkout seller on any PPC advertising you do using their AdWords programme. Google have offered £10 of checkout fee suspension against every £1 spent on Adwords but this promotion ended at the end of 2008.

PayPal I believe will give you better financial tie ins as they are more money oriented – I may substantiate this further at a later date.

I would suggest for business start-ups or newcomers to payment gateways that; due to the quality of marketing data available – Google Checkout may be a better option; you could always switch to PayPal or offer it as an alternative at a later date.

These payment gateways at the time of writing have the following charges:

Google Checkout AND PayPal

There are to no charges made by these gateway providers to transfer money into your own accounts. There are transfer limits however; these limits can be modified and the frequency of transfers can be managed. Transfer limits are as far as I can tell an anti-fraud “feature”.

arcanoid 2 on the c64

I have re-discovered this old classic game on the C64 and can honistly say its a bit of a masterpiece!

We wrote a block and ball game in flash a while back and it was pretty basic; but playing the original 8 bit version again is really great! It’s taken me a while to get the hang of it again but I can get past a few levels again now! I love blasting blocks away with the laser cannon! See a full review here

I’ve started learning 6502 assembly language on the C64 for a bit of fun! I have a C64 breadbin type machine and have a C64TPC interface to allow me to transfer programms from my PC to the real C64 and test.

So far, I’ve just been developing code in VICE using an Action Replay rom for the memory monitor and escaping to the fastloader basic to run the code. Allthough, I did find that VICE seems to have an excellent memory monitor built in. Not sure about how to save and load with it yet though. I’ve also been having a bit of pain getting my head around the Start of Variables pointer (SOV) and placing the machine code in the correct place.

Think I’ve got a bit of a way to go before I write my first game just yet! I’ve been reading “Machine Language for the Commodore 64″ by Jim Butterfield – seems to be a pretty comprehensive guide to programming 6502.