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The NES PPU takes shortcuts that produce characteristic artifacts in the composite signal. Some games, such as Blaster Master, rely on these artifacts to create more apparent colors than are actually there. Some emulators, such as Nestopia, have an NTSC filter that emulates these artifacts; others don't. Not emulating the artifacts makes your game look like it's being played on a PlayChoice or an emulator.

It's not an infringement to run homebrew games like Thwaite in an emulator. Nor is it an infringement to back up your own cartridges using a cart reader like this for the purpose of playing them in an emulator, so long as you do not distribute the dumps. (Assuming US law, 17 USC 117(a)(1).) But by the logic of the ruling in UMG v. MP3.com, it is an infringement to download a commercial game's ROM image through the Internet even if you own an authentic cartridge.

recent articles about a SNES emulator (maybe simulator in this case) which on paper should be literally perfect

Ah yeah, I remember that story; found this Slashdot post about it from last year.

That's getting pretty close to perfect, but I think some of the tricky part is not just emulating the console hardware, but the interface with the analog world, which you can get even with a literally exact emulation.

For example, one of the most common aesthetic flaws in emulators is audio aliasing. If you take the Atari 2600's sound chip, it outputs square waves directly to line-out, because it's a super-cheap chip that is literally a digital circuit (alternating high and low voltages) plugged into analog audio out. Its operation has been reverse engineered so it's emulated bit- and cycle-perfectly by most Atari emulators. But the sound in most of them is still wrong, because when you generate square waves digitally as PCM audio, as opposed to plugging a circuit directly into an analog line-out, you get pretty bad aliasing. Digitally generating unaliased (band-limited) square waves is actually a fairly complex problem, with a bunch of research papers about it. This guy has been trying to get code into some emulators to do it.

That's just one example, but the observation is that you have to do more than a literal simulation of the original hardware to get it to be a good emulation, sometimes, in this case dealing with the fact that digital simulation of audio-generating chips is inherently different from running those chips to analog audio output.

I know some games' graphics appear to have been designed with TV output in mind. Old consoles take shortcuts in generating a composite video signal. These shortcuts produce visible artifacts, and a few games take advantage of these artifacts by placing pixels in odd places to produce richer textures with more apparent colors than the system can produce at once. NES emulators at least have been emulating TVs for years. I almost can't tell the difference between a game running on an NES displayed on my Vizio TV and the same game running in Nestopia on a PC hooked up to the same TV.

Speaking of Tetris-like games, once I found Panel de Pon (also known as Tetris Attack, Pokemon Puzzle League, etc.), I could never go back to Tetris (YouTube videos). Instead of dropping pieces and having no way to undo a drop, you swap pairs of horizontally-adjacend colored panels using a cursor you can move around the screen. When three or more panels of like color form a horizontal or vertical line, they flash and then disappear. Any panels above the ones that disappeared will then fall. If this causes another match you get an extra bonus called an x2 chain; if this match then causes more panels to fall and match, it's an x3 chain, and you can get up to x24 chain (very difficult). There is gravity, and new rows of panels slowly push up from the bottom to keep the area filled (you can also manually speed this up if you've just cleared the stack). Still to this day I can play it for an hour at a time, practicing and improving, due to chain techniques available. It's very appealing due to the simple rules that lead to very rich techniques.

This page has screenshots showing the difference. Many games were designed with NTSC artifacts in mind.

http://www.slack.net/~ant/libs/ntsc.html

Nestopia (as well as BSNES and ZSNES and, I believe, other emulators) use Blargg's NTSC filter to produce the TV-like output. Truly an amazing piece of work.

As far as accuracy goes, the C64 emulator Hoxs64 is pretty damn accurate, going so far as to emulate analog stuff in the disk drive. Wow.

You still get plagued with Flash popups unless you do a bit of hacking of your etc/hosts file (don't worry, Windoze has one too). See here for how to do it. The list of servers is old but still very effective.

Yes, you can buy Crossover Office for some increased (yet still limited) application support.
...and still no Photoshop 6!

Yes, you can buy Crossover Office for some increased (yet still limited) application support.
...and still no Photoshop 6!

http://www.slack.net/~hermit/ebook/
http://www.slack.net/~hermit/ebook/documents/page- 4-1.html

I recommend first looking for them online. I use irc.bookwarez.net #bw and have found many computer books (of course, I only download the ones I own. ;-) )

http://www.slack.net/~hermit/ebook/
http://www.slack.net/~hermit/ebook/documents/page- 4-1.html

I recommend first looking for them online. I use irc.bookwarez.net #bw and have found many computer books (of course, I only download the ones I own. ;-) )

i think this one is from an airport.

id love to make a photo gallery of pics of these, as they become more common in today's world.

i think ive seen a pic of an ATM that had crashed too. when will people learn? :)

okay...


Here is a link to an interesting Lain site, Thought Experiments Lain. It has spoilers galore, and a good explanation of the computer, literary and historical references in the anime. Don't visit the site unless youve seen Lain in its entierty and are trying to make some sense of it.

Here's a link to my little' 'ol Lain Gallery. With plenty of pretty pictures for you to look at.

I was also at otakon, but I went to the bandai panel instead of Lain. Got an interview with the guys for atanime.com too. (eep, shameless self promotion!) BTW, did anyone else who was there think that BOA's Performace at otakon was sub-par?

Anipike has plenty of links for other stuff.

Personally, I loved this anime and found it intriguing. Yes, I do think it is VERY pretencious, but that just part of the experience. When doing an anime like this, its impossible to avoid it. Eva was amazingly pretencious too. Lain is currently my favorite set of anime dvds, and if you havnt seen it yet, I honestly reccomend checking it out.

Okay, Im done..

I Belivethis is the scan you are referring to. It is the cover art for the HK black market DVD.. I dont know anyone who has managed to get ahold of this, but ive heard its craptastic quality.

I don't know how much you can tell us about it, but I'd really like to know about these 1-on-1 cases that the MPAA are involved in.

Is there a webpage w/ a list of DeCSS related cases the MPAA is or were involved in?

We should try to keep a good record of what cases the MPAA is currently involved in and keep it public. Who knows? It could spawn some headlines such as "MPAA imprisons 500 students, students claim 'civil disobedience'"

civil disobedience isnt something you can use to keep you out of jail. :)

Then again, I dont know if I can trust any internet related news I see on TV after This Report (6 meg .asf)
(the report is an atypical glamorized view on pirating movies. Apparently IRC is full of "shadowey chat rooms" in the "darker corners of the web")

I don't know how much you can tell us about it, but I'd really like to know about these 1-on-1 cases that the MPAA are involved in.

Is there a webpage w/ a list of DeCSS related cases the MPAA is or were involved in?

We should try to keep a good record of what cases the MPAA is currently involved in and keep it public. Who knows? It could spawn some headlines such as "MPAA imprisons 500 students, students claim 'civil disobedience'"

civil disobedience isnt something you can use to keep you out of jail. :)

Then again, I dont know if I can trust any internet related news I see on TV after This Report (6 meg .asf)
(the report is an atypical glamorized view on pirating movies. Apparently IRC is full of "shadowey chat rooms" in the "darker corners of the web")

If the school could organize itself and educate the student population on the problem, the issue should be easily fix-able.

These are institutions of learning, banning something because its problematic should not be the primary method. Education is the most powerful tool.

My school managed to pull off not-banning napster through educating the students and faculty on the problem. They only busted one student out of the masses that were using it, because he was sharing over 20 gigs of mp3s 24/7 on napster. Follow this link to read about how skidmore college dealt with napster.

Banning napster likens to burning books in my head.