Slashdot Mirror

• How well does the emulation work? If there's any emulator for PC that emulates all the SNES games (or whichever kind) in existence, i've yet to hear about it.

• And does it have enough processing power to run the non-native code without any slowdown or such?

I put a fake 404 error page on the site last night for a few hours, and then copied the isonews.com nonsense. Been getting emails all day from people telling me how it's the first trick they fell for in years.

www.zophar.net

Zophar's Domain (an emulation site) has set up a nice hoax.

Sierra is publishing now, not developing, although supposedly their development division was sold and is still in operation by Codemasters. They pretty much got kicked out of their old office in the Sierra foothills... lots of stuff was left behind, including, most likely, source to a lot of their old games, which sucks since many of them run too fast on modern processors. Of course, there are some developing utilities to play them at 'normal' speed, and in some cases with improved graphics.
DOSBox, your general purpose DOS game machine.
Sarien, for Sierra games using the AGI interpreter, and
FreeSCI, for Sierra games using the SCI interpreter.
Needless to say, all of these utilities are far from complete.

Anyway, there you go.

> With the terrible legacy DOS support in XP for things like games you are almost forced to run them emulated in linux (dosemu, etc..

Or you can use doxbox, which, in my experience, works better than dosemu for old dos games. And it runs on XP natively :)

I'm sitting here desperatly trying to get settlers to run under dosemu..

Have you tried DOSBox yet? For me, it works approx. 1000 times better than Dosemu. Great for those old DOS games. Only thing lacking is real mode support.

Don't forget the TextNES emulator-- a NES emulator that uses ASCII text output in a DOS windows for the graphics. Really cool! I'd like to find the source code to this thing and port it to Linux/ncurses. If anyone knows who wrote this, let me know.

Hmm... just did a search on google, and found something called DosBox, which seems to be aimed primarily at games. It still seems to be in alpha stages, but better than nothing...

Have you tried dosbox? Not a viable suggestion if you're using a mac. But if you're using windows and it performs as well there as it has for me in linux it might be worth a try. So far it's run pretty much every older dos game I've thrown at it.

If you just want to play old DOS games, try DOSBox. It's specifically designed for this goal, and cheats in various ways to make it fast (for example, the BIOS and DOS are built-in instead of emulated). The main problem with it is the lack of 386 Protected Mode support.

Damn pastes, here's the working URL...

http://dosbox.zophar.net/

Might I suggest you try out DOSbox then? It's still somewhat early in development (no protected mode games), but it's both promising and open-source.

I just bought an old computer to play the DOS version!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, I did go out and buy an old computer JUST for this game... I recently moved to school (thus leaving behind many of my old 386, 486 and Pentiums). During one of my procrastination breaks, I had the urge to play StarCon2.. I found DOSBox, but it would periodically crash for me.

Note that if you still have your original copy of Starcon2, it is possible to play it under Windows XP or 2k, with full sound, by running it under DosBox, an MS-DOS emulator.

Ironic that this bit of news gets posted to Slashdot not two days after I finish playing through the game!

Slightly off topic, but I thought this might be a good place to mention TextNes, the text mode Nintendo emulator.

Site seems to have disappeared, but is available from web.archive.org

File is still available from Zophar.

Try this with some old roms like Super Mario Bros!

Most of the time I just close my eyes and hit next a bunch.

And agree to restrictive EULAs that make you waive most of your "fair use" rights and related rights under copyright law. And then get taken to court for doing something you thought was permitted. Consoles don't have clickwrap EULAs.

Apples and Oranges. You don't have to modify your PC hardware configuration if you don't want to.

What if a game conflicts with the drivers that came pre-installed on the computer that you had just bought from Dell?

Configuration issues are a necessary side effect.

Necessary? There's a lot bigger chance of everything Just Working(tm) on Macintosh hardware.

You don't have to upgrade your PC

Wha? Most new PC games don't run on a 333 MHz Acer laptop with software 3D video. Lots of new games run on my 16.8 MHz Nintendo game console with software 3D video.

but you can't upgrade your console.

Wrong. The Nintendo 64 console had a RAM upgrade. The newer consoles have add-on modems and NICs.

Expensive, proprietary, incompatible controllers

Expensive? At least they don't feel cheap like some of the USB joypads I've seen. Proprietary? The specs for Nintendo Joybus have been published on the Internet. Incompatible? I found the "Nyko Play Cube" adapter that lets my PS2-owning buddies use their controllers on my GameCube system.

I have a 12 year old PC joystick that still works perfectly on my brand new pc.

New PCs no longer come with gameports; the only ways to hook up a controller are through the parallel port (with NTPad XP) or through the USB port. Microsoft's USB controllers feel like ass; because the pad is rotated clockwise 20 degrees, it's nearly impossible to press straight down.

When I play PC games with friends, I don't have to foot the bill for 3 extra controllers.

Yes you do. You have to foot the bill for three extra keyboards, mice, monitors, network cables, and computers, all with roughly the same video card so that nobody female dogs about an unfair disadvantage. (If you think that's silly, you could just have each player Bring Your Own Controller to a console party.)

Is there such a thing [as a respected emulation site]?

Other than this? What about this or this?

Re: Dumping cartridges, you can only do that if the EULA (in the back of game manuals) explicitly allows it.

What do you mean? 17 USC 117 permits a US-resident owner of a program cartridge to dump that cartridge for use on a computer. Because I didn't see any EULA when I handed over my con$ideration, I see no reason why it becomes a binding contract.

(That section doesn't in and of itself permit what these people are doing.)

um, every n64 has been ripped and is available in rom form. and the emulators are out there too.

My son is playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time right now, and I'd love to see it hacked to anti-alias the textures better, if nothing else.

That's what N64 emulators are for. Get a good video card with TV-out, and a fast computer to go with it, and you can play Ocarina of Time like never before. I think one of the graphics plugins even supports Anisotropic filtering.

Learn more at Emulation64

Also, Can anyone hack a game that was originally just for a gaming console?

Yes, I think that is evidenced well enough by all the level-conversion mods that have popped up for Super Mario World, some quite good. You can get more info on these at Zophar's Domain

• The hardware supports carts up to 256 megabit (32mb) in size. There are flash carts which have more space, however, through software bank switching. No commercial ROM currently even hits the hardware size limit (manufactureing costs, it is widely believed, are to blame; it may be the case that Big N limits the available size of carts to both themselves and third parties)
  
• Yes, a linux distro would fit. No, it wouldn't be any fun without a keyboard. Yes, TCP/IP has already been done (a working webserver, which IIRC was even on SlashDot already. That's what caused me to try to post the homebrew dev scene the first time.)
  
• Emulators: there are about a dozen good ones around; many stick to VisualBoy Advance and Mappy Virtual Machine for development. VBA is often regarded as the best and fastest emulation, and Mappy is usually seen as having the best debugging tools (source-level breakpoints, register viewing, disassembly, viewers for most of the important chunks of RAM, etc). VBA interfaces with GNU debuggers, but I'm lazy, and haven't tried it.
  
• How good is the processor? Good enough to emulate an NES? Yes. In fact, there's a port of an emulator which runs NES binaries which were stapled onto the end of the emu binary out there already (it uses scaling and rotation to fit the otherwise too-large pictures; some detail is lost, so text often looks funny, etc). I have no linkage; sorry.
  
• To be specific, the processor is an ARM7 TDMI running at approx 16 mhz. Also, the screen does 60hz refreshes, is 240x160, and has a bitmapped 15bpp color mode (among other modes, including z-buffered modes). The programmer is afforded extreme memory mapping flexability by the hardware; it's more fun than a Rubix' Cube.
  
• Sorry - should have clarified - the ones I listed are all emulators for the GBA. Sorry, but not even remotely close. You didn't even get the popular ones. There's a pretty decent list here, at Zophar's Domain (a pretty good dev site)
  
• Descent is probably beyond the GBA's capabilities, since it uses arbitrarily-angled perspective-correct textured polygons, which are a fair bit harder to render on a low-end CPU (the GBA has a 16MHz ARM7 CPU).You should see some of the stuff that's going on. There are a number of fully textured 3D engines out there, one of which actually uses Descent levels as its examples! (I linked to another in my previous post which uses the quake level 1) A good example is the Raylight engine, though there are probably a dozen that I've seen (and a few proprietary, one of which I'm about halfway done writing :) )
  
• Hey, maybe we'll see Tux Racer for the GBA? That'd be tight. Quite possible. A racer wouldn't be difficult - the floor is a mode 7 S/R background, the sprites are prerendered, and there's enough VRAM that they don't need to be DMAed into place or anything (though people do that anyway, often enough [grins])
  
  Actually, how low-level is the API? Any chance someone could get Linux running on one of these babies?"The API" isn't. HAM has an engine, SGADE has an engine, there are others (I don't use them), and there are some commercial ones. But, here's the thing: the hardware does a lot of stuff. Sprites and backgrounds are supported in hardware, and do scaling and blending stuff, etc. It's just register tweakage. You don't really need an API.
  
  Big N does send an API of some sort, but I'm not a licensed developer, so I know dick about it. I'm told it's not that much of a difference - mostly just wrapper functions.
• well if you realyl want to consider assembler an API, that is your answer. ARM flavored assmebler. We're not stuck to Assembly. Though there are about six assemblers in common use (the one that gets most use as not just part of a toolchain seems to be GoldRoad, but because I don't use assembly except in-line, I have a biased perspective), there are also a buttload of C and C++ and so forth compilers. Because Gnu's Compiler Collection (GCC does not mean gnu's c compiler) works and is the common compiler for the homebrew platform, you also have access to *compiled* java, pascal, and I think Objective C and Forth, or Fortran, or something that starts with an F. Too lazy to go check. :)
  
  There are other compilers which can target the platform. Commercial people often use the ARM ADS or SDT. Other tools, like the Metaware toolchain and the Green Hills Optimizing Compiler (it's part of the name, not a parroted description, settle down) are commonly used because of their purported performance. Far from being an expert myself, I'll just point you at the Dhrystone that David Welch graciously presented to the community.
  
• I was planning on trying to develop something on my friends PS2 when he got the Linux kit. But since I actually own a GBA, this is a much more worthy project. More worthy, but more difficult. You'll want a flash cart and linker - the hardware is still the only perfect binary executor, though VBA is pretty impressive. All told, the PS2 Linux kit isn't more expensive, and it's hella more fun in the long run (Tux Racer on a console anyway, doncha know!)
  
• At about $70 (Game Boy Advanced, Amazon price [amazon.com]), you can create custom games, ports of other things, etc. This sounds to me like a much more practical thing to purchase to play around with the the PS2, which is in at least the $500 range to start hacking your own stuff for. You're counting just the hardware in one, but the hardware and the mod stuff in the other. $200 (ps2) + $200 (Linux kit) is $400. There was a recent price drop. $70 (AGB) + $40 (USB Flasher) + $15 (Power cable for flasher) + $10 (Parallel cord) + ~$100 (Average flash cart - price varies by size) = $235. Granted, a $175 price difference, but not what you implied. Also, a lot of us already have both. Then, the price of a homebrew kit actually weighs in the other direction, and the AGB is small and limiting enough that unless you really want to, it's a pain of a challenge.
  
• It would be interesting to know how many people will create practical, non-game applications. I know there are many non-game attachments, like a TV tuner and digital camera available for the unit. There are already music sequencers, methods of connecting it (realtime!) to a PC for chatter, MIDI sequencers, connections to serve as visualizers for various kinds of data collectors (think forest service), and a host of weird homebrew things that aren't exactly games. I expect quite a few more over time; I'm working on one in a half-assed way right now. Moreover, over time I expect level editors for at least homebrew games, and possibly for commercial games; would you call those applications?
  
• This would totally rule.. I'd love to see Nethack for the GB. I'm currently working on a Palm version, and of course, it'll work on Windows CE, but honestly, wouldn't Nethack be an awesome alternative to bejeweled on the bus?Shhh... Shen Mansell already has Moshpit put together, and there are three or four people already rumbling about alternatives on the list. Also, note that I'm on alt.games.roguelike.development making an ass of myself all the time... (For those who may be Ccurious, a BooFly is a creature which looks like Will Riker and which doesn't meet me for coffee at E3. Thpppbbt.)
  
• I think that companies like Nintendo and Sony and such should sell stipped down dev kits for like, say $50... including software you'd need and maybe a transfer cable. This gets kicked around a lot in the chatrooms and on the dev lists. The consensus seems to be that yeah, it'd be nice, but though a lot of people would really use it for what it was for, a whole lot of people would use it to pirate games, and besides, Big N's licensing fees per cart and hegemony on software support their business model, so they'd be hurting themselves anyway. In conclusion: not bloody likely.
  
• No disrespect to the great underground game hackers out there, but I don't think there is much of a risk of an uber fantastic game like Gran Tourismo 3 getting put out. Whereas art and sound resources usually make this true, with time, they actually often do. Take a look into the very mature NES or 2600 development scenes; you'll see things you'd never imagine possible (for instance, someone ported the Z-Machine interpreter Frotz to the GameBoy Advance as GBA Frotz, which seems impressive until you realize that the no$gmb guy, who I think is Martin Korth or something, and who really needs to put his damn name in his bio page, did it for the gameboy(!) in *8* *K* of RAM (far smaller than the real Z-Machine was supposed to be), and it works fine! Linkage
  
  Homebrew developers thrive on being told it can't be done. The more you tell them they can't do commercial stuff, the more you're going to see commercial stuff done. That's what got me started. :)
  
• Yes, Craig Rothwell is reliable (someone else's post). Also, though Lik-Sang is reliable (that's where I got mine), right now cyustoms is banning the import of these, and so you won't get one even if lik-sang mails it to you. Craig Rothwell currently goes under their radar, but don't try him if you're seeing this post a month or so old - things may have changed (they often do, unfortunately). The best thing to do is to go to the Yahoo! Group and ask; you'll get a lot of replies in 48 hours.
  
• I know that the Game Cube can use GBA as controllers. I am not sure what the interface protocol is like, though. Do you think that it might be possible to make custom GBA carts for Cube games, that provide enhancements (cheats, etc) to a game playing on the Cube? No. The GC uses half-size DVD discs which are difficult to burn and which have not yet had their protections cracked or circumvented. Things may change later.
  
• So does this mean that with the ROMS that are for the SNES, we could somehow make our own port of say "Secret of Mana" (or some other SNES title) for the GBA? That would be awesome! Though probably not awesome enough for me to spare time to learn this. If you're dedicated. you need to scale a lot of graphics down; the sound hardware is completely different, so the audio stuff will need to be wholly rewritten. There are odd considerations due to the different CPUs. But, yeah, many people have been porting SNES and Genesis games commercially; I don't see why a team of amateurs with lots of time and skill couldn't do the same. It's not easy, though, mind you.
  
  This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. Pre-chewed pieces of pap! And shouldn't be teaching anyway!!@!3T1!! r00l!
  
  cough Sorry. Old habits die hard.
  

it's to play games

This opening of the Xbox may eventually a fellow run independently developed game software on the Xbox hardware. ("Independently developed" means that Microsoft doesn't get a cut of the revenue. So much for razors and blades business model.) With a port of the GNU/Linux system to Xbox hardware, such games would potentially include the whole gnome-games suite, the freepuzzlearena suite, Tetanus On Drugs, Tux Racer, Quake III Arena, and every NES and Game Boy Advance game in existence.

Does Linux support blast processing yet??

"Blast Processing" is the name of the sprite engine that Sega used in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 for Sega Genesis. Here are some Genesis emulators for UNIX and Linux systems. DGen is pretty good.

(And yes, I own the cartridges. heh.)

Check out Zophar's Domain for more info.

Check out Zophar's Domain for more info.

Wait, are you saying that Group X's rendition of "Mario twins" Isn't the best music ever written?

I spit at your suggestion!

I caught that 2 second blip where that 200x200 ad was up too. As long as that 200x200 banner stays way the heck below the article posted (as it did when I caught it here) and doesnt do that nasty C-NET (and likewise other news sites) wrap around, i could deal with this. Zophar's Domain did a similar ad placement deal on the side of their site and I have to say, I dont mind all that much.

HONESTLY people. For the websites we go to on a DAILY (or in my case hourly) basis like Slashdot, do you REALLY mind throwing them a bit, even a teansy bit of revenue by allowing them to throw some ads up? I certainly dont. As long as they keep it below the story but before the commentary, and the footprint of the ad doesnt hamper page load times very it isnt much of a bother. Just my 8 braincells

• GBS (Gameboy)
• GYM (Genesis)
• VGM (SMS/GG)
• NSF (NES)
• SPC (SNES)

• GBS (Gameboy)
• GYM (Genesis)
• VGM (SMS/GG)
• NSF (NES)
• SPC (SNES)

• GBS (Gameboy)
• GYM (Genesis)
• VGM (SMS/GG)
• NSF (NES)
• SPC (SNES)

• GBS (Gameboy)
• GYM (Genesis)
• VGM (SMS/GG)
• NSF (NES)
• SPC (SNES)

• GBS (Gameboy)
• GYM (Genesis)
• VGM (SMS/GG)
• NSF (NES)
• SPC (SNES)

• GBS (Gameboy)
• GYM (Genesis)
• VGM (SMS/GG)
• NSF (NES)
• SPC (SNES)

The following is the letter that Sam Michaels is sending to Nintendo, copied from this message board post by Sam Michaels:

Before anything is even considered, I need a letter sent via certified mail with the following:

1) The specific items in my store that violate the DMCA
2) Excerpts from the DMCA which provide support for your claim
3) Past judgements in your favor supporting your claim
4) Legal representation's name
5) The individuals to whom #4 is representing
6) The contact info of 4 and 5
7) The signatures of 4 and 5
8) Your recourse should I choose to ignore this request

Until then, no action will be taken or even considered on my part. Once that info is provided, I'll have my legal representation contact you about possible litigation.

-Sam Michaels

He also mentions in the post that he has been told by the manufacturer of the Linkers and a guy from Lik Sang to basically "tell them to kiss your ass and ignore it".

While your advice is quite sound and helpful, your statement that it is just a letter is not true. If you check his site http://www.zophar.net/store/index.phtml you will see that the Linkers he has been sending to customers are being held at Customs and not being delivered. This is costing him business and wasting his cutomers time. An actual resolution is needed for him to return to normal operation

According to this post he says he's just going to ignore them for now.

There are a ton of video games, and support for games on windows and that is not true on linux.

You can run thousands of games on Linux. Free software exists to run titles designed for NES, Game Boy, Sega Genesis, Super NES, and many more. Just get a dumper, hook it up to your cartridges, and you're off. (Or just pirate the ROMs.)

Wine is not an emulator. TuxNES is.

perhaps complete this with the addition of

[Visual Pinball Homepage]

and

[IR-pinball]

for a variety of tables, and I *think* rom images (for PinMAME, otherwise the manufacturers usually put them out on their sites for those blessed with an actual machine) Sad part (for me at least) is that there isn't a similar (or port for that matter) project under Linux. Any pinball-addicted developers up for the challenge?

Hope I can turn some people on to pinball via Virtual Pinball and PinMAME. Most of your favorite games are available. It really has come a LONG way.

Cheers!

Visual Pinball Forums>

Tables and more>

Most college students don't need to play games why would they need ms windows?

"Games" don't need Windows. You can hook up a linker from lik-sang, copy all your Game Boy cartridges into your computer, and then run them on VisualBoyAdvance. You can also get the ROMs for many Atari 2600, NES, Genesis, and Super NES games at pe2000 and edgeemu; pick up emulators at Zophar's Domain.

I run an online store that has credit card processing via Cardservice with Linkpoint. I'm currently rewriting the real time authorization software for it because the system they use writes all the info to a plain text file, and shells out from within PHP to execute a binary which reads the temp file with the CC info. (FYI: I was thinking of doing an SSL PHP module hack)

I think a more important question is "Does the credit card processor have enough security?" Here is the reply from Linkpoint's coding team when I said that writing plain text to a temp file is unacceptable for me and my customers:

"Writing to a temp file is how the PHP wrapper works. It is only insecure if your server is an environment where a hacker can get in and grab that temp file. Don't you have a firewall up?? If you are running a secure server then writing the info to a temp file to pass to the LBIN object should not be a problem. We have thousands of people using this product currently. This is not a security risk."

The suggestions about using public/private key encryption is excellent...it's the system I use. But how is Surepay handling the cards? Are the other major gateways giving their clients the same kind of software? Do processors such as Paypal, Surepay, et al use this kind of software? All the security of your CC database won't mean a thing if that's not the method a cracker uses to grab the info...

Should send them a link to this Ask Slashdot...

Santa does not exist!!

This is probably the best way to explain to your kids that he doesn't exist... i guess you could use this for the Easter rabbit as well :-\

FF I (NES) -- simplistic, but still fun.

Lots of fun, this is the game that got me hooked on Final Fantasy in the first place. Even though every one is different, they all have that much in common.

FF II (Famicom, get an emulator and a translated version)

Might as well give a link to a translation...

FF III (again, emulate)

Translation again.

FF IV (II on the NES, see FFC on the PSX for the "hard" edition) -- I absolutely love this game.

I didn't like the US easy version when it first came out, but the translation of the Japanese hardtype version was a lot better. Better characterization, characters say "Well, i'm off to die!" instead of "I'll see you later" before they go sacrafice themselves for the greater good, and so on.

FF V (emulate, or see FFA on the PSX)

From what I've heard, the fan translation is actually better than the playstation version, fewer WTF moments in the dialog and such. As far as I've been able to determine, the original translation group doesn't have a website anymore, but the patch is all over the net. v1.10 seems to be the latest.

FF VI (III SNES, FFA on PSX)

Definately a good game, but not that much better than the other SNES FFs. No translation needed, unless you're like this guy (slashdot doesn't seem to like the underscore in 'sky_render'... check that if it says the page can't be found) and think the translation could've been done better (Nintendo does have this thing about strong language, 'sex', death, and so on). Too bad he has such bad taste in fonts sometimes...

Zophar's domain has Information on the Genesis's specs.

Note, the Majesco Genesis clone did not have the Z80 chip making it incompatable with some games. The master system emulator and game-genie included.

I've also felt it was strange the various authors for the various NES emulators never considered using a modular design allowing mappers to be supported.

The Win32 emulator NESten uses DLLs for its cartridge board emulation support. Or you can contribute a mapper to a free software emulator such as nesterj (Win32) or TuxNES (freebsd/linux86).

Weavus writes:

Apart from that, i'm sure Microsoft have put in plenty of other measures to stop people emulating the Xbox on a PC. BIOS checks, DirectX differences, Stripped OS etc...

Sorry. There is only one console that I know of that's a bitch to emulate on the PC, and that's the lowly NES. Not the N64, not the SNES, but the original 8 bit NES, and that was due to mapper support. No NES emulator that I know of has full mapper support, bioNES, fwNES, and NESticle were the best when I was in the emulation scene. Arcade games also tend to be a pain, due to anti-piracy measures implimented in a few of the games, and the relative scarcity of arcade games when compared to most console games. The Atari Jaguar has also been slow to be emulated, although I don't know if this was due to technical difficulties or a lack of interest.

That being said, the following have been successfully emulated on the lowly PC (running DOS/Win for the most part): Arcade (which is technically many different platforms, even if the systems are JAMMA compliant, they have different hardware. MAME roms alone list over 3000 games (including clones, and there are other multi-arcade emulators out there). The NeoGeo (some games that have been successfully emulated by MAME) adds a hundred or two more. Looking at old school stuff, the C64, Amiga, and Apple II have all been emulated, according to Zophar, as well as the Trash-80's and Tandy's. For consoles, we have Atari, ColecoVision, Dreamcast, SMS/Gamegear, Intellivision, NES, SNES, N64, Dreamcast, Playstation, Saturn, Turbo Grafix 16, and the Vectrex, among others. The Gameboy, and the NeoGeo pocket has also been emulated (as well as the aforementioned Game Gear, which is really a SMS with better graphics). We also have both HP and TI calculators emulated.

With all of this emulated, I don't suspect that Xbox will be that much of a problem, especially with the demand for an emulator that we will see.

Most of the posts have been focusing on ways to get people to pay for content either already available on the site, or for some added goodies. I think a much better plan than just charging for functionality or information is to think up something tangible that people want to buy (this might get in the way of ThinkGeek, but oh well). Zophar's Domain tried this recently by opening the "ZD Store" from where they sell video games and accessories. This store is pretty much run by one person from his home, and they seem to be generating some decent revenue. This is because they have been able to sell their goods at same as retail or even a little cheaper, and their users would much rather spend the same amount of money or less, and at the same time support a good web site, instead of supporting a shitty retail chain like circuit city or worst buy.

So I guess what the people at slashdot need to do is figure out what we want to buy from them (and there's only one way to find that out, isn't there? tell them!). Maybe something like "type up a letter to someone in the US government regarding (insert current way we are being fucked over) and for 5 bucks slashdot will snail mail it to them." Not only do you support slashdot, you support its cause, and you never even have to get your ass out of your chair.

they could also sell standard stuff like T-Shirts (I'd buy a "Fuck the RIAA!" (or DMCA,MPAA,SSSCA, whatever) shirt), pins, mugs, bumper stickers, whatever else you people tend to waste your excess money on.

another idea is to donate money to slashdot to keep them running, and slashdot will donate a portion of that to various organizations like the ACLU, etc.

just a few thoughts that might be helpful, I figured they were much needed since other slashdotters tend to enjoy bitching about this well maintained, FREE ACCESS web site than thinking up ways to keep it going.

You can also download a GameBoy version (scroll down to "Pocket Enigma").

but from experience with playing gbc games on my AMD k6-2 400 at home, and P3 500 at work, the speed of the emu is comparable to that of the hardware. [strong added by yerricde]

You're comparing the Game Boy Color to the Game Boy Advance. Game Boy Color is about as complex as the old Nintendo Entertainment System to emulate, and LoopyNES (the most accurate NES emulator, available from Zophar.net's NES collection) runs at full speed on a P100. However, Super NES is about three or four times more complex as NES, and GBA is nearly twice as complex as Super NES, with two layers of Mode 7 and affine transformation (i.e. rotation/scaling) on every single sprite, but with two dumb but easy DMA channels for sound instead of a pain-in-the-ass SPC700 processor.

Here's a comparison of GBA hardware to that of the Super NES:
Read the rest of this comment...

Actually, if you're really into the music from the Nintendo, Super Nintendo and other old console games, you really should check out Zophar's Domain.

You can download music rips from the actual games and download special players (many come in the form of a Winamp or even an XMMS plug-in :)