1. How can one softmod an Xbox with version 1.6 firmware? And now that new copies of MechAssault have the buffer overflow fixed, how can one softmod an Xbox at all?
How about finding a used copy of the game without the "greatest hits" banner on the box? MS didn't suddenly make the old version disappear, you know.
And you could always still hard-mod it.:-) Of course they've made hard mods a total pain in the butt with v1.6 motherboard, but that doesn't stop you from buying an older Xbox used. Besides, it's less worry about being banned if you play Live on an unmodded box and emulators on a separate modded box.
2. How do you suggest to dump one's Game Paks or otherwise obtain legit copies of games to run in the emulator?
You can't. Except for a few games that were explicity made public domain by their copyright holders, that is. Even if you had a cartridge dumper and put the output of that on your hard drive, technically even that is illegal. But you can at least go for moral and only download and install ROMs for cartridges that you actually posess in your collection.
I've been wishing that N would come out with a cartridge reader accessory for each (or all) of the various sorts of cartridges they support in VC. I doubt they will, though, especially when you consider what little they did with the GB reader for N64. Plus, limiting you to their pre-chosen list means that they can verify that the emulator in fact works with those particular games, and they can update the emulator as needed.
It would still be nice if a 3rd party company could come out with cart reader/emulator combos.
Anyone remember when Sega announced the Saturn would be coming out three months early, and it would be $399?
The Sony guy walked up to the mike and said one thing that got the crowd going: "$299"
Somehow, I think that Sony is opening themselves up to exactly what they took advantage of.
I don't want a 360, and I'll probably buy a Wii-volution on release day (as I did with GameCube), but I'm going to hold off on the PS3 until it significantly goes down in price. At least the stripped down PS3 will be more usable than the stripped down 360. (I don't need HDMI, and I don't need WiFi in the console.)
I don't care about SACD or DVD-A, and don't care about the two HD movie formats either. I just want a bigger write-once media format to store my own stuff.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
(Yes, I know it's probably a water droplet on a high-altitude atmospheric camera, since there's a grid of them. Why wouldn't the "UFOs" airbrushed out by NASA also be weather balloons and similar artifacts?)
Try wearing khaki pants, a white button down shirt, and a tie next time you shop at the supermarket.
Or at a Fry's.
I can one-up you. More than a few times I've been in a thrift store and mistaken for someone who works there simply because of being a guy who doesn't look confused and lost. Never mind that the other employees are clearly wearing identically-colored vests with the thrift store logo on them.
That's not recycling, that's merely letting the planet bury them for you.
Recycling is using them in a breeder reactor of some sort (as someone else said, send them to Canada), then the fuel reprocessing will only leave short-lived (a few hundred years at most) nuclear waste. The only reason we don't do this now is that Jimmy Carter (as bad of a president as he was a nice guy) getting skittish about weapons grade plutonium resulting from the fuel reprocessing, and forbidding us from using breeder reactors, but having no success in forbidding anyone else from doing so. And nowadays we can reprocess fuel without leaving pure enough plutonium to be a problem anyhow.
Aum Shinrikyo apparently also used Eva tapes for recuriting afterwords, but apparently stopped after GAINAX started complaining.
I can't think of anything better to use for recruiting people to a cult than an over-analyzed, over-hyped anime with a total mindfuck ending. Scientology is pretty similar here, except they use the writings of a hack SF author.
Since it seems security devices are always being compromised, I'd hate to have to cut myself open every time one of these things had been likewise compromised.
I'd be more worried about security being compromised by someone else cutting me open. You know, like that guy in Hong Kong with the thumbprint-start BMW. When some bad guys wanted to steal his car, they just chopped of his thumb.
Apple should spend more time making it easier to switch -- like including a "start menu" equivalent, using the defacto standard "ctrl-c & ctrl-v" type shortcut keys
Where do you think Microsoft got those from anyhow? Guess what, before Microsoft copied from the Mac-standard command-c/command-v (which date back to 1984, and probably earlier if they were on the Lisa as well), those were mapped to the INS and DEL keys, with random application of ctrl or alt (I can't remeber the exact mappings, but I don't think anyone could) depending on what you wanted to do.
This is so lame. Why? Because they took the easy way out. The concept certainly has plenty of room for a "Revenge of the Nerds: The Next Generation" type of movie. Especially since there are so many new forms of revenge over 20 years later when the jocks have to deal with computers and the internet. They wouldn't even have to make any kind of continuity (like a main character being the son of someone from the previous movie, or a prof being someone from the previous movie), but it wouldn't hurt.
Hollywood and their got-damn remakes. Can't they even try to come up with a half-original idea?
And one problem I heard about long ago which it would have been nice if they had fixed was that the syscall mechanism ignores the second and third byte of the instruction word, rather than requiring them to be zero, which would make it more complicated for a buffer overflow to do anything really bad.
Luckily, all ICBMs ship with the hardware support.
Well then, that'll keep the Russians from launching against us by accident. (I know what you were trying to say, but I can't figure out what the heck the "B" stands for. And overloading acronyms doesn't make you funny anyhow.)
The problem with Windows (in)security with masive worm problems (especially the norotorious RPC bug) has been that it was the equivalent of a burglar sneaking in through the 2' x 2' pet door built into every house, even the majority whose owners don't have pets.
Most systems don't need cycle-accurate emulation. The Atari 2600 is a notable exception, because the games depended upon the timing between the CPU and video (three pixels per clock cycle).
Console games generally do fine with emulation that is more permissive than the real hardware, but this can be a problem for people writing homebrew games because the emulator will let them do things that the real hardware is not capable of. And some emulators are more permissive than the real hardware in other ways, such as allowing more sprites or video data per line than the real hardware can display on one scan line.
Really, the only reason to overclock a CPU on console hardware (on which the games are almost always kept from running too fast by waiting for vertical sync) is to reduce lag when game screens are full of sprites and stuff.
The usefulness comes in with games which use the vertical sync as a timebase. If they take too many computations per frame, they will miss the vertical sync, and only sync to every other vertical frame. This causes a slowdown to half speed. Overclocking the CPU allows it to do more work per frame, avoiding slowdowns. There are released games which exhibit this problem, and not all of them are action games. In Harvest Moon, if you have more than ten cows in the barn, slowdowns will happen.
This is known to be useful on the Dreamcast, where it improves emulator performance.
As I said in another reply, if anyone taught me how to program, it was Bill Gates. I had disassembled the TRS-80 BASIC, which was 12K of very well written 8080 code (with a nod to the Z-80 by using relative jumps). I still remember that I only found 35 "wasted" bytes (obvious optimizations) in there. I can still program Z-80 code like it was BASIC. (minus the silly stuff like floating point)
Smalltalk is a great language, but the problem with it is that the MVC model for the user interface, and the associated class library, has an extremely steep learning curve. I tried to play around with some Cocoa programming a couple of weeks ago and encountered similar "which object does what?" problems. And by the way, Objective C is like C plus Smalltalk, and is much more elegant than C++, which is has become a "kitchen sink" language, full of wonderful ways to make your code incomprehensible.
And for those lamenting the lack of a programming language on those locked down computers... what about Javascript? As much as it gets mocked for being a toy language, it's still a programming language. That plus Notepad should get you somewhere.
I wish somebody had shown me Lisp when I was 14. All I got was Pascal and 6502.
Hah, I started out on a TRS-80 when I was 14, so I got BASIC and Z-80. I understood event loop driven programming within a year (try THAT with Lisp), and was a whiz at assembly language within four years. I pretty much used a disassembly of BASIC as a textbook. You might even say that because of that, I learned how to program assembly language from none other than Bill Gates himself.
When I was in college, I even managed to wedge the Small C compiler from DDJ into it (with the assistance of a handy VAX), and once I was done I realized that a Z-80 with 48K RAM and 86K floppies just wouldn't cut it for a C compiler. So I "switched" from TRS-80 to Mac and got Pascal and 68K.
Anyhow, the whole point here is that computers have become like automobiles. Everybody uses one, but very few people are "gearheads" who tinker around with the insides. Hell, a lot of people can't even comprehend the need for oil changes. Back in the '80s (and even more so in the late '70s) there was a much higher percentage of computer gearheads. Most people couldn't care less about the difference between two-stroke, four-stroke, and diesel engines, and they certainly don't want to mess around in all that grease with their only vehicle that they need to get to work every day.
Re:New Nintendo Controller Name
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I wonder if they'll start calling the new controller a Wii-Wii.
You must have missed yesterday's meeting. Wii-Wii is what you play with when you connect two of them together. The controller is going to be called the Wii-mote[tm]. Wii-li.
Slashdot Mirror
How about finding a used copy of the game without the "greatest hits" banner on the box? MS didn't suddenly make the old version disappear, you know.
And you could always still hard-mod it. :-) Of course they've made hard mods a total pain in the butt with v1.6 motherboard, but that doesn't stop you from buying an older Xbox used. Besides, it's less worry about being banned if you play Live on an unmodded box and emulators on a separate modded box.
2. How do you suggest to dump one's Game Paks or otherwise obtain legit copies of games to run in the emulator?
You can't. Except for a few games that were explicity made public domain by their copyright holders, that is. Even if you had a cartridge dumper and put the output of that on your hard drive, technically even that is illegal. But you can at least go for moral and only download and install ROMs for cartridges that you actually posess in your collection.
I've been wishing that N would come out with a cartridge reader accessory for each (or all) of the various sorts of cartridges they support in VC. I doubt they will, though, especially when you consider what little they did with the GB reader for N64. Plus, limiting you to their pre-chosen list means that they can verify that the emulator in fact works with those particular games, and they can update the emulator as needed.
It would still be nice if a 3rd party company could come out with cart reader/emulator combos.
If it passed with greater than 2/3rds majority, then a lot of Democrats must have voted for it, too.
I think it would be more effective to write the name of a recently released movie on the DVD. Then they have to waste their time looking at it.
I'm wondering when they'll be trained to sniff out a video nasty.
The Sony guy walked up to the mike and said one thing that got the crowd going: "$299"
Somehow, I think that Sony is opening themselves up to exactly what they took advantage of.
I don't want a 360, and I'll probably buy a Wii-volution on release day (as I did with GameCube), but I'm going to hold off on the PS3 until it significantly goes down in price. At least the stripped down PS3 will be more usable than the stripped down 360. (I don't need HDMI, and I don't need WiFi in the console.)
I don't care about SACD or DVD-A, and don't care about the two HD movie formats either. I just want a bigger write-once media format to store my own stuff.
But trust me on the sunscreen.
...right here!
Like this one?
(Yes, I know it's probably a water droplet on a high-altitude atmospheric camera, since there's a grid of them. Why wouldn't the "UFOs" airbrushed out by NASA also be weather balloons and similar artifacts?)
Or at a Fry's.
I can one-up you. More than a few times I've been in a thrift store and mistaken for someone who works there simply because of being a guy who doesn't look confused and lost. Never mind that the other employees are clearly wearing identically-colored vests with the thrift store logo on them.
Recycling is using them in a breeder reactor of some sort (as someone else said, send them to Canada), then the fuel reprocessing will only leave short-lived (a few hundred years at most) nuclear waste. The only reason we don't do this now is that Jimmy Carter (as bad of a president as he was a nice guy) getting skittish about weapons grade plutonium resulting from the fuel reprocessing, and forbidding us from using breeder reactors, but having no success in forbidding anyone else from doing so. And nowadays we can reprocess fuel without leaving pure enough plutonium to be a problem anyhow.
I can't think of anything better to use for recruiting people to a cult than an over-analyzed, over-hyped anime with a total mindfuck ending. Scientology is pretty similar here, except they use the writings of a hack SF author.
I'd be more worried about security being compromised by someone else cutting me open. You know, like that guy in Hong Kong with the thumbprint-start BMW. When some bad guys wanted to steal his car, they just chopped of his thumb.
Darth Vader: "Jar Jar, meesa you father!"
It's not truly the original if it says "A NEW HOPE" in the title. But it's close enough.
Where do you think Microsoft got those from anyhow? Guess what, before Microsoft copied from the Mac-standard command-c/command-v (which date back to 1984, and probably earlier if they were on the Lisa as well), those were mapped to the INS and DEL keys, with random application of ctrl or alt (I can't remeber the exact mappings, but I don't think anyone could) depending on what you wanted to do.
Hollywood and their got-damn remakes. Can't they even try to come up with a half-original idea?
I don't theen that word means what you theen it means. The PPC, all mainstream desktop microprocessors, uses a Von Neumann architecture.
And one problem I heard about long ago which it would have been nice if they had fixed was that the syscall mechanism ignores the second and third byte of the instruction word, rather than requiring them to be zero, which would make it more complicated for a buffer overflow to do anything really bad.
Luckily, all ICBMs ship with the hardware support.
Well then, that'll keep the Russians from launching against us by accident. (I know what you were trying to say, but I can't figure out what the heck the "B" stands for. And overloading acronyms doesn't make you funny anyhow.)
The problem with Windows (in)security with masive worm problems (especially the norotorious RPC bug) has been that it was the equivalent of a burglar sneaking in through the 2' x 2' pet door built into every house, even the majority whose owners don't have pets.
Console games generally do fine with emulation that is more permissive than the real hardware, but this can be a problem for people writing homebrew games because the emulator will let them do things that the real hardware is not capable of. And some emulators are more permissive than the real hardware in other ways, such as allowing more sprites or video data per line than the real hardware can display on one scan line.
Really, the only reason to overclock a CPU on console hardware (on which the games are almost always kept from running too fast by waiting for vertical sync) is to reduce lag when game screens are full of sprites and stuff.
This is known to be useful on the Dreamcast, where it improves emulator performance.
Now I can have the full twelve cows in Harvest Moon without the slowdowns!
As I said in another reply, if anyone taught me how to program, it was Bill Gates. I had disassembled the TRS-80 BASIC, which was 12K of very well written 8080 code (with a nod to the Z-80 by using relative jumps). I still remember that I only found 35 "wasted" bytes (obvious optimizations) in there. I can still program Z-80 code like it was BASIC. (minus the silly stuff like floating point)
And for those lamenting the lack of a programming language on those locked down computers... what about Javascript? As much as it gets mocked for being a toy language, it's still a programming language. That plus Notepad should get you somewhere.
I wish somebody had shown me Lisp when I was 14. All I got was Pascal and 6502.
Hah, I started out on a TRS-80 when I was 14, so I got BASIC and Z-80. I understood event loop driven programming within a year (try THAT with Lisp), and was a whiz at assembly language within four years. I pretty much used a disassembly of BASIC as a textbook. You might even say that because of that, I learned how to program assembly language from none other than Bill Gates himself.
When I was in college, I even managed to wedge the Small C compiler from DDJ into it (with the assistance of a handy VAX), and once I was done I realized that a Z-80 with 48K RAM and 86K floppies just wouldn't cut it for a C compiler. So I "switched" from TRS-80 to Mac and got Pascal and 68K.
Anyhow, the whole point here is that computers have become like automobiles. Everybody uses one, but very few people are "gearheads" who tinker around with the insides. Hell, a lot of people can't even comprehend the need for oil changes. Back in the '80s (and even more so in the late '70s) there was a much higher percentage of computer gearheads. Most people couldn't care less about the difference between two-stroke, four-stroke, and diesel engines, and they certainly don't want to mess around in all that grease with their only vehicle that they need to get to work every day.
You must have missed yesterday's meeting. Wii-Wii is what you play with when you connect two of them together. The controller is going to be called the Wii-mote[tm]. Wii-li.
(Wii are not amused.)