There is a Sega Model 3 arcade hardware emulator in development. That hardware uses a PowerPC 603 or 603ev CPU at speeds ranging between 66 and 166 MHz. I can assure you the emulator is real.
PPC hasn't been emulated previously because there hasn't been any demand for it.
Matrix 2 & 3 teaser trailer, Quicktime and MPE
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Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 2, Informative
Although the MPEG-1 version is re-encoded from the Quicktime version, it's significantly better because the Quicktime version is encoded at 30 fps whereas the original is 24 fps. Every fifth frame is a duplicate, resulting in jerky motion in the Quicktime version. The MPEG-1 version does not suffer from this defect.
Mirrors for the MPEG-1 version are needed urgently.
From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: MAME going GPL!?
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 00:41:15 -0400
I hope they change the license of NAME, because the current license is not free. It is also self-contradictory.
[lengthy bit about the word "free" that is pointless to reproduce here]
Maybe it's the viral nature of GPL. The mere thought of moving to GPL makes you lose all control.;-)
Some background information of MAME going GPL
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MAME To Become GPL?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Damn, I expected to be able to submit this story for some quality karma whoring. Oh well, even I tend to forget things when updating mame.net at 4 am.;-)
One of the reasons for our own license a long time ago was to deter those who wanted to make a quick buck from selling MAME (together with illegal ROMs). It worked reasonably well - the presence of this deterrent was enough to prevent at least some of them. Even though the reality is that selling the ROMs is illegal, moving back to GPL would open us to that sort of abuse again. You must have seen the banners and popups advertising DVD to CD copy programs for a low price of $49,95 - guess what, they are nothing but GPL'd software (MPEG-2 decoders and MPEG-4 encoders) slapped on a CD. Moreover, in the case of legal trouble, it would be easier to target the original authors than those who are redistributing the illegal material. In short:
Step 1. GPL MAME
Step 2. ?
Step 3. Profit!
The legal uses of MAME (together with legal ROMs) have been explicitly allowed previously (see the Capcom Classics CD), and it has been made clear that MAME itself isn't for sale, rather just a license for the game ROMs and a free copy of MAME on top.
Of course, we've had a fair share of problems because nobody is willing to try to enforce our current license on the most visible license violators, who currently do not redistribute the full source code changes: MAME32K (Kaillera) and the other MAME32 (not to be confused with the "right" MAME32). GPL would probably help here to force the source changes open, or to end the development of these particular derivative works. GPL would also allow us to re-use some non-critical code from other GPL'd projects, but personally I don't see this as a big advantage. Everything can be rewritten anyway.
In any case, even if MAME were to move to GPL, I don't think the development model would change much. Due to the dubious nature of ROMs, the developer mailing list and archive simply can not be public. A public CVS server would also be quite unlikely due to the support and maintainance nightmare. There haven't been any significant forks (unlike somebody mentioned here - changing one or two lines to remove the OK screen isn't forking) nor are we currently forbidding them - and I don't think GPL would change this situation.
Oh, and if you're wondering, mame.net is handling the Slashdot effect just fine. In fact, we've served even bigger audiences successfully. Moderators should frown any attempts of gaining karma through cut'n'pasting text from mame.net;-)
> So the MAME project uses the Xbox Development Kit to develop MAME for the Xbox.
The MAME project doesn't use the XDK. The Xbox port does. You repeat this same mistake throughout your comment, but otherwise you've pretty much nailed it.
There's nothing you can do, short of re-implementing the Xbox API or whatever the Xbox development kit provides that is crucial in getting binaries running on the Xbox.
The core MAME project was not threatened at any point. The Microsoft legal department was very specific about the Xbox binaries being illegal, and it's easy to accept the simple fact that Microsoft owns the XDK and whatever part of it remains in the binaries compiled with it.
Not EULA, but Microsoft's property. Apparently binaries compiled with the XDK end up with some part of them still copyrighted by Microsoft, so they clearly have a case here. They did not mention anything about source code, and common sense says that it shouldn't be a problem, so that is still available.
If somebody invests the time and other resources to do a clean-room reverse-engineering of the Xbox development kit or API, we may see the binaries again. But until then, they are illegal. Move along, nothing to see here (anymore).
Without taking any part in the debate of browser integration, I feel that it is an absolute necessity to speak out the facts about the Windows Media Player.
Basically, Media Player will play back any audio / video format for which a DirectShow filter is available. The API is completely published; anybody can go out and write their own DirectShow filter for any new audio / video format that (s)he might develop. It is also completely open in the other direction; anybody can go out and write their own media player that can take the full advantage of all the DirectShow filters installed on the system. Good examples are Zoom Player (good for crappy TV-out chips like in some Geforce2 MX cards), TMPGEnc (can read in any video format that is supported and write out MPEG-1 or 2) and AVISynth (virtualizes any DirectShow-supported video format into.avi that all video editing programs understand).
Additionally, Media Player 6.4 is the absolutely best media player program that there can be. It's light weight, fast, simple, easy to use and doesn't have any advertisements. It can also retrieve newly supported codecs automatically from a server in the Internet, although this feature hasn't been used much. Compared to RealPlayer and Quicktime Player, the superiority is obvious.
It looks more like Apple and Real are pissed off because they would lose precious advertising and branding revenues if any media player program could play back their files. As previously noted, *anybody* can write their own DirectShow filter so Apple and Real definitely have the technical abilities to make those, but don't want to do so. Of course, it would mean that anybody could use the DirectShow filters to re-encode the content from their proprietary formats to some open format like MPEG-1 or 2, and reduce Real's and Apple's exclusivity value. It would also mean that people wouldn't be limited to their crappy, ad- and spyware-ridden media player programs.
Incidentally, DivX was supported in Linux originally thanks to the DirectShow filters being available. It was relatively easy to hook them up to a media player in a completely different OS, even if the source code wasn't available. Not very surprisingly, neither the Realvideo/audio codecs nor the most common Quicktime codecs are supported in for example mplayer.
In other words, would you REALLY want to see the standard Media Player removed from Windows and have it replaced with RealPlayer and Quicktime Player that don't play half of the formats that Media Player does, and are slow, sluggish, difficult to use and filled with advertisements and spyware, and are basically dead-ends when it comes to video formats and video processing? I wouldn't.
You're probably just thinking of the Tom's Hardware video, which only demonstrates that the Thunderbirds and the earliest Athlon 4's don't have proper overheating control without special support from the motherboard. The heat dissipation issue is just a myth. A P3/P4 of equivalent performance to an Athlon (TB or XP) will produce about the same amount of heat.
Check the chip specs at Intel's and AMD's web site, if you don't believe.
Also, if the fan dies, there is more than enough time for the motherboard or even a temperature monitor program to realize the situation and shut down before it's too late. I've personally stopped the CPU fan on my TB-1333 for up to 15 seconds and the temperature didn't rise more than a few degrees C, still well below the safety limits. Additionally, a P3 would *not* happily run until the end of the world if you ripped out the fan, but it would probably graciously freeze rather than overheat.
Currently Xbox emulation is infeasible.
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X-Box Emulated (Not)
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· Score: 4, Flamebait
Didn't you read what I just said? Or didn't you want to understand? The completely different memory architecture makes it impossible to emulate it like a virtual machine. You'd have to wrap your high level emulation around every opcode that gets executed, and by doing this, you wouldn't be gaining anything over a traditional interpretive or dynamically recompiling emulator. The speed requirements of this are unbelievable. Even if you could recompile whole blocks of code into tightly optimized emulation loops, there are many more things that need consideration on the emulation side such as IO ports, HD access, interrupts, proprietary 3D hardware - so what if DirectX is used? Its interface to the actual graphics chip does not exist on the PC side, so you'd have to emulate all that as well.
FYI, emulating x86 on x86 does not make it any simpler than some other CPUs on x86. In fact, it is one of the most dreadful tasks one can imagine. Writing a CPU core for MIPS chips is a breeze compared to emulating a complete x86-based system with all its quirks, strange behaviours and design stupidities.
Emulating a Nintendo 64 was never impossible, as Mike Tedder (aka Breakpoint) proved years before the high level emulators - which, if I may say so - are essentially real-time ports of the games to PC code and not emulation at all. The MIPS opcodes are dynamically recompiled into x86 code in memory, the graphics chip calls are trapped and translated into native 3D API calls, the sound chip playlists are simply thrown at the sound card. This is also why the high level emulators will never run more than Mario 64 and Zelda 64 without ugly hacks, since both the CPU, graphics and sound chips can be reprogrammed and none of the current emulators can handle this. Your compatibility estimate of "slightly less" is several magnitudes wrong. Of course there has to be an exception - I've understood that Project64 actually emulates the RSP microcode (3D manipulations, audio functions) instead of faking it on a high level. But it also requires a lot faster computer.
I never said emulating Xbox will always remain impossible. At this time however, because of current CPU speeds and the sheer complexity of the Xbox system, you cannot expect to see an emulator. Not for at least five years, probably closer to ten.
The contents of the files are..
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X-Box Emulated (Not)
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· Score: 5, Informative
I actually went and checked the files.
snd3d.dll is from MSN Messenger
xbox.vxd is a data file from Return to Castle Wolfenstein
xboxkrnl32.dll is from Trillian (another messenger program)
xbox_emulator.0.35.exe is a Visual Basic program compiled to.exe form that uses the c:\con\con trick to induce the Blue Screen of Death on unpatched Win9x systems.
Slashdot has sunk to a new low. We all knew it had absolutely no journalistic integrity, but come on, you could at least use your brains before accepting this sort of submission. And the previous screw-up, 100:1 lossless compression. Yeah, right. Why the hell are people so gullible these days?
At the moment, no computer on this planet has enough juice to emulate the Xbox (No, not even the supercomputers which have 9,600 CPUs - because multiple CPUs don't make it any faster to emulate a single CPU), not to mention that nobody has been able to dump the contents of the HDs, the DVDs nor has anybody been able to crack the encryption of the Xbox BIOS. Additionally, the unified memory architecture makes it impossible to emulate the Xbox on a PC like a virtual machine. An interpretive or dynamic recompiling CPU core with everything else re-implemented is the only way, and that simply won't happen during the next decade because of the sheer complexity of such a project and because of getting sued to hell by Microsoft.
They've just renamed a bunch of common files to make it look neat. But no matter how much you want it to be true, it is just a poor fake.
In a related matter, no much how you want the Xbox MAME, you will never get it. The developer cannot release his port, because software developed on the Xbox dev kit can't be released to public domain. Just stick with the good old PC versions, which are also available for *nix / Linux.:)
X-box MAME is not going to happen for a while..
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MAME on X-Box
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· Score: 5, Informative
There's no point in raving about this until somebody develops an alternative to the official Microsoft X-box developers' kit. Under the developers' kit license, there is simply no way Otaku could release his port of MAME to the world. Probably the company he works for wouldn't like to see their expensive and NDA-affected devkit being used in such a manner either.
The MAME open source license -- although not GPL (but comparable) -- also requires the release of all port-relevant source code, which I very much believe Microsoft's X-box developers' kit license forbids even if he was able to release it in binary form. Hint: You do not want to get into trouble with the MAME mafia by forgetting the release of source code.
Not to mention that MAME can already be considered as a violation of DMCA in terms of the decryption algorithms that are in the source code, so the less attention there is from big companies, the better.
Besides, X-box is beginning to be underpowered in MAME's case. You can get a cheap Duron setup for a MAME cabinet for much less effort and pain than getting an X-box -- with the force-bundled games worth of hundreds of dollars -- and waiting for a MAME port to get released, which really is not going to happen for a while. Microsoft has gone to some lengths to prevent homebrewn stuff, for example by changing APIs and executable file formats.
According to the lawyer types I work with, it's more or less the same as if a fax went through to the wrong number. They are prohibited from disclosing the information if there is a legal blurb on the bottom of the page or wherever that says so.
Or alike how you are prohibited from doing anything with stuff that you receive - without solicitation - to your (physical) mailbox? Wait a minute, that's not the case. Cuecat anyone?
My strong opinion is that the monetary damage that comes from a virus leaking secret documents has to be collected from either the user who was dumb enough to open the virus - or if the spreading of the virus was possible because of a bug in the operating system or software, you have all the reason to get Microsoft to pay for the damages.
Case if the female webmaster wants her site back. Even if the rape "joke" comment is completely unrelated to the matter at hand, it will make a difference in the courtroom.
For a change, would you please read the links too? Who the hell would invest two months of constant typing to create 12 MB of forged logs with authentic information, passwords, people, phone numbers et cetera, and what for?
I have no reason to suspect the logs aren't real. Draw your own conclusions though.
Also, ICQ's license agreement pretty much states that since they can't guarantee privacy, it's essentially a public forum. I guess eFront just fucked themselves.
About the rape quote, grep rape from iBLAMEj00.txt. You'll find it easily. Perhaps it wasn't said with any intention to do it, but it still sticks at people's eyes and would be pretty much an open and shot case for this female webmaster's lawyers.
Sorry to burst your bubble and smash the integrity of this news piece, but the encryption algorithm has not been broken, nor any of the actual encryption keys are known.
CPS2Shock team however managed to do something that nobody has done before - extract unencrypted data from the board using 68k code on the hardware itself. This will help figuring out the actual algorithm, but as of yet, the encryption has not been broken. The current files are only useful for playing Street Fighter Zero on emulators, and the painful process to extract this unencrypted data will have to be re-done on EVERY game if nobody can reverse-engineer the actual algorithm.
CPS-2 encryption sounds simple, but it has been used for 8 years now (since 1993 and Super Street Fighter 2, the first CPS-2 system game) and no bootlegs have been made of the games. It doesn't have to mean that it's an overly complicated algorithm, but so far nobody has had any unencrypted data to work against. What makes this scheme devious is that it only encrypts 68k code, not data, so the 0xFFFF and 0x0000 fills don't get encrypted (0xFF and 0x00 fills were crucial in breaking the Kabuki algorithm, used in CPS-1 games' Qsound program roms). Without the unencrypted 68k code, it was impossible to figure out what the encrypted values are related to. It is known that it works on word values (change any bit in the first word and only its encrypted / unencrypted values change, none of the others') and that the address of the value in question is probably used as one of the coefficients in the algorithm.
The files that CPS2Shock released are XOR tables. When used against the original encrypted program ROM file they will produce a ROM file with unencrypted code, but data intact (since it was never encrypted anyway). Go ahead and see if you can actually break the encryption, it shouldn't be that hard now.
(Encrypted) CPS2 ROMs, get the encrypted Street Fighter Zero program ROM from here and XOR table from CPS2Shock.
I disagree with any kind of media tax since the reasoning and functionality behind it is inherently flawed. Their argument for media tax is that it compensates the poor artist whose music I might pirate.
If I don't pirate anything, I am paying the tax, for nothing. Paying media tax for using a CD-R for legitimate purposes is just plain ridiculous.
If I pirate something, I am paying the tax that is supposed to compensate the poor artist, but doesn't this in essence justify the piracy, since their point for the tax is that the poor artist gets compensated? Oh, you mean I am still paying the tax for nothing since I can't legally pirate anything on the CD-R.
These two points leave no arguments for the media tax advocates. Either way I'm paying the tax for something that I didn't do, or I'm not allowed to do. On the other hand, all the revenue from this media tax goes to RIAA's members or whatever is your country's copyright royalty collecting organization. Joining RIAA or any other similar organization is practically impossible for any poor artist who would REALLY be affected by piracy. Naturally the organization will have no idea whose music I might pirate and will keep channeling the media tax income to its biggest artists.
Back when iCraveTV was litigated, they promised to return with better security, implemented with the help of www.bordercontrol.com. Try it out, it's pretty exact (at least with the country).
However, all this will be useless if you use a bouncer or a web proxy at a different location. Any location information on the Internet can be spoofed with the current technology. I'm not sure if IPv6 will change anything, so far I haven't noticed any location-specific header field in the specs.
The point being, Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator is available for many platforms (such as *nix - get XMAME) unlike Shockcrap, and the Shockcrap-recreations aren't true emulation like in MAME. I admit that they are very well crafted, but the feel just isn't correct and for example the sound is far from original. Actually, MAME emulates these particular games perfectly!
It would have been much more useful for them to release the ROMs to free redistribution, so that all MAME users could use them in good conscience. Now they'll just have to download the roms illegally or simply not play those games.
There are even two free games available for use with MAME. In fact, another one of them was previously owned by Midway, being Robby Roto. However its coder had quite a good contract - it said that when the sales of the game dropped below a certain level, the copyright would revert back to him. Being a good guy, he then released the game for free redistribution. The other free romset is Poly-Play, the only arcade game ever made in ex-GDR (East Germany), and thus there does not seem to exist a copyright holder for that piece of software anymore.
Other choice to get legal games for MAME is to buy the Hot Rod Joystick control panel which comes with a compilation of 14 good old Capcom arcade classics (such as 1941, Block Block, Commando, Exed Exes, Ghouls'n Ghosts, Magic Sword, Mercs, Section Z, Side Arms, Son Son, Street Fighter 2 HF, Strider, U. N. Squadron and Varth), which not recreations but actual ROM files that you can use with MAME. I'd love to see more people buy this pack - it would show the copyright holders that there actually still is a market for stuff like this.
The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (also XMAME available) project includes sound emulation support for just about every classic arcade game that it emulates. Not to even mention that its sound cores seem to be the best ones available, for example the YM-2151 emulation is the most accurate sound simulation ever written.
Check out also Qplayer (For standalone playing of CPS2 system games' sounds and music) and NeoJukeBox (For standalone playing of Neo Geo music and sounds).
The only reasonable choice is a camera based on the Digita OS, so that you can have some fun and run MAMED and MESSD on it. So, good ones for that purpose are Kodak DC265 and DC290.
Slashdot Mirror
PPC hasn't been emulated previously because there hasn't been any demand for it.
- Quicktime version
- MPEG-1 version
Although the MPEG-1 version is re-encoded from the Quicktime version, it's significantly better because the Quicktime version is encoded at 30 fps whereas the original is 24 fps. Every fifth frame is a duplicate, resulting in jerky motion in the Quicktime version. The MPEG-1 version does not suffer from this defect.Mirrors for the MPEG-1 version are needed urgently.
One of the reasons for our own license a long time ago was to deter those who wanted to make a quick buck from selling MAME (together with illegal ROMs). It worked reasonably well - the presence of this deterrent was enough to prevent at least some of them. Even though the reality is that selling the ROMs is illegal, moving back to GPL would open us to that sort of abuse again. You must have seen the banners and popups advertising DVD to CD copy programs for a low price of $49,95 - guess what, they are nothing but GPL'd software (MPEG-2 decoders and MPEG-4 encoders) slapped on a CD. Moreover, in the case of legal trouble, it would be easier to target the original authors than those who are redistributing the illegal material. In short:
Step 1. GPL MAME
Step 2. ?
Step 3. Profit!
;-)
The legal uses of MAME (together with legal ROMs) have been explicitly allowed previously (see the Capcom Classics CD), and it has been made clear that MAME itself isn't for sale, rather just a license for the game ROMs and a free copy of MAME on top.
Of course, we've had a fair share of problems because nobody is willing to try to enforce our current license on the most visible license violators, who currently do not redistribute the full source code changes: MAME32K (Kaillera) and the other MAME32 (not to be confused with the "right" MAME32). GPL would probably help here to force the source changes open, or to end the development of these particular derivative works. GPL would also allow us to re-use some non-critical code from other GPL'd projects, but personally I don't see this as a big advantage. Everything can be rewritten anyway.
In any case, even if MAME were to move to GPL, I don't think the development model would change much. Due to the dubious nature of ROMs, the developer mailing list and archive simply can not be public. A public CVS server would also be quite unlikely due to the support and maintainance nightmare. There haven't been any significant forks (unlike somebody mentioned here - changing one or two lines to remove the OK screen isn't forking) nor are we currently forbidding them - and I don't think GPL would change this situation.
Oh, and if you're wondering, mame.net is handling the Slashdot effect just fine. In fact, we've served even bigger audiences successfully. Moderators should frown any attempts of gaining karma through cut'n'pasting text from mame.net
> So the MAME project uses the Xbox Development Kit to develop MAME for the Xbox.
The MAME project doesn't use the XDK. The Xbox port does. You repeat this same mistake throughout your comment, but otherwise you've pretty much nailed it.
There's nothing you can do, short of re-implementing the Xbox API or whatever the Xbox development kit provides that is crucial in getting binaries running on the Xbox.
The core MAME project was not threatened at any point. The Microsoft legal department was very specific about the Xbox binaries being illegal, and it's easy to accept the simple fact that Microsoft owns the XDK and whatever part of it remains in the binaries compiled with it.
> The EULA strikes again.
Not EULA, but Microsoft's property. Apparently binaries compiled with the XDK end up with some part of them still copyrighted by Microsoft, so they clearly have a case here. They did not mention anything about source code, and common sense says that it shouldn't be a problem, so that is still available.
If somebody invests the time and other resources to do a clean-room reverse-engineering of the Xbox development kit or API, we may see the binaries again. But until then, they are illegal. Move along, nothing to see here (anymore).
It's located at xbox.mame.net now. We can handle the slashdot effect. Bring it on.
There will be a new version and source code release shortly.
Without taking any part in the debate of browser integration, I feel that it is an absolute necessity to speak out the facts about the Windows Media Player.
.avi that all video editing programs understand).
Basically, Media Player will play back any audio / video format for which a DirectShow filter is available. The API is completely published; anybody can go out and write their own DirectShow filter for any new audio / video format that (s)he might develop. It is also completely open in the other direction; anybody can go out and write their own media player that can take the full advantage of all the DirectShow filters installed on the system. Good examples are Zoom Player (good for crappy TV-out chips like in some Geforce2 MX cards), TMPGEnc (can read in any video format that is supported and write out MPEG-1 or 2) and AVISynth (virtualizes any DirectShow-supported video format into
Additionally, Media Player 6.4 is the absolutely best media player program that there can be. It's light weight, fast, simple, easy to use and doesn't have any advertisements. It can also retrieve newly supported codecs automatically from a server in the Internet, although this feature hasn't been used much. Compared to RealPlayer and Quicktime Player, the superiority is obvious.
It looks more like Apple and Real are pissed off because they would lose precious advertising and branding revenues if any media player program could play back their files. As previously noted, *anybody* can write their own DirectShow filter so Apple and Real definitely have the technical abilities to make those, but don't want to do so. Of course, it would mean that anybody could use the DirectShow filters to re-encode the content from their proprietary formats to some open format like MPEG-1 or 2, and reduce Real's and Apple's exclusivity value. It would also mean that people wouldn't be limited to their crappy, ad- and spyware-ridden media player programs.
Incidentally, DivX was supported in Linux originally thanks to the DirectShow filters being available. It was relatively easy to hook them up to a media player in a completely different OS, even if the source code wasn't available. Not very surprisingly, neither the Realvideo/audio codecs nor the most common Quicktime codecs are supported in for example mplayer.
In other words, would you REALLY want to see the standard Media Player removed from Windows and have it replaced with RealPlayer and Quicktime Player that don't play half of the formats that Media Player does, and are slow, sluggish, difficult to use and filled with advertisements and spyware, and are basically dead-ends when it comes to video formats and video processing? I wouldn't.
You're probably just thinking of the Tom's Hardware video, which only demonstrates that the Thunderbirds and the earliest Athlon 4's don't have proper overheating control without special support from the motherboard. The heat dissipation issue is just a myth. A P3/P4 of equivalent performance to an Athlon (TB or XP) will produce about the same amount of heat.
Check the chip specs at Intel's and AMD's web site, if you don't believe.
Also, if the fan dies, there is more than enough time for the motherboard or even a temperature monitor program to realize the situation and shut down before it's too late. I've personally stopped the CPU fan on my TB-1333 for up to 15 seconds and the temperature didn't rise more than a few degrees C, still well below the safety limits. Additionally, a P3 would *not* happily run until the end of the world if you ripped out the fan, but it would probably graciously freeze rather than overheat.
Didn't you read what I just said? Or didn't you want to understand? The completely different memory architecture makes it impossible to emulate it like a virtual machine. You'd have to wrap your high level emulation around every opcode that gets executed, and by doing this, you wouldn't be gaining anything over a traditional interpretive or dynamically recompiling emulator. The speed requirements of this are unbelievable. Even if you could recompile whole blocks of code into tightly optimized emulation loops, there are many more things that need consideration on the emulation side such as IO ports, HD access, interrupts, proprietary 3D hardware - so what if DirectX is used? Its interface to the actual graphics chip does not exist on the PC side, so you'd have to emulate all that as well.
FYI, emulating x86 on x86 does not make it any simpler than some other CPUs on x86. In fact, it is one of the most dreadful tasks one can imagine. Writing a CPU core for MIPS chips is a breeze compared to emulating a complete x86-based system with all its quirks, strange behaviours and design stupidities.
Emulating a Nintendo 64 was never impossible, as Mike Tedder (aka Breakpoint) proved years before the high level emulators - which, if I may say so - are essentially real-time ports of the games to PC code and not emulation at all. The MIPS opcodes are dynamically recompiled into x86 code in memory, the graphics chip calls are trapped and translated into native 3D API calls, the sound chip playlists are simply thrown at the sound card. This is also why the high level emulators will never run more than Mario 64 and Zelda 64 without ugly hacks, since both the CPU, graphics and sound chips can be reprogrammed and none of the current emulators can handle this. Your compatibility estimate of "slightly less" is several magnitudes wrong. Of course there has to be an exception - I've understood that Project64 actually emulates the RSP microcode (3D manipulations, audio functions) instead of faking it on a high level. But it also requires a lot faster computer.
I never said emulating Xbox will always remain impossible. At this time however, because of current CPU speeds and the sheer complexity of the Xbox system, you cannot expect to see an emulator. Not for at least five years, probably closer to ten.
snd3d.dll is from MSN Messenger
xbox.vxd is a data file from Return to Castle Wolfenstein
xboxkrnl32.dll is from Trillian (another messenger program)
xbox_emulator.0.35.exe is a Visual Basic program compiled to .exe form that uses the c:\con\con trick to induce the Blue Screen of Death on unpatched Win9x systems.
Slashdot has sunk to a new low. We all knew it had absolutely no journalistic integrity, but come on, you could at least use your brains before accepting this sort of submission. And the previous screw-up, 100:1 lossless compression. Yeah, right. Why the hell are people so gullible these days?
:)
At the moment, no computer on this planet has enough juice to emulate the Xbox (No, not even the supercomputers which have 9,600 CPUs - because multiple CPUs don't make it any faster to emulate a single CPU), not to mention that nobody has been able to dump the contents of the HDs, the DVDs nor has anybody been able to crack the encryption of the Xbox BIOS. Additionally, the unified memory architecture makes it impossible to emulate the Xbox on a PC like a virtual machine. An interpretive or dynamic recompiling CPU core with everything else re-implemented is the only way, and that simply won't happen during the next decade because of the sheer complexity of such a project and because of getting sued to hell by Microsoft.
They've just renamed a bunch of common files to make it look neat. But no matter how much you want it to be true, it is just a poor fake.
In a related matter, no much how you want the Xbox MAME, you will never get it. The developer cannot release his port, because software developed on the Xbox dev kit can't be released to public domain. Just stick with the good old PC versions, which are also available for *nix / Linux.
There's no point in raving about this until somebody develops an alternative to the official Microsoft X-box developers' kit. Under the developers' kit license, there is simply no way Otaku could release his port of MAME to the world. Probably the company he works for wouldn't like to see their expensive and NDA-affected devkit being used in such a manner either.
The MAME open source license -- although not GPL (but comparable) -- also requires the release of all port-relevant source code, which I very much believe Microsoft's X-box developers' kit license forbids even if he was able to release it in binary form. Hint: You do not want to get into trouble with the MAME mafia by forgetting the release of source code.
Not to mention that MAME can already be considered as a violation of DMCA in terms of the decryption algorithms that are in the source code, so the less attention there is from big companies, the better.
Besides, X-box is beginning to be underpowered in MAME's case. You can get a cheap Duron setup for a MAME cabinet for much less effort and pain than getting an X-box -- with the force-bundled games worth of hundreds of dollars -- and waiting for a MAME port to get released, which really is not going to happen for a while. Microsoft has gone to some lengths to prevent homebrewn stuff, for example by changing APIs and executable file formats.
Since we're still on-topic, I see mame.net just added a nice MAME development history chart which makes for a good Windows and/or Linux background too. Enjoy.
Or alike how you are prohibited from doing anything with stuff that you receive - without solicitation - to your (physical) mailbox? Wait a minute, that's not the case. Cuecat anyone?
My strong opinion is that the monetary damage that comes from a virus leaking secret documents has to be collected from either the user who was dumb enough to open the virus - or if the spreading of the virus was possible because of a bug in the operating system or software, you have all the reason to get Microsoft to pay for the damages.
Case if the female webmaster wants her site back. Even if the rape "joke" comment is completely unrelated to the matter at hand, it will make a difference in the courtroom.
For a change, would you please read the links too? Who the hell would invest two months of constant typing to create 12 MB of forged logs with authentic information, passwords, people, phone numbers et cetera, and what for?
I have no reason to suspect the logs aren't real. Draw your own conclusions though.
Also, ICQ's license agreement pretty much states that since they can't guarantee privacy, it's essentially a public forum. I guess eFront just fucked themselves.
About the rape quote, grep rape from iBLAMEj00.txt. You'll find it easily. Perhaps it wasn't said with any intention to do it, but it still sticks at people's eyes and would be pretty much an open and shot case for this female webmaster's lawyers.
Wouldn't I love to know. I submitted it as 'news'.
Sorry to burst your bubble and smash the integrity of this news piece, but the encryption algorithm has not been broken, nor any of the actual encryption keys are known.
CPS2Shock team however managed to do something that nobody has done before - extract unencrypted data from the board using 68k code on the hardware itself. This will help figuring out the actual algorithm, but as of yet, the encryption has not been broken. The current files are only useful for playing Street Fighter Zero on emulators, and the painful process to extract this unencrypted data will have to be re-done on EVERY game if nobody can reverse-engineer the actual algorithm.
CPS-2 encryption sounds simple, but it has been used for 8 years now (since 1993 and Super Street Fighter 2, the first CPS-2 system game) and no bootlegs have been made of the games. It doesn't have to mean that it's an overly complicated algorithm, but so far nobody has had any unencrypted data to work against. What makes this scheme devious is that it only encrypts 68k code, not data, so the 0xFFFF and 0x0000 fills don't get encrypted (0xFF and 0x00 fills were crucial in breaking the Kabuki algorithm, used in CPS-1 games' Qsound program roms). Without the unencrypted 68k code, it was impossible to figure out what the encrypted values are related to. It is known that it works on word values (change any bit in the first word and only its encrypted / unencrypted values change, none of the others') and that the address of the value in question is probably used as one of the coefficients in the algorithm.
The files that CPS2Shock released are XOR tables. When used against the original encrypted program ROM file they will produce a ROM file with unencrypted code, but data intact (since it was never encrypted anyway). Go ahead and see if you can actually break the encryption, it shouldn't be that hard now.
(Encrypted) CPS2 ROMs, get the encrypted Street Fighter Zero program ROM from here and XOR table from CPS2Shock.
I disagree with any kind of media tax since the reasoning and functionality behind it is inherently flawed. Their argument for media tax is that it compensates the poor artist whose music I might pirate.
If I don't pirate anything, I am paying the tax, for nothing. Paying media tax for using a CD-R for legitimate purposes is just plain ridiculous.
If I pirate something, I am paying the tax that is supposed to compensate the poor artist, but doesn't this in essence justify the piracy, since their point for the tax is that the poor artist gets compensated? Oh, you mean I am still paying the tax for nothing since I can't legally pirate anything on the CD-R.
These two points leave no arguments for the media tax advocates. Either way I'm paying the tax for something that I didn't do, or I'm not allowed to do. On the other hand, all the revenue from this media tax goes to RIAA's members or whatever is your country's copyright royalty collecting organization. Joining RIAA or any other similar organization is practically impossible for any poor artist who would REALLY be affected by piracy. Naturally the organization will have no idea whose music I might pirate and will keep channeling the media tax income to its biggest artists.
Back when iCraveTV was litigated, they promised to return with better security, implemented with the help of www.bordercontrol.com. Try it out, it's pretty exact (at least with the country).
However, all this will be useless if you use a bouncer or a web proxy at a different location. Any location information on the Internet can be spoofed with the current technology. I'm not sure if IPv6 will change anything, so far I haven't noticed any location-specific header field in the specs.
That's called a bukkake party.
http://ww w10.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/article s/28laser.html
Oh when, oh when will people learn to substitute www. with www10.
The point being, Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator is available for many platforms (such as *nix - get XMAME) unlike Shockcrap, and the Shockcrap-recreations aren't true emulation like in MAME. I admit that they are very well crafted, but the feel just isn't correct and for example the sound is far from original. Actually, MAME emulates these particular games perfectly!
It would have been much more useful for them to release the ROMs to free redistribution, so that all MAME users could use them in good conscience. Now they'll just have to download the roms illegally or simply not play those games.
There are even two free games available for use with MAME. In fact, another one of them was previously owned by Midway, being Robby Roto. However its coder had quite a good contract - it said that when the sales of the game dropped below a certain level, the copyright would revert back to him. Being a good guy, he then released the game for free redistribution. The other free romset is Poly-Play, the only arcade game ever made in ex-GDR (East Germany), and thus there does not seem to exist a copyright holder for that piece of software anymore.
Other choice to get legal games for MAME is to buy the Hot Rod Joystick control panel which comes with a compilation of 14 good old Capcom arcade classics (such as 1941, Block Block, Commando, Exed Exes, Ghouls'n Ghosts, Magic Sword, Mercs, Section Z, Side Arms, Son Son, Street Fighter 2 HF, Strider, U. N. Squadron and Varth), which not recreations but actual ROM files that you can use with MAME. I'd love to see more people buy this pack - it would show the copyright holders that there actually still is a market for stuff like this.
The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (also XMAME available) project includes sound emulation support for just about every classic arcade game that it emulates. Not to even mention that its sound cores seem to be the best ones available, for example the YM-2151 emulation is the most accurate sound simulation ever written.
Check out also Qplayer (For standalone playing of CPS2 system games' sounds and music) and NeoJukeBox (For standalone playing of Neo Geo music and sounds).
The only reasonable choice is a camera based on the Digita OS, so that you can have some fun and run MAMED and MESSD on it. So, good ones for that purpose are Kodak DC265 and DC290.