Yeah, but is the project even still in development? I started looking around last summer for the tools necessary to burn the disc and get this going, but the links I remembered had started disappearing, and the only disc image anyone has is in that retarded DiscJuggler format. I'll be damned if I'm installing another CD recording app just to handle this. Plus, the last image compilation was done like three years ago, and most of the documentation has vanished.
To top it all off, DC-Linux on SourceForge is even deader than BSD.
So, if I'm just a noob to all this, how does one recommend that I get started? I already have a boot-capable Dreamcast and the Ethernet adapter, so I should be pretty much covered. I imagine that the keyboard and mouse would be easy enough to track down.
"The main thing we wanted to accomplish on this title was the genre merging of first person action with first person shooting [and some third-person play] with a whole new twist, which is live [creatures as] ammo, and the different types of strategy that would offer."
I guess the man has never played a game with Yoshi in it. Specifically, Super Mario World 2 and Yoshi's Story.
Arcanum didn't do it for me. I was *SO* stoked about the game until I got it in my hands.
First off, the turn-based combat was really difficult to handle, compared to Fallout's well-established fighting. You wouldn't know how many AP a move would cost unless you tried it, so it made strategy difficult.
Switching to real-time made the battles go lethally quickly. Especially with random encounters on the map. You'd get into the battle too fast and could have a dead character within 5 seconds without hardly a chance to engage. And to top it off, the difficulty distribution varied *way* too widely, so you could have a super-easy random encounter followed by an attack by monsters which can one-hit-kill you.
And the open-ended morality system is cool, but you're not really allowed to stick to one path or the other. As I recall, it is *extraordinarily difficult* to escape the first town without accruing some "dark side" points. Basically, you have to pass the trolls that are blockading the town, and the only way to get past 'em without a (very difficult) fight is to screw over the townfolk. There may be some class-specific ways to pass the fight, but you shouldn't have to do that. In the end, I had to plant a bunch of spike traps around the trolls to soften them up before the battle, and I *still* had to do the fight five or six times before I finally passed it.
I'm still thinking about picking it up on the cheap and trying again, but those design problems were just...awful. I spent ten hours in the sewers of Tarrant killing low-level creatures to try to catch up with my level discrepancy.
Basically, Intel wanted something they could trademark, because their legal team had told them that "586" wasn't trademarkable any more than 486 was, and Intel wanted a way to distinguish themselves from AMD and Cyrix.
Of course then my question becomes, WHAT IS SILICON KNIGHTS UP TO?
Not much of anything, actually. They're still working on GEIST and Too Human, but otherwise, their partnership with Nintendo came to a close earlier this year.
I've been using Mozilla (and then FireFox) for ages and I constantly do online banking (psecu), access my (admittedly too many) credit cards (mbna, discover, amex, etc) via web sites, get all my news online, buy stuff online, etc.
As was pointed out to me several months ago, MBNA started using a new system for managing online payments, and the company they contracted checked the UserAgent string and blocked Firefox, claiming it didn't support SSL.
I (and presumably others) called MBNA to complain about the situation (after all, the DOD was perfectly fine with me using Firefox to check my e-mail), and after navigating several individuals who simply didn't understand the situation, I finally got someone who appeared to know what I meant (but simultaneoulsy didn't care).
I'm trying to access it now in Moz 1.4 and it hasn't blocked me out yet, so who knows.
This is understandable, when you understand NASA politics and funding - In NASA, getting stuff done as soon as possible is ideal because if you take another four years, you could end up with an unfunded hunk of half-working metal instead.
NASA is great, but its a bit difficult to run an agency with 20-year projects when everything changes every 4.
Funny you say this. As I'm reading it, it looks 10-to-1 in favor of the Christians. Maybe your moderators are just now waking up, but in truth I'm seeing more people complaining about complainers than actual complainers...
The actions of one corrupt lobbyist group in the US won't easily affect the operations of a worldwide filesharing network with many members outside the US.
What's funny is that, if you've ever worked at an office supply store, you kinda know how some of the product SKUs work from the manufacturer.
HP uses the last character in many of its SKUs to indicate packaging variance. For instance, the 51625A cartridge is a standard series, but HP also produces E, G, and X series cartridges (though not for this particular printer, the classic DeskJet series models through the DeskJet 600). The G-series is economy-class, with half-full tanks, while the X-series is expanded capacity above the standard A-series.
So, when the customer in the advertisement is standing there, hanging on the last letter of the HP part number before getting shut down, people like me can amuse themselves by acknowledging that the employee is portrayed as an idiot and that the poor sap of a customer could've just walked out of there with a 100% vendor-certified compatible cartridge...:P
The HD is not USB - it's IDE, mounted internally. The connection interface is on the inside of the Network Adapter, which you also require to use it. Since all the games that need the HD are online-only, this matters little.
Also, it's Final Fantasy XI that needs the HD. FFXII likely will not.
PS1->PSOne: lost the serial port, so two-player, two-TV games such as Command & Conquer Red Alert Retaliation no longer work.
The PSOne didn't do that - The PlayStation itself lost that port over time. It also used to have a parallel port, but they killed that off as well (in the 700x series, IIRC). Both were used for cheat devices which led to bootleg accessories.
Hell - The very first release of the PlayStation didn't even have a special A/V cable - it had RCA jacks on the back of the unit itself - You just used plain ol' male-male RCA cables.
The PlayStation itself has evolved a fair bit over time. One series produced for a very short time had a quad-speed CD-ROM drive instead of a dual-speed.
Yeah, I can understand the borders not being supported (since the screens aren't big enough), but I still wish that they'd support SGB color schemes instead of reverting to the 4-color pallette...
I guess for Dragon Warrior I&II it's moot, since it's a dual GB/GBC cart, but for Donkey Kong, Mega Man V, and many others, you're stuck with 4-color only.
Lots of people seem to be weighing in only on one side of this debate, and that's console-specific exclusivity. I think a large amount of attention (and legal focus, possibly) should be paid to the territorial lockouts, however. Why is it that people find it perfectly reasonable to complain about the MPAA and DVD-CCA implementing DVD region coding, but not nearly as many people get up in arms about game region coding?
I remember when Advance Wars 2 was scheduled to come out in Great Britain, and it kept getting delayed for no apparent reason. Some of the UK shops started importing US product, and Nintendo tried to come down on them for it. But the fact of the matter is that there was plenty of demand for the game, and Nintendo was sitting on it for no good reason.
For those of you that don't know, Nintendo uses no region coding or lockouts in portable software (yet), so a US GBA can play Japanese and EU games. For some time, US gamers had to import Shining Soul, a Diablo-ish RPG based on Sega's Shining Force series, because Sega only released it in Japan and the EU, and wouldn't release it here.
Furthermore, Nintendo markets and publishes games to the different EU territories specifically, so having an EU-specific (IE - multilanguage) game isn't a problem either, especially on handhelds where NTSC/PAL/SECAM isn't an issue.
So, localization issues aside, why are the game manufacturers given leeway when we take the MPAA to task for the same tactics? Why is it that I must void my console warranty if I choose to import legally produced and purchased game software from other territories? My modded PSX is almost dead from drive failure, and I have quite a few DDR games that I won't be able to play anymore unless I chip my PSone. And that just sucks.
The article repeatedly mentions Sega's mag-stripe card systems and how this helps to alleviate the savegame system...but it also ignores other manufacturers that have done this, Konami, Capcom, and SNK in particular.
As a matter of fact, in most of these cases, the Japanese cabinets have had memory card access, but the US cabinets have had it removed for whatever reason.
Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 was originally supposed to have unlockable characters which could only be unlocked by taking a Dreamcast VMU to the arcade with you. In theory, it was also supposed to store game records and stuff. However, the US version had the VMU slots removed. SNK's Neo-Geo AES system cabinets usually had memory card slots as well, so that the games could function exactly as the home versions did.
As for Konami, many of the Bemani games feature PSX memory card slots so that, depending on the game/version played, you could do scorekeeping, customized step/beat patterns, Internet Ranking (via password saving), and other features.
I seem to remember that Midway also produced some NFL Blitz and similar sports games that had a slot for N64 memory packs...
As for your examples, like Zelda, Dragon Warrior, and Final Fantasy...The problem is that these games can't easily be "metered out" into credits - That hasn't been done since Nintendo's Play Choice 10. The only games I can think of offhand which can be played "infinitely" are pinball and fighters, provided that someone keeps popping in credits to play versus. They're designed to be short-term, so that people keep pumping in credits.
One of the reasons cited for arcade losses lately is that home consoles have comparable power to the arcade machines, meaning that there's little reason to go to the arcade when you can just play the same game at the comfort of home. It's one of the same market transitions that the MPAA fears like crazy.
I feel that's why Bemani games like Dance Dance Revolution and Drummania are so popular - They offer a unique experience that isn't easily recreated at home without a substantial hardware investment. Sure, you can buy softpads or metal pads for DDR, but the arcade is still where it's at for both ideal configurations and the social factor.
Everyone always says that console peripherals never sell well...So, perhaps the games needing the peripherals should be tried more in the arcade. What games are really popular in arcades? Silent Scope...Bemani titles...things like Mo-Cap Boxing, Martial Beat, and Police 911...and big-screen fighters.
I found it to be a much weaker game overall than the original, which was the reason I bought a SNES.
That's because Rare developed the second game. It took Nintendo a little while to realize how bad Rare was getting, especially since part of the team did so well with Goldeneye, and then proceeded to release the crap that was DK64.
Penny Arcade says it best. Note that I *liked* Starfox Adventures, but the comic definitely says what's wrong with DK64, and Donkey Kong Country 2, and Donkey Kong Country 3, and Banjo Kazooie, and Banjo Tooie, and Diddy's Kong Pilot, etc. etc. etc...
Also, a fair amount of suggestions are horribly short sighted, or uninformed. Like, when IT suggest, well why don't we simply build systems in house for this job. Well because i have a contract with Dell saying I won't do that, and in return they cut the company a great deal on the other 300 pcs we have to buy and replace every couple of years, not to mention the parts and service waranties that automatically are updated to four hour on site, by having this contract.
Well, if you actually tell your employees that, rather than throwing them some BS bone to go chew on, then you're already a few steps above most of the other managers out there.
Employees that can trust their bosses and feel like their bosses trust them have much higher morale (and productivity) than those who feel unappreciated or distrusted. If you just swat away your employees' suggestions with a careless remark or a counterpoint that everyone knows is BS, then you've become the manager that we all hate.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but is the project even still in development? I started looking around last summer for the tools necessary to burn the disc and get this going, but the links I remembered had started disappearing, and the only disc image anyone has is in that retarded DiscJuggler format. I'll be damned if I'm installing another CD recording app just to handle this. Plus, the last image compilation was done like three years ago, and most of the documentation has vanished.
To top it all off, DC-Linux on SourceForge is even deader than BSD.
So, if I'm just a noob to all this, how does one recommend that I get started? I already have a boot-capable Dreamcast and the Ethernet adapter, so I should be pretty much covered. I imagine that the keyboard and mouse would be easy enough to track down.
"The main thing we wanted to accomplish on this title was the genre merging of first person action with first person shooting [and some third-person play] with a whole new twist, which is live [creatures as] ammo, and the different types of strategy that would offer."
I guess the man has never played a game with Yoshi in it. Specifically, Super Mario World 2 and Yoshi's Story.
Arcanum didn't do it for me. I was *SO* stoked about the game until I got it in my hands.
First off, the turn-based combat was really difficult to handle, compared to Fallout's well-established fighting. You wouldn't know how many AP a move would cost unless you tried it, so it made strategy difficult.
Switching to real-time made the battles go lethally quickly. Especially with random encounters on the map. You'd get into the battle too fast and could have a dead character within 5 seconds without hardly a chance to engage. And to top it off, the difficulty distribution varied *way* too widely, so you could have a super-easy random encounter followed by an attack by monsters which can one-hit-kill you.
And the open-ended morality system is cool, but you're not really allowed to stick to one path or the other. As I recall, it is *extraordinarily difficult* to escape the first town without accruing some "dark side" points. Basically, you have to pass the trolls that are blockading the town, and the only way to get past 'em without a (very difficult) fight is to screw over the townfolk. There may be some class-specific ways to pass the fight, but you shouldn't have to do that. In the end, I had to plant a bunch of spike traps around the trolls to soften them up before the battle, and I *still* had to do the fight five or six times before I finally passed it.
I'm still thinking about picking it up on the cheap and trying again, but those design problems were just...awful. I spent ten hours in the sewers of Tarrant killing low-level creatures to try to catch up with my level discrepancy.
Well, obviously, the name means "five", right?
Basically, Intel wanted something they could trademark, because their legal team had told them that "586" wasn't trademarkable any more than 486 was, and Intel wanted a way to distinguish themselves from AMD and Cyrix.
Of course then my question becomes, WHAT IS SILICON KNIGHTS UP TO?
Not much of anything, actually. They're still working on GEIST and Too Human, but otherwise, their partnership with Nintendo came to a close earlier this year.
I've been using Mozilla (and then FireFox) for ages and I constantly do online banking (psecu), access my (admittedly too many) credit cards (mbna, discover, amex, etc) via web sites, get all my news online, buy stuff online, etc.
As was pointed out to me several months ago, MBNA started using a new system for managing online payments, and the company they contracted checked the UserAgent string and blocked Firefox, claiming it didn't support SSL.
I (and presumably others) called MBNA to complain about the situation (after all, the DOD was perfectly fine with me using Firefox to check my e-mail), and after navigating several individuals who simply didn't understand the situation, I finally got someone who appeared to know what I meant (but simultaneoulsy didn't care).
I'm trying to access it now in Moz 1.4 and it hasn't blocked me out yet, so who knows.
This is understandable, when you understand NASA politics and funding - In NASA, getting stuff done as soon as possible is ideal because if you take another four years, you could end up with an unfunded hunk of half-working metal instead.
NASA is great, but its a bit difficult to run an agency with 20-year projects when everything changes every 4.
I don't know about you but those keys are long gone for me.
I still remember mine! You can use them too if you like!
111-1111111
123-1234567
1234-1234567
Funny you say this. As I'm reading it, it looks 10-to-1 in favor of the Christians. Maybe your moderators are just now waking up, but in truth I'm seeing more people complaining about complainers than actual complainers...
The actions of one corrupt lobbyist group in the US won't easily affect the operations of a worldwide filesharing network with many members outside the US.
Interesting that you mentioned the Navy specifically, but omitted the Seabee base in Gulfport, right between Stennis and Keesler AFB.
My uncle was a tech instructor there for years until he retired.
There will be two flipper controls, two directional pads, and an 'A' and 'B' button.
Interesting that this describes the Virtual Boy *exactly*.
Sounds like some "industry analyst" is playing a joke.
Sigh...Funny, yes. Informative, no.
Biloxi is in Mississippi.
What's funny is that, if you've ever worked at an office supply store, you kinda know how some of the product SKUs work from the manufacturer.
:P
HP uses the last character in many of its SKUs to indicate packaging variance. For instance, the 51625A cartridge is a standard series, but HP also produces E, G, and X series cartridges (though not for this particular printer, the classic DeskJet series models through the DeskJet 600). The G-series is economy-class, with half-full tanks, while the X-series is expanded capacity above the standard A-series.
So, when the customer in the advertisement is standing there, hanging on the last letter of the HP part number before getting shut down, people like me can amuse themselves by acknowledging that the employee is portrayed as an idiot and that the poor sap of a customer could've just walked out of there with a 100% vendor-certified compatible cartridge...
Good points, but to add to your corrections:
The HD is not USB - it's IDE, mounted internally. The connection interface is on the inside of the Network Adapter, which you also require to use it. Since all the games that need the HD are online-only, this matters little.
Also, it's Final Fantasy XI that needs the HD. FFXII likely will not.
PS1->PSOne: lost the serial port, so two-player, two-TV games such as Command & Conquer Red Alert Retaliation no longer work.
The PSOne didn't do that - The PlayStation itself lost that port over time. It also used to have a parallel port, but they killed that off as well (in the 700x series, IIRC). Both were used for cheat devices which led to bootleg accessories.
Hell - The very first release of the PlayStation didn't even have a special A/V cable - it had RCA jacks on the back of the unit itself - You just used plain ol' male-male RCA cables.
The PlayStation itself has evolved a fair bit over time. One series produced for a very short time had a quad-speed CD-ROM drive instead of a dual-speed.
Yeah, I can understand the borders not being supported (since the screens aren't big enough), but I still wish that they'd support SGB color schemes instead of reverting to the 4-color pallette...
I guess for Dragon Warrior I&II it's moot, since it's a dual GB/GBC cart, but for Donkey Kong, Mega Man V, and many others, you're stuck with 4-color only.
Bender: You put a one and two zeros at the end of that and you got yourself a deal!
Lots of people seem to be weighing in only on one side of this debate, and that's console-specific exclusivity. I think a large amount of attention (and legal focus, possibly) should be paid to the territorial lockouts, however. Why is it that people find it perfectly reasonable to complain about the MPAA and DVD-CCA implementing DVD region coding, but not nearly as many people get up in arms about game region coding?
I remember when Advance Wars 2 was scheduled to come out in Great Britain, and it kept getting delayed for no apparent reason. Some of the UK shops started importing US product, and Nintendo tried to come down on them for it. But the fact of the matter is that there was plenty of demand for the game, and Nintendo was sitting on it for no good reason.
For those of you that don't know, Nintendo uses no region coding or lockouts in portable software (yet), so a US GBA can play Japanese and EU games. For some time, US gamers had to import Shining Soul, a Diablo-ish RPG based on Sega's Shining Force series, because Sega only released it in Japan and the EU, and wouldn't release it here.
Furthermore, Nintendo markets and publishes games to the different EU territories specifically, so having an EU-specific (IE - multilanguage) game isn't a problem either, especially on handhelds where NTSC/PAL/SECAM isn't an issue.
So, localization issues aside, why are the game manufacturers given leeway when we take the MPAA to task for the same tactics? Why is it that I must void my console warranty if I choose to import legally produced and purchased game software from other territories? My modded PSX is almost dead from drive failure, and I have quite a few DDR games that I won't be able to play anymore unless I chip my PSone. And that just sucks.
The article repeatedly mentions Sega's mag-stripe card systems and how this helps to alleviate the savegame system...but it also ignores other manufacturers that have done this, Konami, Capcom, and SNK in particular.
As a matter of fact, in most of these cases, the Japanese cabinets have had memory card access, but the US cabinets have had it removed for whatever reason.
Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 was originally supposed to have unlockable characters which could only be unlocked by taking a Dreamcast VMU to the arcade with you. In theory, it was also supposed to store game records and stuff. However, the US version had the VMU slots removed. SNK's Neo-Geo AES system cabinets usually had memory card slots as well, so that the games could function exactly as the home versions did.
As for Konami, many of the Bemani games feature PSX memory card slots so that, depending on the game/version played, you could do scorekeeping, customized step/beat patterns, Internet Ranking (via password saving), and other features.
I seem to remember that Midway also produced some NFL Blitz and similar sports games that had a slot for N64 memory packs...
As for your examples, like Zelda, Dragon Warrior, and Final Fantasy...The problem is that these games can't easily be "metered out" into credits - That hasn't been done since Nintendo's Play Choice 10. The only games I can think of offhand which can be played "infinitely" are pinball and fighters, provided that someone keeps popping in credits to play versus. They're designed to be short-term, so that people keep pumping in credits.
One of the reasons cited for arcade losses lately is that home consoles have comparable power to the arcade machines, meaning that there's little reason to go to the arcade when you can just play the same game at the comfort of home. It's one of the same market transitions that the MPAA fears like crazy.
...things like Mo-Cap Boxing, Martial Beat, and Police 911...and big-screen fighters.
I feel that's why Bemani games like Dance Dance Revolution and Drummania are so popular - They offer a unique experience that isn't easily recreated at home without a substantial hardware investment. Sure, you can buy softpads or metal pads for DDR, but the arcade is still where it's at for both ideal configurations and the social factor.
Everyone always says that console peripherals never sell well...So, perhaps the games needing the peripherals should be tried more in the arcade. What games are really popular in arcades? Silent Scope...Bemani titles
I found it to be a much weaker game overall than the original, which was the reason I bought a SNES.
That's because Rare developed the second game. It took Nintendo a little while to realize how bad Rare was getting, especially since part of the team did so well with Goldeneye, and then proceeded to release the crap that was DK64.
Penny Arcade says it best. Note that I *liked* Starfox Adventures, but the comic definitely says what's wrong with DK64, and Donkey Kong Country 2, and Donkey Kong Country 3, and Banjo Kazooie, and Banjo Tooie, and Diddy's Kong Pilot, etc. etc. etc...
Also, a fair amount of suggestions are horribly short sighted, or uninformed. Like, when IT suggest, well why don't we simply build systems in house for this job. Well because i have a contract with Dell saying I won't do that, and in return they cut the company a great deal on the other 300 pcs we have to buy and replace every couple of years, not to mention the parts and service waranties that automatically are updated to four hour on site, by having this contract.
Well, if you actually tell your employees that, rather than throwing them some BS bone to go chew on, then you're already a few steps above most of the other managers out there.
Employees that can trust their bosses and feel like their bosses trust them have much higher morale (and productivity) than those who feel unappreciated or distrusted. If you just swat away your employees' suggestions with a careless remark or a counterpoint that everyone knows is BS, then you've become the manager that we all hate.
One word: Gameboy.
Does that price include shipping?
:)
Because you know...it probably costs more to ship it than to build it...