Not true at all. It is NOT socially acceptable for a middle-aged businessman to read Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon is for preteen and early-teen girls. Not only that, Sailor Moon ended years ago... Nakayoshi (one of a thousand phone-book sized manga anthology magazines that gets printed every week) replaced it with another story.
The middle-aged businessmen are reading a class of comics made specifically for businessmen. They are aptly called "Business Comics". Now these comics aren't necessarily ABOUT business (although a huge amount of them are), but they are tailored to the businessman market.
Women have their own kind of comics (Women's Comics). Young men have their own (Youth Comics). Boys, girls, etc. of all ages have comics tailored for their gender and specific age group.
Basically walk down the aisle of your local Barnes & Noble, and imagine *EVERY* story there done as comic books. All the biographies, the historical fiction, the "true crime", the romance, the mystery, the documentaries... All of them written much as they are, except as comics. THAT is what comics are like in Japan.
Just about the only thing you WON'T see as comics in Japan are scholarly works -- i.e. things which are meant to be totally informative rather than entertaining... On the non-scholarly end though, even some of the informative stuff like instructional "HOW-TO" books are sometimes made as manga.
What you see outside of Japan is in fact a very small subset, mostly geared at the "otaku" (geek/freak/fanboy|girl) market (which I am a part of, but have no illusions about).
Quick explanation -- (really you should google for this info but oh well)
The stack is a LIFO (Last in First out) data structure. OS's and programs use it to store all sorts of data, but one thing it's commonly used for is storing return addresses for subroutines and such.
By "stack smashing" what people mean is the typical goal of a buffer overflow attack. A program that doesn't do bounds checking on an array of data can be fed a huge amount of data that exceeds the length of the buffer that it has allocated to hold that memory. It then starts walking over other parts of memory and runs into the stack (which exists in memory just like everything else).
If you overwrite a return address in the stack with a pointer that points to some code that you've written to memory with the buffer overflow you just did, you can execute arbitrary code and thusly take control of a system (with whatever privileges the program you just attacked uses).
Since a lot of your overflowing data is going into the stack, it's a potential space for a lot of the code you might want to execute. Since the stack should only hold data and pointers, not code, it's safe to make it non-executeable with the MMU. This makes it harder to write a buffer overflow exploit, although it doesn't totally prevent it (since you can stick your malicious code in non-stack space as well).
(Feel free to flame/mod me down for any mistakes in this explanation.:-) )
The phone company will never ever give you an ACTS line. It's not something they give out. No end-user customer "owns" a ACTS-type phone.
All customer owned payphones (COCOTs) use regular phone lines and do all their billing internally. A COCOT is relatively easy to obtain -- anyone can buy one, and it will happily ask for your quarters.:-)
I still don't understand why Amuro would take such pride in building a dumb robot that does nothing more than roll around, bleep "Hello, Amuro... Hello, Amuro.... Genki..." all day and pal around with a bunch of even more annoying little kids....
I also want to know why the heck robotics engineers keep building and rebuilding the damn things in the future, as newer model but equally stupid Haros keep showing up decades later.
(For those who don't know, Haro is a roughly-volleyball sized and shaped, green, semi-sentient robot that flits around on mechanical ear/wings and rolls around spouting inane babble. It (he?) appears in various TV series and movies in the Mobile Suit Gundam Universal Century continuum... and even more bizarrely in the near-totally-unrelated Gundam SEED TV series that began airing this year.... For more info, you can check out this mirror of the (sadly no longer around) Gundam Project's FAQ.... For more info just do a search for "Mobile Suit Gundam" on Google.:-)
Well, my response here is a bit late, but perhaps you'll see it if you check your posts on your info page like I do. ^^;;
Anyway, yes, there is a Phantasy Star for the Megadrive -- it's even mentioned in the article this story links to. It's hard to find, and it was only released in Japanese. It's currently the best version of Phantasy Star available. However there are remakes of the original Phantasy Star games under development now for the PS1/PS2, and they are looking much nicer! (Not to be confused with the recent GBA versions, which are straight ports).
Don't complain to me about not knowing Japanese.:-) I consider learning Japanese to be a requirement for all fans of console games, especially RPGs. Japan is the holy land for console RPGs and you need to learn it just like Jewish people should learn Hebrew.:-)
I can certain enjoy a high school simulation... The appeal is you can go back and do things differently. You could try being someone else, joined a different club, met a different girl, etc....
Maybe there are FPS's that would appeal to people in the military because they would let them do things differently as well...
I have a friend who drove an M1 in the army, but he still plays WWIII tank simulations... Why? Because he never got a chance to take on the Russkies.:-)
There were actually a fair number of games for the Famicom (the real name of the NES before the name was changed for the American market) in Japan that had nudity -- and even sex. The trick was that they were all for the Famicom Disk System, the floppy disk add-on, that wasn't released in the States.
These games were sold without Nintendo's approval, but they are full, original games, not simple ROM hacks with changed graphics.
If you do some searching (searching in Japanese helps:-) you can find quite a few adult games for the FDS for download.
Anyway the article's list seems kind of U.S.-centric... It does list a couple of Japanese games, but there are in fact much harder games to find (that constitute a much greater prize) than those. ^_^ Well, aside from Phantasy Star for the Megadrive, which really IS rather hard to find.
Quite a few ArcadeCD (as opposed to SuperCD) PCEngine games are rather rare. The Arcade Card games were among the best ports of many arcade games, (very notably among them, the best version of Strider).
No matter what the origin though, rare games are expensive. ^_^ It's fun to find all the great hard-to-find classics (like Suchie Pai Remix for the Saturn, which undid the censorship of the original Suchie Pai port -- Suchie Pai Special, but was produced in far smaller numbers).
The Kenwood TrueX drives were spectacularly unreliable.
While they could read glass-pressed CD-ROMs at insane speeds, they suffered horribly at reading CD-Rs, dropping to single digit read speeds. The real problem though came from the fact that the Kenwood TrueX drive didn't really use multiple laser assemblies. Instead, it used a single laser and a beam splitter to create multiple beams. The beam-splitter assembly frequently failed, sometimes only a month into use. Kenwood was eventually slapped with a class-action lawsuit because of this.
I do wish someone would build true multi-laser drives, but so far nobody has.
...is that they are done by people who really don't understand what they're talking about. They measure the SPEED of a burn as if its the most important thing.
The fact of the matter though is that speed is largely arbitrary -- the issue is how many errors you are burning onto your disc at that speed. *EVERY* disc has errors, and the best burners are those that can create the fewest -- extra points for doing it quickly on crappy media. The problem is that there are very few tools to test BLER/C1 errors -- the "invisible" errors that are automatically corrected by your drive but increase into hard C2 errors and then uncorrectable ISO9660 errors with time and decay. You need a drive capable of doing it and software which can understand the data.
Some people, lacking the tools, have even hacked portable CD players into BLER-measurement devices........but the vast majority of reviewers just measure "how fast" the burn goes. Great -- you burned a disc in 2 1/2 minutes. Now lets see how long that disc lasts?
Actually, it's quite the opposite. DVDs just have image data encoded, not the vertical blank area (which is where Macrovision type 1 is encoded).
Instead there is just a "Macrovision bit" which tells whether or not the content creator has paid Macrovision their royalties for type 1 Macrovision, or type 1 and type 2 Macrovision. Your DVD player's firmware actually generates the macrovision signal ITSELF, on command. Removing Macrovision simply means adjusting your firmware so it never turns it on.
(For the curious, type 1 Macrovision works by creating flashing bars in the vertical blank area. Your VCR's auto-gain circuit looks there to try to figure out how black black is (so it can record with the greatest dynamic range -- important for a crappy format like VHS) and sees the bars and gets convinced that white is black... If you've ever seen Macrovision at work, where the image fluctuates in brightness, it's flashing in time with the bars in the vertical blank. Those "image stabilizers" you see that remove Macrovision type 1 just strip out the vertical blank and replace it with its own. Macrovision type 2 isn't used as often. It works by mucking up the chroma signal in a composite signal. Avoiding it is as easy as not using the composite output.:-)
...except I've already paid for those minutes. They are not "free" minutes (I have to pay more for my service for those minutes than I would with just the minimal service plan). I have to plan -- a month in advance -- how many minutes I'm going to talk, or risk being socked by a high per-minute rate after that.......and you DON'T get thousands of minutes. You get thousands of middle-of-night minutes.... Daytime minutes are another matter......AND you have to pay for these minutes for local calls, as well as long distance.
Basically what this means is that, rather than getting long distance calls for free -- as you assert, instead there is no such thing as a local call and you pay long distance on every call. (There actually IS one provider in my area that provides unlimited anytime talktime for local calls, making the local/long-distance difference closer to that of a landline)....and this still doesn't get into the logistics of calling internationally...
Plus this STILL has nothing to do with the problem that I can't PICK my provider on the fly without getting my phone/card reprogrammed, like you can in some other places.
One of the nicest features of GSM and -- strangely -- the one that's not really implemented in the U.S., is the ability to change your service provider on the fly -- to be able to get a list of available providers and pick the one you want to use at the time.
Instead in the US you are basically locked into your provider. You have to sign a long (at least a month) binding contract that limits you to that provider and your phone always defaults to that provider. If that provider is not available you are penalized heavily when your phone switches to use a provider that isn't "yours".
Ideally you should be able to pick whichever provider in whichever area is offering you the best value/performance in the area you are currently in -- and be able to change for each and every call.
Instead in the U.S. if you want to change providers you have to sign a new contract and often even have to buy a new phone (unless you're using GSM). "Prepaid" cellphone service in the U.S. is a joke. It's no different from the normal service -- you are still locked into that provider from that phone -- you just pay up front instead of getting billed later.:-P
This is ridiculous and anticompetetive.
In contrast, long distance service from a landline in the USA is wonderful and highly competetive. From my home phone I can use *ANY* long distance carrier I want. I don't need a contract. I can dial a 1010 number to switch my carrier on the fly, or I can dial a 1-800 number and use a prepaid phone card (often the cheapest solution). I'm NEVER "locked in" to a provider. I don't have to send $50 to AT&T each month for a fixed amount of "minutes" of long distance call time.
Why isn't wireless service in the U.S. like long distance service in the U.S.?:-P
(For the record, presently I use a prepaid calling card from Sam's Club that uses AT&T, for $0.036/minute domestically with no per-call surcharge. The card may be "prepaid" but in actuality I only add minutes to it in approx $10 chunks on the fly as I need them, because I can add calling time to it whenever I feel like it with a simple call to the customer service line. If I want to make a very long call to another country sometimes I use a different card with a surcharge but lower per-minute, I almost always use the AT&T card though to call first and find out if the person is there so I don't get needlessly smacked with the surcharge.)
...if mainstream stores carried Japanese versions of games.
I simply don't play the American versions because they are usually 1) dubbed , 2) censored , 3) modified in some other way, or more often 4) just plain don't exist (most of my favorite games were never ever given a U.S. release, like Giren's Ambition series, Tokimeki Memorial series, Shin Megami Tensei series, etc.)
There are exceptions, where there is a good, non-mangled non-censored English translation and the voices aren't dubbed over, but they are few and far between.
This is where mail-order stuff comes to my rescue.:-)
Probably the best utopia I've ever seen is in James Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear".
In it a group of "seeded" space colonists grow from birth outside the influence of Earth, and create an economy that is based on respect rather than slips of green paper. The interesting thing is that it's *STILL* capitalist, but it's based on scarcity of respect rather than scarcity of resources (everyone has access to resources but not everyone is respected).
Of course then a bunch of people from Earth show up and tell them why they should charge money for goods, why they should worship a god,why extramarital/teen/non-missionary sex was bad, why they shouldn't let people listen to their music, etc.
Naturally this doesn't go over well. It's interesting watching the people from Earth behaving like asses... It's kind of like someone walking into a buffet who doesn't understand the concept and winds up trying to eat so much food that they die from a ruptured stomach.
Why TurboLinux CAN'T die (or Linux in Asia dies)
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Turbolinux Not Dead Yet
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· Score: 2, Informative
People wonder about why TurboLinux is still around when they know nobody who uses it. The reason it's still around is because it has one killer feature: Japanese support. It is the only distro with good Japanese support. Other distros have a hodgepodge of Japanese implemented but they are nowhere near as thorough (sure Japanese might work in the installer, but will it work in your shell? Will your file manager let you easily see Japanese filenames? etc.)
In addition it also supports other East Asian languages better than any other distro but Japanese is the most important since Japan has the best track record for actually paying money for software.
You see, supporting languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. is not just a matter of translating the text in your application. The big problem is actually supporting the multibyte text format itself in every display. Most applications expect text to be one byte per character, and they format text that way and always render as ASCII. You can patch the graphical text rendering functions to render Japanese automatically but if the application still assumes that the text area is a certain size it will look fucked up. Not only that, but Linux uses a real hodgepodge of display mechanisms so you have to frantically patch to get them all.
TurboLinux is still behind Japanese Windows and Japanese MacOS in terms of ability to use Japanese/Chinese/Korean text anywhere you can use Roman text. This has really hurt the acceptance of Linux in East Asia.... but TurboLinux is getting better at least.
So far no other distro has come anywhere near as close as Turbo in support. If Turbo dies then Linux in East Asia will suffer a major blow from which it may not recover. (Red Flag Linux might survive, but RFL *STILL* not as good in terms of Chinese-language support as Turbo).
If you want to find a user of Turbo in the U.S. to see, look for someone who speaks Japanese.:-)
When I did Shogo, I too had a problem with a nVidia card, namely the
TNT2 ultra. I reported this problem to Nick Triantos at nVidia, and he
found the reason. The new driver revision fixed the bug.
I really have to say that I (as head of the Shogo team) never had a
problem with nVidia, especially with their Linux team. They did and
still do a great job.
Thomas Frieden, Hyperion Entertainment
Since Thomas here posted as an AC, I thought I'd reply to it to point it out. I've come to realize that I was overly harsh in my criticism of nVidia as a whole. While I greatly dislike many of their corporate decisions and management, I shouldn't have included their Linux driver team in the rant. My apologies to Nick.
Despite that, I still encourage people to get stuff besides nVidia until nVidia's management change their minds about secrecy.. If it wasn't for that secrecy, it would be easy to fix stuff that broke.:-)
(Someone please mod Thomas's comment up to 1 at least so more people can see his opinion)
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Re:I'm not really surprised
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Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Would it be possible to include the Windows and Linux binaries in the
box set then, making the data files available to both, but in one
package? That way, no distribution channnels would need to change, and
Linux users could buy games in their local games store.
Certainly it's POSSIBLE, it's just that the major publishers don't consider Linux to be worth their time -- period. They won't do it.
Unless you're suggesting that we do the port and somehow magically make it appear on all the Windows version discs. You don't understand, we buy a license for the Linux version. We don't make any money off the sales of the Windows version. Even if we somehow did the port before they were done with the Windows version (how can we port something that isn't done?) and convinced them to put our binary on the disc, we would not make a cent because THEY are selling the Windows version, not us. And if you're about to suggest that they would pay us royalties for the privilige of including our port on their Windows version disc, think again! If they really thought it was worth their money and time to include a Linux version on their Windows install discs, we wouldn't have to license it from them!
For some reason people can't seem to fathom that the people who do the ports have to PAY for the rights, because the original publishers JUST DON'T CARE about Linux. *THEY REALLY DON'T GIVE A DAMN*. They are not about to take the risk of investing in something that they don't care about, so we take the risk by making the investment ourselves (by buying the license and funding the port). If the port sells well, we make money from sales (and they make money from royalties, maybe in the process convincing them that Linux is worthwhile). It's as simple as that.
It really frustrates me that time and time again people keep suggesting the same "solutions" which just aren't possible. The only way to get free downloadable Linux binaries, Linux binaries included with Windows version, or even inexpensive binary-only packages that you combine with the Windows version, is if THE ORIGINAL PUBLISHER is the one doing it. Loki, Hyperion, etc. can't. We can only buy the rights and then sell our own version.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Re:I'm not really surprised
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Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Here's another suggestion then- how about something like a Bleemcast!
equivalent then; charge less for your port, but require the data files
off the 'original' version. I know that Bleem! is dead though, so this
obviously doesn't work _that_ well.
You're missing something here -- we don't make a cent on sales of the original. Our cost in terms of pay to our coders to do the port, and the cost per copy of royalties, and the up-front advance payments all stay the same. If we have to pay $5-$10 a copy (royalties vary depending on the agreement) we can't very well sell your Bleemcast-equivalent for cheap and expect to make anything. Bleem! is a totally different scenario. They didn't have to pay a cent in licensing fees/royalties. They just wrote an emulator. Not only that, but the bulk of the work was done after the emulator was written, it just needed tweaking to run a different game. The cost and effort involved per-title is minimal in comparison to what we do. We have to pay to port each game (although if we do multiple Quake engine or multiple Lithtech engine games the ports are a little easier). We have to pay our coders to port it. We have to pay our royalties/up-front license costs. We have to pay these things that Bleem! did not.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Heh... maybe it's because the Amiga page is the only one of the three
(MAc, Linux, and Amiga) pages on your website.
That is an issue. The page has been like that for some time, I actually asked that it be fixed up as it's been "under construction" for far too long. There were, however real pages for the Mac and Linux stuff before that, then our site went into redesign and they never got added back. You might be able to find the old pages in Google's cache or something. We *DID* have active pages for Linux at the time our games were released though, so this argument isn't strictly correct. I can understand, however, how one could imagine the situation based on the current status of the website.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
The lack of response to his post shows that people generally don't
respond to trolls. "The Amiga market, by a good estimate, is around
100 times smaller than the Linux community"? Do you notice that he
gave no source for this statistic? That's because he just made it up.
Well, maybe I wasn't being humble enough when I called it a "good" estimate, since it really was my own. However it is just that -- an estimate -- one that is based on personal experience. There are a LOT more Linux users than Amiga users. My best GUESS, if you'd rather I phrase it that way, is that there are about 100 Linux users for every Amiga user. It's not based on hard research, just on impressions. Again, I only said it was an estimate. If you have hard figures from a reliably study, then that takes precedence. I would bet an Andy Jackson that my estimate is within an order of magnitude of the exact number.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Re:huh? I already got free.
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Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 2, Informative
You pay them a "big chunk of money", for the right to pay all of the
porting expenses, so that you can pay them some huge percentage of the
unit profit margin when you're done with the port?
Sounds like the size of the Linux market and the alleged expectations
of Linux users aren't the only problem with the business model.
It's not just Linux. This is how licensing a port works in the real world. Companies that license Playstation ports do the same thing. Just about EVERY Mac port is made this way. Basically unless the original publisher decides ON THEIR OWN to create a port of the game (and then either does an in-house port or subcontracts), then you have to pay them for the right to port the game and to sell that port. They won't let you do it for free, and they won't let you do it without up-front payment (otherwise non-serious people could just secure the rights for free and then sit on them).
This REALLY IS how it works, and companies like Loki, Macplay, and any other company that specializes in porting games all do it this way. What you are buying is the rights to the game. They don't think the port is worth their time, but you do. They won't give you the rights for free though because not only do the aforementioned non-serious people create a problem, but it also costs them money to pay the lawyers who read and okay the license agreement. If they can't make a certain amount of money from your license then it's not even worth their time to license it to you.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Interestingly, I bought SiN waybackwhen, and just upgraded my machine.
On a Mandrake 8.1 (Gaming Edition) install, with the latest nVidia
drivers, I was able to run SiN with the OpenGL drivers without a
problem.
I'm glad to hear this! I haven't tested it lately on an nVidia card, so maybe the current drivers have fixed the problem that was breaking the game. If the Linux driver team fixed this because of our input then I will definitely have to soften my stance a bit......still you have to understand that it's really frustrating when there's a problem and you don't have the information you need to quickly figure out what is causing it and how to fix it.:-/
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Umm... I suggest you look at both the XF86 and DRI homepages....
I really don't need to say anything more than that.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Re:I'm not really surprised
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Loki Games Closing?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
We actually considered this, unfortunately most major publishers specifically prohibit making their products downloadable -- even after credit card verification. It opens up a big can of worms like credit card fraud and the like so they generally prevent us from doing such things in the license agreement.
In the future as we move more towards distribution of stuff over the 'net, perhaps these attitudes might change, but as it is this is simply not possible. The companies like having that physical box, that keeps the product "real" and makes it harder for numbers to be fudged about the number of copies produced, etc. I do understand this perspective and agree with it somewhat, but the obvious advantages of digital distribution I think will in the end override these concerns. These same issues affect the movie and music industries as well, and they are only just now sticking their toes into the digital content distribution market (after thoroughly sueing a lot of people I might add.:-( ).
We'll see what tomorrow brings.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Slashdot Mirror
Not true at all. It is NOT socially acceptable for a middle-aged businessman to read Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon is for preteen and early-teen girls. Not only that, Sailor Moon ended years ago... Nakayoshi (one of a thousand phone-book sized manga anthology magazines that gets printed every week) replaced it with another story.
The middle-aged businessmen are reading a class of comics made specifically for businessmen. They are aptly called "Business Comics". Now these comics aren't necessarily ABOUT business (although a huge amount of them are), but they are tailored to the businessman market.
Women have their own kind of comics (Women's Comics). Young men have their own (Youth Comics). Boys, girls, etc. of all ages have comics tailored for their gender and specific age group.
Basically walk down the aisle of your local Barnes & Noble, and imagine *EVERY* story there done as comic books. All the biographies, the historical fiction, the "true crime", the romance, the mystery, the documentaries... All of them written much as they are, except as comics. THAT is what comics are like in Japan.
Just about the only thing you WON'T see as comics in Japan are scholarly works -- i.e. things which are meant to be totally informative rather than entertaining... On the non-scholarly end though, even some of the informative stuff like instructional "HOW-TO" books are sometimes made as manga.
What you see outside of Japan is in fact a very small subset, mostly geared at the "otaku" (geek/freak/fanboy|girl) market (which I am a part of, but have no illusions about).
Quick explanation -- (really you should google for this info but oh well)
:-) )
The stack is a LIFO (Last in First out) data structure. OS's and programs use it to store all sorts of data, but one thing it's commonly used for is storing return addresses for subroutines and such.
By "stack smashing" what people mean is the typical goal of a buffer overflow attack. A program that doesn't do bounds checking on an array of data can be fed a huge amount of data that exceeds the length of the buffer that it has allocated to hold that memory. It then starts walking over other parts of memory and runs into the stack (which exists in memory just like everything else).
If you overwrite a return address in the stack with a pointer that points to some code that you've written to memory with the buffer overflow you just did, you can execute arbitrary code and thusly take control of a system (with whatever privileges the program you just attacked uses).
Since a lot of your overflowing data is going into the stack, it's a potential space for a lot of the code you might want to execute. Since the stack should only hold data and pointers, not code, it's safe to make it non-executeable with the MMU. This makes it harder to write a buffer overflow exploit, although it doesn't totally prevent it (since you can stick your malicious code in non-stack space as well).
(Feel free to flame/mod me down for any mistakes in this explanation.
The phone company will never ever give you an ACTS line. It's not something they give out. No end-user customer "owns" a ACTS-type phone.
:-)
All customer owned payphones (COCOTs) use regular phone lines and do all their billing internally. A COCOT is relatively easy to obtain -- anyone can buy one, and it will happily ask for your quarters.
I still don't understand why Amuro would take such pride in building a dumb robot that does nothing more than roll around, bleep "Hello, Amuro... Hello, Amuro.... Genki..." all day and pal around with a bunch of even more annoying little kids....
I also want to know why the heck robotics engineers keep building and rebuilding the damn things in the future, as newer model but equally stupid Haros keep showing up decades later.
(For those who don't know, Haro is a roughly-volleyball sized and shaped, green, semi-sentient robot that flits around on mechanical ear/wings and rolls around spouting inane babble. It (he?) appears in various TV series and movies in the Mobile Suit Gundam Universal Century continuum... and even more bizarrely in the near-totally-unrelated Gundam SEED TV series that began airing this year.... For more info, you can check out this mirror of the (sadly no longer around) Gundam Project's FAQ.... For more info just do a search for "Mobile Suit Gundam" on Google.
Anyway, yes, there is a Phantasy Star for the Megadrive -- it's even mentioned in the article this story links to. It's hard to find, and it was only released in Japanese. It's currently the best version of Phantasy Star available. However there are remakes of the original Phantasy Star games under development now for the PS1/PS2, and they are looking much nicer! (Not to be confused with the recent GBA versions, which are straight ports).
Don't complain to me about not knowing Japanese.
I can certain enjoy a high school simulation... The appeal is you can go back and do things differently. You could try being someone else, joined a different club, met a different girl, etc....
Maybe there are FPS's that would appeal to people in the military because they would let them do things differently as well...
I have a friend who drove an M1 in the army, but he still plays WWIII tank simulations... Why? Because he never got a chance to take on the Russkies.
There were actually a fair number of games for the Famicom (the real name of the NES before the name was changed for the American market) in Japan that had nudity -- and even sex. The trick was that they were all for the Famicom Disk System, the floppy disk add-on, that wasn't released in the States.
:-) you can find quite a few adult games for the FDS for download.
These games were sold without Nintendo's approval, but they are full, original games, not simple ROM hacks with changed graphics.
If you do some searching (searching in Japanese helps
Anyway the article's list seems kind of U.S.-centric... It does list a couple of Japanese games, but there are in fact much harder games to find (that constitute a much greater prize) than those. ^_^ Well, aside from Phantasy Star for the Megadrive, which really IS rather hard to find.
Quite a few ArcadeCD (as opposed to SuperCD) PCEngine games are rather rare. The Arcade Card games were among the best ports of many arcade games, (very notably among them, the best version of Strider).
No matter what the origin though, rare games are expensive. ^_^ It's fun to find all the great hard-to-find classics (like Suchie Pai Remix for the Saturn, which undid the censorship of the original Suchie Pai port -- Suchie Pai Special, but was produced in far smaller numbers).
The Kenwood TrueX drives were spectacularly unreliable.
While they could read glass-pressed CD-ROMs at insane speeds, they suffered horribly at reading CD-Rs, dropping to single digit read speeds. The real problem though came from the fact that the Kenwood TrueX drive didn't really use multiple laser assemblies. Instead, it used a single laser and a beam splitter to create multiple beams. The beam-splitter assembly frequently failed, sometimes only a month into use. Kenwood was eventually slapped with a class-action lawsuit because of this.
I do wish someone would build true multi-laser drives, but so far nobody has.
...is that they are done by people who really don't understand what they're talking about. They measure the SPEED of a burn as if its the most important thing.
...but the vast majority of reviewers just measure "how fast" the burn goes. Great -- you burned a disc in 2 1/2 minutes. Now lets see how long that disc lasts?
The fact of the matter though is that speed is largely arbitrary -- the issue is how many errors you are burning onto your disc at that speed. *EVERY* disc has errors, and the best burners are those that can create the fewest -- extra points for doing it quickly on crappy media. The problem is that there are very few tools to test BLER/C1 errors -- the "invisible" errors that are automatically corrected by your drive but increase into hard C2 errors and then uncorrectable ISO9660 errors with time and decay. You need a drive capable of doing it and software which can understand the data.
Some people, lacking the tools, have even hacked portable CD players into BLER-measurement devices.....
Actually, it's quite the opposite. DVDs just have image data encoded, not the vertical blank area (which is where Macrovision type 1 is encoded).
:-)
Instead there is just a "Macrovision bit" which tells whether or not the content creator has paid Macrovision their royalties for type 1 Macrovision, or type 1 and type 2 Macrovision. Your DVD player's firmware actually generates the macrovision signal ITSELF, on command. Removing Macrovision simply means adjusting your firmware so it never turns it on.
(For the curious, type 1 Macrovision works by creating flashing bars in the vertical blank area. Your VCR's auto-gain circuit looks there to try to figure out how black black is (so it can record with the greatest dynamic range -- important for a crappy format like VHS) and sees the bars and gets convinced that white is black... If you've ever seen Macrovision at work, where the image fluctuates in brightness, it's flashing in time with the bars in the vertical blank. Those "image stabilizers" you see that remove Macrovision type 1 just strip out the vertical blank and replace it with its own. Macrovision type 2 isn't used as often. It works by mucking up the chroma signal in a composite signal. Avoiding it is as easy as not using the composite output.
...except I've already paid for those minutes. They are not "free" minutes (I have to pay more for my service for those minutes than I would with just the minimal service plan). I have to plan -- a month in advance -- how many minutes I'm going to talk, or risk being socked by a high per-minute rate after that.... ...and you DON'T get thousands of minutes. You get thousands of middle-of-night minutes.... Daytime minutes are another matter... ...AND you have to pay for these minutes for local calls, as well as long distance.
...and this still doesn't get into the logistics of calling internationally...
Basically what this means is that, rather than getting long distance calls for free -- as you assert, instead there is no such thing as a local call and you pay long distance on every call. (There actually IS one provider in my area that provides unlimited anytime talktime for local calls, making the local/long-distance difference closer to that of a landline).
Plus this STILL has nothing to do with the problem that I can't PICK my provider on the fly without getting my phone/card reprogrammed, like you can in some other places.
Uhh... It's since been discovered that there are most likely more than a few asteroids with satellites out there. We already know of several.
The earliest discovered one being Ida's satellite, Dactyl, which the Galileo probe took some very nice pictures of on its way to Jupiter.
One of the nicest features of GSM and -- strangely -- the one that's not really implemented in the U.S., is the ability to change your service provider on the fly -- to be able to get a list of available providers and pick the one you want to use at the time.
:-P
:-P
Instead in the US you are basically locked into your provider. You have to sign a long (at least a month) binding contract that limits you to that provider and your phone always defaults to that provider. If that provider is not available you are penalized heavily when your phone switches to use a provider that isn't "yours".
Ideally you should be able to pick whichever provider in whichever area is offering you the best value/performance in the area you are currently in -- and be able to change for each and every call.
Instead in the U.S. if you want to change providers you have to sign a new contract and often even have to buy a new phone (unless you're using GSM). "Prepaid" cellphone service in the U.S. is a joke. It's no different from the normal service -- you are still locked into that provider from that phone -- you just pay up front instead of getting billed later.
This is ridiculous and anticompetetive.
In contrast, long distance service from a landline in the USA is wonderful and highly competetive. From my home phone I can use *ANY* long distance carrier I want. I don't need a contract. I can dial a 1010 number to switch my carrier on the fly, or I can dial a 1-800 number and use a prepaid phone card (often the cheapest solution). I'm NEVER "locked in" to a provider. I don't have to send $50 to AT&T each month for a fixed amount of "minutes" of long distance call time.
Why isn't wireless service in the U.S. like long distance service in the U.S.?
(For the record, presently I use a prepaid calling card from Sam's Club that uses AT&T, for $0.036/minute domestically with no per-call surcharge. The card may be "prepaid" but in actuality I only add minutes to it in approx $10 chunks on the fly as I need them, because I can add calling time to it whenever I feel like it with a simple call to the customer service line. If I want to make a very long call to another country sometimes I use a different card with a surcharge but lower per-minute, I almost always use the AT&T card though to call first and find out if the person is there so I don't get needlessly smacked with the surcharge.)
I simply don't play the American versions because they are usually 1) dubbed , 2) censored , 3) modified in some other way, or more often 4) just plain don't exist (most of my favorite games were never ever given a U.S. release, like Giren's Ambition series, Tokimeki Memorial series, Shin Megami Tensei series, etc.)
There are exceptions, where there is a good, non-mangled non-censored English translation and the voices aren't dubbed over, but they are few and far between.
This is where mail-order stuff comes to my rescue.
Probably the best utopia I've ever seen is in James Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear".
In it a group of "seeded" space colonists grow from birth outside the influence of Earth, and create an economy that is based on respect rather than slips of green paper. The interesting thing is that it's *STILL* capitalist, but it's based on scarcity of respect rather than scarcity of resources (everyone has access to resources but not everyone is respected).
Of course then a bunch of people from Earth show up and tell them why they should charge money for goods, why they should worship a god,why extramarital/teen/non-missionary sex was bad, why they shouldn't let people listen to their music, etc.
Naturally this doesn't go over well. It's interesting watching the people from Earth behaving like asses... It's kind of like someone walking into a buffet who doesn't understand the concept and winds up trying to eat so much food that they die from a ruptured stomach.
People wonder about why TurboLinux is still around when they know nobody who uses it. The reason it's still around is because it has one killer feature: Japanese support. It is the only distro with good Japanese support. Other distros have a hodgepodge of Japanese implemented but they are nowhere near as thorough (sure Japanese might work in the installer, but will it work in your shell? Will your file manager let you easily see Japanese filenames? etc.)
:-)
In addition it also supports other East Asian languages better than any other distro but Japanese is the most important since Japan has the best track record for actually paying money for software.
You see, supporting languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. is not just a matter of translating the text in your application. The big problem is actually supporting the multibyte text format itself in every display. Most applications expect text to be one byte per character, and they format text that way and always render as ASCII. You can patch the graphical text rendering functions to render Japanese automatically but if the application still assumes that the text area is a certain size it will look fucked up. Not only that, but Linux uses a real hodgepodge of display mechanisms so you have to frantically patch to get them all.
TurboLinux is still behind Japanese Windows and Japanese MacOS in terms of ability to use Japanese/Chinese/Korean text anywhere you can use Roman text. This has really hurt the acceptance of Linux in East Asia.... but TurboLinux is getting better at least.
So far no other distro has come anywhere near as close as Turbo in support. If Turbo dies then Linux in East Asia will suffer a major blow from which it may not recover. (Red Flag Linux might survive, but RFL *STILL* not as good in terms of Chinese-language support as Turbo).
If you want to find a user of Turbo in the U.S. to see, look for someone who speaks Japanese.
Thomas Frieden, Hyperion Entertainment
Since Thomas here posted as an AC, I thought I'd reply to it to point it out. I've come to realize that I was overly harsh in my criticism of nVidia as a whole. While I greatly dislike many of their corporate decisions and management, I shouldn't have included their Linux driver team in the rant. My apologies to Nick.
Despite that, I still encourage people to get stuff besides nVidia until nVidia's management change their minds about secrecy.. If it wasn't for that secrecy, it would be easy to fix stuff that broke. :-)
(Someone please mod Thomas's comment up to 1 at least so more people can see his opinion)
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Certainly it's POSSIBLE, it's just that the major publishers don't consider Linux to be worth their time -- period. They won't do it.
Unless you're suggesting that we do the port and somehow magically make it appear on all the Windows version discs. You don't understand, we buy a license for the Linux version. We don't make any money off the sales of the Windows version. Even if we somehow did the port before they were done with the Windows version (how can we port something that isn't done?) and convinced them to put our binary on the disc, we would not make a cent because THEY are selling the Windows version, not us. And if you're about to suggest that they would pay us royalties for the privilige of including our port on their Windows version disc, think again! If they really thought it was worth their money and time to include a Linux version on their Windows install discs, we wouldn't have to license it from them!
For some reason people can't seem to fathom that the people who do the ports have to PAY for the rights, because the original publishers JUST DON'T CARE about Linux. *THEY REALLY DON'T GIVE A DAMN*. They are not about to take the risk of investing in something that they don't care about, so we take the risk by making the investment ourselves (by buying the license and funding the port). If the port sells well, we make money from sales (and they make money from royalties, maybe in the process convincing them that Linux is worthwhile). It's as simple as that.
It really frustrates me that time and time again people keep suggesting the same "solutions" which just aren't possible. The only way to get free downloadable Linux binaries, Linux binaries included with Windows version, or even inexpensive binary-only packages that you combine with the Windows version, is if THE ORIGINAL PUBLISHER is the one doing it. Loki, Hyperion, etc. can't. We can only buy the rights and then sell our own version.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
equivalent then; charge less for your port, but require the data files
off the 'original' version. I know that Bleem! is dead though, so this
obviously doesn't work _that_ well.
You're missing something here -- we don't make a cent on sales of the original. Our cost in terms of pay to our coders to do the port, and the cost per copy of royalties, and the up-front advance payments all stay the same. If we have to pay $5-$10 a copy (royalties vary depending on the agreement) we can't very well sell your Bleemcast-equivalent for cheap and expect to make anything. Bleem! is a totally different scenario. They didn't have to pay a cent in licensing fees/royalties. They just wrote an emulator. Not only that, but the bulk of the work was done after the emulator was written, it just needed tweaking to run a different game. The cost and effort involved per-title is minimal in comparison to what we do. We have to pay to port each game (although if we do multiple Quake engine or multiple Lithtech engine games the ports are a little easier). We have to pay our coders to port it. We have to pay our royalties/up-front license costs. We have to pay these things that Bleem! did not.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
(MAc, Linux, and Amiga) pages on your website.
That is an issue. The page has been like that for some time, I actually asked that it be fixed up as it's been "under construction" for far too long. There were, however real pages for the Mac and Linux stuff before that, then our site went into redesign and they never got added back. You might be able to find the old pages in Google's cache or something. We *DID* have active pages for Linux at the time our games were released though, so this argument isn't strictly correct. I can understand, however, how one could imagine the situation based on the current status of the website.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Well, maybe I wasn't being humble enough when I called it a "good" estimate, since it really was my own. However it is just that -- an estimate -- one that is based on personal experience. There are a LOT more Linux users than Amiga users. My best GUESS, if you'd rather I phrase it that way, is that there are about 100 Linux users for every Amiga user. It's not based on hard research, just on impressions. Again, I only said it was an estimate. If you have hard figures from a reliably study, then that takes precedence. I would bet an Andy Jackson that my estimate is within an order of magnitude of the exact number.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
Sounds like the size of the Linux market and the alleged expectations of Linux users aren't the only problem with the business model.
It's not just Linux. This is how licensing a port works in the real world. Companies that license Playstation ports do the same thing. Just about EVERY Mac port is made this way. Basically unless the original publisher decides ON THEIR OWN to create a port of the game (and then either does an in-house port or subcontracts), then you have to pay them for the right to port the game and to sell that port. They won't let you do it for free, and they won't let you do it without up-front payment (otherwise non-serious people could just secure the rights for free and then sit on them).
This REALLY IS how it works, and companies like Loki, Macplay, and any other company that specializes in porting games all do it this way. What you are buying is the rights to the game. They don't think the port is worth their time, but you do. They won't give you the rights for free though because not only do the aforementioned non-serious people create a problem, but it also costs them money to pay the lawyers who read and okay the license agreement. If they can't make a certain amount of money from your license then it's not even worth their time to license it to you.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
I'm glad to hear this! I haven't tested it lately on an nVidia card, so maybe the current drivers have fixed the problem that was breaking the game. If the Linux driver team fixed this because of our input then I will definitely have to soften my stance a bit... ...still you have to understand that it's really frustrating when there's a problem and you don't have the information you need to quickly figure out what is causing it and how to fix it. :-/
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
I really don't need to say anything more than that.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/
In the future as we move more towards distribution of stuff over the 'net, perhaps these attitudes might change, but as it is this is simply not possible. The companies like having that physical box, that keeps the product "real" and makes it harder for numbers to be fudged about the number of copies produced, etc. I do understand this perspective and agree with it somewhat, but the obvious advantages of digital distribution I think will in the end override these concerns. These same issues affect the movie and music industries as well, and they are only just now sticking their toes into the digital content distribution market (after thoroughly sueing a lot of people I might add. :-( ).
We'll see what tomorrow brings.
James Sellman - Hyperion Entertainment - http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/