Hmm.. well, one could try setting up a cross-promotion with the guys at Console Classix-- being able to offer legal emulation would be a huge bonus and allow you to advertise a lot of older games that you just can't find these days.
Maybe a few arcade machines, while I'm on that line of thinking.. Atari and Capcom offer legal arcade roms through several sources, and if nothing else a couple of the favorites in actual arcade machine form go over very well with the crowds.
Consoles you'd have to definitely have someone policing, since the hardware's a bit on the breakable side. Though, to be honest, having staff around to police things is a very good idea.
Gotta have some sort of food and drink monitoring, though-- PCs and consoles don't mix well with food and drinks, and if you're not offering soda you're really hurting yourself.
Personally, I suggest the likes of a tiered system where you can pay-to-play by either buying a month/week/night/hour/etc or on a per-credit basis. As a customer, if the place is cool enough I'd definitely be looking into a membership..
Final Fantasy XI is a great example of an RPG that really shows its roots in the controls. I picked it up the day it came out and immediately started beating my head against some really irritating playcontrol the first time I took it online.
Then I turned on joystick controls and hooked up a PS2 controller via my PSX->USB adaptor. Suddenly it was playable again! The game was REALLY designed around a joypad, though the PS2 version (much like UT for PS2) supports a mouse and keyboard if you hook them up to the USB ports.
That's another thing.. I think that USB ports are going to be remaining on future consoles (at least from Sony; let's hope MS and Nintendo learn), allowing for the good old mouse/keyboard combination for FPS titles.
You've got the gun technology right-- that's how modern lightguns work, but Duck Hunt and all NES gun games used a slightly different trick that MAY or MAY NOT work on plasma/LCD televisions. I haven't tried, but most likely it won't work.
Basically, there's still just a photosensor in the barrel of the gun but the sensor is calibrated to detect only white. When you press the trigger, the screen blacks out for a brief period and replaces targets with white blocks during the blackout. If a white block is detected by the photosensor, you hit a target. Games that have more than one target onscreen use slightly longer blackout periods with the white blocks staggered so as to detect which target had been hit.
I don't believe the NES gun used sync at all to detect hit location; it was pretty inaccurate as a result and prone to cheating.
I should know about the cheating-- I once played Duck Hunt on a black and white TV with the contrast turned all the way up. I couldn't miss-- at all.
Well, the Athlon FX line seems to have been aborted shortly after birth-- I'm glad I didn't choose to buy right from the starting line, since this could have potentially costed me in a pretty large way.
As for the A64, that's pretty much going to be the going line at this rate, it looks like. We'll see if there are any more changes in the next few months, but by summer we should be seeing good indications of where AMD will REALLY be going with this-- roadmap aside, reality doesn't always map out well.
Socket 940.. well, covered that with Athlon FX. Really bad move, and it's one some people will definitely not be happy with.
"Much more popular"? Hardly. They were pretty much neck and neck. Q3 was faster, but UT's weapons and gameplay modes didn't suck half as much. You could find a good server easily for either at their heyday.
The only reason Sony had a chance is because Nintendo shafted them bigtime. The original PSX is just a reworking of the design they and Nintendo put together for the SNES CD-- Nintendo shot themselves in the foot here, because their shafting of Sony and Phillips just ended up costing them access to good sound chips (Sony produced the SNES sound chip) and optical drives.
This karmic retribution has hurt Nintendo for over ten years now..
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Dark, yes, but one of the games I would NOT mind re-purchasing to have in portable form.
Maybe a port of Phantasy Star Online with Wifi LAN play? That'd be pretty cool.
Depending on the screen, Metal Gear may be possible-- the GBC demonstrated without a doubt that you need a screen capable of doing the radar without making you blind.
Of course, a disc with a Ridge Racer compilation would be kinda cool, too.. maybe a Hyper SF2 port since it has enough buttons.
I can think of a number of good possibilities, but only time will tell.
At the MP3/OGG step you'll lose data, sure, but isn't AAC a lossless compression format? If this is true, then the AAC->CD step should make a perfect CD.
I don't know anyone around here (or online, for that matter) using WMA with the exception of perhaps myself. Before I get myself damned with that statement, I should say that I currently keep all my PC-based music in MP3 format (Someday I might move to ogg when I lose it all and have to re-encode..) but for playback on my PDA I find that WMA sounds about the same at lower bitrates; must be the cheap headphones since I definitely don't see that kind of behavior on my PC.
Music and karaoke CDs should be, barring any music cds with explicit protection, be easily copied using existing cd copy tools. I bet CloneCD would handle most protected discs without a second thought as it is, but you'd really probably want to strip the protection rather than copy it since it's intrusive during playback attempts.
With the one exception that I don't believe the CD image mounting will emulate bad sectors and other protection schemes. However, like you said, that's generally not an issue under Linux.
It has to be said, though: Daemon Tools is a windows user's best friend. I always write ISOs instead of straight to disc for my more complex disc types, so that I can test the image before wasting a blank. I also use it for a lot of my games-- I've got all three of the UT2003 discs sitting on my HD right now, though I almost wish I hadn't wasted my time since UT2004 is everything they promised in UT2003, but with a completely new pricetag.. *sigh*
Whoops, got offtopic there a sec. Anyway.. Daemon Tools is highly reccomended. Just keep checking for new versions every so often as the software companies blacklist it frequently. There's usually a new version within a DAY or two of such, though.
Nope, not part of the drivers. There's a new cross-advertising system Nvidia's been doing of late with branding many games with "The way it was meant to be played-- Nvidia".. UT2003 was the first I've seen, but I know there're a number of other games that do similar. Planetside, for instance, advertises NVidia every time you load the game and advertises Intel P4 processors _every time you load a map_.
Some of the games up to the mid 80s had buttons on both sides, but they changed this in favor of having two controllers for two players. Once they made that switch, they put the buttons on the right side-- and that's where it's been on every machine I've seen since. Mortal Kombat has the buttons on the right side.
Good luck on your hacking, though. You might find it easier to just get a PS2 arcade stick like the ones Red Octane is selling that use arcade parts, then move them around.
Okay, maybe it's a small quantity of schools, but I hear this often enough from people I know that I can't help but think it's quite a bit larger than people think.
That, however, is merely my opinion. I could be wrong-- hell, I HOPE I'm wrong.
THAT brings back a few memories. Did the same with a friend at my school way back when. File->Open to get a directory structure, find command.com, rightclick and use quickview to be able to get it to execute..
Once you've got a command prompt, you've got the machine beaten down.
Sure, but I wonder if paper/detention/whatever is really WARRANTED. A verbal warning should have been MORE than sufficient, considering the incident is so absolutely minor as to be worthless.
Maybe I'm biased, though.. I nearly got suspended for miskeying ctrl-something or another years ago on an old Apple 2 wordprocessor. The thing beeped, the instructor freaked, and I was accused of hacking. I was just lucky that someone with a CLUE caught the situation and defused it before it got all the way to the top and I ended up suspended..
One thing's for sure-- I think the fearmongering amongst the ignorant teachers and administration needs to stop. This has been out of control for a long time..
Well, since.Net allows you to (excuse me while I go into semi-marketingspeak) leverage C and a number of other languages, I'd say it's a considerable subset of the C developers but likely nowhere near as big as the whole..net isn't all that bad in theory, but it's not the silver bullet they're marketing it as-- it's DEFINITELY not cheaper to develop for. GNU compilers? Free. Microsoft's.NET languages? Free without gui, help, and support.. which, really, isn't that far off from GNU's offerings..
All politics about free software aside,.net is definitely where MS wants the Windows end of coding to go though I'm not sure if it's really going to work out how they want it to.
Well, price isn't everything. Size, display quality, and supported formats will also play a major role in things. Essentially, though, price and size are the killers-- the size has to be small enough to carry but still large enough to have a decent screen, plus the price of the whole thing has to be competitive. I'm not sure there's a workable medium in there, considering the costs and how big a pocket is.
I don't see the Tablet PC as being the big "revolution" that it was hyped to be, but it IS an evolutionary step. I see it as the next phase for the laptop, since many of these are the convertable types that allow you to run them as a laptop or tablet depending on what you're wanting to use it as.
There're hints Apple MAY be working on a video-based iPod. Whether or not they ARE doing something remains to be seen, but I don't expect to see them winning on a price basis-- they'd have to do so with a "cool" design and by features. For a video player, I think I'd have to say I'd want upgradable codecs.. Divx, Mpeg4, Xvid.. these things change too fast to be static. A year's time would render a static device VERY obsolete.
I do definitely have to agree with you on two things, though...
The next 12 months WILL be most interesting in terms of technology, and John DOES love lower prices. My name, conincidentally, is also John.;)
So poor? What kind of CE device do you have? I'm running a cheap PocketPC myself (Toshiba e310, discontinued now) and I generally get a day's worth of performance out of it before I have to charge it. This isn't such a big deal since I'm near a PC or outlet at various times of a day (or night..)
Yeah, you get weeks out of a Palm, but is that really so important?
Hey! I resemble that... Man, you kids make me feel OLD with these comments, and I'm only 26! Feels more like 26,000,000 as I've seen the rise and fall of many an OS now.
Kinda sad how much of my knowledge is virtually useless now.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. well, one could try setting up a cross-promotion with the guys at Console Classix-- being able to offer legal emulation would be a huge bonus and allow you to advertise a lot of older games that you just can't find these days.
Maybe a few arcade machines, while I'm on that line of thinking.. Atari and Capcom offer legal arcade roms through several sources, and if nothing else a couple of the favorites in actual arcade machine form go over very well with the crowds.
Consoles you'd have to definitely have someone policing, since the hardware's a bit on the breakable side. Though, to be honest, having staff around to police things is a very good idea.
Gotta have some sort of food and drink monitoring, though-- PCs and consoles don't mix well with food and drinks, and if you're not offering soda you're really hurting yourself.
Personally, I suggest the likes of a tiered system where you can pay-to-play by either buying a month/week/night/hour/etc or on a per-credit basis. As a customer, if the place is cool enough I'd definitely be looking into a membership..
Final Fantasy XI is a great example of an RPG that really shows its roots in the controls. I picked it up the day it came out and immediately started beating my head against some really irritating playcontrol the first time I took it online.
Then I turned on joystick controls and hooked up a PS2 controller via my PSX->USB adaptor. Suddenly it was playable again! The game was REALLY designed around a joypad, though the PS2 version (much like UT for PS2) supports a mouse and keyboard if you hook them up to the USB ports.
That's another thing.. I think that USB ports are going to be remaining on future consoles (at least from Sony; let's hope MS and Nintendo learn), allowing for the good old mouse/keyboard combination for FPS titles.
You've got the gun technology right-- that's how modern lightguns work, but Duck Hunt and all NES gun games used a slightly different trick that MAY or MAY NOT work on plasma/LCD televisions. I haven't tried, but most likely it won't work.
Basically, there's still just a photosensor in the barrel of the gun but the sensor is calibrated to detect only white. When you press the trigger, the screen blacks out for a brief period and replaces targets with white blocks during the blackout. If a white block is detected by the photosensor, you hit a target. Games that have more than one target onscreen use slightly longer blackout periods with the white blocks staggered so as to detect which target had been hit.
I don't believe the NES gun used sync at all to detect hit location; it was pretty inaccurate as a result and prone to cheating.
I should know about the cheating-- I once played Duck Hunt on a black and white TV with the contrast turned all the way up. I couldn't miss-- at all.
Well, the Athlon FX line seems to have been aborted shortly after birth-- I'm glad I didn't choose to buy right from the starting line, since this could have potentially costed me in a pretty large way.
As for the A64, that's pretty much going to be the going line at this rate, it looks like. We'll see if there are any more changes in the next few months, but by summer we should be seeing good indications of where AMD will REALLY be going with this-- roadmap aside, reality doesn't always map out well.
Socket 940.. well, covered that with Athlon FX. Really bad move, and it's one some people will definitely not be happy with.
"Much more popular"? Hardly. They were pretty much neck and neck. Q3 was faster, but UT's weapons and gameplay modes didn't suck half as much. You could find a good server easily for either at their heyday.
The only reason Sony had a chance is because Nintendo shafted them bigtime. The original PSX is just a reworking of the design they and Nintendo put together for the SNES CD-- Nintendo shot themselves in the foot here, because their shafting of Sony and Phillips just ended up costing them access to good sound chips (Sony produced the SNES sound chip) and optical drives.
This karmic retribution has hurt Nintendo for over ten years now..
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Dark, yes, but one of the games I would NOT mind re-purchasing to have in portable form.
Maybe a port of Phantasy Star Online with Wifi LAN play? That'd be pretty cool.
Depending on the screen, Metal Gear may be possible-- the GBC demonstrated without a doubt that you need a screen capable of doing the radar without making you blind.
Of course, a disc with a Ridge Racer compilation would be kinda cool, too.. maybe a Hyper SF2 port since it has enough buttons.
I can think of a number of good possibilities, but only time will tell.
Replace? You probably could have sent it in for repair and paid $30 or so. Even out-of-warranty repairs are reasonable from Nintendo.
At the MP3/OGG step you'll lose data, sure, but isn't AAC a lossless compression format? If this is true, then the AAC->CD step should make a perfect CD.
I don't know anyone around here (or online, for that matter) using WMA with the exception of perhaps myself. Before I get myself damned with that statement, I should say that I currently keep all my PC-based music in MP3 format (Someday I might move to ogg when I lose it all and have to re-encode..) but for playback on my PDA I find that WMA sounds about the same at lower bitrates; must be the cheap headphones since I definitely don't see that kind of behavior on my PC.
Music and karaoke CDs should be, barring any music cds with explicit protection, be easily copied using existing cd copy tools. I bet CloneCD would handle most protected discs without a second thought as it is, but you'd really probably want to strip the protection rather than copy it since it's intrusive during playback attempts.
With the one exception that I don't believe the CD image mounting will emulate bad sectors and other protection schemes. However, like you said, that's generally not an issue under Linux.
It has to be said, though: Daemon Tools is a windows user's best friend. I always write ISOs instead of straight to disc for my more complex disc types, so that I can test the image before wasting a blank. I also use it for a lot of my games-- I've got all three of the UT2003 discs sitting on my HD right now, though I almost wish I hadn't wasted my time since UT2004 is everything they promised in UT2003, but with a completely new pricetag.. *sigh*
Whoops, got offtopic there a sec. Anyway.. Daemon Tools is highly reccomended. Just keep checking for new versions every so often as the software companies blacklist it frequently. There's usually a new version within a DAY or two of such, though.
Posting without karma bonus as this is most definitely off-topic and only relevant to a previous off-topic comment.
Many newer games like Max Payne, Max Payne 2, and Freelancer actually DO save to My Documents, so that you can have saves per-account.
God, I wish I had mod points right now. I'm trying SO hard not to laugh out loud at work right now.
Nope, not part of the drivers. There's a new cross-advertising system Nvidia's been doing of late with branding many games with "The way it was meant to be played-- Nvidia".. UT2003 was the first I've seen, but I know there're a number of other games that do similar. Planetside, for instance, advertises NVidia every time you load the game and advertises Intel P4 processors _every time you load a map_.
It's getting out of hand.
Check the article again, she didn't say it. The slashdot posting is a bit misleading, so it seems-- a lot of us fell for it.
So, it's safe to go out and pick up that PDA..
Some of the games up to the mid 80s had buttons on both sides, but they changed this in favor of having two controllers for two players. Once they made that switch, they put the buttons on the right side-- and that's where it's been on every machine I've seen since. Mortal Kombat has the buttons on the right side.
Good luck on your hacking, though. You might find it easier to just get a PS2 arcade stick like the ones Red Octane is selling that use arcade parts, then move them around.
Okay, maybe it's a small quantity of schools, but I hear this often enough from people I know that I can't help but think it's quite a bit larger than people think.
That, however, is merely my opinion. I could be wrong-- hell, I HOPE I'm wrong.
THAT brings back a few memories. Did the same with a friend at my school way back when. File->Open to get a directory structure, find command.com, rightclick and use quickview to be able to get it to execute..
Once you've got a command prompt, you've got the machine beaten down.
Never did get caught, which was a good thing.
Sure, but I wonder if paper/detention/whatever is really WARRANTED. A verbal warning should have been MORE than sufficient, considering the incident is so absolutely minor as to be worthless.
Maybe I'm biased, though.. I nearly got suspended for miskeying ctrl-something or another years ago on an old Apple 2 wordprocessor. The thing beeped, the instructor freaked, and I was accused of hacking. I was just lucky that someone with a CLUE caught the situation and defused it before it got all the way to the top and I ended up suspended..
One thing's for sure-- I think the fearmongering amongst the ignorant teachers and administration needs to stop. This has been out of control for a long time..
Well, since .Net allows you to (excuse me while I go into semi-marketingspeak) leverage C and a number of other languages, I'd say it's a considerable subset of the C developers but likely nowhere near as big as the whole. .net isn't all that bad in theory, but it's not the silver bullet they're marketing it as-- it's DEFINITELY not cheaper to develop for. GNU compilers? Free. Microsoft's .NET languages? Free without gui, help, and support.. which, really, isn't that far off from GNU's offerings..
.net is definitely where MS wants the Windows end of coding to go though I'm not sure if it's really going to work out how they want it to.
All politics about free software aside,
Well, price isn't everything. Size, display quality, and supported formats will also play a major role in things. Essentially, though, price and size are the killers-- the size has to be small enough to carry but still large enough to have a decent screen, plus the price of the whole thing has to be competitive. I'm not sure there's a workable medium in there, considering the costs and how big a pocket is.
;)
I don't see the Tablet PC as being the big "revolution" that it was hyped to be, but it IS an evolutionary step. I see it as the next phase for the laptop, since many of these are the convertable types that allow you to run them as a laptop or tablet depending on what you're wanting to use it as.
There're hints Apple MAY be working on a video-based iPod. Whether or not they ARE doing something remains to be seen, but I don't expect to see them winning on a price basis-- they'd have to do so with a "cool" design and by features. For a video player, I think I'd have to say I'd want upgradable codecs.. Divx, Mpeg4, Xvid.. these things change too fast to be static. A year's time would render a static device VERY obsolete.
I do definitely have to agree with you on two things, though...
The next 12 months WILL be most interesting in terms of technology, and John DOES love lower prices. My name, conincidentally, is also John.
So poor? What kind of CE device do you have? I'm running a cheap PocketPC myself (Toshiba e310, discontinued now) and I generally get a day's worth of performance out of it before I have to charge it. This isn't such a big deal since I'm near a PC or outlet at various times of a day (or night..)
Yeah, you get weeks out of a Palm, but is that really so important?
At least he isn't going by the name "Sai".. that'd be downright scary. Still amusing that life mirrors art..
Hey! I resemble that... Man, you kids make me feel OLD with these comments, and I'm only 26! Feels more like 26,000,000 as I've seen the rise and fall of many an OS now.
Kinda sad how much of my knowledge is virtually useless now.