Oh, and if that wasn't enough, the emulator was developed separately from its host project (DosBox) partly to deflect this very kind of legal trouble from the more legitimate DosBox.
Wow, there's a lot of uncalled-for Roland-bashing going on here. Read the project history - early in development, the author anticipated the legal issues and explicitly sought permission from Roland, who somewhat predictably denied it. The author then realized that the ROM may actually not be copyrighted due to a technicality and asked for Roland to produce evidence to the contrary, which this story shows they've been unable to produce. There was a mistaken C&D letter issued but that's only part of the story. It's not like Roland came out of nowhere and decided to swoop down on an established project, the author asked for them to get involved to clear up any legal issues before he put too much work into it.
Why even bother with emulating obsolete hardware at all then? Why not just use your own samples with a plain MIDI interface? The whole point of having the emulator is to have an authentic-sounding experience in old games, so of course you need the original samples. To do otherwise would be like writing an emulator for Pac-Man but then rewriting the ROMs from scratch for copyright reasons - you might as well have just made a clone in C++ and saved yourself the bother.
I do realize these don't read the discs but he needs to phrase his question better if this isn't the kind of thing he wants. I read the question over again and it's still not completely clear that he needs it to read the discs too.
You're missing the point. Of course the developers *could* have made the hitpoint field larger than 32 bits if they wanted to using various techniques, the question is why would they have bothered if no other monster in the game even gets close to the 32-bit limit. Programmers are lazy, remember.;)
Well sure, if you're buying brand new games. I've built up quite a sizeable collection of console RPGs for various older consoles that I'm probably never going to finish as it is, and I hardly have money coming out of my ass.
Zero Wing would be a bit problematic because the company that made it (Toaplan) went out of business years ago, was a Japanese company, and I don't believe anyone knows who if anyone owns their copyrights now.
``Instead of trying to segregate the California e-mail addresses, many of our members are going to make the California standard the lowest common denominator.
I'm sure we'd all be very broken up to see that happen.
The question I have is how is it possible that California is making it illegal to send UCE to my Inbox, but it's still legal to send UCRealMail to my
actual mailbox?
Easy - real mail is paid for by the sender in the form of postage. With UCE, the cost is borne by others in the form of bandwidth, storage space, etc (although the costs are small, they add up significantly when multiplied by millions and millions of spam messages). It's the same principle as outlawing fax spam that uses up other people's ink and paper.
Seeing this story reminded me of a review from the SomethingAwful ROM Pit of a SNES game called Cho Aniki - Bakuretsu Rantou Hen. It seems to be in the same series, except it's a one-on-one fighter a la Street Fighter II. The ROM is worth a download for a laugh at the blatant homosexuality everywhere if nothing else.
Well, I've found that the Babelfish Korean->English translation is really fucked compared to the other language pairs, so including it as a step is a bit misleading. There's way too many identically pronounced and written words in Korean with different meanings.
This game was written using the old Sierra AGI engine, which used bytecode and intepreters to allow games to be run on just about every platform back in the day (PC, Amiga, Mac, Tandy, even Apple II and CoCo).
Sarien is a very mature reverse-engineered interpreter that carries on that tradition and will run on just about every modern platform (protected-mode DOS, Win32, *nix, pre-OSX Mac, OSX, Photon, PalmOS, even original platforms like real-mode CGA DOS and Amiga). It even offers improvements over the original AGI like high-res graphics and multi-channel sound even on PCs.
*Disclaimer* I'm an official project member, so I may be slightly biased.;)
Maybe I didn't phrase that too well. You're correct, zipping the already compressed EXE won't do much. I was using EXE compressors as an example of how it's possible to reduce an existing zip file's size by "50-75%", assuming that zip file contained a program (which the story states). One would probably zip the compressed EXE anyway to include other support files etc. in one file but that wouldn't offer much benefit in the way of compression.
Sounds to me like an EXE compressor like UPX - they can compress EXE files better than a ZIP archive can (by taking advantage of known aspects of executable files); so by unzipping, EXE-compressing, and re-zipping, one can reduce the size of an already existing ZIP archive.
Re:Puzzles = Waste of CPU cycles?
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
That's no good either - what if it turns out the original computation was in error? Then your email doesn't get through. If you assume the original is always correct then checking it is useless.
I find blogs especially annoying when I'm searching for a relatively obscure MP3 (i.e. not on P2P) with Google, and I get a bunch of hits, but they're all from "Listening to:" headers on blog entries.
Now if they'd just do something about those *$&@* "WinAmp generated playlist", "my MP3 collection", "files you can request via email", and "sorry the files got taken down but I'm leaving the page up because I'm an asshat" pages, but you can't have everything I guess.
I can reproduce this with a recent nightly. I can't find it in Bugzilla though; have you reported it? Odds are good that none of the developers know about it unless you've informed them via such a report, so you can hardly expect it to be fixed.
We were one of the few families that actually bought it. I made disk images of my original floppies...email me if you want them (11MB or so). It's actually quite a fun program that does what it's designed to do very well; I'm not sure why everyone bashes it so much.
I've also had troubles with this as my secondhand console collection has grown. What I've done with the systems is to put each in one drawer of a plastic set of drawers with cables coming out the back (a tight fit, but possible if things don't close all the way). All the controllers for that system go in the drawer when not in use to keep things from tangling like crazy. I have a little plastic thing that holds all the carts. For cabling, I got one of these switches (except 5-in-1, I can't find it on their site) for $20 from Wal-Mart and it works great.
While InterTran has an impressive number of languages supported, all it seems to do is word-for-word dictionary lookup. As you can see, this is not useful most of the time unless you already know a fair bit of the language (especially with regards to word order).
I especially notice this with the DirectDraw test that displays a series of concentric white rectangles on the screen, with my old monitor. There's an unmistakable whine. I can also hear when a TV switches to high brightness abruptly, if the volume is turned down enough and I'm close enough to it.
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Oh, and if that wasn't enough, the emulator was developed separately from its host project (DosBox) partly to deflect this very kind of legal trouble from the more legitimate DosBox.
Wow, there's a lot of uncalled-for Roland-bashing going on here. Read the project history - early in development, the author anticipated the legal issues and explicitly sought permission from Roland, who somewhat predictably denied it. The author then realized that the ROM may actually not be copyrighted due to a technicality and asked for Roland to produce evidence to the contrary, which this story shows they've been unable to produce. There was a mistaken C&D letter issued but that's only part of the story. It's not like Roland came out of nowhere and decided to swoop down on an established project, the author asked for them to get involved to clear up any legal issues before he put too much work into it.
Why even bother with emulating obsolete hardware at all then? Why not just use your own samples with a plain MIDI interface? The whole point of having the emulator is to have an authentic-sounding experience in old games, so of course you need the original samples. To do otherwise would be like writing an emulator for Pac-Man but then rewriting the ROMs from scratch for copyright reasons - you might as well have just made a clone in C++ and saved yourself the bother.
I do realize these don't read the discs but he needs to phrase his question better if this isn't the kind of thing he wants. I read the question over again and it's still not completely clear that he needs it to read the discs too.
Get two 150-disc CD carousels, available here or here in the $100 range. Haven't used one myself but looks like the kind of thing you're looking for.
You're missing the point. Of course the developers *could* have made the hitpoint field larger than 32 bits if they wanted to using various techniques, the question is why would they have bothered if no other monster in the game even gets close to the 32-bit limit. Programmers are lazy, remember. ;)
Well sure, if you're buying brand new games. I've built up quite a sizeable collection of console RPGs for various older consoles that I'm probably never going to finish as it is, and I hardly have money coming out of my ass.
Isn't karma whoring fun?
Zero Wing would be a bit problematic because the company that made it (Toaplan) went out of business years ago, was a Japanese company, and I don't believe anyone knows who if anyone owns their copyrights now.
Seeing this story reminded me of a review from the SomethingAwful ROM Pit of a SNES game called Cho Aniki - Bakuretsu Rantou Hen. It seems to be in the same series, except it's a one-on-one fighter a la Street Fighter II. The ROM is worth a download for a laugh at the blatant homosexuality everywhere if nothing else.
Well, I've found that the Babelfish Korean->English translation is really fucked compared to the other language pairs, so including it as a step is a bit misleading. There's way too many identically pronounced and written words in Korean with different meanings.
Sarien is a very mature reverse-engineered interpreter that carries on that tradition and will run on just about every modern platform (protected-mode DOS, Win32, *nix, pre-OSX Mac, OSX, Photon, PalmOS, even original platforms like real-mode CGA DOS and Amiga). It even offers improvements over the original AGI like high-res graphics and multi-channel sound even on PCs.
*Disclaimer* I'm an official project member, so I may be slightly biased. ;)
Maybe I didn't phrase that too well. You're correct, zipping the already compressed EXE won't do much. I was using EXE compressors as an example of how it's possible to reduce an existing zip file's size by "50-75%", assuming that zip file contained a program (which the story states). One would probably zip the compressed EXE anyway to include other support files etc. in one file but that wouldn't offer much benefit in the way of compression.
Sounds to me like an EXE compressor like UPX - they can compress EXE files better than a ZIP archive can (by taking advantage of known aspects of executable files); so by unzipping, EXE-compressing, and re-zipping, one can reduce the size of an already existing ZIP archive.
That's no good either - what if it turns out the original computation was in error? Then your email doesn't get through. If you assume the original is always correct then checking it is useless.
I find blogs especially annoying when I'm searching for a relatively obscure MP3 (i.e. not on P2P) with Google, and I get a bunch of hits, but they're all from "Listening to:" headers on blog entries.
Now if they'd just do something about those *$&@* "WinAmp generated playlist", "my MP3 collection", "files you can request via email", and "sorry the files got taken down but I'm leaving the page up because I'm an asshat" pages, but you can't have everything I guess.
I can reproduce this with a recent nightly. I can't find it in Bugzilla though; have you reported it? Odds are good that none of the developers know about it unless you've informed them via such a report, so you can hardly expect it to be fixed.
Oh good! Now we can all be protected from the Terrible Secret of Space! Just watch out near staircases.
We were one of the few families that actually bought it. I made disk images of my original floppies...email me if you want them (11MB or so). It's actually quite a fun program that does what it's designed to do very well; I'm not sure why everyone bashes it so much.
I've also had troubles with this as my secondhand console collection has grown. What I've done with the systems is to put each in one drawer of a plastic set of drawers with cables coming out the back (a tight fit, but possible if things don't close all the way). All the controllers for that system go in the drawer when not in use to keep things from tangling like crazy. I have a little plastic thing that holds all the carts. For cabling, I got one of these switches (except 5-in-1, I can't find it on their site) for $20 from Wal-Mart and it works great.
While InterTran has an impressive number of languages supported, all it seems to do is word-for-word dictionary lookup. As you can see, this is not useful most of the time unless you already know a fair bit of the language (especially with regards to word order).
I especially notice this with the DirectDraw test that displays a series of concentric white rectangles on the screen, with my old monitor. There's an unmistakable whine. I can also hear when a TV switches to high brightness abruptly, if the volume is turned down enough and I'm close enough to it.