I am using 0.9 now (all those IE holes finally converted me). It seems to not lock up/crash as long as you don't get directed to a.pdf file by google, or try anything else unusual.
It's an early production run (the ROM is dated 01 APR 2004 in the test mode). According to amazon.com it is released on 01 July so it might not be available at your local shop yet. Mind you Iraq got handed over two days early so who knows how accurate that street date is!:-)
Except that the Labour party in the UK is almost the same as the Conservatives used to be (except for being competant with the economy; why are right wing parties so lax with national debt? Did Reagan start that?)
So here it is (left-to-right):
George Galloway/Respect, Green, Liberal Democrats, New Labour, Conservative (Tories), UKIP (United Kingdom Independance Party - want out of the EU), BNP (British National Party - want "foreigners" out of UK).
I'd say (without knowing anything about US politics:-) perhaps the Democrats are equivalent to the Conservatives, and the Republicans range from UKIP (Bush) to the BNP (Buchanan).
That would be cool. Specific feedback on any such issues is very helpful.
One problem with getting accurate colours is that even if you find an original arcade cabinet, a 24 year old television is not guaranteed to be accurate compared to its original colours:-(
Also, a sound frequency analyser costs 18 or so, but a television analyser costs 8000 or more which was way out of budget:-( and might not offer much help.
You'll be pleased to know Xevious retains the hidden message at the beginning of the game (unlike the problem with the Warren Robinett text). That game really impressed me when it first came out although I was never that good at it.
I would love to do Crazy Climber on a dual joystick system. But I don't think Nichubutsu did enough famous games to get a full pack out of them. Heck, I would put Crossfire (C64 game), Robotron and a tank game on too, but the licensing would be nightmarish. And that's what its all about after all - getting permission.
I was somewhat disappointed when I found bosconian could only be played four way (the first I heard about it was when I received the joystick) but the software handles 8 way fine. I don't know if this can be changed by physical means (i.e. altering the joystick). It was done to make Pac-man closer to the original (4 way) joystick, since it was thought that making pac-man closer was more important than bosconian. This is the sort of decision that is made when a collection of titles is put together.
I played with the Ms. Pacman pack just now and the joystick works fine in all directions. It will be up to you to decide whether the 8 way joystick is good for Ms Pacman but it is certainly essential for Xevious!
All I can say about the colours is that NTSC stands for Never The Same Colour. We tried it on various TVs using various colour algorithms and each brand displays colours slightly differently (and have different visible areas of the screen). Sorry!
The hardware certainly does have a white noise generator, which was used in some games, but the new Ms-Pacman pack uses a far superior sound generator which easily supports all the original sounds (including speech).
Re:Data point - Donkey Kong franchise
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Retro Gaming Gets Hot
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hey, I'm just playing DK64 this weekend and am slightly disappointed compared to my memories. They seem to have been stretching the graphics rather than the gameplay on that game, although there are a lot of great things in it, for example being able to save at any time, the monkey rap, and the banana transporters.
Jumping and missing those ropes gets me too many times, and the close-up angles can be really annoying when you want to do some platform jumping; IIRC Banjo Kazooie was better for that but I'll have to replay that to see, and Mario 64 to see if it was as incredibly cool as I remember (except for a couple of annoying camera angles).
But IIRC DKC for SNES was much less "dense" than e.g. Super Mario World and also a major selling point for it was Rare's SGI workstations prerendering the art, so that was part of the franchise.
Of course I can't say that any 16bit games I wrote were marvels of gameplay:-) but I would suggest looking at some other SNES games, such as "ActRaiser" which is wonderful especially for the music!
Speaking as the guy who converted Pac-man, Ms-Pacman and Galaxian for Jakks Pacific, I can say yup that's true. But we had two other programmers on that pack so that the games were written faster. Three programmers + a day or so of an artist + a producer is quite a cheap project these days!
We had an artist to draw the front-end but didn't need a musician since we used the original tunes (albeit on lesser hardware in the case of the first pack - the second pack has decent sound though).
But shush! Now everyone is trying to get into the act and flood the market:-(
Some of us do actually leave our houses sometimes and go to areas over the horizon. And unlike.au we have mountains, rivers, seas etc which mean that the weather does actually vary between places.
You have to go through a third party to file taxes? Sheesh, the UK tax office has had a big push trying to get people to do electronic filing. Or are you talking about having to use an ISP?
I think that may vary between countries. Here in the UK I do get annoyed though by people putting married/single etc. on the page - are they trying to get me in trouble with the law?
I would love to see people apply who weren't white male 20s/30s, but that's just a dream... We got shockingly few CVs sent to us in the first place so we are mostly dealing with people we have known for 10 years instead of looking at newbies. With our deadlines we can't take risks on people, though we did give one project to a new person recently.
An artist wouldn't dream of applying for a job without a portfolio. For a job where you actually produce stuff (as opposed to management) having some examples of what you can produce goes a great way.
For example, lead developers of significant open source projects should have little difficulty in proving their credentials.
I think you are missing the point. If Monsanto could take out a few hundred patents on "weeding a garden", "using a rake", "using a rake backwards", "using fertiliser to improve mineral content" etc. and you are not allowed to do any of those things without paying them a fee, then your garden will look pretty poorly despite your intentions.
That is what corporations are currently doing - by patenting 30,000 software techniques (EU example; this is while they are not even allowed to be patented yet!) it becomes impossible for you to check that every line of code you write does not infringe one of those 30,000 patents. Especially since some of them are kept secret until they are granted, and others stretch the very bounds of the english language.
So FOSS is not allowed to use any of those techniques, even if they are independantly discovered/invented. That is the point.
OK, I am not familiar with the distinction you make between a prison and a jail. IIRC In the UK people get transferred from a police cell (at the local cop shop) to a prison within 48 hours, long before any trial.
Being charged with a crime does not necessarily mean you are guilty. I hear that in Japan nearly all cases brought to trial result in a guilty verdict, but I thought that a significant proportion of US defendants were found to be not guilty, like in the UK. Perhaps I am wrong there.
OTOH, if as you say trials are speedy in the US once charged, that is certainly better than in the UK where people can wait for 6 months in prison before trial (often the same prisons as for convicts, but with slightly different privileges - some guilty prisoners prefer to delay the trial for that reason, but anyone protesting their innocence has less luck).
That Dick Smith VZ-200 was quite popular. It booted up much faster than the slothful C-64 or ZX Spectrum! (RAM test? we don't need no steenking RAM test!)
And then of course the Dick Smith CAT was an Apple 2 clone.
And (in the UK) they are only now starting to lead with the 1742 temperature scale instead of the 1724 temperature scale (Celcius vs Farenheit) on the weather...
My preference is for my monitor to be side on to the window. No glare from behind, no bright lights in front. And to be on a different set of lights from the troglodytes, I mean artists. Ever wonder why PC games use colours (1,2,1) and (2,3,2) (out of 255) as contrasting textures? It's cos artists (and many coders) live in utter darkness. So let people have different lighting, otherwise they will be irritable and less productive.
Slashdot Mirror
I am using 0.9 now (all those IE holes finally converted me). It seems to not lock up/crash as long as you don't get directed to a .pdf file by google, or try anything else unusual.
Oh my god, I have terrorist connections!
It's an early production run (the ROM is dated 01 APR 2004 in the test mode). According to amazon.com it is released on 01 July so it might not be available at your local shop yet. Mind you Iraq got handed over two days early so who knows how accurate that street date is! :-)
OK, how about half the output of the pr0n industry :-) "Shaving Ryan's Privates", etc. etc.
You mean like this book and the others in the series?
So here it is (left-to-right):
George Galloway/Respect, Green, Liberal Democrats, New Labour, Conservative (Tories), UKIP (United Kingdom Independance Party - want out of the EU), BNP (British National Party - want "foreigners" out of UK).
I'd say (without knowing anything about US politics :-) perhaps the Democrats are equivalent to the Conservatives, and the Republicans range from UKIP (Bush) to the BNP (Buchanan).
One problem with getting accurate colours is that even if you find an original arcade cabinet, a 24 year old television is not guaranteed to be accurate compared to its original colours :-(
Also, a sound frequency analyser costs 18 or so, but a television analyser costs 8000 or more which was way out of budget :-( and might not offer much help.
You'll be pleased to know Xevious retains the hidden message at the beginning of the game (unlike the problem with the Warren Robinett text). That game really impressed me when it first came out although I was never that good at it.
I would love to do Crazy Climber on a dual joystick system. But I don't think Nichubutsu did enough famous games to get a full pack out of them. Heck, I would put Crossfire (C64 game), Robotron and a tank game on too, but the licensing would be nightmarish. And that's what its all about after all - getting permission.
I played with the Ms. Pacman pack just now and the joystick works fine in all directions. It will be up to you to decide whether the 8 way joystick is good for Ms Pacman but it is certainly essential for Xevious!
All I can say about the colours is that NTSC stands for Never The Same Colour. We tried it on various TVs using various colour algorithms and each brand displays colours slightly differently (and have different visible areas of the screen). Sorry!
The hardware certainly does have a white noise generator, which was used in some games, but the new Ms-Pacman pack uses a far superior sound generator which easily supports all the original sounds (including speech).
Jumping and missing those ropes gets me too many times, and the close-up angles can be really annoying when you want to do some platform jumping; IIRC Banjo Kazooie was better for that but I'll have to replay that to see, and Mario 64 to see if it was as incredibly cool as I remember (except for a couple of annoying camera angles).
But IIRC DKC for SNES was much less "dense" than e.g. Super Mario World and also a major selling point for it was Rare's SGI workstations prerendering the art, so that was part of the franchise.
Of course I can't say that any 16bit games I wrote were marvels of gameplay :-) but I would suggest looking at some other SNES games, such as "ActRaiser" which is wonderful especially for the music!
We had an artist to draw the front-end but didn't need a musician since we used the original tunes (albeit on lesser hardware in the case of the first pack - the second pack has decent sound though).
But shush! Now everyone is trying to get into the act and flood the market :-(
Some of us do actually leave our houses sometimes and go to areas over the horizon. And unlike .au we have mountains, rivers, seas etc which mean that the weather does actually vary between places.
You have to go through a third party to file taxes? Sheesh, the UK tax office has had a big push trying to get people to do electronic filing. Or are you talking about having to use an ISP?
"Now is not the time for sound-bites. I can feel the hand of history on my shoulder".
I would love to see people apply who weren't white male 20s/30s, but that's just a dream... We got shockingly few CVs sent to us in the first place so we are mostly dealing with people we have known for 10 years instead of looking at newbies. With our deadlines we can't take risks on people, though we did give one project to a new person recently.
For example, lead developers of significant open source projects should have little difficulty in proving their credentials.
That is what corporations are currently doing - by patenting 30,000 software techniques (EU example; this is while they are not even allowed to be patented yet!) it becomes impossible for you to check that every line of code you write does not infringe one of those 30,000 patents. Especially since some of them are kept secret until they are granted, and others stretch the very bounds of the english language.
So FOSS is not allowed to use any of those techniques, even if they are independantly discovered/invented. That is the point.
I take it you haven't seen the section in your local pr0n shop with the videos/dvds "Bridget the Midget" and "Demented Dwarves" then...
OK, I am not familiar with the distinction you make between a prison and a jail. IIRC In the UK people get transferred from a police cell (at the local cop shop) to a prison within 48 hours, long before any trial.
Being charged with a crime does not necessarily mean you are guilty. I hear that in Japan nearly all cases brought to trial result in a guilty verdict, but I thought that a significant proportion of US defendants were found to be not guilty, like in the UK. Perhaps I am wrong there.
OTOH, if as you say trials are speedy in the US once charged, that is certainly better than in the UK where people can wait for 6 months in prison before trial (often the same prisons as for convicts, but with slightly different privileges - some guilty prisoners prefer to delay the trial for that reason, but anyone protesting their innocence has less luck).
And then of course the Dick Smith CAT was an Apple 2 clone.
Um, a large proportion of people in jail are not convicted; they are on remand.
This proportion rises to 100% when you look at Guantanamo bay.
They could have just kept it as "Vinland" :-)
IIRC expedia.co.uk has temperature ranges (for suggested holidays) that include "Scorchio!" (a reference to the "fast show" tv series).
And (in the UK) they are only now starting to lead with the 1742 temperature scale instead of the 1724 temperature scale (Celcius vs Farenheit) on the weather...
My preference is for my monitor to be side on to the window. No glare from behind, no bright lights in front. And to be on a different set of lights from the troglodytes, I mean artists. Ever wonder why PC games use colours (1,2,1) and (2,3,2) (out of 255) as contrasting textures? It's cos artists (and many coders) live in utter darkness. So let people have different lighting, otherwise they will be irritable and less productive.