Actually Metal Gear Solid is the third game in the Metal Gear series. The original Metal Gear was released on MSX2 and NES, the sequel Metal Gear 2 - Solid Snake was only released on MSX2. Unfortunately MSX was never popular in the USA, but it was popular in Japan, Europe, South America and several other areas.
Many of the themes in Metal Gear Solid were there from the very first episodes, such as being lied to by your superiors. Also the game play was there right from the start (tactical espionage: avoid being spotted instead of shooting everyone) and several mechanics (luring guards with sound, avoiding detection by video camera's, creative uses of cigarettes etc). Of course they were refined and added to in later episodes. And several of the characters originate there as well: Grey Fox (Frank Jaeger) and Big Boss were in MG1 and MG2, Roy Campbell was in MG2.
MG1 had a decent storyline considering the small size of the game, but a lot of it was lost in the translation to English. MG2 has a storyline that is almost as complex as MGS. I did an English fan translation of MG2 together with Takamichi Suzukawa; I hope we were able to preserve the quality of the original story (Konami never released MG2 in English). The background story / previous missions options in the MGS menu summarise the storyline of MG1 and MG2; it's good to see that Kojima did not forget Metal Gear's origin.
My TV broke down while I was in the middle of playing Final Fantasy X. I tried connecting my PS2 to my Hauppauge TV card. This is a very decent card for watching TV, but I was unable to get a good PS2 image from it.
The first problem is that the card can only capture composite video. The PS2 used to be connected to my TV with an RGB cable and compared to that, composite video is really a step back. I read that S-video does provide acceptable image quality, but my card isn't able to capture that.
The second problem is that most (all?) PS2 games use an interlaced video mode. TVs are made to deal with interlaced video and therefore it looks reasonably well. Capture cards have more trouble dealing with interlaced video. The default playback mode shows some nasty interlacing artifacts when there is quick movement in the video. I tried using MPlayer to run a deinterlace filter over the video, which gave a much better picture, but now the latency between the PS2 sending the video and my PC display increased so much that action games became difficult to play.
The third problem is specific to my setup: I have a TFT monitor. I love it for coding and browsing the web, but it's not ideal for video. A TFT has a fixed resolution, so the video had to be scaled to that which made it even more blurry than it already was. The colors of a TFT are different and PS2 games were designed to look good on TVs. And finally TFTs are slow to react to fast changes in the video.
The fourth problem is that the refresh rate of the PC monitor is not equal to the refresh rate of the PS2. If the captured video is not synced to the PC vsync, tearing occurs. If it is synced, latency increases and the framerate becomes irregular.
So I would suggest that you buy the capture card at a shop that lets you return it if you're not satisfied with the result. The solution I found was to connect my PS2 to my 15-year-old home computer RGB monitor; I got much better video quality than on my PC + TFT.
Webware for Python lets you write servlets in Python. I'm using it for a project at work and I'm very pleased with it. My initial plan was to do the prototype in Python and switch to Java later, but the Python implementation works so well that it is now running in production.
What is the difference from the viewpoint of the "sharecropper" between having the rug pulled out from under you by a new piece of software that gets added to windows and a free version that someone develops. To the end user, they both look free (as in beer of course.)
Exactly. If you're trying to sell the same piece of software to a lot of people, you can divide your costs among a lot of customers. But you're always at risk that someone will write something that fulfills the same requirements for free. Even Microsoft, who owns the platform they write for, runs this same risk (OpenOffice).
JBoss does sell the full documentation, but does not place non-disclosure restrictions on them. So you are not allowed to distribute those PDF files (copyright), but you are allowed to spread the information in there as long as you write it in your own words.
In fact, JBoss even offers free volunteer-made docs for version 2.4, but those are outdated as many things changed between then and the current 3.0 release.
The VDR program can record shows from a digital source. It uses the Linux DVB drivers. At work, we succesfully used it with a Hauppauge DVB-S card connected to an Astra feed. However, this is in Europe, I'm not sure something compatible exists in the US (OpenCable?).
Re:Slightly OT: How to burn .avi files to vcd?
on
Build Your Own Linux PVR
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
mencoder (comes with MPlayer) can recode to MPEG. And if mencoder does not have enough features, there is transcode.
To create (S)VCD cue/bins from MPEG files , you can use vcdimager. Keep in mind that (S)VCD only accept certain resolutions and bitrates, not just any MPEG file can be used to create a video CD.
On kdeleague.org I found this link to the up-to-date
README for KDE kiosk mode. The kiosk feature is included in the standard KDE distribution since KDE3. This README describes how to activate the restricted permissions features.
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Actually Metal Gear Solid is the third game in the Metal Gear series. The original Metal Gear was released on MSX2 and NES, the sequel Metal Gear 2 - Solid Snake was only released on MSX2. Unfortunately MSX was never popular in the USA, but it was popular in Japan, Europe, South America and several other areas.
Many of the themes in Metal Gear Solid were there from the very first episodes, such as being lied to by your superiors. Also the game play was there right from the start (tactical espionage: avoid being spotted instead of shooting everyone) and several mechanics (luring guards with sound, avoiding detection by video camera's, creative uses of cigarettes etc). Of course they were refined and added to in later episodes. And several of the characters originate there as well: Grey Fox (Frank Jaeger) and Big Boss were in MG1 and MG2, Roy Campbell was in MG2.
MG1 had a decent storyline considering the small size of the game, but a lot of it was lost in the translation to English. MG2 has a storyline that is almost as complex as MGS. I did an English fan translation of MG2 together with Takamichi Suzukawa; I hope we were able to preserve the quality of the original story (Konami never released MG2 in English). The background story / previous missions options in the MGS menu summarise the storyline of MG1 and MG2; it's good to see that Kojima did not forget Metal Gear's origin.
My TV broke down while I was in the middle of playing Final Fantasy X. I tried connecting my PS2 to my Hauppauge TV card. This is a very decent card for watching TV, but I was unable to get a good PS2 image from it.
The first problem is that the card can only capture composite video. The PS2 used to be connected to my TV with an RGB cable and compared to that, composite video is really a step back. I read that S-video does provide acceptable image quality, but my card isn't able to capture that.
The second problem is that most (all?) PS2 games use an interlaced video mode. TVs are made to deal with interlaced video and therefore it looks reasonably well. Capture cards have more trouble dealing with interlaced video. The default playback mode shows some nasty interlacing artifacts when there is quick movement in the video. I tried using MPlayer to run a deinterlace filter over the video, which gave a much better picture, but now the latency between the PS2 sending the video and my PC display increased so much that action games became difficult to play.
The third problem is specific to my setup: I have a TFT monitor. I love it for coding and browsing the web, but it's not ideal for video. A TFT has a fixed resolution, so the video had to be scaled to that which made it even more blurry than it already was. The colors of a TFT are different and PS2 games were designed to look good on TVs. And finally TFTs are slow to react to fast changes in the video.
The fourth problem is that the refresh rate of the PC monitor is not equal to the refresh rate of the PS2. If the captured video is not synced to the PC vsync, tearing occurs. If it is synced, latency increases and the framerate becomes irregular.
So I would suggest that you buy the capture card at a shop that lets you return it if you're not satisfied with the result. The solution I found was to connect my PS2 to my 15-year-old home computer RGB monitor; I got much better video quality than on my PC + TFT.
Webware for Python lets you write servlets in Python. I'm using it for a project at work and I'm very pleased with it. My initial plan was to do the prototype in Python and switch to Java later, but the Python implementation works so well that it is now running in production.
Exactly. If you're trying to sell the same piece of software to a lot of people, you can divide your costs among a lot of customers. But you're always at risk that someone will write something that fulfills the same requirements for free. Even Microsoft, who owns the platform they write for, runs this same risk (OpenOffice).
JBoss does sell the full documentation, but does not place non-disclosure restrictions on them. So you are not allowed to distribute those PDF files (copyright), but you are allowed to spread the information in there as long as you write it in your own words.
In fact, JBoss even offers free volunteer-made docs for version 2.4, but those are outdated as many things changed between then and the current 3.0 release.
The VDR program can record shows from a digital source. It uses the Linux DVB drivers. At work, we succesfully used it with a Hauppauge DVB-S card connected to an Astra feed. However, this is in Europe, I'm not sure something compatible exists in the US (OpenCable?).
To create (S)VCD cue/bins from MPEG files , you can use vcdimager. Keep in mind that (S)VCD only accept certain resolutions and bitrates, not just any MPEG file can be used to create a video CD.
On kdeleague.org I found this link to the up-to-date README for KDE kiosk mode. The kiosk feature is included in the standard KDE distribution since KDE3. This README describes how to activate the restricted permissions features.