MP gain is based on how many magic stones you've waited on.
If the AI's turned all the magic stones red, it's going to gain MP, and you're not going to. You can completely shut down the AI by sitting on all the stones until he dies.
Whoever moderated this informative is a drooling idiot. It's an obvious joke.
Think about it - for a patch changing VIDEO CARD SETTINGS to only affect the character's movement speed would basically mean that the patch screws up the gameplay by making it easier. It makes absolutely no sense at all - and the links don't support that either.
It's inspirational to realize that software consultants actually do what they do for money.
"Don't repeat yourself"
Durr.
"Think about the kind of work that can be effectively outsourced (where "effectively" is used in the context of some manager's opinion). Can they ship stuff offshore that can be specified down to some fine level of detail? Yup! Can they send repetitive, rule-based, highly constrained stuff overseas? You bet! The stuff that will stay is the stuff that involves more intuition, and more interaction. To get job security, developers need to position themselves as highly effective business-value generators, working with the rest of the company to solve common goals. If you sit in your cube waiting for a spec to be thrown over the wall, then you may be in for a wait -- that spec might be in an envelope on its way to Bangalore."
It's fun maintaining code from India. It's also fun to tell your customers and your boss what the program should do. You should try both sometime.
"Explain how agile processes can reduce risk. Explain how lightweight approaches can earn value faster. And explain how they should outsource the mundane stuff, and leave their talented pool of in-house developers free to work on the next revolutionary change to the company's business."
These are the same people that advocate nightly builds and all that other crap that just gets in the way. All you have to do to make a software project successful is have at least two people who don't suck at life working on it, and have them delegate the boring work to the people who thought going into computers would make them rich - all consultants do is take common sense and dress it up so it sounds good to management, and in turn, management gives them a shitload of money. I've never heard of a software house suddenly turning around and not sucking because "we hired a consultant, and his strategy was fricking awesome, and suddenly we were making products that like didn't suck, and it was pretty cool." Managers only hire consulants if their teams aren't making the numbers they should, so they can therefore justify the lower productivitivy of their teams by saying that they're "adapting to the new vision/strategy/paradigm," and that's usually enough to buy them a year of suckage until upper management wises up - and knowing upper management, that rarely ever happens.
Performance really doesn't play an issue in outshoring to India - if your job's so simple a monkey could do it, your job's going to get outsourced, regardless of your performance. You can't really match cost efficiency of someone who lives in a country with 1/10 the per capita income. All you have to do is pray for the language barrier and hope the companies who are employing offshoring all get burned when they need to maintain the code - I think it's a fad, but I've been wrong before.
You can't compare relative "strength" of a console by showing two completely different programs running - you're simply not controlling enough variables for the comparison to be meaningful. The best way of clearly demonstrating that the X-Box is superior is simple: Run the X-Box version of games vs. the Gamecube and the PS2 versions. If a game's released on all three systems, the X-Box version invariably runs better and looks better than the others. It's pretty much unquestionable: take a look at all the major game review sites, they'll agree that the X-Box port is better.
And even then, comparing ports isn't the best means of comparison - system-specific optimizations have to be accounted for. The Gamecube's memory bandwidth is the worst of the three systems; the PS2 is slower; and the X-Box doesn't particularly like letting you go low-level.
In the good old days, processor makers would usually sell 3 different speeds of chip -
1. The base speed
2. A little better, for $100 more
3. TEH ALPHA AND OMEGA, for $500 more.
The only real difference between the base speed chips and TEH ALPHA AND OMEGA are clock limitations - I've never seen a chip that couldn't be stably clocked up to at least the next model's worth without remaining stable, and occasionally you get lucky. On paper what's supposed to happen is that processors will yield a few different speeds, with most failing to be stable at the maximum speed - but that's not really how it works when the chip reaches retail.
The big problem with this practice is as follows: A. The performance difference between, say, a P4 2.53 and a P4 2.80 is almost zero B. Nearly all P4 2.53's can overclock to 2.8 without any problems. C. The price difference between a P4 at 2.26 ghz and a P4 at 2.53 ghz is 30 bucks; the price difference between a P4 3.4 Extreme and a P4 3.2 extreme is about $100 - and don't even get me started about the Pentium-M. Overclocking can really save quite a bit of money.
Most cheap people just buy the slowest processor in a family and overclock it to the next in the family - and it very often works flawlessly.
So many of the PS2/GC's eventual best games were ported from Dreamcast:
Grandia II Skies of Arcadia Ikaruga Rez Guilty Gear X Marvel vs. Capcom 2
All were on the Dreamcast first. They played better on the Dreamcast than they did on the PS2 as well.
Other games, like Street Fighter III: First Strike, haven't been ported yet - but that got mixed reviews when it came out anyway.
Still, if you liked fighting games, this system was utterly godlike. With titles like SOUL CALIBER and Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves and Virtua Fighter 3 and Capcom vs. SNK (and 2 as well) and Dead or Alive 2 and the million King of the Fighters games and Last Blade 2, if anything it surpasses the Neo Geo in fighting game awesomeness.
I never bought a Dreamcast while it was in its prime though. I'm guessing it's probably because I kept seeing crap on the shelves like Power Stone 2 (which was actually an OK game) that I'd never heard of, and that scared me away.
Copy protection doesn't work. It hasn't worked for years now. All software that's remotely valuable is posted on the internet for free weeks before its official release, with cracks that allow you to bypass the copy protection.
Also, all commercial copy protection is capable of being bypassed by a determined fifth-grader. It's not that damn hard to image a disk. It's a little harder to make the game accept the image as valid, but as long as you keep buying commercial solutions (all very recognizable in a hex editor, if a canned solution doesn't already exist.) Quit trying.
There are many of us here who are exactly the same way.
The big problem that you'll face is that there are many, many smart people. 50% of the population's going to be "above average" in intelligence, after all. Employers would rather have a stupid person who actually gets stuff done rather than a smart person who doesn't - and worse still, they don't have to choose. There a lot of smart people who can actually sit down and force themselves to do unpleasant, boring tasks - just about everyone with a phD has had to deal with incredible tedium, especially people with phD's in the sciences.
Since you're going into college, I'd suggest staying the hell away from an engineering major, or any major that has right answers - your only prayer is the liberal arts. You're probably going to have a difficult time with college if only because you're undisciplined, and college has very little inherent structure. Since it's possible to not go to classes without any short-term consequences, and you're a very short-term kind of person, you could flunk out your first semester. Be careful.
Best case scenario, you'll probably end up working for yourself. You're the worst kind of employee, the biggest pain in the ass - you're too smart for menial work so that'll get done half-assed, and you'll get bored of whatever work you're given very, very quickly, but if you're given a really creative-type job with a lot of lattitude, you'll probably end up doing nothing and failing miserably.
Mac OS X is reasonably secure (to the best of my knowledge, I could easily be wrong) from a networking perspective, but only gives the illusion of security when tampered with from the hardware side. It's possible to bypass any startup login screen with merely an OS X CD, and what's worse, even without the CD you can still boot into darwin by holding down a key combination - I'm pretty sure you can turn both of these "features" off with a bit more technical expertise, but frankly, these security problems being left open by default worried me so much that I migrated away from putting OS X on any machines that are exposed to public use on our network, and I still won't do anything mission-critical on a Mac-based desktop system.
Meanwhile, most x86 PCs have BIOS passwords, a feature which I wish I knew how to enable on Macs - maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, it sure wasn't forthcoming in the manual or any of the man pages I read.
I know my concerns for security do border on the paranoid, but my goal is to have my desktop systems so secure that compromising them necessitates stealing the hard drive. If that happens, I'll know there's been a compromise, and heck, I've rigged up a surprise of my own in store for the poor soul who attempts such a feat. I don't want someone to be able to walk up to a turned-off system, hold down a few keys, type a few commands, and have unrestricted access.
Let us, for laughs, point out the assumptions this idiot has made in the article:
The target audience for the Sims 2, and the Singles, is pasty white teenage boys. There is on-screen explicit sex in "The SingleS" Pornography is inherently evil. Exposing children to pornography is inherently evil. Video game players tend to be ignorant, smut-obsessed, teenage males. Parents are stupid and ignorant and are perfectly willing to lend their sons credit cards so that they can purchase an Adults-Only game over the internet. The ESRB is a toothless organization composed only of malcontent pedophiles who wish to corrupt our children's minds with sex and violence. Movies inherently contain less violence, filthy sex, and coarse language than videogames do, and are much harder for little kids to see/obtain. Homosexuality is a deviant lifestyle, and depictions of homosexual acts are somehow worse than ordinary pornography.
Questions you might ask the author:
Did you actually play the games in question? Are you aware of any of the earlier shit that came from Japan? If so, are you aware how it is sold, and what the sales volume for it is, and what the target audience is? If you're so morally pure, then why do you use such sexually charged language? Are you compensating for something by growing that thick, 1970's-style beard? Are you aware of the how much better the pornography industry is doing in terms of gross sales in comparison to the movie industry? Are you aware of how much more profitable video games seem to be in comparison with traditional feature films? Why do you think that is? Do you have a template or something for writing reactionary articles against bullshit you don't understand? Could you try using a different template next time, perhaps one more subtle?
Then again, would you rather pay 50 bucks for a game you could beat in a weekend? I've played FFXI for over 20 straight in-game days - 480 hours over 5 months. It works out to be 12 bucks for every 96 hours of playtime as number of months -> infinite - and I'm by no means a hardcore FFXI player.
The Gameboy Advance has a 16.78 Mhz ARM7tdmi for its main CPU, whereas the SNES has a WDC 65C816 16 bit processor running at 1.79, 2.68 MHz, or 3.58 MHz (variable), with 128 KB of RAM. Graphical emulation of SNES games is no problem - in the old days, you could simulate an SNES game on a Mac Quadra or even a IIgs if you felt lucky, but you wouldn't have sound. Oddly enough, the SNES's sound processor is relatively hardcore - it's a SPC700 running at 4.1 MHz. The SNES even has a special 512k segment of memory reserved for audio RAM - quite considerable if you realize that the main CPU has 128k of working RAM and the dedicated video subsystem only has 64k of RAM. So from a technological perspective, it's quite feasible that the GBA could run an SNES emu with no sound, but sound emulation without overclocking would take quite a feat of software optimization.
The emulator you're using on your PDA probably hasn't been fully optimized yet. Give it a year or two, or wait for ZSNES or SNES9X to get ported.
DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectSound, DirectMusic, DirectInput, and DirectPlay.
OpenGL is only a graphics API - before DirectX, using a gamepad or such would require each game to have its own gamepad driver or some obscene higher level kludge. DirectSound and DirectInput are INFINITELY better than what came before... *shudder*
Hell, if I knew a GBA Lost Vikings existed I DEFINITELY would have bought it. Definitely one of the more kick-ass games on the Super NES - I think it's one of Blizzard's SNES era games.
The laptop's chipset doesn't support AGP 8x, so there isn't going to be any difference, performance-wise, between a 9000 and a 9200 in the laptop. You could send the laptops back to them and ask them to put in the 9200, and they may put in a 9200 - but the performance wouldn't change at all.
Admittedly, the advertising is deceptive, but come on - the difference between AGP 4x and AGP 8x to begin with is almost nil. The companies should give the people who actually bought those laptops refunds for the difference between a 9000 and 9200, correct the future advertisments, and apologize - even though their defense of the model change was pretty lame, it's not as if the original sin was something that I'd be up in arms about if I purchased one of those laptops.
Depending on the quality of the electricity generated you could easily damage the power supply, especially if the power goes on and off erratically. Run it through a UPS/power filter if you're going to attempt it.
Did you try using a fixed exe or patch to take the copy protection out? www.gamecopyworld.com or www.gameburnworld.com can help you out. If it is the copy protection then applying one of the patches / using one of the fixed exes should help you out.
Disclaimer: I'm pretty sure these might void your warrenty, and should not be used to pirate games, etc. etc. But I've always figured that since you paid the money to buy the game, you shouldn't need to have the damn disk in the drive.
1. Every single enemy in the game is either too easy to be bothered with or will kick your ass instantly - there's NEVER an intermediate, even with bosses.
2. The "no exp" system means that in order to grow your characters, you actually have to force them to stab themselves with their own swords in order to build their stats to even decent levels. Nothing is more hilarious than getting into a battle of imps, killing all but one, then spending a good five minutes telling your characters to stab themselves just to build stats. It gets even worse with the "chge" spell...
3. If you wear armor your magic will always be hilariously pathetic (even though it won't say so in the stats) - and for the final dungeon, it's actually better to strip off your clothes and run through the final dungeon buck naked because your armor will actually slow you down enough so you get hit 11 times every time the enemies attack, and it's better to get hit twice with no armor on than 11 times with armor on. I was taking like 2000 damage a turn on a character with a full set of Gengi equipment, then on a lark I decided to see what would happen if I stripped him naked, and suddenly the damage he received dropped to 400. WTF?
4. Weapons and Magic operate on a proficiency scale. The problem is that the game's glitched so that you can actually select, cancel, select cancel to build the proficency without actually wasting your turn. "Well fine then, don't cheat." Actually, you literally have to do this because building up even a decent swordskill would require swinging your sword something like 800 times or something, and mastering takes like 2000 times. That's for ONE KIND OF WEAPON - there's like 8. And you're totally hopeless with a weapon until you hit level 4 proficency. Spells don't even really do ANYTHING until you hit insane proficiency either.
5. Your 4th character will always be totally useless because you go through god knows how many over the course of the game, and they're always ridiculously undermatched compared to the enemies. And you can't select-cancel with him/her. Great.
Slashdot Mirror
You sure that's cell-shading?
I'm pretty sure it's an honest-to-god (gasp) 2d game.
Who would'da thunk it?
Contra: Legacy of War.
That was one horrible game.
It's not cheating.
MP gain is based on how many magic stones you've waited on.
If the AI's turned all the magic stones red, it's going to gain MP, and you're not going to. You can completely shut down the AI by sitting on all the stones until he dies.
Whoever moderated this informative is a drooling idiot. It's an obvious joke.
Think about it - for a patch changing VIDEO CARD SETTINGS to only affect the character's movement speed would basically mean that the patch screws up the gameplay by making it easier. It makes absolutely no sense at all - and the links don't support that either.
People have actually done what you've suggested.
Final Fantasy suffers less than you imagine, Mario suffers more.
It's inspirational to realize that software consultants actually do what they do for money.
"Don't repeat yourself"
Durr.
"Think about the kind of work that can be effectively outsourced (where "effectively" is used in the context of some manager's opinion). Can they ship stuff offshore that can be specified down to some fine level of detail? Yup! Can they send repetitive, rule-based, highly constrained stuff overseas? You bet! The stuff that will stay is the stuff that involves more intuition, and more interaction. To get job security, developers need to position themselves as highly effective business-value generators, working with the rest of the company to solve common goals. If you sit in your cube waiting for a spec to be thrown over the wall, then you may be in for a wait -- that spec might be in an envelope on its way to Bangalore."
It's fun maintaining code from India. It's also fun to tell your customers and your boss what the program should do. You should try both sometime.
"Explain how agile processes can reduce risk. Explain how lightweight approaches can earn value faster. And explain how they should outsource the mundane stuff, and leave their talented pool of in-house developers free to work on the next revolutionary change to the company's business."
These are the same people that advocate nightly builds and all that other crap that just gets in the way. All you have to do to make a software project successful is have at least two people who don't suck at life working on it, and have them delegate the boring work to the people who thought going into computers would make them rich - all consultants do is take common sense and dress it up so it sounds good to management, and in turn, management gives them a shitload of money. I've never heard of a software house suddenly turning around and not sucking because "we hired a consultant, and his strategy was fricking awesome, and suddenly we were making products that like didn't suck, and it was pretty cool." Managers only hire consulants if their teams aren't making the numbers they should, so they can therefore justify the lower productivitivy of their teams by saying that they're "adapting to the new vision/strategy/paradigm," and that's usually enough to buy them a year of suckage until upper management wises up - and knowing upper management, that rarely ever happens.
Performance really doesn't play an issue in outshoring to India - if your job's so simple a monkey could do it, your job's going to get outsourced, regardless of your performance. You can't really match cost efficiency of someone who lives in a country with 1/10 the per capita income. All you have to do is pray for the language barrier and hope the companies who are employing offshoring all get burned when they need to maintain the code - I think it's a fad, but I've been wrong before.
You can't compare relative "strength" of a console by showing two completely different programs running - you're simply not controlling enough variables for the comparison to be meaningful. The best way of clearly demonstrating that the X-Box is superior is simple: Run the X-Box version of games vs. the Gamecube and the PS2 versions. If a game's released on all three systems, the X-Box version invariably runs better and looks better than the others. It's pretty much unquestionable: take a look at all the major game review sites, they'll agree that the X-Box port is better.
And even then, comparing ports isn't the best means of comparison - system-specific optimizations have to be accounted for. The Gamecube's memory bandwidth is the worst of the three systems; the PS2 is slower; and the X-Box doesn't particularly like letting you go low-level.
In the good old days, processor makers would usually sell 3 different speeds of chip -
1. The base speed
2. A little better, for $100 more
3. TEH ALPHA AND OMEGA, for $500 more.
The only real difference between the base speed chips and TEH ALPHA AND OMEGA are clock limitations - I've never seen a chip that couldn't be stably clocked up to at least the next model's worth without remaining stable, and occasionally you get lucky. On paper what's supposed to happen is that processors will yield a few different speeds, with most failing to be stable at the maximum speed - but that's not really how it works when the chip reaches retail.
The big problem with this practice is as follows:
A. The performance difference between, say, a P4 2.53 and a P4 2.80 is almost zero
B. Nearly all P4 2.53's can overclock to 2.8 without any problems.
C. The price difference between a P4 at 2.26 ghz and a P4 at 2.53 ghz is 30 bucks; the price difference between a P4 3.4 Extreme and a P4 3.2 extreme is about $100 - and don't even get me started about the Pentium-M. Overclocking can really save quite a bit of money.
Most cheap people just buy the slowest processor in a family and overclock it to the next in the family - and it very often works flawlessly.
So many of the PS2/GC's eventual best games were ported from Dreamcast:
Grandia II
Skies of Arcadia
Ikaruga
Rez
Guilty Gear X
Marvel vs. Capcom 2
All were on the Dreamcast first. They played better on the Dreamcast than they did on the PS2 as well.
Other games, like Street Fighter III: First Strike, haven't been ported yet - but that got mixed reviews when it came out anyway.
Still, if you liked fighting games, this system was utterly godlike. With titles like SOUL CALIBER and Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves and Virtua Fighter 3 and Capcom vs. SNK (and 2 as well) and Dead or Alive 2 and the million King of the Fighters games and Last Blade 2, if anything it surpasses the Neo Geo in fighting game awesomeness.
I never bought a Dreamcast while it was in its prime though. I'm guessing it's probably because I kept seeing crap on the shelves like Power Stone 2 (which was actually an OK game) that I'd never heard of, and that scared me away.
Copy protection doesn't work. It hasn't worked for years now. All software that's remotely valuable is posted on the internet for free weeks before its official release, with cracks that allow you to bypass the copy protection.
Also, all commercial copy protection is capable of being bypassed by a determined fifth-grader. It's not that damn hard to image a disk. It's a little harder to make the game accept the image as valid, but as long as you keep buying commercial solutions (all very recognizable in a hex editor, if a canned solution doesn't already exist.) Quit trying.
You can download at super fast-speeds, sure...
But who's going to be UPLOADING at that rate?
Even if it does work, you're not going to notice the difference all that much.
There are many of us here who are exactly the same way.
The big problem that you'll face is that there are many, many smart people. 50% of the population's going to be "above average" in intelligence, after all. Employers would rather have a stupid person who actually gets stuff done rather than a smart person who doesn't - and worse still, they don't have to choose. There a lot of smart people who can actually sit down and force themselves to do unpleasant, boring tasks - just about everyone with a phD has had to deal with incredible tedium, especially people with phD's in the sciences.
Since you're going into college, I'd suggest staying the hell away from an engineering major, or any major that has right answers - your only prayer is the liberal arts. You're probably going to have a difficult time with college if only because you're undisciplined, and college has very little inherent structure. Since it's possible to not go to classes without any short-term consequences, and you're a very short-term kind of person, you could flunk out your first semester. Be careful.
Best case scenario, you'll probably end up working for yourself. You're the worst kind of employee, the biggest pain in the ass - you're too smart for menial work so that'll get done half-assed, and you'll get bored of whatever work you're given very, very quickly, but if you're given a really creative-type job with a lot of lattitude, you'll probably end up doing nothing and failing miserably.
Mac OS X is reasonably secure (to the best of my knowledge, I could easily be wrong) from a networking perspective, but only gives the illusion of security when tampered with from the hardware side. It's possible to bypass any startup login screen with merely an OS X CD, and what's worse, even without the CD you can still boot into darwin by holding down a key combination - I'm pretty sure you can turn both of these "features" off with a bit more technical expertise, but frankly, these security problems being left open by default worried me so much that I migrated away from putting OS X on any machines that are exposed to public use on our network, and I still won't do anything mission-critical on a Mac-based desktop system.
Meanwhile, most x86 PCs have BIOS passwords, a feature which I wish I knew how to enable on Macs - maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't, it sure wasn't forthcoming in the manual or any of the man pages I read.
I know my concerns for security do border on the paranoid, but my goal is to have my desktop systems so secure that compromising them necessitates stealing the hard drive. If that happens, I'll know there's been a compromise, and heck, I've rigged up a surprise of my own in store for the poor soul who attempts such a feat. I don't want someone to be able to walk up to a turned-off system, hold down a few keys, type a few commands, and have unrestricted access.
Let us, for laughs, point out the assumptions this idiot has made in the article:
The target audience for the Sims 2, and the Singles, is pasty white teenage boys.
There is on-screen explicit sex in "The SingleS"
Pornography is inherently evil.
Exposing children to pornography is inherently evil.
Video game players tend to be ignorant, smut-obsessed, teenage males.
Parents are stupid and ignorant and are perfectly willing to lend their sons credit cards so that they can purchase an Adults-Only game over the internet.
The ESRB is a toothless organization composed only of malcontent pedophiles who wish to corrupt our children's minds with sex and violence.
Movies inherently contain less violence, filthy sex, and coarse language than videogames do, and are much harder for little kids to see/obtain.
Homosexuality is a deviant lifestyle, and depictions of homosexual acts are somehow worse than ordinary pornography.
Questions you might ask the author:
Did you actually play the games in question?
Are you aware of any of the earlier shit that came from Japan?
If so, are you aware how it is sold, and what the sales volume for it is, and what the target audience is?
If you're so morally pure, then why do you use such sexually charged language?
Are you compensating for something by growing that thick, 1970's-style beard?
Are you aware of the how much better the pornography industry is doing in terms of gross sales in comparison to the movie industry? Are you aware of how much more profitable video games seem to be in comparison with traditional feature films? Why do you think that is?
Do you have a template or something for writing reactionary articles against bullshit you don't understand? Could you try using a different template next time, perhaps one more subtle?
Then again, would you rather pay 50 bucks for a game you could beat in a weekend? I've played FFXI for over 20 straight in-game days - 480 hours over 5 months. It works out to be 12 bucks for every 96 hours of playtime as number of months -> infinite - and I'm by no means a hardcore FFXI player.
The Gameboy Advance has a 16.78 Mhz ARM7tdmi for its main CPU, whereas the SNES has a WDC 65C816 16 bit processor running at 1.79, 2.68 MHz, or 3.58 MHz (variable), with 128 KB of RAM. Graphical emulation of SNES games is no problem - in the old days, you could simulate an SNES game on a Mac Quadra or even a IIgs if you felt lucky, but you wouldn't have sound. Oddly enough, the SNES's sound processor is relatively hardcore - it's a SPC700 running at 4.1 MHz. The SNES even has a special 512k segment of memory reserved for audio RAM - quite considerable if you realize that the main CPU has 128k of working RAM and the dedicated video subsystem only has 64k of RAM. So from a technological perspective, it's quite feasible that the GBA could run an SNES emu with no sound, but sound emulation without overclocking would take quite a feat of software optimization.
The emulator you're using on your PDA probably hasn't been fully optimized yet. Give it a year or two, or wait for ZSNES or SNES9X to get ported.
DirectX has multiple components:
DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectSound, DirectMusic, DirectInput, and DirectPlay.
OpenGL is only a graphics API - before DirectX, using a gamepad or such would require each game to have its own gamepad driver or some obscene higher level kludge. DirectSound and DirectInput are INFINITELY better than what came before... *shudder*
So they steal our technology, it blows up, and now the Russians somehow have a right to complain? Notice how they didn't.
Hell, if I knew a GBA Lost Vikings existed I DEFINITELY would have bought it. Definitely one of the more kick-ass games on the Super NES - I think it's one of Blizzard's SNES era games.
1997? 33 MHz 486?
"I took the liberty to upgrade your computer. A real hacker needs a 33-MHz, not a 20." = sarcasm.
The laptop's chipset doesn't support AGP 8x, so there isn't going to be any difference, performance-wise, between a 9000 and a 9200 in the laptop. You could send the laptops back to them and ask them to put in the 9200, and they may put in a 9200 - but the performance wouldn't change at all.
Admittedly, the advertising is deceptive, but come on - the difference between AGP 4x and AGP 8x to begin with is almost nil. The companies should give the people who actually bought those laptops refunds for the difference between a 9000 and 9200, correct the future advertisments, and apologize - even though their defense of the model change was pretty lame, it's not as if the original sin was something that I'd be up in arms about if I purchased one of those laptops.
Depending on the quality of the electricity generated you could easily damage the power supply, especially if the power goes on and off erratically. Run it through a UPS/power filter if you're going to attempt it.
Did you try using a fixed exe or patch to take the copy protection out? www.gamecopyworld.com or www.gameburnworld.com can help you out. If it is the copy protection then applying one of the patches / using one of the fixed exes should help you out.
Disclaimer: I'm pretty sure these might void your warrenty, and should not be used to pirate games, etc. etc. But I've always figured that since you paid the money to buy the game, you shouldn't need to have the damn disk in the drive.
There's a reason why it never crossed the ocean.
The battle system COMPLETELY broken.
1. Every single enemy in the game is either too easy to be bothered with or will kick your ass instantly - there's NEVER an intermediate, even with bosses.
2. The "no exp" system means that in order to grow your characters, you actually have to force them to stab themselves with their own swords in order to build their stats to even decent levels. Nothing is more hilarious than getting into a battle of imps, killing all but one, then spending a good five minutes telling your characters to stab themselves just to build stats. It gets even worse with the "chge" spell...
3. If you wear armor your magic will always be hilariously pathetic (even though it won't say so in the stats) - and for the final dungeon, it's actually better to strip off your clothes and run through the final dungeon buck naked because your armor will actually slow you down enough so you get hit 11 times every time the enemies attack, and it's better to get hit twice with no armor on than 11 times with armor on. I was taking like 2000 damage a turn on a character with a full set of Gengi equipment, then on a lark I decided to see what would happen if I stripped him naked, and suddenly the damage he received dropped to 400. WTF?
4. Weapons and Magic operate on a proficiency scale. The problem is that the game's glitched so that you can actually select, cancel, select cancel to build the proficency without actually wasting your turn. "Well fine then, don't cheat." Actually, you literally have to do this because building up even a decent swordskill would require swinging your sword something like 800 times or something, and mastering takes like 2000 times. That's for ONE KIND OF WEAPON - there's like 8. And you're totally hopeless with a weapon until you hit level 4 proficency. Spells don't even really do ANYTHING until you hit insane proficiency either.
5. Your 4th character will always be totally useless because you go through god knows how many over the course of the game, and they're always ridiculously undermatched compared to the enemies. And you can't select-cancel with him/her. Great.
Torrentsearch installs a LOT of spyware (more than it admits) - I recommend running it on a PTP bitch box rather than your regular machine.