There's not going to be a thousand different pieces of hardware to begin with. They have a thousand GAMES, not hardware systems. Doubtful they'll cover more than a dozen hardware systems. MAME doesn't cover a thousand different pieces of hardware either, for that matter. Furthur, all of the development that's gone into MAME has gone into other emulation projects. MAME is only the most ambitious emulator out there, trying to emulate several dozen (not several thousand) different platforms, but there are still many other emulators that match, sometimes even outperform MAME, and even more emulators that emulate systems quite well that MAME doesn't even try to support yet.
Lastly, we come down to the original point: Do you really think they're going to use an emulator that was made by people who lacked intimate knowledge of the systems? Most all publically available consoel and arcade emulators are hodge-podges that were assembled bit by bit to get best-fit support of the hardware being emulated. The hardware manufacturers, however, often produce much better emulators simply because they have access to better details of the system and how it works together. Sony had a PSP emulator out last year, it was even mentioned on Slashdot because it included a battery usage simulator. Currently, Zophar.net hasn't even linked to projects that claim they're going to try to emulate it, let alone ones that have already started to try, or had any success. Same goes for the DS. So far, all that's been accomplished is two screen GBA emulators that don't yet support the DS hardware, but guess what? Nintendo probably has emulated it already because they're far more knowledgable about the system. Emulating the CPU is only the beginning. The emulator has to also emulate all the other hardware and how it's connected, and none of that information is public. It's attained by trial and error. The manufacturer doesn't have that weakness.
MAME isn't the only emulator out there. With access to the companies that own the games, they likely have access to more advanced development tools and information specific to the systems than freeware emulator developers do. Thoseo tools could very well include emulators, and if not, will probably include enough specifications to make high-accuracy emulation easier.
The point isn't China, the point is that they're trying to sell it in Japan.
Ever noticed that many Japanese RPGs take place in a very slightly altered version of the real world and/or real mythology? Many identifiable things, familiar names and themes, but it's never quite authentic. Things aren't quite as they would be normally. In Valkyie Profile, Odin was half human, Frei was a woman, and Freya wasn't a slut. In the Final Fantasy games, Shiva has somewhat fewer arms than you see in tradidtional statuary. In Xenogears, God was a giant world killing weapons system and bishops fed little boys into a machine that processed them as food. There's enough there to identify the source, but not enough there to say it's true to that source.
Jade Empire is doing the same thing. There's enough there to see that it's primarily Chinese mythology, but there are elements of Japanese (I've only seen multi-tailed fox spirits in Japanese myth, anyway), Indian (those elephant demons look an awful lotlike Ganesh to me), and even Jewish (golems) mythology, and a good deal of creative thinking thrown in, and well as a movie-theater treatment of martial arts. It's not a faithful treatment of Chinese mythology, but it is a lot like Valkyrie Profile's treatment of Norse mythology or Xenogears treatment of Catholicism.
It isn't unintelligible. I have noticed some definite matches between the subtitles and what's being said. If they talked a bit slower, I could probably start matching words with their translations.
It was at the effective end of its life, but Nintendo was not through with it. They continued looking for developers and had regular game releases until 1998 (They were slow, but mostly because most developers had bailed out and started making Playstation games), and even had several releases in 1999 (The last was a Fire Emblem game, which was in September or October of 1999). Nintendo had played around with the CDi and Playstation (the SNES CD one, not the one that eventually came out), neither of which panned out. The SNES was still their top console three years after they'd previously planned to replace it, and two years after it had reached the "end of its life" as you say.
Innovation is a pretty loose subject in this case, too. An innovative system is nothing if it doesn't have solid and innovative games. It ends up getting delegated to gimick standing. The system feels like a waste since the games don't take advantage of what it was made for, and the games seem unfinished for the same reason.
A system completely devoid of innovation, however, can excell with innovative games. The games are great, and they earnthe system a reputation as innovative in doing so.
They're also not destroying the industry by any means. They're destroying Nintendo's dominance of the handheld market, but that's always been a fragile thing, enforced by half-assed competitors like Nokia (and even Nintendo themselves with the Virtual Boy), but that's always what happens when a market leader stagnates and is blindsided by a new competitor.
The PSP and GBA/DS is a lot like the PS1 comming out back in the SNES days. Nintendo was caught with hardware that hadn't changed much in years, and hadn't had serious competition in a long time. The time was ripe for somebody else to break into the market. The GBA is still very much alive, though, so at least it won't be as decisive as the SNES's downfall. We won't all forget Nintendo in six months. When the N64 came out, a lot of people I knew basically said, "What? Nintendo still makes games?" At that time, my SNES hadn't even been pluggged in since the PS1 launch.
The DS was certainly a radical change, but so far it doesn't have the game lineup. An innovative system means nothing if it doesn't have innovative games, but a completely mundane and uninnovative system can excell with innovative games, and that's what Sony wants to do with the PSP.
I just hope that Nintendo doesn't respond to the PSP like they responded to the PS1. I can't see any two ways about it: The N64 was a lousy system. Just about everything in it and its games - especially it's early games - felt to me like they were in desperation mode, trying to get something - anything, for that matter - on the market to compete with the PS1, just to keep the Nintendo name in the market.
If they produce a handheld system like that, just to meet the PSP, then they're really going to end up loosing that handheld war you see comming, and they're going to loose it badly. Nintendo's console offering still hasn't gotten back where the SNES was, and it'll be rough for them if they end up in the same position in the handheld market.
But, then, with each new generation of systems, the leaders can shift around all over the place. In 1993, could you see Nintendo virtually erased from gaming in two years? Before the PS1 came out, the word "Nintendo" meant video games. My friends would say, "Want to come over and play Nintendo?" even if they had a Genesis, because Nintendo and video game were the same words. That changed fast with the Playstation, and Nintendo was marginalized really until the Gamecube came out.
I thought the Dreamcast would be the end of Sony, and then the PS2 blew it out of the water. Before the DS came out, I was expecting a stellar system with amazing and innovative games. Now I have the system and a disappointing set of games. Those weak games made me expect another massacre when the PSP came out, but that hasn't happen yet. With the next set of consoles comming soon, who knows what happens. Nintendo might be back on top. Everybody involved has a shot, if they play it right.
There's a distinction between don't panic and don't care.
Don't panic doesn't mean you're not in danger, it means that if you do panic, you're lost. You have to keep your wits in order when you're in danger. You have to be aware of the danger, even if it is small, and you have to have your towel ready to deal with it.
Let's say you're driving down the road, and see two children playing in a yard up ahead. "Don't panic" means you should remember that it's unlikely they'll dart out into the road ahead of you, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't care. Even if it's a million to one shot that one of those kids will run out into the road, you still need care enough to watch them in case they do.
Wouldn't it be possible for a p2p network to use two hashes at the same time? Even if they can reliably generate a junk file for one, or even both hashes, it would be much more compelx to generate one that matches both.
It's true. They're not massively killing off negative reviews - most of the reviews I have on that site are negative, and they're all still there (even though negative reviews have been removed from the same games). They're getting rid of the crappy half-assed reviews written by people who clearly didn't play the game (and often SAY SO in the review), and give no coherent reasons behind anything.
There's a difference between a good bad review and a bad bad review. Now all GameFAQs has to do is get rid of all the bad good reviews and maybe they'll have something left worth reading.
Not counting eclipses, there are actually more than one. At the north and south poles, you're always at the terminator between night and day, and the sun is always at the horizon. The north pole is more convenient, since the crater mentioned in the article provides an elevated area at its rim very close to the pole, which will raise the base out of the long shadows that would be cast by other crater rims and mountains around the pole. As long as the earth isn't blocking the sun, it will always be at least partially above the horizon.
The south pole is a bit less convenient, since, while there is a crater there, the pole is in the interior of the crater instead of near the rim, and is instead permanantly dark. The rim of the crater is raised above, but it's also some distance away from the rim.
Should have checked my numbers - it's closer to 2000 miles, so we have a 6000 mile circumference, and 3000 miles of cable between our primary base and its backup solar collector.
Rest of the points still stand - 3000 miles of cable is a lot to build and a lot to break.
The moon's about 3000 miles wide, so for the sake of simplicity let's say it's 9000 miles around (for the next two minutes, we live in a make believe world where pi==3). To put a solar collector opposite your base requies 4500 miles of cable to carry the electricity.
That's a lot of cable to lay down to begin with, and once it's there, that's a lot of cable to fail. Not to mention that you're effectively building TWO bases with four thousand miles of cable strung out between them. 4500 miles is a conservative estimate, too. I rounded pi down to 3, and I assumed it could be laid down in a straight line. It would have to meander around mountains and craters a bit along the way.
Now, alternately, we can build one base with everything it needs in one place. One set of solar collectors (they'd have to pivot, since at the lunar north pole, the sun would march around the horizon every month) with somewhat less than four thousand miles of cable connecting them to the base.
Easy way to deal with that (instead of cutting off outside light and imposing an artificial day/night cycle inside the base) is to change the kind of people NASA gets for astronauts. The Mercury through Apollo astronauts were mostly pilots, and a lot of space shuttle astronauts have been as well. But I think a permanantly-lit lunar base would be better suited for naval officer, particularly ones that serve on submarines.
People on submarines have to adapt to weeks and even months without any sense of time. No daylight, no night, sometimes not even a well defined schedule. Not everybody can handle it, but some people get by pretty well. Not to mention that submarines are cramped and uncomfortable places to be, which isn't uncommon in space travel.
You've got it backwards. Take a look at the numbers. The maximum possible number of lunar eclipses per year is three.
What you're thinking is that when there is an eclipse, it's visible everywhere on earth, I think. Solar eclipses are only visible in certain places.
The alternative is that you're thinking of solar eclipses, and just completely wrong. The maximum possible number of solar eclipses visible from ANYWHERE on earth in the same year is five (also worth noting that if there are five solar eclipses, there can only be two lunar eclipses).
Furthurmore, of those maximum of three eclipses per year, not all of them are total. The north or south pole sometimes escapes them. If the north rim of the moon is visible, then the north pole station will remain lit.
Now, when there is a lunar eclipse, the maximum length is two hours for a partial eclipse, and 1 hour 42 minutes for a total eclipse.
In the worst possible case scenario, a north polar base on the moon will have to run without solar power for a total of six hours a year, broken into three two-hour blocks.
Eclipses are relatively rare. It's one thing to have to run off stored energy for a few hours a couple times a year tops, it's another one to have to run off batteries for half of every month.
Far better to wait for somebody ELSE to invent it and then patent it, which is the case in most of these patent lawsuits. Better yet, patent a bunch of obvious stuff and wait for somebody else to invent it.
No, there are even better options. You ever seen a Yugo? My city had some mild excitement when somebody drove one around the mall in the early morning. He didn't even damage the double doors comming in. They're capable of pretty impressive speed, too, if they've been modified. The one that flipped off the Mackinaw bridge was going faster than my Lumina can and accellerating.
Battery warnings don't always help. Some brands of battery (the ones that are advertised to hold near their maximum voltage longer) die pretty quickly. My TI-86 will run for months on one set of evereadies (been running since around this time last year on one set, with pretty heavy use), but it rolls over and dies within hours of its first low battery warning.
I'd like to see a wireless controller that has a "dock" and a rechargeable battery. When you're not playing, just set it in the dock and let it recharge. Even then, I've been known to put in game-a-thons that will outlast an army of energizer bunnies.
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There's not going to be a thousand different pieces of hardware to begin with. They have a thousand GAMES, not hardware systems. Doubtful they'll cover more than a dozen hardware systems. MAME doesn't cover a thousand different pieces of hardware either, for that matter. Furthur, all of the development that's gone into MAME has gone into other emulation projects. MAME is only the most ambitious emulator out there, trying to emulate several dozen (not several thousand) different platforms, but there are still many other emulators that match, sometimes even outperform MAME, and even more emulators that emulate systems quite well that MAME doesn't even try to support yet.
Lastly, we come down to the original point: Do you really think they're going to use an emulator that was made by people who lacked intimate knowledge of the systems? Most all publically available consoel and arcade emulators are hodge-podges that were assembled bit by bit to get best-fit support of the hardware being emulated. The hardware manufacturers, however, often produce much better emulators simply because they have access to better details of the system and how it works together. Sony had a PSP emulator out last year, it was even mentioned on Slashdot because it included a battery usage simulator. Currently, Zophar.net hasn't even linked to projects that claim they're going to try to emulate it, let alone ones that have already started to try, or had any success. Same goes for the DS. So far, all that's been accomplished is two screen GBA emulators that don't yet support the DS hardware, but guess what? Nintendo probably has emulated it already because they're far more knowledgable about the system. Emulating the CPU is only the beginning. The emulator has to also emulate all the other hardware and how it's connected, and none of that information is public. It's attained by trial and error. The manufacturer doesn't have that weakness.
MAME isn't the only emulator out there. With access to the companies that own the games, they likely have access to more advanced development tools and information specific to the systems than freeware emulator developers do. Thoseo tools could very well include emulators, and if not, will probably include enough specifications to make high-accuracy emulation easier.
Normal Human? I take it that's one of those nerfed classes that nobody picks?
I tried it with IE and got the same junk.
It's like when you go to jail. You only get one call to get yourself back out.
Low cost? Ever think of the elecricity and phone bill (even basic local-only service) for a half a million years?
The point isn't China, the point is that they're trying to sell it in Japan.
Ever noticed that many Japanese RPGs take place in a very slightly altered version of the real world and/or real mythology? Many identifiable things, familiar names and themes, but it's never quite authentic. Things aren't quite as they would be normally. In Valkyie Profile, Odin was half human, Frei was a woman, and Freya wasn't a slut. In the Final Fantasy games, Shiva has somewhat fewer arms than you see in tradidtional statuary. In Xenogears, God was a giant world killing weapons system and bishops fed little boys into a machine that processed them as food. There's enough there to identify the source, but not enough there to say it's true to that source.
Jade Empire is doing the same thing. There's enough there to see that it's primarily Chinese mythology, but there are elements of Japanese (I've only seen multi-tailed fox spirits in Japanese myth, anyway), Indian (those elephant demons look an awful lotlike Ganesh to me), and even Jewish (golems) mythology, and a good deal of creative thinking thrown in, and well as a movie-theater treatment of martial arts. It's not a faithful treatment of Chinese mythology, but it is a lot like Valkyrie Profile's treatment of Norse mythology or Xenogears treatment of Catholicism.
It isn't unintelligible. I have noticed some definite matches between the subtitles and what's being said. If they talked a bit slower, I could probably start matching words with their translations.
It was at the effective end of its life, but Nintendo was not through with it. They continued looking for developers and had regular game releases until 1998 (They were slow, but mostly because most developers had bailed out and started making Playstation games), and even had several releases in 1999 (The last was a Fire Emblem game, which was in September or October of 1999). Nintendo had played around with the CDi and Playstation (the SNES CD one, not the one that eventually came out), neither of which panned out. The SNES was still their top console three years after they'd previously planned to replace it, and two years after it had reached the "end of its life" as you say.
Innovation is a pretty loose subject in this case, too. An innovative system is nothing if it doesn't have solid and innovative games. It ends up getting delegated to gimick standing. The system feels like a waste since the games don't take advantage of what it was made for, and the games seem unfinished for the same reason.
A system completely devoid of innovation, however, can excell with innovative games. The games are great, and they earnthe system a reputation as innovative in doing so.
They're also not destroying the industry by any means. They're destroying Nintendo's dominance of the handheld market, but that's always been a fragile thing, enforced by half-assed competitors like Nokia (and even Nintendo themselves with the Virtual Boy), but that's always what happens when a market leader stagnates and is blindsided by a new competitor.
The PSP and GBA/DS is a lot like the PS1 comming out back in the SNES days. Nintendo was caught with hardware that hadn't changed much in years, and hadn't had serious competition in a long time. The time was ripe for somebody else to break into the market. The GBA is still very much alive, though, so at least it won't be as decisive as the SNES's downfall. We won't all forget Nintendo in six months. When the N64 came out, a lot of people I knew basically said, "What? Nintendo still makes games?" At that time, my SNES hadn't even been pluggged in since the PS1 launch.
The DS was certainly a radical change, but so far it doesn't have the game lineup. An innovative system means nothing if it doesn't have innovative games, but a completely mundane and uninnovative system can excell with innovative games, and that's what Sony wants to do with the PSP.
I just hope that Nintendo doesn't respond to the PSP like they responded to the PS1. I can't see any two ways about it: The N64 was a lousy system. Just about everything in it and its games - especially it's early games - felt to me like they were in desperation mode, trying to get something - anything, for that matter - on the market to compete with the PS1, just to keep the Nintendo name in the market.
If they produce a handheld system like that, just to meet the PSP, then they're really going to end up loosing that handheld war you see comming, and they're going to loose it badly. Nintendo's console offering still hasn't gotten back where the SNES was, and it'll be rough for them if they end up in the same position in the handheld market.
But, then, with each new generation of systems, the leaders can shift around all over the place. In 1993, could you see Nintendo virtually erased from gaming in two years? Before the PS1 came out, the word "Nintendo" meant video games. My friends would say, "Want to come over and play Nintendo?" even if they had a Genesis, because Nintendo and video game were the same words. That changed fast with the Playstation, and Nintendo was marginalized really until the Gamecube came out.
I thought the Dreamcast would be the end of Sony, and then the PS2 blew it out of the water. Before the DS came out, I was expecting a stellar system with amazing and innovative games. Now I have the system and a disappointing set of games. Those weak games made me expect another massacre when the PSP came out, but that hasn't happen yet. With the next set of consoles comming soon, who knows what happens. Nintendo might be back on top. Everybody involved has a shot, if they play it right.
There's a distinction between don't panic and don't care.
Don't panic doesn't mean you're not in danger, it means that if you do panic, you're lost. You have to keep your wits in order when you're in danger. You have to be aware of the danger, even if it is small, and you have to have your towel ready to deal with it.
Let's say you're driving down the road, and see two children playing in a yard up ahead. "Don't panic" means you should remember that it's unlikely they'll dart out into the road ahead of you, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't care. Even if it's a million to one shot that one of those kids will run out into the road, you still need care enough to watch them in case they do.
His parents probably got fed up waiting for the honor system to go live and quit.
Wouldn't it be possible for a p2p network to use two hashes at the same time? Even if they can reliably generate a junk file for one, or even both hashes, it would be much more compelx to generate one that matches both.
It's true. They're not massively killing off negative reviews - most of the reviews I have on that site are negative, and they're all still there (even though negative reviews have been removed from the same games). They're getting rid of the crappy half-assed reviews written by people who clearly didn't play the game (and often SAY SO in the review), and give no coherent reasons behind anything.
There's a difference between a good bad review and a bad bad review. Now all GameFAQs has to do is get rid of all the bad good reviews and maybe they'll have something left worth reading.
Not counting eclipses, there are actually more than one. At the north and south poles, you're always at the terminator between night and day, and the sun is always at the horizon. The north pole is more convenient, since the crater mentioned in the article provides an elevated area at its rim very close to the pole, which will raise the base out of the long shadows that would be cast by other crater rims and mountains around the pole. As long as the earth isn't blocking the sun, it will always be at least partially above the horizon.
The south pole is a bit less convenient, since, while there is a crater there, the pole is in the interior of the crater instead of near the rim, and is instead permanantly dark. The rim of the crater is raised above, but it's also some distance away from the rim.
To stick to the theme: *BZZT* Wrong yet again
Solar eclipses ARE more common. Lunar eclipses do happen as many as three times a year, but solar eclipses happen up to five times a year.
Should have checked my numbers - it's closer to 2000 miles, so we have a 6000 mile circumference, and 3000 miles of cable between our primary base and its backup solar collector.
Rest of the points still stand - 3000 miles of cable is a lot to build and a lot to break.
The moon's about 3000 miles wide, so for the sake of simplicity let's say it's 9000 miles around (for the next two minutes, we live in a make believe world where pi==3). To put a solar collector opposite your base requies 4500 miles of cable to carry the electricity.
That's a lot of cable to lay down to begin with, and once it's there, that's a lot of cable to fail. Not to mention that you're effectively building TWO bases with four thousand miles of cable strung out between them. 4500 miles is a conservative estimate, too. I rounded pi down to 3, and I assumed it could be laid down in a straight line. It would have to meander around mountains and craters a bit along the way.
Now, alternately, we can build one base with everything it needs in one place. One set of solar collectors (they'd have to pivot, since at the lunar north pole, the sun would march around the horizon every month) with somewhat less than four thousand miles of cable connecting them to the base.
Easy way to deal with that (instead of cutting off outside light and imposing an artificial day/night cycle inside the base) is to change the kind of people NASA gets for astronauts. The Mercury through Apollo astronauts were mostly pilots, and a lot of space shuttle astronauts have been as well. But I think a permanantly-lit lunar base would be better suited for naval officer, particularly ones that serve on submarines.
People on submarines have to adapt to weeks and even months without any sense of time. No daylight, no night, sometimes not even a well defined schedule. Not everybody can handle it, but some people get by pretty well. Not to mention that submarines are cramped and uncomfortable places to be, which isn't uncommon in space travel.
You've got it backwards. Take a look at the numbers. The maximum possible number of lunar eclipses per year is three.
What you're thinking is that when there is an eclipse, it's visible everywhere on earth, I think. Solar eclipses are only visible in certain places.
The alternative is that you're thinking of solar eclipses, and just completely wrong. The maximum possible number of solar eclipses visible from ANYWHERE on earth in the same year is five (also worth noting that if there are five solar eclipses, there can only be two lunar eclipses).
Furthurmore, of those maximum of three eclipses per year, not all of them are total. The north or south pole sometimes escapes them. If the north rim of the moon is visible, then the north pole station will remain lit.
Now, when there is a lunar eclipse, the maximum length is two hours for a partial eclipse, and 1 hour 42 minutes for a total eclipse.
In the worst possible case scenario, a north polar base on the moon will have to run without solar power for a total of six hours a year, broken into three two-hour blocks.
Eclipses are relatively rare. It's one thing to have to run off stored energy for a few hours a couple times a year tops, it's another one to have to run off batteries for half of every month.
1. invent technology
Far better to wait for somebody ELSE to invent it and then patent it, which is the case in most of these patent lawsuits. Better yet, patent a bunch of obvious stuff and wait for somebody else to invent it.
No, there are even better options. You ever seen a Yugo? My city had some mild excitement when somebody drove one around the mall in the early morning. He didn't even damage the double doors comming in. They're capable of pretty impressive speed, too, if they've been modified. The one that flipped off the Mackinaw bridge was going faster than my Lumina can and accellerating.
Battery warnings don't always help. Some brands of battery (the ones that are advertised to hold near their maximum voltage longer) die pretty quickly. My TI-86 will run for months on one set of evereadies (been running since around this time last year on one set, with pretty heavy use), but it rolls over and dies within hours of its first low battery warning.
I'd like to see a wireless controller that has a "dock" and a rechargeable battery. When you're not playing, just set it in the dock and let it recharge. Even then, I've been known to put in game-a-thons that will outlast an army of energizer bunnies.