As wiretap evidence is inadmissable in British courts, it is not as regulated as searches of private premises, for example, which do require a warrant.
It is arguably still a tremendous invasion of privacy, and one lacking in judicial oversight, but there is no concept of a general right to privacy in British law - something which I'm sure is much appreciated by sleazy tabloid journalists with telephoto lenses.
Even if your MAC address is not sent beyond the gateway, your unique gamer ID number for any particular game is a combination of your MAC address and a hash value associated with the game. As one of those is a known value which remains constant, it shouldn't require too much effort on Nintendo's part to generate a list of gamer IDs for each online game and match them up accordingly.
The HD-DVD format allows you to burn high-definition content onto standard DVD-R discs. A single dual-layered disc will hold around 135 minutes of 1080p24 content, and that is the method Warner Brothers are choosing for their upcoming HD-DVD releases.
The latest version of Final Cut Pro has allowed you to burn perfectly valid HD-DVDs for months, and they have been tested to work perfectly with the just-released HD-DVD players.
It really surprises me that this is not a well known or much talked-about fact. It seems to me to be the single largest difference between the two formats, and the one which puts HD-DVD in a far superior position in my mind.
The largest Nintendo DS card to date is 128MB (1 Gigabit), which has been used on a handful of games, including Resident Evil. The first game to use a card of this size was The Rub Rabbits!, released shortly before.
DVD Recorders shouldn't place a region code on recorded discs, so your ownly obstacle is the NTSC television standard, which isn't really much of an obstacle.
Just about any European TV made in the last 15 years or so should be able to handle an NTSC-encoded disc, as European DVD players send a PAL60 signal rather than an NTSC one when playing NTSC discs - by using NTSC framerate and resolution but using PAL colour information, they can trick most televisions that aren't completely ancient (pre-remote control era) into playing back with a proper image.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Nintendo has said that their system will not support HD. This includes 16:9 mode.
Adding a 16:9 mode to a game requires no extra hardware. All that happens is the game is rendered all squished-in, so that when it is stretched out by the Widescreen display, it is in the proper aspect ratio. The advantage of this over simply adding borders to the image (letterboxing) is that you are utilizing the full vertical resolution, rather than just 75% of it.
I've got a handful of original Playstation games that do this (Micro Maniacs, Worms Armageddon, Worms World Party are a few that spring to mind) - despite the fact that the Playstation was not at all designed with Widescreen gaming in mind.
Re:A lot less than meets the eye
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Any television that is HD-ready should be new enough to support a 60Hz signal. Almost every television from the last decade or more should be able to handle a 60Hz signal.
The number of PS3 owners without a 60Hz compatible television will be negligable. Nintendo have already released at least two games (Metroid Prime 2 and the Zelda bonus disc) which only contained a 60Hz version of the game, and it did not seem to impact sales.
Besides, the quality of most 50Hz conversions is dreadful. There are a lot games which suffer from the 17.5% slowdown and borders - to patch a game to the PAL format in this way takes mere seconds, and has been going on for years with the PAL/NTSC selectors found at the start of many warez releases on the original Playstation. It would take a miniscule amount of effort to add a 50Hz/60Hz selector to a game, and anyone playing on an old enough TV to not support a 60Hz signal isn't likely to complain about borders and slowdown. In fact, they're very unlikely to buy a PS3 in the first place.
Contrary to what a lot of people have stated, the Action Replay cheat devices for the PS2 can play backups and imports... well, the older ones can at least.
Aside from a few early versions that didn't circulate far, every Gameshark and Action Replay up to the V2 is capable of booting backups and imports, through use of a slide card or similar device. This involves swapping the AR with a CD-R without the PS2 knowing it. Newer versions of the Action Replay will auto-eject, making the swap impossible.
It was also at this time that the Gameshark stopped being a re-badged Action Replay, and became a re-badged Xploder, a very different cheat device from Blaze. It's clearly obvious that they aren't as advances as Datel - all of their discs are created by cutting part of another legitimate PS2 disc and gluing it to another part containing their code. I've seen Datel's DVD Region X used, and more recently Crazy Taxi. These do not boot backups, although its parent company, "Success", make a Swap Magic boot disc that does - its pretty damn spiffy, too.
My suspisions are that this product is taking advantage of the homebrew software PGen, a Genesis emulator, and the PS2Reality Player, which plays DivX, MP3 and the like.
Both of these can take advantage of a new disc format recently discovered, known as UMCDR. It manages to trick the PS2 into allowing you to insert a CD-R without use of a swap trick, and access its contents in any program that been specifically programmed to accept them. Developemtn was ceased a few days after tools and information were released, after the author found out that people were attempting to use it for warez. It didn't work, whatever they were doing, but he stopped work on it nonetheless. The warez guys, on the other hand, still continue to try and exploit it for backup booting.
What fuels my suspisions is that the author of the UMCDR format stated that a version of PGen (the Genesis emulator) with UMCDR support has been created and should appear on the PGen's website soon. It's been over a month with no mention of it. Not a newspost or anything. The version of PS2Reality Player with support, though, has been released.
The only bugger about it is that it creates a disc with one audio and one data track, leaving you around 670MB on an 80 minute CD-R for DivX movies, which is 30MB shy of the usual filesizes. Thankfully the PS2 is fully compatible with up to 100-minute CD-Rs. It's just a question of whether this software is.
The only thing that you currently cannot do without some form of boot disc or modchip is launch homebrew code on the PS2. It's all very well being able to insert CD-Rs of DivXs and Genesis ROMs, but you need to have the software to do something with it. About the closest thing is the PS2 Independance Exploit, which allows booting of PS2 programs from the memory card via insertion of a pre-determined PSone game, but that requires a great deal of work to get the code onto the disc - an exploit installed CD and a friend with a modded PS2 is about the only way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
As wiretap evidence is inadmissable in British courts, it is not as regulated as searches of private premises, for example, which do require a warrant.
It is arguably still a tremendous invasion of privacy, and one lacking in judicial oversight, but there is no concept of a general right to privacy in British law - something which I'm sure is much appreciated by sleazy tabloid journalists with telephoto lenses.
Even if your MAC address is not sent beyond the gateway, your unique gamer ID number for any particular game is a combination of your MAC address and a hash value associated with the game. As one of those is a known value which remains constant, it shouldn't require too much effort on Nintendo's part to generate a list of gamer IDs for each online game and match them up accordingly.
The HD-DVD format allows you to burn high-definition content onto standard DVD-R discs. A single dual-layered disc will hold around 135 minutes of 1080p24 content, and that is the method Warner Brothers are choosing for their upcoming HD-DVD releases.
The latest version of Final Cut Pro has allowed you to burn perfectly valid HD-DVDs for months, and they have been tested to work perfectly with the just-released HD-DVD players.
It really surprises me that this is not a well known or much talked-about fact. It seems to me to be the single largest difference between the two formats, and the one which puts HD-DVD in a far superior position in my mind.
The largest Nintendo DS card to date is 128MB (1 Gigabit), which has been used on a handful of games, including Resident Evil. The first game to use a card of this size was The Rub Rabbits!, released shortly before.
DVD Recorders shouldn't place a region code on recorded discs, so your ownly obstacle is the NTSC television standard, which isn't really much of an obstacle.
Just about any European TV made in the last 15 years or so should be able to handle an NTSC-encoded disc, as European DVD players send a PAL60 signal rather than an NTSC one when playing NTSC discs - by using NTSC framerate and resolution but using PAL colour information, they can trick most televisions that aren't completely ancient (pre-remote control era) into playing back with a proper image.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Nintendo has said that their system will not support HD. This includes 16:9 mode.
Adding a 16:9 mode to a game requires no extra hardware. All that happens is the game is rendered all squished-in, so that when it is stretched out by the Widescreen display, it is in the proper aspect ratio. The advantage of this over simply adding borders to the image (letterboxing) is that you are utilizing the full vertical resolution, rather than just 75% of it.
I've got a handful of original Playstation games that do this (Micro Maniacs, Worms Armageddon, Worms World Party are a few that spring to mind) - despite the fact that the Playstation was not at all designed with Widescreen gaming in mind.
Any television that is HD-ready should be new enough to support a 60Hz signal. Almost every television from the last decade or more should be able to handle a 60Hz signal.
The number of PS3 owners without a 60Hz compatible television will be negligable. Nintendo have already released at least two games (Metroid Prime 2 and the Zelda bonus disc) which only contained a 60Hz version of the game, and it did not seem to impact sales.
Besides, the quality of most 50Hz conversions is dreadful. There are a lot games which suffer from the 17.5% slowdown and borders - to patch a game to the PAL format in this way takes mere seconds, and has been going on for years with the PAL/NTSC selectors found at the start of many warez releases on the original Playstation. It would take a miniscule amount of effort to add a 50Hz/60Hz selector to a game, and anyone playing on an old enough TV to not support a 60Hz signal isn't likely to complain about borders and slowdown. In fact, they're very unlikely to buy a PS3 in the first place.
Contrary to what a lot of people have stated, the Action Replay cheat devices for the PS2 can play backups and imports... well, the older ones can at least.
Aside from a few early versions that didn't circulate far, every Gameshark and Action Replay up to the V2 is capable of booting backups and imports, through use of a slide card or similar device. This involves swapping the AR with a CD-R without the PS2 knowing it. Newer versions of the Action Replay will auto-eject, making the swap impossible.
It was also at this time that the Gameshark stopped being a re-badged Action Replay, and became a re-badged Xploder, a very different cheat device from Blaze. It's clearly obvious that they aren't as advances as Datel - all of their discs are created by cutting part of another legitimate PS2 disc and gluing it to another part containing their code. I've seen Datel's DVD Region X used, and more recently Crazy Taxi. These do not boot backups, although its parent company, "Success", make a Swap Magic boot disc that does - its pretty damn spiffy, too.
My suspisions are that this product is taking advantage of the homebrew software PGen, a Genesis emulator, and the PS2Reality Player, which plays DivX, MP3 and the like.
Both of these can take advantage of a new disc format recently discovered, known as UMCDR. It manages to trick the PS2 into allowing you to insert a CD-R without use of a swap trick, and access its contents in any program that been specifically programmed to accept them. Developemtn was ceased a few days after tools and information were released, after the author found out that people were attempting to use it for warez. It didn't work, whatever they were doing, but he stopped work on it nonetheless. The warez guys, on the other hand, still continue to try and exploit it for backup booting.
What fuels my suspisions is that the author of the UMCDR format stated that a version of PGen (the Genesis emulator) with UMCDR support has been created and should appear on the PGen's website soon. It's been over a month with no mention of it. Not a newspost or anything. The version of PS2Reality Player with support, though, has been released.
The only bugger about it is that it creates a disc with one audio and one data track, leaving you around 670MB on an 80 minute CD-R for DivX movies, which is 30MB shy of the usual filesizes. Thankfully the PS2 is fully compatible with up to 100-minute CD-Rs. It's just a question of whether this software is.
The only thing that you currently cannot do without some form of boot disc or modchip is launch homebrew code on the PS2. It's all very well being able to insert CD-Rs of DivXs and Genesis ROMs, but you need to have the software to do something with it. About the closest thing is the PS2 Independance Exploit, which allows booting of PS2 programs from the memory card via insertion of a pre-determined PSone game, but that requires a great deal of work to get the code onto the disc - an exploit installed CD and a friend with a modded PS2 is about the only way to go.