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[General Gaming / Re: Microsoft to open Xbox 360 to indies]

oops. double post.

[General Gaming / Re: Microsoft to open Xbox 360 to indies]

MS announced this shortly after it was revealed that the Wii Dev Kits would be a lot more "reasonable" than those previously available ($2,000 as opposed to $20,000+).

announced, yes, but this has been in the works for a long time as GarageGames already has some of 2d & 3d engines up and running on it. this rumour has been floating around for a while, and they've been dropping hints at doing this since the E3 before launch.

it'll be natively ran C# code at the moment, but being that most of the expensive work is handled in hardware, this shouldn't really negatively affect the way people develop for it. they're still looking into the distribution of these games through their community, but at the moment it's limited to sending the project and resources to friends. i'm sure MS will heavily monitor this for any Devil Dice quality games, as they've handed out lots of free devkits already.

i think it's a really good move. i'm pretty excited to try it, especially the whole XNA thing, which seems to be a lot nicer to use than DirectX in a lot of areas.

[General Gaming / OMG...Poor Bomberman :(]

i assume this is because Japan is becoming a Niche market as games will sell much more if targetted at the western audiences, and they become a hit

anyway, gametrailers has some video of the game in progress, and aside from the artistic spin, the gameplay looks to be almost identical. there seems to be a way to still do the overheard view or something.

click here and scroll down to the gameplay section, which should be at the bottom.

the electric guitar-heavy music reminds me of Lords of Thunder.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / connect to pal tv]

there's a guy who sells new versions of the PAL ones on ebay all the time but they're not cheap. (i think they're like 130Euro or so) and they obviously only play the US hucards without an adapter.

[General Gaming / Famicom Sound Mappers]

wow that is pretty impressive. this is supposedly because the two pins that allowed for cartridges to change the sound were removed from the SNES when it landed in the US

[General Gaming / OMG...Poor Bomberman :(]

i'm still a little wary about this. i wish they'd just follow through with their thought of taking saturn bomberman to the xboxlive arcade. i do hope that they don't try to pull any strange shenanigans on the 360 version of Dungeon Explorer though.

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / Tengai Makyou Ziria 360 to get NA release]

RPGs actually do quite well on the xbox, at least in the west. i'm not so surprised by the decision, as it gives them a chance to make up the lost money in the japanese market. there's a surprising number of RPGs prepared for release for the 360 already. Japan will have like 3 or 4 by the end of next month. the US will have about 6 by the end of the year, barring delays. i believe both are better than the PS2's launch in this period of time.

anyway, i'm really glad to hear this. now we just have to hope that the Dungeon Explorer game remake also makes it to the west as well. Bomberman is a no-brainer. although the saturn bomberman that hudson was thinking about for live arcade would be a lovely addition

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Sapphire for less than $30? Sealed?]

i've seen a few like this in europe, although they usually go for 60-100Euro or so.

what are the main differences though? i mean if it's 'sealed' is there anything you can tell just by looking at it? anything specific you can ask?

are there any other games that have well made fakes masquerading around?

[PC/Console/Mobile Ports / GameCube Bonk: Good times]

WOW! I very much like the looks of that title. It would be nice to see some other games done up like that...well not in that same style but given a remake of that quality.

i've been trying to guess how easy this would be to do in a specialized emulator. you'd probably have to make one for each and every game that had different replacement addresses. so that you could create packages of new games with exactly the same gameplay.

btw, where can you find this game? i remember seeing screenshots and stuff before it came out and then i haven't heard anymore. i searched again rather quickly to find it and came up with nothing.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Censoring / Sanitizing North American Games]

it's actually a good thing that patents can't be renewed unless you love Gauntlet and ford automobiles. Ford patented the carburetor and Atari patented "multiplayer, multicharachter cooperative play video games". (making the assumption they refused to license the patent to 3rd parties or did so at a crazy price).

most people think that the copyright times should be less than they are, as it seems rather silly to protect something for that long, especially well after the death of the artist.

the reason for difference, is that a patent is usually on some form of technology that could potentially block development of entire branches of science. whereas copyrighted artwork only prevents people from making nearly identical copies, however they can still make very similar copies.

there's a guy in japan making at least somewhat of a hardware rom emulator for the pc engine.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Save file sizes]

i think you could possibly use the Tototek flash cards for that purpose.

an interesting side note is that populous will attempt to use the cd unit's ram, if it's own fails for some reason. (or at least, if reading from it's own fails). you can see this in emulators that don't implement it's own battery backed ram at 0x40.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Background on Street Fighter 2]

What I mean by sampled music is basically actually sampling a CD music track for example at a low resolution and sampling frequency. For example 4-bit 4kHz mono. You can try this yourself by taking a short loop of a 16-bit 44.1kHz stereo WAV file and convertin it to 4-bit 4kHz mono file.

yeah the resolution is only 5bit and probably around 3-7Khz or so.

the problem with it is that although it supported reasonably small samples with no extra CPU useage (32byte samples) most games threw in the standard FM wave structures like the sawtooth and sine waves. i have heard a few more games though that have sampled sound.  batman comes to mind.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Background on Street Fighter 2]

PCE version of SFII CE used sampled music like AirZonk instead of the regular FM synthesizer channels.

technically speaking, all of the PCE sounds are sampled as each of it's 6 channels have 32 samples used for playing. this game uses a lot more direct PCM tracks than normal games, but it also uses quite a lot of normal ones as well. otherwise the music alone might've taken up all 20Mbits ;) the soundchip was way ahead of it's time, as far as consoles go.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Hucard Sound Output]

Problem is, if you play the rom on emulator, you can only play stage 1. that's it.

I have been able to make it past many stages on the emulator before, using Magic Engine v.99 Beta 5. I think I even made it past the first stage using Magic Engine v1.0 PR 9 recently, not sure though.

i know that my emulator can make it past the first level, so i imagine magic engine could as well. i didn't check it though.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / CD-R's]

unless the hardware access method changed between the drives the amount of ram is irrelevant, simply because the cdrom drive has an internal sector buffer, that the system cards read out byte by byte. there no DMA from the drive to system ram (only to ADPCM RAM).  thus the amount of ram is irrelevant.

you just keep sending commands to read one sector, wait until it's returned success, and then read the next, without transferring the data back to system ram. this is enough to keep the rate up to what it should be.

you shouldn't need the acd library, because you can access the hardware directly, inthe same way the card does.

if the hardware differs in some access way, then yes you would need to use the ACD. however, i thought the ACD only added extra memory and the special shifting registers to the system card.

a spinup test wouldn't really help much, but i think it should be possible by simply stopping the drive and checking the hardware that it's spundown. then start a timer, play a track, and read the Q channel data or the PCM data.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / CD-R's]

there is a rather simple way to test this. assuming there were no special commands needed to enable this, if you have any pce programmer friends out there, they could do sequential reads from the cd and time them. with the magic engine kit it's a rather simple program. you shouldn't even need to care about the ram as you would repeatedly do disc reads from an increasing position back and ignore what was read in.

from what i've seen of the system card disassemblies, it's possible that the drive could've been 2x as they never seem to guarantee a specific seek or read time for any operation. they just do it until it succeeds or timesout.

perhaps if no one has done it in a few months, i'll do it so you can end this ;)

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / cd reading problem]

to help progress the development pace of my emulator, i bought a coregrafxII and CDRom2 unit several months ago. everything seemed to work ok, but i addmittedly didn't played it much. as i started using it a bit more, and with some cdrs, i've noticed that it slowly seems to be getting worse performance -- both on originals and cdrs. the symptoms are read errors on start and increasingly long load times, even in the original.

i attempted clean it a bit once and even tried to vacuum some dust out of it, which actually worked great for a bit of time. relatively speaking of course, because i've only played it about 25-30 hours in this time.

i've noticed that the power supply that came with it is what appears to be a cheap replacement. instead of supplying 12V to the cdrom. it runs at 10V and has 2 output cables, one for the cdrom and one for the coregrafxII. i then read a thread, on here, that seemed to indicate the power was very important in properly reading discs, which got me a bit hopeful.

can you use just any generic adapter with the right number of volts? how can i find out how many amps it needs? anyone know where to get a good replacement one, along with the replacement joining power cable?

anyway, does anyone know a good place to replacement power adapters, or perhaps have a few pointers on what i can do to get a little more CDR play out of the unit. i've guessed that maybe hte laser unit is just finally dying and i may just have to get a new one at some point, but that's such a bitch. it took me a few months just to find this one and not have to sell myself into prostitution just to buy it. i've also noticed that a fair amount don't seem to come with the original power supplies, or at least in europe.   oddly, mine is one for 240v, but with an US plug style.

the whole point of buying it with the cdR was so that i could write test programs to improve the emulator, but it's not becoming a pain in the ass to do. so yeah, any tips would greatly be appreciated.