Messages

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Space Adventure Cobra and Snatcher]

As shown in Cobra the Animation: Time Drive, Lady actually was once a human (despite all the sites that take text from Wikipedia and claim she is an android).

[PC-FX Discussion / Re: What's the correct aspect ratio on a PC-FX/running Zeroigar?]

"Industry standard", 12 3/11 MHz rate for sampling square pixels from interlaced NTSC video:
256 * (12272727.27 / 2) / 5369318.18 ~= 292.6

I don't understand this.  Are you saying that this is what you should do assuming that the TV output is composed of square pixels?  (In which case I would express my doubt that the PC-FX outputs square pixels.)  Or are you saying that this is what you should do if the TV output is non-square pixels and you want to stretch square pixels to look like them?  (In which case I would ask how you figure out the corresponding number to know how to stretch the pixels vertically, since it would not make sense for this number to always stretch by a factor of 1.)

[PC-FX Discussion / Re: What's the correct aspect ratio on a PC-FX/running Zeroigar?]

256x232 scaled to fit inside a 4:3 screen would give about 309x232.  It's producing 288x232, which sounds like it's scaling, but not enough to get to 4:3.  Scaling it to actually get to 4:3 does make it look better.  Of course, there could be overscan, but I wouldn't have any way to figure out how much.

(The people on the Mednafen forum seem to think it's already scaling properly....)

[PC-FX Discussion / What's the correct aspect ratio on a PC-FX/running Zeroigar?]

I've been trying to play Zeroigar on an emulator, but I never owned a real PC-FX and don't know what the real display looked like.

Googling shows that it had a resolution of 256x240 or 341.333 (=1024/3) x240.  Mednafen when I run it with a scale of 1 claims to be using 288x232 video mode.  I ran it with an xscale and yscale of 4 and it has 4x that mode, but it seems to be producing oval planets and oval explosions.

Does Mednafen already scale it properly according to aspect ratio, (so further scaling it by a constant 4 is enough), or do I need to use a different X and Y value to make it look like what people would see on an actual 4:3 TV?  Are those planets and explosions supposed to be round?

[Off-Topic / Re: surugaya-a-too not selling outside of Japan anymore?]

I sent them an email.  Their reply:

Thank you very much for your mail.

We are very sorry to inform that Surugaya-A-Too stopped acceptation of
overseas

orders in these days. We would like you to wait for a time being.

The date that we resume our service is still uncertain.

We would like to resume it as soon as possible.

Second, "Surugaya-A-Too" and "Surugaya-A-Too-Plus" the same store.

However, "Surugaya-A-Too-Plus" only for domestic customers in Japan.

Hope you understand the situation.

I don't think stores there are actually required to ship outside of Japan, but there is a forwarding service that you can use with stores that only ship to Japan (but the extra cost will eat up anything you saved by buying items from Japan)

[Off-Topic / Re: surugaya-a-too not selling outside of Japan anymore?]

It actually says "Japan or use forwarding service".

Is it really true that Rakuten requires that sellers ship out of Japan?  It sounds like that that setting is only for shipping within Japan.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: If you'd been in charge of NEC U.S./TTI what would've been your ideal TG-16 set?]

The problem with this question is the usual one: if you were running NEC at the time, what you would have been able to bring out would still have been limited by what you could license.  It's not right to treat it as NEC making a mistake in not bringing out some game that could have made the system more popular--it may have been out of NEC's control.

It might be more insightful to ask "what games would you have brought out to make the system more popular, that NEC actually had access to".

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Turbo CD Recommendations]

Remember that there's no copy protection on the CDs.  It may be hard to find a brand that the system will read, however.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Cosmic Fantasy Anime, Translated and Live]

A group that commonly has fansub torrents has a torrent of the Cosmic Fantasy OVA available for torrenting.  However, unlike most of their stuff, their Cosmic Fantasy OVA is not subtitled.  A subtitle file would work well with it.  I don't know if I'm allowed to give the URL here.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Cosmic Fantasy Anime, Translated and Live]

Is this a real translation, even if you did spice it up?

How about releasing the script?  It should be possible to use the script and a video to actually play it as a real video with subtitles rather than using Youtube.  Maybe some fansubber could even make a version with the subtitles in the file.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Wanted: Cosmic Fantasy Spell Translations]

It looks like a lot of those aren't generic names, though a few are (the 3MP one seems to be "blaze").

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Raffle: Altered Beast and 1.0 system card]

Count me in too, it's not the 31st yet...

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: ACD games... feasible?]

People keep saying you can get an arcade card for $20.  I have an original TG-16 CD with a super system card, so if I get an Arcade Card I'd need the Pro.  Where can a Pro be bought for $20?

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Mysterious Song is now released]

Still waiting for mine...

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Awful Raffle: Yo Bro!]

Sign me up.  I've played China Warrior.  It can't be that much worse...  can it?

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: WTB Avenue Pad 6 and Avenue Pad 3]

http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/surugaya-a-too/item/178268-1/

Avenue pad 6 for $9.40 on Rakuten.  Shipping from Japan is really expensive (rakuten doesn't do the cheap forms of shipping) but it's probably still under $20 total.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: english friendly PC Engine games worth importing]

These are English friendly and not expensive:

I would disagree.  Vasteel or Nectaris, English friendly?

Spriggan, Macross 2036, and Download 2, not expensive?  Macross isn't quite as bad as it used to be, but still.

Also, several of those games have American versions and you really have no reason to want the Japanese version just to play it.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Tips for Valis III...]

I remember it taking forever to get past this point and then I beat the bosses after 1 or 2 tries.  I think it was the ones that you probably wanted to use the slide attack against (if I'm remembering it correctly).

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Dancing Stage: Dreams Come True]

Going to Wikipedia and looking up the composer suggests that it probably is, but I have no way to actually prove it.

I put the game up on Ebay again.  Let's see if it sells this time.  If not it goes back here.

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Low cost Flash Hucard]

Would it be possible to create a PCE/TG-16 Hu-card adapter for a similar or lower price?

(Just asking out of curiosity--I still have my old green diving board adapter from back in the day, so I wouldn't need one.)

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Dancing Stage: Dreams Come True]

Okay, fine.  I'll trade this for anything that I don't have and can play, on any system.  Heck, if you want it for free, and honestly have no cheap games to trade whatsoever, you can have it.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Cheapest good HuCards to track down]

I was tempted to do a search on rakuten to find Soldier Blade.

I did and it's $47.88.  What's up with this game?

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Are the "RPGs" on the TurboGrafx16/CD worth playing?]

I remember that Vay had some late game monsters (dragons I think) that were so tough to kill you could basically only run.  Killing one was as hard as killing a boss, but gave almost no experience.  There were some other monsters in the area you could easily kill with magic, so I suspect this was just an example of Working Designs rebalancing the difficulty poorly.

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Raffle: Kato-Chan & Ken-Chan]

I'd like to be in on this...

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Cheapest good HuCards to track down]

Street Fighter II (requires a 6 button pad, however, more expensive than the game)
Dragon Spirit
Bomberman
Blodier
Space Harrier
Klax
Volfeid
Ballistix
Soukoban World
Galaga '88
Space Invaders
Chase HQ

All under $5 on Rakuten.  Disclaimer: I haven't played many of these but they seem to all be games you can play without knowing too much Japanese.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Are the "RPGs" on the TurboGrafx16/CD worth playing?]

Cosmic Fantasy 2 has a bad bug: attacks are always plain attacks.  Monsters don't have special attacks.  You can run into a group of cockatrices and never get petrified, because there's no petrification in the game (although there are items that supposedly stop it, but of course have no effect whatsoever.)

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Buying stuff from Japan via proxy]

If you do the math, that's roughly a 50% increase in price. 

The increase is roughly 50% of the *new* price, but it's a 100% increase from the old price.

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: MSR is finished!]

I was under the impression that the Neo Geo versions of the NG:Dev Team games are made mostly as a trial run for the Dreamcast version and are produced in extremely small quantities.  There's no way they could make a million dollars off of them.

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: Low cost Flash Hucard]

Have you considered, once this is complete, telling the people who created ucon64 so that they can add support for it?

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: FS/FT PCE Super System Card V3.0]

$4.35 on Rakuten: http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/surugaya-a-too/item/177742-1/

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Anime News Network does TG-16 podcast]

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/anncast/2012-04-13

Guests are Victor Ireland and the former head of Hudson Soft.  I haven't listened to all of it yet, but it's very heavily Turbografx-centered and includes a lot of material that even long time fans have not already heard hundreds of times.

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: someone sell me a complete City Hunter [pretty please]]

I really wish you had PM'd me that link....it already sold.

I just tried adding that to my cart.  It didn't tell me it had already sold.

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: WTB: Starting off with PCE Collecting - Take my money!]

Bloody Wolf, Last Alert, and Buster Brothers exist as US versions (and the Japanese names of the latter two are Red Alert and Pomping World).

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Raffle: Super Star Soldier!]

I don't have this so add me please...

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: someone sell me a complete City Hunter [pretty please]]

All right, here's a rakuten link.

http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/surugaya-a-too/item/177549-1/  With shipping that *should* still be under $50, assuming it's actually complete.

It's still less than half the original retail price, but the exchange rate is horrible (though it's gotten a bit less horrible in recent weeks).

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: MSR is finished!]

Let them take us to court. It'll be fun. Then they will have to prove not only infringement but also profit loss.

This is untrue.

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: MSR is finished!]

No company will be made a laughing stock in the industry for suing fans.  They may be a laughingstock in a few circles on the Internet, but that's all.  It's not going to hurt them in any real way.  Do you really think that Square Enix was made a laughingstock for shutting down Chrono Resurrection?  Maybe to a few people's friends, but it certainly doesn't hurt their profits, and the stockholders don't care and probably would approve if they had even heard of it.

And yes, they can bully you.  Unless you're going to refuse a court order and get arrested and sent off to jail.  The whole point of jail is to bully the person being sent to jail, and you're not immune to it.

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: MSR is finished!]

They can always say "we're going to sue you for what you already did in the past, unless you agree to this settlement, which obliges you to destroy all copies of the game whether renamed or not".

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: MSR is finished!]

If they come banging down the door after people making a few hundred copies who are making 0 profit, then we'll just change it into a spiritual sequal. 

They can come bang down the door after you've made a couple of hundred copies but before you've sold them.  You will then be out the money it takes to make those copies.  You don't have to be making profit for them to come after you.

As for being renewed, as I pointed out, putting the games on the VC effectively does mean the trademarks are renewed.  You might be able to get away with saying that Neutopia 3 was announced before the games made it to VC, but ultimately using that as your defense is still going to require paying for a lawyer.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: helping a beginner collector make the right choices]

Hold on a sec! Don't go for the rare games yet! Take it slow and start out with some cheap and excellent HuCards!

I don't think Parasol Stars counts as a cheap game.

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Re: MSR is finished!]

I suspect that producing Neutopia 3 is likely to lead to a lawsuit, or at least a request from lawyers that may mean you'll have to destroy anything you make.  Neutopia is a trademark, and since the Neutopia games are sold on the Wii Virtual Console the trademark is still in active use.

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: Gauging interest in potential Rakuten group buy]

I can't see how doing a group buy would save anything unless every person only wanted to buy one item, and even then, probably not by enough to be worth it.  Flash carts make more sense because they have bulk discounts.

And if it was me and I had only gotten disk 8 of a set, I'd have emailed them and said "Hey, you only sent me disk 8!"

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Dancing Stage: Dreams Come True]

I have an extra copy of this Japanese Playstation game (a DDR clone featuring some obscure to us band) with no manual.  I'll trade it for a TG-16 common that I don't have with manual and jewel case (note: I don't have most sports games).

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Does anyone REALLY like Street Fighter II on the PC Engine?]

There are five versions of SFII. The most popular one today is Super Street Fighter II Turbo (aka: SSFIIX) which didn't even get a 16bit home port.

I don't think that's right.  There are three versions that can be considered the same game with addons: SF2, Champion Edition, and Hyper Fighting.

The Super Street Fighter series wasn't even on the same arcade board.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Nectaris experts, what is the definitive version of Neo Nectaris?]

Don't forget the Gameboy version.  It is in Japanese but it has been fan translated.

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: WTB: Wizardry Games]

I beg to differ, I played 4 through the PCE with little problem and I don't read japanese very well.

How much did you know about the game before you played it on the PCE, though?  Did you know any of the puzzles or secrets?  And did you get the grandmaster ending?

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: FS: Small game lot]

How much of Populous is in English?

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: PC-Engine CD game suggestions]

any good foreign webstores to search for PC engine games?

http://gameofjapan.com/
http://global.rakuten.com/en/category/toys_games/video_games/

[Buy/Sell/Trade / Re: WTB: Wizardry Games]

Personally I don't see the point in playing 3 and 4 in Japanese (even partial Japanese) when the games were originally created in English and released in English for computers for the English-speaking world.

You also have to remember that the games up to 3 are very unfair in that you can pretty much die at any time due to bad luck.  And most of the game is just hundreds of hours of grinding (back in the day when grinding was a new concept).  I would advise playing using an emulator and using savestates to prevent this.  Or at least emulating the Apple version and copying your disk image, something you can't do on the console port but which people *had* to do on the Apple back when the games were new.  Nobody wanted to grind for hundreds of hours, randomly die, and have to grind for hundreds of hours again.

#4 is notoriously unfair (literally notoriously--people talked about it at the time) because not only can you not gain levels normally, you pretty much have to read the mind of the developer to solve some of the puzzles (one enemy requires getting a specific monster to kill it that you would have no other reason to suspect would be useful).  There's no way you're going to solve 4 with the messages in Japanese.

I ended up playing 1-3 on an Apple emulator, 4 not at all past the first few levels except by using a walkthrough, and 5 on the SNES.  5 has the typical Nintendo censorship (no alcohol for instance) but didn't lose anything aside from that, and has improved graphics.  6 and 7 existed for DOS (you probably need Dosbox by now) with 7 also ported to Windows.  8 is new enough that it's a regular Windows game.

[PCE/TG-16|CD/SGX Discussion / Re: Easiest Shooter of the Turbosauce?]

Blazing Lasers gets hard near the end though.