JB0

Not as I understand it. What I've heard is it works JUST like modern CSS does. There's X number of decryption keys defined. All manufacturers are issued one. The key has to be on the disk AND player to work. If a device is found to not comply with the Blu-Ray Disk... group-thingie's rules, they can revoke that company's decryption key. Future disks won't contain that key on them, and thus those disks won't work on offending hardware. That's acutally how CSS was cracked. They shipped ... I believe it was a player with both sets of keys in the ROM. Once they had keys, it was easier for the hackers to work out the algorythm. More relvantly, no one's CSS keys were ever revoked. They were THREATENED, but never actualyl revoked.

Where did you get the $425 price? I know the main numbers going around has been the alleged $700-$900 manufacturing cost for the system. My guess is that the version with the hard drive will be sold at $499 or higher. I just wonder how big of a hit Sony is willing to take during the PS3's first few years of life to get it out to as big of a market possible? 380780[/snapback] That 7-900 price tag is a joke. Merill-Lynch's analyst for that one is totally incompetent and should be shot. Especially since htey quoted manufacture price as 900, but all their BS numbers only added up to 8. Anyways, Sony and MS have both been launching systems with below-cost retail prices, so it won't be anything new either way. Not necessarily. There's HDMI-DVI adapters.

Just remember, the PS and Saturn were both around 800 at Japanese launch. 380717[/snapback] My launch Saturn was just under 35,000 yen 2 days after launch in Japan back in '94. I don't recall the PSX launch price but I don't recall it was that much in Japan either. 380739[/snapback] Maybe I have bad information. I don't recall any of the retarded shenanigans that've marked the current generation's launches. Could be wrong.

Seconded.

VF-1 and VF-11 FAST packs. All others... dunno, really. Haven't seen 'em often in both configurations to form an opinion.

http://mgrsti3030s.seamlesstech.biz/templa...subFolderID=155 Damn you Squeenix, I may get into the trading figure market yet.

Just remember, the PS and Saturn were both around 800 at Japanese launch.

The problem with scrolling shooters is they've gotten incestuous. Macross Plus shows this particularly well. The genre has a small but loyal following. That loyal following doesn't WANT a game that's easy. So they cater to that following and make mean f'ers that fill the entire screen with bullets early on and never let up. UNFORTUNATELY, that difficulty serves as a deterrent to newcomers, ensuring that the genre doesn't grow.

New-school shooters are even worse. Pull down Mars Matrix. *evil grin* Space Harrier is emulated. Dunno about Splatterhouse. Join the anti-MAME32 club. Though hitting F5 forces a list refresh. And I DO understand why they don't refresh every time you load by default(I( suspect there's an option somewhere to enable that behavior). The more games you have, the longer it takes, and MAME supports a couple thousand ROM image sets(somewhat less in terms of real games since there's multiple clones and revisions of many games and many gmaes that just won't run). A refresh with 2000 zips in the rom image directory would take a LONG time.

I use the EmuLoader frontend, personally. http://www.mameworld.net/emuloader/ Me and MAME32 have a long and elaborate history of hatred. That and the MAME32 GUI sucks super monkey balls.

WTF? Odd, to say the least. At least it works now.

I eventually wind up with everything. PC gets an upgrade, the console I hate creeps in, etc. Damned good games keep being exclusive.

Try redownloading the file. Might've been corrupted between them and you.

Shouldn't. The same emulator should run identically on all systems, barring screwups in cross-OS ports.

Odd. They worked for me. Not on my usual computer or I'd test right now, but is it possible you were staring at a self-test screen that would've gone away in a little bit?

Patent's expired, actually. Now it's just to look cool and diffrent. *shakes head* 'S the same d-pad as the GBA. Which is one of 2 d-pads to cause me physical pain, as well as the least accurate I own. Part of it may just be the small size, but I think it has deeper problems. And made them bigger and less stiff and with narrower diagonals and...

macross 1 for MAME works.... just the sounds are a little off 379807[/snapback] Not on my system. It freezes on loading and there is just a screen full of zeros. Emulators need sometimes tweaking. I didn't check out which kind of options there are for that, yet. I hope I'll get it running. 379916[/snapback] But MAME isn't one of those retarded jillion-plugin PSEmu-inspired pieces of crap. Everything supported either works or doesn't work. You've either got a bad MAME or bad ROM images. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

It stands fairly well. The clips holding the legs together should've been something besides plastic. They broke fairly easily, and once they did it lost playability because the legs fell off when you moved it.

Voltron is good. Regardless of the form. As a kid I liked Vehcile Voltron better too. Too bad WEP no longer has rights to it.

I figured it was something like that. Can't imagine an original pad being this flakey. I've seen Sears recommended for old stock before. Mine only has the recent models. I'll be on the lookout. But given I dislike the Dualshock's ergonomics, it's gonna get in line behind yet another 3rd-party pad. I agree. Despite the bad press and reputation it has, after using my friend's I've decided it's not nearly as bad as most make it out to be. I suppose if you have teenie weenie hands it might be uncomfortable, but I never had any problems with it. Not to mention, something it did BETTER than the Controller S was that it had the black and white buttons in an easily accesible place: ABOVE the ABXY buttons instead of below, where its much harder to hit. The big issue I saw with teh original XBox pad was the button angle was ATROCIOUS. Had they just reslanted the buttons, all would be well. It was like they took a 6-button pad and oriented it vertically instead of horizontally. Add one more thing: Hitting start often brushes my thumb against R analog. Doesn't matter unless R analog is USED, but.... I can't imagine how the DS d-pad could be anywhere near the GBA's pad(unless you mean SP?), but I'll take your word for it. Don't have a DS(yet), or any real SP time(I dislike it for so many other reasons the d-pad hasn't gotten much attention).

Don't make me link a Windows XP box. It's as clean as an iPod box, at least on the front. You're forgiven. Given hard drive manufacturers currently insist on using a base 10 gigabyte(1 Gigabyte 1000 megabytes) to maximize apparent storage space while computers do and always have used base 2 gigabytes(1 GB = 1024 megabytes), it's hard to keep it all straight.

... but... I didn't go anywhere? 379471[/snapback] Yes you did. We all know you had to pee.

Indeed there isn't. Hence the popularity of Pretty Sammy.

I strongly recommend it. Looks bad at the beginning, but it picks up FAST towards the end of episode 1. Be warned, though. It has teenage angst in abundance. I like a lot of anime. Some of my favorite non-Macross ones are... Vision of Escaflowne. Featuring special guest star: The Reguld! Magical Project S. Gotta love it when a show spoofing a genre comes out better than the stuff it spoofed. This one started life inside of Tenchi Muyo!, but by the time they produced Magical Project S they had broken far enough away that Tenchi only even showed up in one episode, and none of the characters bore any resemblance to their original forms. So don't let the origins scare you away. Super robots in general. I'm a sucker for anything with over-excited piltos that shout out all their attack names.

Or even better, use a microphone attachment that pauses the game whenever you start swearing at it. I like! It would've helped a little. It's POSSIBLE to hold 3 buttons at once if they form a right angle, just because 6-button pads get packed a bit tighter than 4-button ones. I'd argue the giga crush would be better suited to a fifth face button than 3rd shoulder key if it was possible to use it with any regularity. Weapon select, of course, is ideally suited to shoulder keys. But yeah, the "guest finger" would still happen(for the record, I use double-tap dashes a lot because of that). It's happened since the NES days. As soon as there were 2 buttons on the controller face, figners started sneaking up to work them. I love it on most of what I have, personally(which is admittedly a grand total of ten games). Soul Calibur and Robotech Battlecry don't play very well on it. I think Battlecry is the result of poor button mapping, though teh lack of a key config option makes it difficult to check. Soul Calibur... I can't play with a pad on anything. The Primes are the only ones in my set with Miyamoto's name on them, and I gather his input was rather minimal. The 'Cube pad weakness I see is in XCube 2 games. They're typically designed primarily for the PS2, and while you can fake it with an XBox pad, there's no getting around that the 'Cube pad is massively diffrent. The 'Cube's strength is that you can rock from A to any of the other 3 buttons. The tradeoff is that you can't easily do B-Y or X-Y. An XCube 2 game might require those actions because you CAN easily do them on a diamond. A GameCube game won't because the developer knows it's a hard move to do. Diffrence is in alignment. The Genesis start is under the tip of my thumb when I'm on B. Pausing and unpausing don't interfere with the action for even an instant, as the thumb never leaves the action buttons, and is still seated on the primary one. Unless I'm vastly mistaken on scale, the thumb actually has to leave X to reach start. That interrupts play for a moment as you reseat. Yes, it's nitpicky. But it DOES affect the game, rather drastically if you need to pause while working the action buttons(say because some idiot just got between you and the TV in the middle of a difficult action sequence). Holodecks actually have some serious limitations. Regular rules of physics apply, and the player's physical condition affects what "moves" they can perform. They're a neat idea, but surprisingly limited. Neural interfaces bypass all that, but have some unpleasant connotations attached, especially if they can't get a good wireless one rigged up. It'd be the ultimate controller, sound hardware, and video hardware, though. It's worth it. First time I've ever really felt like a third-party controller improved on the default in every way. It's more solidly built than the Dual Shock, feels better in your hands, sticks have better play, and to top it all off, wireless with vibration, excellent range, and excellent battery life. ACK! BATTERIES! I'm particularly curious how the retarded pressue-sensitive button aspect carries over. Both my DualShock2 clones have lousy sensitivity. Which doesn't matter 99% of the time, but freaking Star Ocean uses them(Dammit tri-Ace, I wouldn't expect this sort of idiocy from you...), and the diffrent degrees of responsiveness can really screw a fight up. But with my Sony pad begging for another cleaning, I'm seriously interested in a good replacement. My revision's buttons start losing responsiveness after signifigant use. Have to lean in after the rubber dome collapses to register a press, and it throws me way off. The thing is really too much of a pain to disassemble and reassemble regularly(says the 5200 fan).