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    Thread review
    Kawaoneechan Not quite it doesn't. But that too is now fixed.
    Mei Koyoki
    Posted by Kawa
    Okay let me see if this works.

    http://megamanlegends.com

    * Kawatests some stuff

    And this is a test reply, now hopefully this can get back on-topic lol.
    Yeah, it works. Thanks :D
    Kawaoneechan Okay let me see if this works.

    http://megamanlegends.com

    * Kawa tests some stuff
    Mei Koyoki
    Posted by tomman
    Posted by Nicholas Steel
    Megaupload still exists at https://mega.co.nz or.. is that a different thing?

    But then, Latin American pirates hated P2P with a special passion, mainly because they were lazy to leave their torrent clients seeding after the downloads were done, just for them to wonder why there are no seeds on their next download, hence the stupid, baseless, inane "torrents are obsolete" remark :/

    Don't make me open that Pandora's box, folks :D

    Oh, so that's where the whole thing of stupid Spanish kids making MEGA downloads to badly compiled things and putting 'Descargar Para Android' in the title of their crappy YouTube videos came from? Interesting.

    Also, interesting bug found here: the / me code checks for '/me' rather than ' /me' on the new reply page, but not on the edit post page, resulting in weirdness like above. Kawaoneechan, sort this out onee-chan <3
    tomman
    Posted by Nicholas Steel
    Megaupload still exists at https://mega.co.nz or.. is that a different thing?

    For the context of this very specific case, I got said email shortly after the Feds seized the original Megaupload and the whole file locker industry was in chaos. Plus, IIRC none of the fileservers that were named there survive as of today.

    But then, Latin American pirates hated P2P with a special passion, mainly because they were lazy to leave their torrent clients seeding after the downloads were done, just for them to wonder why there are no seeds on their next download, hence the stupid, baseless, inane "torrents are obsolete" remark :/

    Don't make me open that Pandora's box, folks :D
    creaothceann
    Posted by Nicholas Steel
    Megaupload still exists at https:/* Nicholas Steelga.co.nz or.. is that a different thing?

    Different but related.
    Nicholas Steel Megaupload still exists at https://mega.co.nz or.. is that a different thing?
    Mei Koyoki
    Posted by tomman
    Oh, and his tech docs are delightful reads for anyone remotely interested into emulation or console development.

    Which is why I sort of don't consider his works entirely 'closed source'. He makes his findings public via the extensively useful documentation around his hardware findings - probably more useful to those writing an emulator from scratch and to homebrew emulators, than to those simply forking the existing project and ending up with a billion forks that then get merged into one big one and becoming quite a state (see: the FCEUltra family, which I recall Xkeeper making a joke about once on Twitter).

    Martin Korth does a hell of a lot more for the communities he writes his software for than basically any other closed source developer I have ever seen, though: while open sourcing the code would be nice it's not necessarily a requirement for me and probably a lot of people as more people are likely interested in the documentations he posts for whatever purpose they require them for. Whether just for reading them in an easy to understand format or making their own implementation, or using his/others' debugging tools.

    On a note, I'm also sort of glad his projects are 'just his', it means, like you say. They have their own 'feel' to them, and yeah the performance on his emulators is outstanding, presumably due to the use of assembler and from what I remember, a self-written binary compiler too for maximum optimisation. I wish more developers would indeed take a page out of his book: especially those who insist on not bothering to even provide a standalone emulator anymore which actually disgusts me somehow (glares at Genesis Plus GX being locked down to RetroArch).

    I'd like to see NO$GMB revived too, at the very least, the key requirement for GBC games removed. On a nice side note, BGB still uses a Nocash-style debugger if I'm not mistaken by default out of the box and even comes with the palette the last version of NO$GMB shipped with... it's an emulator I always wanted to mess around with on some older PC one day for the sakes of it haha. I'm only 19 (and not too knowledgeable compared to the rest of you), I wish I was around in the golden age of these scenes y'know...

    ...maybe someday I'll do my Hall of Shame with all those emails I got from my years doing emulator localizations and anime encodes, as I have some gems deeply buried in nearly 20 years of emails ("torrents are obsolete, please upload to $DEAD_FILELOCKER pretty pls", "can you send all the pokeymans in spanish").

    Lol would be interesting. I imagine $DEAD_FILELOCKER typically refers to the likes of 4Shared, MegaUpload or RapidShare by now given the age of said emails? Be nice to see your sarky responses too the way Martin done his page, also your site doesn't seem to load on my end... :P
    tomman Oh, good ol' NO$ hate mail (I am also guilty of this, a spectre that will never stop haunting me)

    Now that I've been at both sides of the airtight hatchway, I can tell you that it has gone downhill since then.

    ...maybe someday I'll do my Hall of Shame with all those emails I got from my years doing emulator localizations and anime encodes, as I have some gems deeply buried in nearly 20 years of emails ("torrents are obsolete, please upload to $DEAD_FILELOCKER pretty pls", "can you send all the pokeymans in spanish").

    Fortunately nobody asks for support via email nowadays (email is for dinosaurs, remember?). Instead, lamers go to forums (which are on its way out, sadly), social networks, and Discord "servers" (yuck!), where it's easier to deal with stupid. Or you can ask for help the classy asshole way, like the guy that helped gave birth to Mozilla does routinely:
    https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/11/retropie-questions/
    https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/11/retropie-and-mame/


    BTW: Martin Korth should consider reviving NO$GMB (turning it donationware like he did with all his other emulators), if only for reviving the good ol' times. Not that x86-only emulators have a clear future in a world threatened by ARMs, or that I'm too fond of closed-source blobs, but man, this guy comes from a long lost breed of developers who can squeeze up to the last drop of performance of any hardware you put in his hands! Oh, and his tech docs are delightful reads for anyone remotely interested into emulation or console development. The PokèRAWMz 13yo of me didn't appreciated that back then, but my current "I'm sick of computers" 35yo does, as small and efficient software has become an endangered species in this era of Javascript Everywhere™
    Mei Koyoki
    Posted by tomman
    For most people out there (particularly back when the GB was still "hot"), their needs basically boil down to a single franchise: POKéMON. Back in the era, most bugreports received by emu authors were from ROM kiddies claiming that "HALP i can't pokeymanz/I can haz the RAWMz?" (this DID extended sometime after the GBA era, as -until a couple years ago- I still received from time to time those lovely messages in my condition of the LA Spanish localization author for VBA). Most of those people never had any prior experience with the real hardware, they just wanted to play with Pikachu on their econoboxes.

    Martin Korth kept a long log of these types of messages he'd receive from kids back in the NO$GMB days here.
    It got to the point where he went and put this slightly amusing message at the top of the FAQ for the emulator, too.

    (Sorry for bumping the thread, I just felt like sharing this)
    Nicholas Steel Perhaps my experience with ZSNES before we got a computer with a VIA Cyrix III 600MHz CPU, was with a version before v1.00. Iirc it definitely worked fine on a Pentium 1 with MMX.
    KingMike I had a 486/33 as a kid and no, the only way ZSNES DOS could maintain a reasonable speed was max frameskip and disabling sound (which would mean no SPC700 emulation, so hope the game you wanted to play didn't require CPU/SPC sync or it would just freeze).

    RPGs for the SNES were always on the higher end of the price range.
    I assume it was a limited market combined with more localization required (both text translation as well as bugtesting work on said text) combined with generally pricier carts (more ROM and/or battery-backup RAM). Super Mario RPG might be the only RPG I recall seeing at the typical average $59.99 US price, and that being because, you know, Mario, that they could hope to draw a wider audience. (like how Yoshi's Island could getting away with having literally the shittiest US TV commercial (I'd say the bottom of the barrel is NoA's awful "Play It Loud" marketing plan. You know, the one that arguably helped make EarthBound a flop.) and still seem to have sold decently. Only Mario had that kind of marketing power.)
    BearOso
    Posted by Nicholas Steel

    No, ZSNES is perfectly capable on a Pentium 1 so long as it's the MS-DOS version (which also supported the transparency effects etc.) The Windows versions of ZSNES need something like a Pentium 3 though >.>

    Sure as hell didn't run well on our Pentium 1, unless you count 30fps max as running well. I was talking about the DOS version (the Windows version didn't come around until later). A P2-333 was pretty much the baseline. It just barely maintained full speed in most games. And I was a tweaker and ran stuff like fastvid to enable MTRR. You *could* run ZSNES on a Pentium 1, it was just completely pathetic.

    Posted by shadowinthelight

    Pentium might not have even been necessary. I remember getting playable if not full speeds on my brother's 486SX.

    You're definitely misremembering, or you two have a different definition of "full speed." Yeah, it could run the game near realtime, but with significant frame-skipping and poor sound, the same way no$sns runs full speed on a Pentium. A 486SX would definitely not maintain full speed by my definition, 60fps with no sound cutouts.

    Posted by "neologix"

    Got Chrono Trigger SNES at Toys 'R' Us for $80-90

    I remember our TRU having it on a big display under glass on an endcap and touting it as something big, but I didn't know much about it at first. I guess they were charging extra for the game length. I don't know if that was the MSRP, but I remember about $80 as well.

    Posted by "KingMike"

    I thought FF3 SNES had been a pretty consistent US$50 loose game for decades.

    It was about that price when I ordered it. Didn't get it until at least a year later because of the wait list. FF2 was more expensive, obviously because of age.
    shadowinthelight
    Posted by Nicholas Steel
    No, ZSNES is perfectly capable on a Pentium 1 so long as it's the MS-DOS version (which also supported the transparency effects etc.)

    Pentium might not have even been necessary. I remember getting playable if not full speeds on my brother's 486SX.
    Nicholas Steel
    Posted by BearOso
    ZSNES couldn't quite reach full speed (with transparency, no skipping, etc) on our P2-333, so the notions of it being fast enough to run perfectly on the original pentium are uninformed.

    No, ZSNES is perfectly capable on a Pentium 1 so long as it's the MS-DOS version (which also supported the transparency effects etc.) The Windows versions of ZSNES need something like a Pentium 3 though >.>
    KingMike Maybe in Venezuela it costs 10x as much, but I thought FF3 SNES had been a pretty consistent US$50 loose game for decades. (well, I haven't checked that lately to see if S-E has put it or mobile remakes on enough prices to drive down the price yet, like how I recall Bust-A-Move was once a kind of pricey SNES game until enough sequels/ports and even blatant ripoffs seemed to have saturated the market enough to drop it down)
    (though Chrono Trigger has had much more fluctuation, I think)
    tomman
    Posted by neologix
    The mail-order Funco listed Phantasy Star IV for the Genesis for US$110 at the time I wanted it, so I just kept renting it. Got Chrono Trigger SNES at Toys 'R' Us for $80-90 and wasn't gonna be able to convince my mom to drop another $80-90 through Funco for Final Fantasy III SNES, so as soon as we had dial-up internet through AOL it was the first ROM I DL'ed and played via ESNES (yes, THAT old SNES emu).

    FWIW, New York City at the time had FuncoLand (the physical stores for Funco), Software Etc., Babbage's, AND Electronics Boutique, all with nonsense prices for games.


    And now, 20 years later, people is forking off up to x10 those prices for used carts of the very same games. Progress!

    Heh, I can remember that when I downloaded my very first Genesis emulator (it was Gens), I learned that there were more Sonic games beyond the NOT FOR RESALE cart I had been playing for a couple years (yes, I was a VERY latecomer to the home console scene, having only got my hand-me-down Genesis in 1998... but not having a TV to hook it up until December '99!). Needless to say, while emulation failed to awake the PokéRAWMz kiddie inside me, it DID opened my eyes to the wide and wonderful world of (retro) console gaming in general.
    neologix The mail-order Funco listed Phantasy Star IV for the Genesis for US$110 at the time I wanted it, so I just kept renting it. Got Chrono Trigger SNES at Toys 'R' Us for $80-90 and wasn't gonna be able to convince my mom to drop another $80-90 through Funco for Final Fantasy III SNES, so as soon as we had dial-up internet through AOL it was the first ROM I DL'ed and played via ESNES (yes, THAT old SNES emu).

    FWIW, New York City at the time had FuncoLand (the physical stores for Funco), Software Etc., Babbage's, AND Electronics Boutique, all with nonsense prices for games.
    BearOso
    Posted by byuu
    That isn't still the case? I even pre-ordered Riviera on PSP from Gamestop, and the store employee opened the only copy they received -- mine -- before I arrived to pick it up.

    Gamestop stores have always been crap. Software Etc., Babbage's didn't have those dumb policies. Funco was fine until Gamestop bought and twisted them.

    After that, I just started buying games online.

    There was no online then. Nobody put credit cards into the internet because no one on the internet could take credit cards. I'm talking about the mail-order sheets that Funco put out. A year after FF3 was released, I borrowed it from a neighbor and I liked it and wanted a copy. Trouble was, no stores had it anymore. So I put in an order to Funco, and when they (maybe eventually) got a used copy in, they'd send it to you. That was the kind of unavailability that pushed people to emulation at the time.

    ZSNES couldn't quite reach full speed (with transparency, no skipping, etc) on our P2-333, so the notions of it being fast enough to run perfectly on the original pentium are uninformed. Snes9x was only marginally slower, but also not any more accurate at the time. I, for one, wanted my games to be perfectly smooth and to sound correct. So I'd certainly favor the real thing, even if there were some obstructions to getting it. By the late 90s, the internet was finally making buying used games easy, so there was even less reason to emulate. SNES emulation didn't get good enough to replace the real thing until you came around in the mid 00s.
    CaptainJistuce I don't believe I've ever had a preorder with them. But they're terrible in so many ways that I'm not surprised.
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