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Posted on 19-03-15, 11:48 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
Dinosaur

Post: #201 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Some of those 32X games haven't aged well: Virtua Fighter graphics may have been innovative in 1994, but it now looks like if the thing was made in Minecraft.

Also, Pai's face smiling at you when you pick her at the character select is... creepy.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-15, 15:34 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
Dinosaur

Post: #202 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Looks like Sega finally axed Denuvo from Sonic Mania.

And, oh lookie - a Sega publisher sale is right on Steam!

Now that Sega actually want our monies, let they have 'em. The last $7 I've been stashing on Steam since 2015 are about to go then.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-15, 20:23 in Guy Makes SNES/MD-style Homebrew Console
Dinosaur

Post: #203 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Now it only needs games...

Well, it has Tetris, and that's a solid start.

I like that it actually uses a descendant of the Genesis audio chip.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-17, 01:51 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Dinosaur

Post: #204 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 5 days
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Once again, "your browser, your way®™".

Why bother making your software open source if you're going to be an ass protecting MUH PRECIOUS BRANDING!?
It isn't like they want their product to be used by people outside their echo chamber. Oh hey, we've got another Mozilla, but with plain ol' assholes instead of "visionaries", art school dropouts and people that consider "dogfooding" to be a curse word instead of an industry standard term.

I have nothing but really ugly and censor-able words towards the Pale Moon staff right now, but I'll save them for myself as I ran over my quota of really ugly and censor-able words for the month. Instead, I'll just continue ignoring then, telling others why they should stay the hell away from that thing, while I continue to be worried about the future of Seamonkey :/


Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-17, 16:21 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
Dinosaur

Post: #205 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Following on with the 32X library, I'm actually growing some love for Metal Head.

I don't like shooters, much less FPS.

I don't even like mecha games.

SO... why in the hell I like one of the worst mecha FPS ever made? Maybe it's the cheesy explosions when you kill something, maybe it's the cool metalish soundtrack from your average Japanese game from the '90s, or maybe it's the fact I'm playing a 32X game, but... it's not the first time I sink quite some time into Metal Head. If I weren't doing a quick test of the entire library, I would not stop playing.

Now I'm testing Chaotix, the final game on my test schedule. Oh god, Chaotix... The Sonic game everybody wants to forget (including myself).

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-18, 01:55 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
Dinosaur

Post: #206 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Also, the game explicitly tells you "GOOD LUCK" when you hit Start at the main menu.

Nice touch, love it.

You can also setup the music tempo to your liking (slow/default/fast), something I've never seen in any other game I've played to date.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-18, 04:10 in 32X CRAShTEST: the mushroom of doom strikes back! (revision 3)
Dinosaur

Post: #207 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Before my DSL dies (again), here is it, in its glorious pure HTML form (this time free of MSOHTML bloat!):

http://mi.tsdx.net.ve/32Xbench/
Website is now dead, archived copy here: http://web.archive.org/web/20190512182447/http://mi.tsdx.net.ve/32Xbench/test_en.htm


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YAtq4knigW74p8dA1PBZhCx_JBG9TXlrvi-ylQKatuM/edit?usp=sharing

Yes, that's a Google Docs link. Turns out that it's far easier to force YOU -the reader- to download Google's shitpile of Javascripts rather than dealing with Excel's proprietary HTML junk or LibreOffice HTML export artifacts - by default it produces nothing resembling a spreadsheet; if you install Writer2XHTML, the results are far better but the resulting HTML requires A LOT of cleanup due to redundant CSS junk that it's a PITA to deal with on such a document. Plus, clown computing is useful for once (also, yay backups~)


First things first: system specs!

All emulators (sans MAME) were tested on my good ol' Inspiron 6400 (T7200@2Ghz, Mobility Radeon X1400, Debian Jessie/oldstable). In the case of MAME, due to bandwidth/time constraints (I'm not going to compile the behemoth known as everything-and-the-kitchensync MAME), and the fact MAME is more CPU intensive than anything else (except maybe for Exodus and Higan), I used my Asus K53SD (i5-2450M@2.5~3.1GHz, Intel HD3000, Debian Stretch/Stable) to run whatever version of MAME was on the Debian Stable repos - in the case of Stretch, it's 0.182, which is quite ancient (it's from early 2017!). Buster/Sid does have a current version, but it's a moot point in any case: there has been no updates to the 32X cores since then (except for a lone update for audio emulation in 0.202 that most likely has no impact on the results)

You may notice I've restricted myself to testing emulators available to Linux - as I've said, Windows stopped being my go-to place for my emulation needs well over a decade ago. This is only of significance in the case of Kega Fusion, since its final release (3.64) was never released for non-Windows targets. But you aren't missing anything of value, unless if you actually care about quality PWM DMA audio (a feature used by exactly ZERO commercial games).


Anyway, on to the challengers!

- Kega Fusion 3.63x, which is the final Linux release (the PWM DMA fixes on 3.64 have little impact on the final grade, if any)

- PicoDrive 1.93, and that's because orbea bugged notaz hard enough to make him tarball a release :D I did have to apply a patch to get it to build with OpenGL so I can actually resize the window.

- Gens/GS r7: my custom build deviations are documented here: fixes for GTK+ deprecations, and Chilly Willy's PWM DMA audio fixes (the stock r7 binaries would get a minimal negative impact on the final grade due to this, but nothing important if you don't care about homebrew. GerbilSoft did merged those on his Git repo, but it's unknown if the sources there are buildable as-is)

- MAME 0.182: I've just said why this old version - I'm not upgrading to Buster anytime soon just for ONE program I most likely won't be using ever again! Commandline used for reference: mame 32x -w -video opengl -gl_glsl


Tested media:

- Every single commercial cartridge game, including regional variants. 49 carts in total. Notably absent from the test is the PAL version of Motherbase, which surprisingly remains undumped as of today, March 17, 2019. If it ever gets dumped and said dump find its way to the Internets, I'll update the test accordingly

- Every single SegaCD 32X game, all 6 of them, 11 discs in total, almost 7 gigabytes of pure suck. The Digital Pictures logo is like the Anti Quality Seal of Turdiness, and I don't even get why Sega bothered with its lame DRM attempt with Fahrenheit (you need the regular SCD disc to "unlock" the 32X disc, making the whole ordeal needlessly cumbersome)

- The infamous Mars Check Program. Apparently it DOES run just fine on production consoles, despite what the popular legends say.

- A single demo, the Ecco Cinepak demo. I've ignored the rest of the SDK demos as they're pretty much forgettable.

- Four protos: X-Men, Soulstar X, Virtua Hamster, and a very recent dump, the ill-fated 32X version of Pinocchio (which was close to RTM before getting the axe)

- 11 pieces of homebrew, including two Sonic ROM hacks (which reportedly do not work properly on the real thing as you would expect, hence why they're only worth 0.5% of the final grade), every relevant demo/port by Chilly Willy (seriously, this dude is a freakin' god of the mushroom! He even made the ONLY KNOWN SCD32X DEMO, which is awesome beyond all belief considering what abomination is being targeted), and 3 music file format players by mic (which are really nice so you should check them out). I've restricted myself to the most impressive pieces of homebrew out there (and considering the console we're dealing with, that's a quite low bar to clear), so simple things like Hello World, spinning cubes, and anime chicks made in BASIC compilers are not welcome to the party.


Evaluation criteria:

- Remember those Euro computer magazines from the late '90s/early '00s? Then the layout of my test tables will be familiar to you (I particularly stole it from a Spanish magazine, which was actually an international edition of a German magazine edited by Axel Springer, hence why a D -3/10- is a pass; fortunately no emulator fails THAT hard). Every result contributes with a percentage of the final grade. Commercial ROMs contribute with 1.5% of the final grade, while everything else is 1% (except for the two Sonic ROM hacks that won't run on hardware, and the Mars Check Program which is the most "expensive" test so its worth slightly more). And yes, I got all that very wrong on the first versions of my test! Hopefully I've rectified calculations properly this time...

- There is a 3% devoted to overall quality (performance, A/V quality), which is highly subjective by nature (even more so if you consider I don't have the real hardware as a reference - I'm just testing a bunch of pirate junk of which I'm not aware of its true behavior on console), so basically its impact on the final grade is minimal.

- There are a couple games I managed to get running through the debuggers on MAME/Gens (namely: NBA Jam Tournament Edition and that handegg game), and that's only because I had noticed that years ago when I did the first version of this test. Yes, they're playable (when they run, and it's no coincidence that those two in particular have EEPROM saves, which don't seem to be supported on those emulators)... but barely, hence why the low grades there. I've tried the same path with all other ROMs that refused to run on those two emulators (mostly stuck at a infinite loop), but without luck.

- ROM hangs represent a 5-point penalty for that test at the very least, depending at which phase the game does hang (if the game is unbootable, it's an automatic zero). If the emulator crashes, that's another 2-point penalty (I should give an automatic zero, considering crashes/segfaults are never allowable - in this era that could even be considered a security flaw!)

- The Mars Check Program has an unique way to calculate the grade for that test: first I check how many tests the emulator under testing manages to run (a complete run will run all 161 of 'em), and based on how many tests it runs before hanging (if it does not finish), I obtain a base grade (for example, if ROM hangs at test 80, that would be 49,68% of tests completed, for a base grade of 4,97). Then, this ROM does count errors (failed tests). Each error is a 0,1 point deduction (if the check program says you've failed 50 tests, you've already lost 5 points there!). If the test hangs before completion, that's another 1 point deduction. And if your emulator crashes (as PicoDrive does), you lose another 2 points. Only Fusion gets a flawless pass here! While this check program has its flaws, it's the best we get that can somewhat stress the hardware.

- See those [x0] notes on the results for some ROMs/emulators? These are screenshot tags, and since I couldn't do something better, you can lookup for those specific tags on this album they're now clickable so you can open said screenshots on a new tab, to get a visual representation of specific emulation bugs that can be seen on the gameplay.

Now, onto the results!

The short version:

- If all you care are about commercial ROMs, just stick to Fusion, and pray for your distro to never break support for 32-bit x86 applications.
- If you are masochist enough to descend into the sewer pit known as "SegaCD 32X"... you will be fine with PicoDrive, and that's just because it can run the ONLY commercial game that Fusion can't: Surgical Strike. Or better yet: don't waste your time; all those games SUCK RANCID DONKEY BALLS.
- For homebrew, both PicoDrive and Fusion are good choices. Be aware that if you want good PWM DMA audio (required for ANYTHING wrote by Chilly Willy, including his Wolfenstein 3D ports) without resorting to Wine, your only option is PicoDrive.
- Don't bother with Gens or MAME, unless if you absolutely need a debugger.
- Recommended BIOS for multi-disc games: us_scd1_9210.bin (f4f315adcef9b8feb0364c21ab7f0eaf5457f3ed) or us_scd2_9306.bin (328a3228c29fba244b9db2055adc1ec4f7a87e6b). Expect trouble with all others!


Emulator recaps:

- Kega Fusion: The undisputed king of 32X emulation, the only one to get a perfect 10 on the commercial ROM section (basically: if it was officially released, Fusion will run it just fine), and it only lost its crown of perfection because Surgical Strike took over two decades to get ripped. You simply can't get wrong with Fusion if you actually care about the 32X. However, the clock is running out for this legend: as a proprietary binary blob, it's unlikely you will be able to run it as-is on future distros (or even in some current ones!), and it seems Snake dropped off the radar for good. If you're at Windowsland, you will be fine... until MS decides it's time to drop x86-32 for good (which WILL happen someday, maybe sooner than you think!)

- PicoDrive: A relatively late newcomer to the 32X scene, yet it shows some strong compatiblity that far surpasses everything ever made... except for Fusion. Yes, it's still a bit rough around the edges, a few games still give it trouble, and there are at least two unplayable ROMs on it (one is a handegg game which we can forget, and the other is Motherbase/Parasquad), but on the CD-ROM and homebrew departments, it gets a clean pass, which is no small feat. Plus, it's the only one actively developed (or so it looks), so you should have it as a plan B in your arsenal. And it's the only one you can use on ARM toys, and as a bonus, it's also available as a libretro core so you can play it on the libretro-enabled frontend of your choice. Its default standalone UI is quite useable too. Unfortunately, during testing this emulator exhibited intermittent controller issues (6-button pads getting detected as 3-button pads, inputs not working at times with some games, ghost devices plugged to Player 2 socket), although it was not that hard to deal with those, it was still an annoyance (hence the quarter-point penalty on the final grade)

- Gens/GS: Remember Gens? It wasn't the first 32X emulator (that was retroDrive), but it certainly was the first one to embrace the open source road. Too bad this didn't any favors for its emulation cores, although of all of its endless forks, we got Gens/GS, which probably is the most important one. The one where improvements were attempted to address some mistakes of its past. Gens Next Generation, if you will... or maybe not, since the improvements didn't reached that far. Still, Gens served us well all those years, but it's time to hang up the gloves, to check in for the last time, to leave the building straight to the retirement home for broken emulators, where it can die peacefully. Seriously, it's time to. You won't get that far with a 32X emulator that has zero support for CDROM games, and that gets its guts seriously upset when a ROM crashes/hangs. Upset enough to either exhibit random behaviors (like skipping title screens on WWF Raw and 36 Great Holes), or to outright refuse to run anything else until a restart (of the emulator, not your computer!). Farewell, my great friend...

- MAME: Oh boy, the 900-pound gorilla of the arcade emulation land ate the 900-pound gorilla of the home computer emulation park. The results are not glorious: a bunch of half-assed cores that don't get that far. Maybe it will work enough to run a BIOS ROM, or the most simple/popular software titles. Or it will be like the 32X core, where you get results so bad that it rivals Gens at times at the lower end of the scale (and that's not a compliment!) Plus, it's MAME, the least user-friendly emulator ever made, where even simple things like selecting a video mode, setting up firmware ROMs, or loading a game quickly become painful experiences for the typical gamer that only wants a point-and-click solution. At least they're nice enough to warn you that said cores are unusable and that you should not blame anyone else but yourself for wasting your time. On top of that, even if your game runs (and doesn't cause the emulator to segfault!), it's not fun to experience random slowdowns on a i5 box, or nearly unlistenable audio full of pops and crackles while the actual volume levels are almost mute! Guys, ROMaholics of the world: just don't!


REMINDER: This is a "crashtest", that is, "can I have the expectation to run whatever game I want to play on my emulator of choice?". In no way a "Playable" result implies that the game can actually be completed, as this is pretty much impossible to test unless if you have unlimited time and nothing else to do with your life! For most meanings of "playable", it just means I can run the ROM, beat the first level/boss/match/whatever, or play for at least 10 minutes without triggering anything nasty. Plus, without a real hardware reference to draw comparisons, you should interpret these test results as merely informative, not as an authoritative reference! Normal people is far more likely to finish a season on NBA Jam, all missions on Metal Head, or even a full file at Chaotix, rather than getting a 100% at Tempo, Sangokushi 4, or -please have mercy- Slam City! And in some games, it's simply not feasible due to game bugs, considering that some of the library was rushed to market in a heavily unpolished state: the best example would be DOOM. Just like this test, which was rushed in... what, 3 weeks?

Feedback welcome~!

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Dinosaur

Post: #208 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Posted by Broseph
It's too bad Kega Fusion is/was closed source

PicoDrive for me is hit or miss. Games like Virtua Racing 32x works fine but something like Virtua Fighter just hangs right after the player load screen. And Virtua Fighter 32x is actually a pretty decent port of the arcade. Virtua Racing 32x otoh...well, it beats the Megadrive/Genesis port at least.


In my testing, PicoDrive ran Virtua Fighter just fine (I'm not good at fighting games overall, so I just endured like the first 3 fighters), with the only broken thing being the win animations you get after finishing with each fighter: you're supposed to get a fancy animation with "WINNER" on top, but instead all you get is a mostly static frame with a corrupted model of the winner.

As for the 32X Virtua Fighter being a decent arcade port, that's because Sega's AM2 did the port themselves, which makes sense. In the case of Virtua Racing, it seems the home console ports were done by a different team.

Fun fact: the Japanese version of Virtua Racing has SRAM backup save (for record times?). The export versions lost that feature (most likely as a cost cutting measure). But hey, at least they did changed the main menu colors (which were quite unreadable on the JP original), and the "VIIIIIIRTUA RACING!" chant (the JP one is lazy as hell).

Other 32X games supporting backup saves:
- 36 Great Holes (SRAM)
- Chaotix (SRAM)
- World Series Baseball '95 (SRAM)
- Sangokushi 4 (SRAM)
- NBA JAM Tournament Edition (EEPROM)
- NFL Quarterback Club (EEPROM)

(read "SRAM" as "battery-backup save RAM", not "Static RAM").
Apparently SRAM emulation is a tough one for older/less capable emulators: Gens only supports SRAM for Chaotix, and curiously enough, JP Virtua Racing. On all other games all you get are deadlocks due to the broken handling of SRAM. In the case of the two EEPROM sportsball games you can force them to run with patch codes or through the debugger, but there is no point to do so if you intend to play their respective season modes. MAME is even worse, as it doesn't even bother emulating SRAM when running 32X games (I did tried a lone Genesis game - a vanilla Sonic 1 ROM... for which MAME dutifully created a zero-filled NVRAM file!). Chaotix will run, but forget about recording your progress (game won't crash, at least) - for all others, it's glitches/crashes all the way, baby!

The National Handegg League game does make PicoDrive crash, but not due to EEPROM emulation issues (as its NBA counterpart works just fine: both games were developed by Iguana and published by Acclaim, and do seem to exhibit the same kind of problems on emulators that don't bother properly emulating the EEPROM savetype); apparently it dies due to something triggering a bug on PicoDrive's SH2 dynarec core.

Speaking about EEPROM saves:
tomman@tomman-lp-c2:~/.picodrive/srm$ hexdump -C NBA\ Jam\ Tournament\ Edition\ \(World\).srm 
00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 53 6e 61 6b 65 20 31 39 |........Snake 19|
00000010 39 35 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff |95..............|
00000020 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff |................|
*
000000e0 ff ff bf 48 b3 24 49 20 4c 6f 76 65 20 45 6d 6d |...H.$I Love Emm|
000000f0 61 20 57 61 64 72 6f 70 |a Wadrop|
000000f8

Never change, Snake~!
(Where in the world are you? The mushrooms of doom are claiming for your glorious comeback from the dead!)

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-18, 12:21 in Computer Technology News/Discussion (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #209 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 5 days
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Posted by sureanem

You haven't considered doing like in Russia, separating out the dub to make a separate .aac file?
It makes it drastically easier to share and store, with no real downside.

Could also upload the ISO files to archive.org and then only keep the re-encodes. I think their policy is "anything goes", and don't delete anything short of overt spam, just hide it. Although it might be cumbersome to get the ISOs when you need them again.


1) Preserving loose audio tracks is of dubious utility - they're not meant to be consumed as a standalone product! I know, I was there, I still have .FLACs of every audio I managed to rip from Animax. Noone wants them, except those making their own encodes/remuxes.

2) Uploading the ISOs to the Archive is actually a great idea, to be fair (why didn't I thought into that!). If my DSL ever gets fixed, I may look about their offerings and how they would deal with those. The goal of my collection is not a private stash where stuff would be lost forever if all of my HDDs were to suddenly die the very same day, but to share and spread the word about those weird and wonderful Touhou fan animations and concerts. If their rule is "anything goes", why not? They preserve absolute turds like the SCD32X library, and those Touhou DVDs are more worthy of preservation than that. Plus, anything that can be done in spite of Chinese file hoarders is always welcome~

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-18, 13:41 in Computer Technology News/Discussion (revision 4)
Dinosaur

Post: #210 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 5 days
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1) Russia does everything wrong, from politics to piracy. I do watch my dubs. Having to remux them prior to watching kills the enthusiasm, thus why noone does that. I'm not one of those Troo UNIX® Way™ nerds that love really convoluted non-solutions, so don't bother. Once again, HDD space is not a problem if you consider that outside US English, the percentage of dubbed anime licenses is rather small. Dragon Ball dubs are not going to be lost anytime soon, while archiving, say, Di Gi Charat Nyo! LA Spanish dub (complete with average quality MPEG-4 video encodes) only requires 3 DVDs, and for a modern multi-TB HDD that's peanuts.

2) Rutracker is cool (it has saved my ass in at least a few occasions), but not for Touhou stuff. They do have some stuff (mainly music and maybe the games), but nothing regarding the videos (once again I know because that's one of the places where I look for new material from time to time). Regarding the copyright part, most circles don't give a damn (considering that they're doing derivative works from another copyright which belongs to a dude that basically has a "anything goes" rule regarding said works), although I've seen some stingy ones in the music arrange area that are trigger happy with those DMCA takedowns. On the video scene? Not so much - most circles are fine as long as you don't go and upload their latest Comiket releases right away (case in point: Manpuku Jinja -of Fantasy Kaleidoscope ~The Memories of Phantasm~ fame- is fine with reuploads, but only if you respect their "first dibs" right on YT/NND uploads, and that's just one example from personal experience)

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Dinosaur

Post: #211 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 5 days
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Managed to find a way to take the junk that Excel 2003 tries to pass as "HTML" (thanks to HTML Tidy and this C# snippet), and now I've updated the ol' plain HTML version on my site.

Still required some massaging on a editor, mainly to simplify some of the resulting CSS mess and to properly add the links to the bug screenshots this time. Most likely this won't pass the HTML5 validation and will make those Silly Valley VC kids to weep because I'm not using hundreds of megabytes of Javascripts, but the 32X is a suitable punishment for that :D



Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Dinosaur

Post: #212 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Posted by Screwtape
Looks like you've got the MAME and GENS logos switched at the top of their respective columns.


D'OH!

Fixed, thanks!

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-19, 16:03 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Dinosaur

Post: #213 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 5 days
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Flat planes!? Is that the new Kancolle-killer!?

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Dinosaur

Post: #214 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Remember those "Get herpes Windows 10 now!" adware popups disguised inside regular security Windows patches for Win7?

Remember GWX?

Did you thought MS got the message and left you alone to use your computer?

BZZZT! Guess who will be back soon? Yes, it's our good old friend GWX! Kinda, sorta: with the clock running out for Win7 extended support (this next January according to MS lifecycle schedules), they're going full throttle again with the adware bullshittery:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/12/1727214/microsoft-will-now-pester-windows-7-users-to-upgrade-to-windows-10-with-pop-ups

Hope they're kind enough to honor the GWX opt-out settings HAHAHAHA who am I kidding?! This is Microsoft, you WILL get Windows 10, and you will like it, and that's not an option!

In other news, if your local file sharing has been crippled by January KB4480970 on Win7 (as I discovered today, when in one of the few rare occasions where I boot my rarely used W7 setups to pull some file to another laptop) because you're not inside a corporate domain and therefore MS had to revoke your filesharing privileges because SEKURITAH!, here are your workarounds:
- Apply this regkey, then reboot:
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\system /v LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

- Install KB4487345. For this ~28MB patch you need to go to Windows Update Catalog, as MS won't be offering it through regular automatic updates.
- Rollback KB4480970, making your system slightly less secure in the meanwhile
- Update to Windows 10. Who needs SMB anyway?

...fuck this shit, yo.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Dinosaur

Post: #215 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Sounds a lot like 98Lite/XPLite, with the difference that it was a commercial product you could buy, and you had to provide your own Windows setup media to be patched. On the other side this is a straight copyright violation, even if you are required to have a legit Windows license key.

I've never been a fan of custom/modded Windows versions anyway (beyond slipstreaming patches, and in the XP era, SATA/AHCI drivers)

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 19-03-22, 15:21 in Monocultures in Linux and browsers (formerly "Windows 10") (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #217 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 5 days
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Microsoft has gone nuclear in the past with people distributing UNMODIFIED MS software setup media, no matter the channel (despite the fact you actually need a valid license to run most of their products: there is no difference if your Windows ISO came straight from MS store or torrented from TPB; both can be activated with a legit retail license, using a leaked MAK serial from some Soviet blog with enough activations left, or cracked with an activator/loader). I do remember about a well known (and now closed since long ago) anime filesharing board in Latin America that got in hot water with MS just because some people were sharing Office on a couple threads (they emerged nearly unscratched, although they had to purge all MS software download threads from the board).

There is no warranty this specific project will continue flying under the radar now that it's well known, no matter how laudable are their goals. Making a shitty product less shitty doesn't give you a "get out of jail free" card - as much as I despise current Microsoft, those guys have everything to lose should MS unleash the hounds. What they could do to minimize their risk is to release a toolbox which you can use yourself on your (legally sourced) Windows setup media, leading to a custom built ISO/whatever. Something like you can achieve with products like XPLite or BartPE. You would still be on shaky legal grounds but at least there would be no need to distribute copyrighted ISOs, much less modified ones. If you choose to distribute said modified ISO, they can't blame whoever made the toolbox (similar to emulators, where there is a big difference between distributing Higan binaries and a full "SNES GAMES FOR PC" package with a entire copy of the No-Intro SNES ROM set bundled with a copy of Higan)

Anyway, the best edition of Windows 10 is called Windows 7.

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Posted on 19-03-22, 18:26 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Dinosaur

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Now that you guys mention GCC and game development, it turns out that Sega did used GCC as their reference compiler for the 32X (at least for the SH-2 part). That was the compiler they shipped on their SDKs, and if you take a look at some 32X binaries (at least on the CD games), you will find GCC symbols on those.

Did they ever released the sources for whatever GCC version were they using back in 1994?

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Posted on 19-03-22, 19:48 in 32X CRAShTEST: the mushroom of doom strikes back! (revision 3)
Dinosaur

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Found this interesting place with 32X game reviews, cheats, and other stuff:

http://rq87.flyingomelette.com/RQ/32X/1.html

Important information regarding region locked software: http://www.segakore.fr/index.php/2013/11/30/modify-your-mega-drive-genesis-32x-pal-ntsc?page=3

Also, I just realized that there are other undumped Euro 32X releases: they're all CD games (yuck!), basically all of them except for Fahrenheit (this combo release never went outside 'murica) and Surgical Strike (which ended being a Brazilian exclusive for whatever reason, after a last minute cancellation at USA). Europe did got all of the Digital Pictures Full Motion Vomit releases on the enhanced version, but none of the Sega-made ones. The existing rips are all USA/NTSC releases (remember: unlike ROM carts, all SCD games are region locked). Fun.
Found rips for those Euro CD games. I'm not testing those ones for now, sorry :P

Fortunately Japan got spared from the SCD32X disaster, as SoJ was too busy messing up with the Saturn.

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Posted on 19-03-22, 23:06 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Dinosaur

Post: #219 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

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Killed By Google

If your startup is ever bought by Google, they've got a hole for your product already reserved at their cemetery!

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Posted on 19-03-24, 22:53 in Monocultures in Linux and browsers (formerly "Windows 10") (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #220 of 1282
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Windows XP went nowhere south of the border, just sayin'

Being unsupported by every major AV solution, web browser, videogame, office suite, and pretty much anything of value hasn't stopped people from running XP. Banks still truck along with their IE6 intranet apps. The government still manages to get up and running those Compaq Evo pizzaboxes that couldn't even run any serious modern Linux distro with acceptable performance, and are hopeless with anything made past XP. For those people, "pain" is not just an option, but an acceptable tradeoff. I can see a similar fate for 7 or (God forbid!) 8.1.

In my particular case, Windows still survives on this house due to games (which I don't even play) and hardware service tools (good luck tinkering with HDD firmware without those Very Expensive Soviet Tools, or their pirate Chinese knockoffs, some of those still recommending the use of a XP host just to not deal with UAC or driver signing annoyances). Aside of those niche usages, I'm a happy camper on my Debian setups.

In any case, the era of personal computers is long gone, with or without Windows. Between streaming-for-everything and the switch from creation to consumption of contents, very few people (outside nerds and some business for whose change == money we can't/won't spend) cares about Windows versions going EOL :/

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