JB0

Largely irrelevant nitpick: Q-Rau didn't use any sort of mental interface. It's waldos and pressure sensors all the way down. And this is outright absurdity. Sure, you can cherry-pick your examples to make a case. I can cherry-pick examples to prove "everyone" comes to the conclusion that advanced mechanical technology ultimately replaces biological components and we all become robots. It's an extreme which is only slightly less silly. BTW, I recommend you not tell anyone with arthritis that the miracle of biotechnology means their parts naturally self-maintain ensuring they never wear out. Parts wear out, regardless of how they're made. Biotech as a magic cure-all pill makes as much sense as nanotech as a magic cure-all pill. Which is to say, it doesn't.

Which says a lot about Robotech...

THAT one I can answer.Bullpoop requires a seperate filter from regular poop to prevent every single word that contains s, h, i, and t in consecutive order from being censored. Not an excessive concern in this case, but some curses DO show up inside other words fairly often. I've been on boards where the filters underwent several tweaks to allow intelligible conversation while still dealing effectively with unwanted language. Remember, the filter knows not what the words are. It just sees some letters and replaces them with other letters. And no one thought to add bullpoop to the list because.... I dunno. I've honestly always been surprised the board HAS a filter. We all seem... perhaps "mature" is the wrong word, given the thread... responsible enough to be trusted with potty words. I assume that's why no one escalated the filters to include bullpoop in addition to regular poop. I'm self-censoring to poop as a way to balance a respect for the intent behind the filters with having an intelligent discussion ABOUT the filters. Also, poop is more fun to say than it rightly should be at my age. ... Poop.

I seriously don't get Hasbro's love affair with AAs in places where AAAs or button cells would last "forever."But then, I think everything should use J cells just because they look awesome, so I guess they're allowed a favorite cell too..

Now it's a Flash Clapper?!?! That's just one retcon too many! Robotech has just been RUINED FOREVER!

Exactly! Keep in mind that, depending on game, some come as dedicated boards and others(like the CPS2 and NeoGeo) come as more console-y systems. CPS2 and NeoGeo are also nicer than CPS1 in that games come in actual cartridges(though a CPS2 cartridge isn't really smaller than a CPS1 board, it just looks better since it's in a shell). Vector doesn't emulate well, actually. It's a fundamentally different approach to image creation(rough analogy: it's an Etch-A-Sketch compared to the normal display's Lite-Brite), and there's a lot of quirks that don't get reproduced in MAME(or most other emulators).But yeah, I'd definitely settle for a MAME cab, and realistically, that's what I'll do. Got plans to build one at some point, with a modular control panel so I can get the right controls for the right game(again, preferences skew old enough that a lot of it defies modern standards, though certainly some of it is me being nitpicky). Right now I've got a PC and no place to stick even an arcade control panel. Make do with a gamepad a lot of the time, keyboard and trackball when that won't cut it. It's not optimum, but it's better than a lot of things. ... And I just don't even TRY to emulate Defender. Look at the controls, you'll understand why.

Okay, there's two separate things going here. CPS1 games are a two-board set. One board has the computer, the other has the game. You can swap JUST the game board to play other CPS1 games. You never have to touch the JAMMA connector for these. Though it looks like CPS1 games are a bare circuit board covered in ROMs, and connect at like three different places, so... be careful changing the ROM board. Non-CPS1 games, you'll have to swap the entire set. At the JAMMA connector as opposed to at the CPS1 board. Once you have a CPS2 board installed, you can swap CPS2 cartridges at the CPS2 board. Think of the JAMMA connector like the plugs on the back of your TV. Swapping a game at the JAMMA connector is like unplugging the SNES and plugging in the Genesis, effectively. Anything that's 2 players and three buttons or less should be plug and play, so to speak. Anything that's CPS2 and a six-button fighter should use the same secondary harness, so that simplifies things a bit. If it's 3 or 4-player and you don't intend to play it more than two-player, you can skip the harness entirely, for obvious reasons. An arcade forum would be a good idea, actually.http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/ seems to be fairly decent, if you go the MAME cab route. I actually looked up most of the harness stuff as I was typing that last post. I knew the basics of JAMMA, but only had a rough idea how things went once you exceeded the spec. And I vaguely half-remembered some kind of gotcha with the NeoGeo, so did a quick search for "neogeo jamma" to see what came up. I didn't expect dire hardware-frying possibilities, to be honest. Glad I checked. Sadly, I don't actually OWN any arcade hardware. And my primary interests skew towards the older, pre-JAMMA stuff. Especially vector games. Grew up on a Vectrex, and those hard lines make me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Nope. Copyright law will be perverted to the point that no one has rights to play the disks except the original publishers. Rebuilding a DVD player will constitute bypassing a copy-protection mechanism, as well as willful sabotage of obsolescence AND viewing of out-of-print media. That's life without parole right there.

Welp, here's mine... I keep my desktop clean and barren. Autohide taskbar, minimal icons on the desktop. Wallpaper IS desktop, for all intents and purposes.

I assume the angled panel is above everything else? It can't hurt to add a vent on the top. If you're concerned, I'd err on the side of less destruction and put a fan on the existing vent, personally. Final Fight is actually CPS1. http://system16.com/...ware.php?id=793 You can swap other CPS1 game boards in, but CPS2 and CPS3 will require new logic boards, for obvious reasons. CPS1 is JAMMA, though, so swapping in other JAMMA boards like CPS2 and CPS3 is easy.... more or less. Here's the fun part. A notable restriction of JAMMA is that it only supports two digital joysticks, two start buttons, and two sets of three fire buttons for player input. I bet you're already asking "Then how does Street Fighter work?" The answer is... the six-button fighting games CPS2 is known for require a SECOND connection be made between the board and the additional controls via a wiring harness. In most Capcom fighters, the kick buttons are wired to this harness, resulting in it being known colloquailly as the kick harness. These auxillary wiring harnesses are... not standard, to say the least. My understanding is that all the CPS2 6-button fighters use the same kick harness, so you could easily swap XMen VS Street Fighter for Marvel VS Capcom for Dark Stalkers for Super Street Fighter 2. This MAY extend to all JAMMA+ CPS2 games, but I'm not sure. Beyond that, there's no consistency whatsoever. So depending on your board collection, you may wind up with a half-dozen or so little wiring harnesses to swap every time you change games. JAMMA also only supports mono sound. Boards with stereo sound have separate audio outputs, though they also have a mono channel on the JAMMA connector. So they can still be easily swapped with standard JAMMA cabs, but you won't get the glorious stereophonic sound out of them. And Colonel Campbell will recoil in horror at your mono setup(not joking, this actually happens at one point in Metal Gear Solid if you set the sound to mono). As far as the other side of the fence... SNK's NeoGeo boards are NOT JAMMA. They use the same connector, and MOST of the pins are the same, but there are some critical differences. Connecting a NeoGeo directly to a JAMMA connector will damage your NeoGeo board's audio amplifier. You need an adapter. Said adapter is trivial to make, or it can be purchased if you (understandably) don't want to wire up two 50-pin edge connectors.

My understanding is there's three or four companies that THINK they have rights but aren't ENTIRELY sure.And everyone's waiting for someone else to make a move so they can handle this in the traditional american way... by sueing whoever moves first and sorting it out in a court battle. Because Althena forbid they get together with the other potential rights-holders and talk it out like grownups when they can have a good old-fashioned brawl in the streets.

That's what a cell phone IS, though. Kirk's just had voice recognition instead of a keypad. Instead of tapping out a longs equence of numbers, he said "Kirk to Enterprise" and it auto-dialed Uhura for him. Though to be fair, it was actually more like a satellite phone than a cellular phone. I think you just answered your own question.

Oooh, technical discussion about old games! My favorite! Little of column A, little of column B. Thermal stress as it warms up and cools down from power-cycling will put some wear on the board. Most likely to show as socketed parts creeping out of their sockets. Maybe some broken solder joints. Fixable, but annoying when it happens. Leaving it on wears out the CRT. And risks burn-in. Do you WANT phantom "GAME OVER" text on top of everything? I'd vote in favor of power-cycling it. The electrical side is easily repairable, but the CRT is getting hard to replace. Turning it off when not in use also provides a lair of insurance to your hard-to-replace microchips. They're not at risk of wear, per se, but cutting the power means there's no risk of a power surge frying something that's been out of production for fifteen years.. Actually, the CPS3 board that Street Fighter 3 used loaded the entire disk into RAM at boot, then shut down the drive. Though more modern electronics are less resiliant than older ones. Lower voltages, higher clock speeds, tighter tolerances, and more heat to remove from smaller parts. A fan can't hurt, though it's probably not necessary. Convection will keep the heat away from the important stuff and get it out of the box(I assume there's a vent in the top like most arcade cabs). There's a good reason the logic boards are all BELOW the CRT. How many tube TVs did you ever see with a cooling fan? Modern arcade games use LCDs. They don't handle older games very well, though. Some LCDs make a good showing. Some make the game look like an over-compressed JPEG. Some exhibit weird shimmering and tearing. Favorite failure I've seen was a Sega Genesis hooked into a PC LCD monitor of unknown model. It got a quite nice image... with a big blue "signal out of range" box covering the center of the screen. If you get an LCD with RGB inputs(likely via a VGA port), it's probably POSSIBLE, but sub-optimal.Not so much refresh rate(the board and display are both geared towards 60Hz timings), but the resolution will be weird, HSync timings will be quite a bit slower than expected, and the LCD will probably do strange things while trying to "fix" the image.

You're lucky. My Classics Unicron has a foot that wants to ratchet out under the weight of the robot. If his weight's not over teh center of his foot, then a little while after setting him down I hear a click, he tips off-axis, and falls over.... I should probably tighten the foot screws, come to think of it. There is that. I've got a small army of smaller TFs standing off against him. Led by Classics Grimlock in T-Rex mode, holding the Matrix up in his tiny dino-claws. Because it sounded funny, and like hell we trust Hot Rod with that.

Stealthy? I thought Milia's SDF infiltration mission involved missile clouds. If I recall, she immediately opened fire as soon as the humans sortied, despite orders not to engage if she could avoid it. Then inserted the intelligence operatives while under direct fire... The Zentradi seem to have a remarkably poor understanding of stealth and subtlety, as an aside. Also, don't forget that in DYRL she shot Kakizaki between the eyes from the horizon. Which is a different kind of style than a PPB punch to the ribs, and a blatant trick shot. Heck, in SDF she devoted an entire operation to baiting Max out and then isolating him so she could fight him one-on-one, just because Kamjin said he MIGHT be her equal. That's not serious warfare. Really, from what little screen time she has, she seems the kind of person that plays with her job, if only because she's so good at it that it's mind-numbingly boring otherwise. Which does match with stylish and agressive, but ... I wouldn't hold anything she does up as proof that the 22 is good for SUBTLETY, as I'm not convinced she knows the meaning of the word. </thinking_too_hard_about_this> And as much as I love the VF-22, I'dve liked to see Max and Millia's VF-1s together again at the end even more. Yes, the 22 is the more logical plane to deploy two ace pilots, Space War 1 heroes, and top-ranking individuals in, being massively superior in every possible way, but how much of Macross 7 makes sound military sense? And the 1J is my favoritest Valk. Of course, they COULDN'T have a 1J reunion, because Gamlin sucks.

Hell yeah!

It's a Bethesda game. My understanding of that developer is that it's not a good idea to get their games on anything other than a PC, so you can mod the hell out of it.

For crap's sake! I'm giving that to someone for his birthday tomorrow, and I bought it the week before Christmas at sixty.

I'm just glad they were wrong about disco making a comeback.But yeah, near-future sci-fi is always awesome once it becomes set in the present. I've not looked at Macross: The First. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about modern style on classic Macross, as I kinda LIKE the retro-future style. ... Please tell me they kept the autonomous coke machines?

I didn't say their commenters COULDN'T be that dumb, just that I HOPE they aren't.

Alternatively, he's referencing the book, which is what matters for Starship Troopers. But if that's teh case, he damn well BETTER be sarcastic, since th book wasn't remotely satire and Heinlen's political views are distinctly "unamerican."So let's HOPE it was sarcasm, since otherwise the stupid is bad enough to be contagious.

IT's better than having to PLAY the latest FF game. ... Or do you mean you have to buy the expansion and then ALSO play the game to get the ending? Because that would seriously be kicking you while you're down.

Why would they do that when they can sell it to you for five bucks more elsewhere?Actually, I'd keep an eye on gog.com for that. They finally broke EA down. While you're waiting, maybe bide your time with some Ultima or Wing Commander.

Actually, the box calls them "full screen version" and "theatrical widescreen version"Odds that the theatrical presentation was actually 16:9 are low, but... it was probably A widescreen format. I think the confusion is because .... while Transformers was SHOWN in widescreen, it was PRODUCED in 4:3, then matted to the widescreen aspect. The 4:3 version is a full-frame transfer, and actually shows MORE than you would have seen in theaters. This is not an uncommon practice, actually. MOST movies are shot using 4:3 film frames. An open-matte release may not be technically feasable on many films, due to "garbage" in the matte area or special effects that were never rendered into the matte area. Or, of course, anamorphic lenses being used, therefore making a widescreen image the one originally comitted to the 4:3 film frame. Given the nature of the franchise, I imagine Transformers: The Movie was explicitly intended to be viable for TV broadcast and home video sales, thus the full frame had to be up to release quality regardless of theatrical presentation.

Syndicate wasn't an isometric shooter. It was real-time strategy. It was also fun as hell.