JB0

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.

I'm actually pretty annoyed with EA about this. It's little more than a blatant attempt to cash in on the recent success the Deus Ex resurrection had, and there's no respect for the original Syndicate here. They may just call it Cyberpunk Shooter and be honest. They don't give two craps about what Bullfrog Software did back in the 90s, it's just the first cyberpunk name they found while searching their back catalog. ... And it's STILL more respectful than what they're doing with Origin's name these days.

Person: Me.

Ya know, I've throught those antennae looked a bit too bug-like for a while now. Spider Prime just proves I'm not the only one that noticed.

Because Yang is a master hacker, and he sabotaged the displays to make the -19 look better than it was and the -21 to look worse!!!That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

I'd second this motion, but I think given my track record, it probably goes without saying.

Missed this earlier. It's not that he wants to stop making big-budget games and start making smaller games. It's that he wants to make games. The position he's stepping down from had elevated him far enough that he was no longer able to actually make games. He got to sit at a desk and do paperwork, and talk to the project leads who WERE making games. But he's been insulated from the process, and while he's had an indirect hand in many games these last few years, he's had a direct hand in almost none. Super Mario Galaxy seems to be the last game he actually WORKED on, if the credits at MobyGames are any indication. Supervisor and general producer aren't directly involved in production is my understanding. And I know Miyamoto said several years back that anything he's credited as general producer on isn't a Miyamoto game, it's just something he put a signature on some paperwork for. From what I gather, it was a crappy position for someone who genuinely enjoyed making games to be in. He's done his noble sacrifice for the business and worn that mantle for several years, but it's time to kick sacrifice in the nuts, get back to doing what he wants, and show some of these whipersnappers how it's done in the process*. And he's important enough to the company that he can get away with it. *I think that's how he's justifying it to the company, and the important thing long-term. He said he wants to work on lower-budget projects with a small team of recent hires. That's projects that can afford to fail, made with people that need room to make mistakes and find their own style. And cutting things down to small budgets with small teams means there's more time for actual mentoring. He didn't create Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. in a vacuum, he had Gunpei frickin' Yokoi showing him the ropes.

Whoops! Either I was just in a groove and not ready to stop typing 19 yet, or my personal fantasies are creeping out and that's how I think it SHOULD happen. You decide. It's a bit more complex than that, since VF production isn't centralized. As I understand it, colony fleets have a high degree of autonomy, and many choose not to gear up for the latest and greatest when there's something cheaper and good enough available. If I recall, this is part of why there aren't a lot of VF-4s out there, either. As cool a plane as it was, it just didn't fit the budget and needs of most of the colony fleets, so they didn't adopt it. I imagine you'd see the highest adoption of high-end fighters, be they the VF-4 in it's day or the VF-19 in the "modern" era, in fleets that had actually encountered hostile forces. But then, Frontier never geared up for VF-19 production after the Vajra showed up, so... go figure. ... Maybe Frontier held off because the VF-25 was so close to final approval, and who wants to retool to build a whole new fleet of planes that's ALREADY obsolete? But then there's the VF-171 EX... which has the advantage of being a partial retool instead of a whole new product? I dunno.