JB0

Oh, that's definitely part of the problem. Pretty much everything pre-Dreamcast outputs some variant of semi-NTSC that's only loosely compatible with the standard and does horrible unspeakable things to the spec. But part of it's also the problem of scaling 256*224 up to 1440*1080. It's just not going to look good unless you have the compute power available to apply something more complex than nearest-neighbor scaling and still get the image up in 1/60th of a second. And part of it(depending on how smart the parts inside are, possibly the largest part) is that my chosen test platforms have notoriously BAD composite video outputs. Even on an old TV, the 99/4a exhibits a terrible amount of ringing. They aren't cool anymore. Remember, they were never mainstream. They were reserved for higher-end gear. The home theater boom coincided with DVD and *blech* component video inputs, so THAT'S what everyone wants. S-video is some unloved bastard child in most people's eyes. Companies can change. I have no problems buying Western Digital hard drives nowadays, but back in the day, they were better used as paperweights instead of data storage devices. Similarly, I actually spent a few months doing research before pulling the trigger, and the LG set I have is a rather good one. This particular model even avoided the panel lottery issues LG is somewhat infamous for. Though it cries when fed the dark horrors of semi-NTSC, that is far from an uncommon problem with digital displays. LG tries very hard these days too. They make quite nice hardware in most of the markets they're in. The big problem with their TVs, and make no mistake, I think it's a serious ethics issue, is they have a bad habit of changing the LCD panel they use mid-run. Several of their TVs the past few years have launched with very nice panels, and a few months after the new models have been released and the positive reviews have come in, they start snaking other panels of vastly different quality into the supply line alongside the good ones. On the up side, the panel used is coded into the model number on the outside of the box, so you can sift through the pile to find the right revision if you know that they aren't actually all the same TV. On the down side, it's a fairly blatant bait&switch attempt. I have to take complete and unmitigated exception to this. Digital image scaling will NEVER produce a perfect, crystal-clear image, especially not when working from an analog source intended for home use(professional analog sources are MUCH better than the ones available for home use). The only time you get a perfect image out of an LCD is when it's fed an image at it's native resolution through either RGB or digital input.(and even THAT'S up for grabs sometimes). Given enough time and post-processing, you can get very close, but when you're doing it on a very minimal computer in real-time, with 0.017 seconds to sample the analog waveform, create a digital image, resize that image to the native resolution, analyze the result, apply any of a number of post-processing effects, and get it on the screen... there's a lot of work to do in very little time, and corners are cut to keep component costs under control. PCs and game consoles can get away with it because they have much more complex hardware that costs a lot more. Which is why I use system-side scaling on my 360, PS3, and PC instead of trusting the TV or monitor to do it. Claiming a flat-panel HDTV is always providing a cleaner image than the CRT it's replacing is like claiming the camera never lies. It sounds good on the face of it, but once you learn a bit about what's going on, it rapidly becomes obvious that it's a bald-faced lie. I won't say CRT is purer without qualification, but all other things being equal, it gets MUCH closer to what an SD source is outputting since it skips all that image processing. No A-D. No image resizing. No post-processing. No lag. No chroma encoding glitches. Just picture in, picture out. Certainly a bad CRT will hide a lot of detail due to poor focus, but a bad LCD will hide a lot of it too due to poor blacks and blown-out whites and 6-bit color channels. Optimally, I'd be playing my old games on a healthy multisync RGB monitor. 256*224 on a display capable of doing razor-sharp 1024*768 isn't a bad deal at all. But as I don't HAVE a healthy multisync monitor, I'm settling for healthy high-grade CRT TVs. Both my current tube TVs are SD CRTs from the peak of that market. At the time they were made, they were a step or two down from top-end, and consequently don't support progressive-scan inputs, but are still sharp enough that you can see the individual scanlines easily, and have more jacks on the back than you can shake a stick at(composite, component, and the lonely, unloved s-video). Young enough that the capacitors haven't dried up and the tube phosphers are still in good shape. They're also both too damn big, but beggars can't be choosers. But the next time I move a 32-incher, it better be because I found a freaking XBR-960 for cheap.

Sheeeez... I never even HEARD of Grimstone until now. Not that I monitor the TF news outlets closely, but... I'd've bought him. He looks awesome. I've got Smolder. He was a fun mold. The fact that the flip-out mini-con mount on his chest looks kinda like a built-in cannon doesn't hurt matters, either.

VF-19 is supposed to be mainstream, a replacement for the VF-11. VF-22, however, is an elite special forces plane, and replaces the VF-17. IT does NOT replace the VF-19, no matter how hard I wish. This is, of course, because the VF-22 is AWESOME.

That's likely due to the system design. PS1 isn't emulated on the PS2, there's actually PS1 hardware in there. My bet is, since an original PS1 couldn't do component, neither can a PS2 in PS1 mode. RGB is better anyways, but poorly supported in the west. S-video is a nice compromise, but requires another cable. Personhally, I prefer PS1 games through composite, though. I've found s-video makes the PS1's terrible pattern-dithering on almost everything entirely too visible. Even lovely games like Valkyrie Profile and Symphony of the Night have dithering speckles everywhere. So of course, they go and do the same thing for the PSP, without even the option of reintroducing blur to the display to hide the checkerboards. Eh, it's a little of column A, little of column B. Yes, composite video and poor CRT quality made things look a bit less jaggy and dithered than they actually were, but most TVs have terrible upscaling routines(due in part to the need to get it done fast to reduce the amount of lag that's going to be introduced). A high-quality CRT with a decent feed will look better than an upscaled-via-TV image. I can make my SNES through s-video look remarkably close to an emulator. As far as DVD VS BluRay, I've been preaching this since before BluRay existed. I noticed the resolution limits of DVD early on(make no mistake, it was still a huge step up from VHS). That varies a lot by television. There are some TVs where game mode actually RAISES the overall response time. No, I don't know what they're doing there either. Really, what TV you have means a lot more than whether game mode is on or off. Some displays have single-frame lag, some can lag by as much as a half a second. And even for non-gaming situations, I recommend David's advice. Turn everything off. Most of it only exists to crap up your image. And for the love of Althena, find the option to kill overscan! There's simply no excuse for a 1920*1080 display being fed a 1920*1080 image to rescale the image and then chop a fifth of it off! If your TV stations still display garbage in the "overscan" area, then call them up, share your opinion of their technical incompetence, and stop watching them! This is supposed to be the shining bright point of a pure-digital display, we aren't supposed to NEED to deal with questionable geometry and overscan compensation anymore! *sigh* This is what I REALLY miss about CRT. A bad CRT would still give you dark blacks and bright whites, virtually instant response, and could generally be bullied into producing accurate color, though it may never have the beam focus needed for a truly good picture. No amount of tweaking will ever make a bad LCD behave tolerably.

Oddly, I've had the opposite experience. My vintage game hardware looks ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE on my LG LCD. NES and 99/4a both looked like grossly over-compressed JPEGs. I didn't feel like hitting it up with the rest of the collection after the sheer horrors of those first two tests. Now, admittedly, both of those systems have questionable video signals to START with, and the artifacts inherent to their video paths probably provided a sub-optimal test situation, but... meh. I'm keeping my NTSC-targetted hardware on relatively high-end CRTs for as long as possible. Now if only I could get everyone together long enough to move this old Mitsubishi presentation monitor out and replace it with this Toshiba I dragged home. I really do want to keep Screenzilla, but as well-regarded as the old Diamondview displays are, this one is in desperate need of some serious maintainence that I'm not qualified to give it. Bad caps, at least, possibly a failing transformer, flaky input switch on the back, and at least one bad input. Also, component video inputs are more useful to me than RGB inputs are, and the composite/s-video switch being on the BACK instead of the front seriously hinders usability. An NTSC tuner also brings the first-era stuff back into play. And GOD DAMN 32-inch CRTs are heavy. I may be a staunch supporter of Rube Goldberg's vacuum tube, but seriously, panel displays are worth it just because you don't have to get a football team together to help you move The Herniator.

First, a link: http://system16.com/hardware.php?id=903&page=2#19049 Okay, now why did no one TELL ME that Taito was still making Darius arcade cabs, and with the traditional "build the biggest kludged-together screen you can think of" mentality that made Darius famous in the first place? I want this. I don't care how irrational this is, I don't even care if the game's utterly terrible. I MUST HAVE THAT SCREEN.

Hey now, Porthos was the best character in Enterprise!This is what we call damning with faint praise.

Well, I call shenanigans in general!

I watched Robotech on TV. I was something like three at the time. To say the least, the finer details of the plot went right over my head. I thought it was related to Transformers, I'm pretty sure. As for why I'm here now.... Many years later, I am starting to get old enough to realize I'm not too old for cartoons. There is a Robotech book at the library, which surprises and intrigues me. As an early venture into childhood nostalgia I was not yet jaded and embarassed by my childhood lack of taste and thought this was a good idea. This book was End of the Circle. I was left confused, upset, and nursing a headache. Not JUST because it's End of the Circle, mind you. My exposure to the franchise in the intervening years had consisted of two VHS cassettes holding a handful of taped-off-the air episodes of Robotech(late Macross episodes, probably three or 4 to either side of the final battle), and a third tape holding an off-the-air Robotech II: The Sentinels. So I really lack appropriate context to make what sense there is to make of this book. Finding the OTHER Robotech novels leaves me able to COMPREHEND End of the Circle, but it's still awful. Some things just don't change. But I loved those other Robotech books. Browsing THE INTERNET for some information, I discovered the DARK TRUTH behind Robotech's creation. And thus I became a Macross fan as well. This is also around the time Toonami happens. I can both see AND COMPREHND the whole show... except I can't because they never run not-MOSPEADA. I suffered through not-Southern Cross SOLELY because of the promise of transforming motorcycles, you a-holes! Experience since then, combined with HG's mix of questionable, incompetent, and overtly fan-hostile moves, has divorced me from Robotech almost entirely.

It would be far from the craziest thing the franchise has credited protoculture with.

Man, I love Visionaries. Not so much because I ever owned them, but because it reminds me of a simpler time, when a hologram was a LINE-SELLING FEATURE. Now they're so boring no one uses them for anything but anti-copying measures.

Probably to make it easier to draw. The VF-19 got significantly streamlined too.

I, as well, greatly enjoyed this show as a kid. It's part of why I've not tried very hard to see it in recent years. But what the hell, another few forever-tarnished memories won't kill me.

That's so closed-minded. For me, pacifism isn't about saying NO to things, it's about saying YES to things. Even fighting.

Copy/paste the link or you get a 403-forbidden.

I know what it isn't!

Yeah. Apparently, the official excuse for not following Second Raid's blatant sequel-hook ending(hell, there's an entire plot thread that does nothing BUT set up for the next season) is "well, the books aren't finished, and we don't want to do another season until they are." I can't see how this is actually a PROBLEM, though. Especially after leaving Second Raid sitting on, for all intents and purposes, a cliffhanger for six years. What I take away is they don't want to animate any more than they absolutely NEED to close the series out, as opposed to wanting to sell a new FMP series every year for the next decade. Especially since the main book series ended last year and no new animation has been forthcoming. I can't prove it, but I suspect that the Full Metal Panic anime didn't actually do particularly well in Japan. One of the very few reasons I can think of that someone would say they DON'T want to do more sequels than they absolutely have to is they already know there won't be a good return on it. The only other reason I can think of is that the author of the books was too involved in the animated adaptation and they don't want to work with him. He was involved with Second Raid and Fumoffu to the degree that he wrote the scripts for several episodes of both. That's... not common. In fact, I can't think of another example of it happening. I'd love to be proven wrong, in either case.

That DOES look fun... Internet says it's a Sega Saturn game? Well, SSF has been sitting idle far too long lately!

Too bad they didn't hire some more monkeys to animate and direct these scripts. We might actually have some new Robotech that way.

He got there with Snatcher. Way back in the 80s. Metal Gear was something different. It was an attempt to make a "realistic" spec ops commando game. It's only since Kojima's become inextricably bound to Metal Gear that the whole interactive movie thing's taken it over. And... from what I hear, MGS4 isn't very interactive. MGS isn't anything like an FPS. I'm confused here. Snatcher did it better. So did Dragon's Lair, for that matter. Heh. Anyone else remember when full-motion video was the future of games? Hell, I'd go far enough as to say Ninja Gaiden did it better. NES or XBox, your choice, though they're very different KINDS of movie. Yeah, I haven't bothered with a Metal Gear after MGS for any real length of time. I don't mind ridiculously over-the-top action(Snake kicking missiles out of the air is ridiculous, but Vulcan Raven carrying a gun bigger than him that he ripped out of an A-10 isn't?), but if I'm spending more time watching the story than I am playing the game, I have to wonder why I'm not watching a movie instead. Metal Gear was fun, and at the time it was something that simply hadn't been done before. Metal Gear 2 struck a nice balance between complexity and playability, and the plot comes in enough to be an ongoing THING and not a reason to kill us some terrorists, but not enough to really get in the way. MGS struck a balance between plot and play. There's enough interlude to tell a complex story while not actually hindering enjoyment of the game. It's like the NES Ninja Gaiden games. The plot happens in bursts between "stages." And it never takes itself too seriously. It knows it exists to entertain, and if that means that people occasionally tell you a turbo-fire controller is cheating, use their psychic powers on your memory card, or recoil in horror when they realize you have a monaural television... well, it's all in the name of entertainment. MGS2 was an active attempt by Kojima to kill the franchise before it gained enough momenteum to be some unstoppable lumbering beast like Final Fantasy that will continue in perpetuity no matter how bad it gets. It only served to prove that Metal Gear was ALREADY a lumbering unstoppable beast like Final Fantasy that will continue in perpetuity no matter how bad it gets. MGS3 I just don't care about. Prequels almost always raise red flags at me, and moving from near-future sci-fi to near-past "real world" isn't even remotely an improvement in my book. So that's really as much as I know of it, other than there's a hilarious radio conversation about the infamous cardboard box. As for MGS4 and it's cutscene craziness... I think Kojima wanted to do another Snatcher game and then realized people demand gunplay. So there's bursts of Metal Gear in between the cutscenes. I'll ignore Ghost Babel and Metal Gear Acid, just like everyone else did. Though Ghost Babel was fun to play. Very MG2-style of game. And now Kojima's chained down by a franchise he never wanted, since he can't bring himself to stand back and let people pump complete garbage out with the Metal Gear name on it while he makes something he WANTS to do instead of something he HAS to do. I gather he TRIED to leave Peace Walker alone, but he had to come back because Konami was screwing it up fast and hard. And it's all because you jerks had to make MGS2 a best-seller! I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!

The combination seems to be pretty much the same as the original, from the heavily-filtered photos available. Use Prime's knee joint to fold the legs behind the truck cab, then drop the cab-cube in the hole. It's simple, but really makes you question whether it counts as a combination at all. So you could probably kludge a lot of other cubes of similar size in there. Even cubes with oddly-shaped fronts, since the front third of the cab hangs out into space. MP-10 seems to be blatantly too large to me, given the photos of it with the original and PM cabs inserted in the hole.

In theory, it celebrates the pilgrims surviving their first year in America after a particularly rough time getting started.In practice, it's typically an excuse to eat way the hell too much food, then camp out in front of retailers so you can risk life and limb for insane sales the next day(or possibly later that night). In short, a celebration of greed, gluttony, and consumption in all it's forms. In my personal case, it's mostly just an excuse to get the family together... and eat way the hell too much food.

"This trailer add on kit can link up with your Generation 1 Optimus Prime as well as Powermaster Optimus prime according to the pictures. The intent is to give a fully articulated "masterpiece" Powermaster Optimus Prime." I want one. I want one now. I have wanted one for twenty years. But I probably don't want to pay the price they're going to ask for one. In the interests of full disclosure, Powermaster Optimus was my first Prime, and I'm a little biased towards him as a result.

Happy Thanksgiving! Be thankful for your friends, your family, and your indoor plumbing.

Then my work here is done.