JB0

The really awesome part about this? That's his JOB.

I'd put my SXRD (Sony's LCOS) against any CRT out there. I was hardcore CRT for years and swore I'd never go rear projection... I use whatever I can scrounge up. The BEST TV I have access to is a 32" NTSC tube. Not even progressive scan. Having helped put it in, I KNOW why tube TVs are dying. Thing weighs a QBerting ton. I've got an AVphile buddy that uses an SXRD set. Also uses an XBR960, which is Sony's high-end tube HDTV. He says the XBR is the best set in his house, but the SXRD is close(as well as bigger and lighter). XBR960's also been discontinued. It's replacement can't even display 1080 lines. Basically, once the 960 stock is cleared out, there won't be any more large tube HDTVs. They're gradually being squeezed out. Soon it'll only be the bargin-bin. Then... nothing.

I like 'em too. But modern ones are designed, however unintentionally, to scare newbies away. I own it. Beat it on the easier difficulty levels. It's a really neat game, but it suffers massive slowdown in places that it really shouldn't. Also generates my traditional unholy love/hatered for irem. Which basically means in part that it has a reasonably good difficulty curve. Starts friendly for the novice, and after a few levels it gets pretty hostile. It ALSO means that it focuses too heavily on pattern memorization, which is a gameplay paradigm I dislike. Yes. The genre still lives. Even makes it to America from time to time. Ikaruga would be a notable recent release. As well as a notably over-rated one. Chaos Field had a US release too, but it was in very small quantities.

Videophile in training, are we? LCoS sets are supposed to be nearly as good as CRT, for what it's worth. Get a set that AT LEAST supports progressive scan. Personally, I'd prod you to upgrading the nightstand and getting a 30-ish" HD set. Well, you can adjust it to bring it back in-line, for the most part. But tubes are indeed becoming a non-option. There's a few high-end tube sets, but they're dying fast.

Not as I understand it. What I've heard is it works JUST like modern CSS does. There's X number of decryption keys defined. All manufacturers are issued one. The key has to be on the disk AND player to work. If a device is found to not comply with the Blu-Ray Disk... group-thingie's rules, they can revoke that company's decryption key. Future disks won't contain that key on them, and thus those disks won't work on offending hardware. That's acutally how CSS was cracked. They shipped ... I believe it was a player with both sets of keys in the ROM. Once they had keys, it was easier for the hackers to work out the algorythm. More relvantly, no one's CSS keys were ever revoked. They were THREATENED, but never actualyl revoked.

Where did you get the $425 price? I know the main numbers going around has been the alleged $700-$900 manufacturing cost for the system. My guess is that the version with the hard drive will be sold at $499 or higher. I just wonder how big of a hit Sony is willing to take during the PS3's first few years of life to get it out to as big of a market possible? 380780[/snapback] That 7-900 price tag is a joke. Merill-Lynch's analyst for that one is totally incompetent and should be shot. Especially since htey quoted manufacture price as 900, but all their BS numbers only added up to 8. Anyways, Sony and MS have both been launching systems with below-cost retail prices, so it won't be anything new either way. Not necessarily. There's HDMI-DVI adapters.

Just remember, the PS and Saturn were both around 800 at Japanese launch. 380717[/snapback] My launch Saturn was just under 35,000 yen 2 days after launch in Japan back in '94. I don't recall the PSX launch price but I don't recall it was that much in Japan either. 380739[/snapback] Maybe I have bad information. I don't recall any of the retarded shenanigans that've marked the current generation's launches. Could be wrong.

Seconded.

VF-1 and VF-11 FAST packs. All others... dunno, really. Haven't seen 'em often in both configurations to form an opinion.

http://mgrsti3030s.seamlesstech.biz/templa...subFolderID=155 Damn you Squeenix, I may get into the trading figure market yet.

Just remember, the PS and Saturn were both around 800 at Japanese launch.

The problem with scrolling shooters is they've gotten incestuous. Macross Plus shows this particularly well. The genre has a small but loyal following. That loyal following doesn't WANT a game that's easy. So they cater to that following and make mean f'ers that fill the entire screen with bullets early on and never let up. UNFORTUNATELY, that difficulty serves as a deterrent to newcomers, ensuring that the genre doesn't grow.

New-school shooters are even worse. Pull down Mars Matrix. *evil grin* Space Harrier is emulated. Dunno about Splatterhouse. Join the anti-MAME32 club. Though hitting F5 forces a list refresh. And I DO understand why they don't refresh every time you load by default(I( suspect there's an option somewhere to enable that behavior). The more games you have, the longer it takes, and MAME supports a couple thousand ROM image sets(somewhat less in terms of real games since there's multiple clones and revisions of many games and many gmaes that just won't run). A refresh with 2000 zips in the rom image directory would take a LONG time.

I use the EmuLoader frontend, personally. http://www.mameworld.net/emuloader/ Me and MAME32 have a long and elaborate history of hatred. That and the MAME32 GUI sucks super monkey balls.

WTF? Odd, to say the least. At least it works now.

I eventually wind up with everything. PC gets an upgrade, the console I hate creeps in, etc. Damned good games keep being exclusive.

Try redownloading the file. Might've been corrupted between them and you.

Shouldn't. The same emulator should run identically on all systems, barring screwups in cross-OS ports.

Odd. They worked for me. Not on my usual computer or I'd test right now, but is it possible you were staring at a self-test screen that would've gone away in a little bit?

Patent's expired, actually. Now it's just to look cool and diffrent. *shakes head* 'S the same d-pad as the GBA. Which is one of 2 d-pads to cause me physical pain, as well as the least accurate I own. Part of it may just be the small size, but I think it has deeper problems. And made them bigger and less stiff and with narrower diagonals and...

macross 1 for MAME works.... just the sounds are a little off 379807[/snapback] Not on my system. It freezes on loading and there is just a screen full of zeros. Emulators need sometimes tweaking. I didn't check out which kind of options there are for that, yet. I hope I'll get it running. 379916[/snapback] But MAME isn't one of those retarded jillion-plugin PSEmu-inspired pieces of crap. Everything supported either works or doesn't work. You've either got a bad MAME or bad ROM images. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

It stands fairly well. The clips holding the legs together should've been something besides plastic. They broke fairly easily, and once they did it lost playability because the legs fell off when you moved it.

Voltron is good. Regardless of the form. As a kid I liked Vehcile Voltron better too. Too bad WEP no longer has rights to it.

I figured it was something like that. Can't imagine an original pad being this flakey. I've seen Sears recommended for old stock before. Mine only has the recent models. I'll be on the lookout. But given I dislike the Dualshock's ergonomics, it's gonna get in line behind yet another 3rd-party pad. I agree. Despite the bad press and reputation it has, after using my friend's I've decided it's not nearly as bad as most make it out to be. I suppose if you have teenie weenie hands it might be uncomfortable, but I never had any problems with it. Not to mention, something it did BETTER than the Controller S was that it had the black and white buttons in an easily accesible place: ABOVE the ABXY buttons instead of below, where its much harder to hit. The big issue I saw with teh original XBox pad was the button angle was ATROCIOUS. Had they just reslanted the buttons, all would be well. It was like they took a 6-button pad and oriented it vertically instead of horizontally. Add one more thing: Hitting start often brushes my thumb against R analog. Doesn't matter unless R analog is USED, but.... I can't imagine how the DS d-pad could be anywhere near the GBA's pad(unless you mean SP?), but I'll take your word for it. Don't have a DS(yet), or any real SP time(I dislike it for so many other reasons the d-pad hasn't gotten much attention).

Don't make me link a Windows XP box. It's as clean as an iPod box, at least on the front. You're forgiven. Given hard drive manufacturers currently insist on using a base 10 gigabyte(1 Gigabyte 1000 megabytes) to maximize apparent storage space while computers do and always have used base 2 gigabytes(1 GB = 1024 megabytes), it's hard to keep it all straight.