JB0

what brought this on? 340267[/snapback] The random realization that he was the only Trek castmember to get typecast, and have it NOT be his Trek character.

Also the original gb screen was differnt and the ones put out years later. the first ones with the standard screws the screen was more faded compared to the newer ver with those 3 prone safety screws that hold them together. I thinik it's got more to do with aging than it does with whether or not they used the security screws. The original GB LCDs are either breaking down with age, or the connector is(likely the connector, given the column failures). Thats why they pay the designers to make it work if they wanted to. But that makes you redesign your chipset, which costs money, which eats into your profits. They aren't in this just for fun. They're here for the money. I doubt it. They're likely all going to wait another generation or 2. Let OLED prove long-term reliability on someone else's product first. Like I said, since it's not a drop-in replacement, you won't see them swap screen designs. Their current video hardware is mated to LCDs. They don't want to redesign the chipset just so they can use a new technology with little field testing.

Heh. I'm pretty sure it was just so they could use the same screen in both systems, though that WAS the reason the original GB and GBColor weren't lit. Possibly GBA even. But the SP could've been backlit. the original gba had enough room for the afterburner kit and was put out eariler so my guess why they didn't use a internal lighting system was the same old docerin of long battery life. Perhaps. I'd think they skipped front-lighting because it's more complicated and doesn't offer even lighting. I can't speak for the quality of the afterburner's lighting, but the original SP had pretty uneven coverage. Yah. Original GB could've been lit. But they would have had the same abysmal battery life of the GameGear and company. Was also why they were monochrome. You couldn't get a passive color screen that was really visible at the time. I knew the original, Pocket, and Color used diffrent displays, though. Pocket had a much cleaner monochrome screen, and the Color used the same tech as the Advance. OLED still isn't ready for prime time. 340177[/snapback] My self Xmas present dissagrees with you. I need a new mp3 player since I tend to destroy them when im hiking plus it plays movies and this can play movies compared to my second choise the arex thumbstick solid which just have a 2 color oled screen. tm-630 media player 340192[/snapback] My mistake. I was under the impression they still had some problems to iron out. Could just be a case of Nintendo using a tech they already have hardware for, then. Using OLED could require a signifigant redesign of the hardware to replace the LCD driver with a OLED one. Dunno if the display driver is integrated with the rest of the hardware or not.

I find it hard to believe Custer's REvenge stirred up a lot of controversy, mainly because virtually no one knew it(or any of Mystique/PlayAround's other games) existed. I think you mean Cathouse Blues. Not surprisingly, another Playaround title. I feel obliged to point out X-Man, mainly because of the flakey name. According to AtariAge, this one has documented controversy, which served to restrict it's availability far beyond that of the Mystique/Playaround titles.

You're not joking? You really play your 2600 to this day? OMG. Sorry I just think that is funny. As a little kid even I thought the games were way too primitive to enjoy. hehe They were good for thier time, but man what on earth are you doing playing stuff that old? That would be like me still playing my old Donkey Kong Jr. Game and Watch over halo 3. What addictive game be that good that you'd still be playing it on such an old legacy system after so many years? I've got quite a few worth playing.The LCD games were never my thing. I DO play Donkey Kong Jr still. I just MAME the arcade, for original yummy goodness. Sometimes the NES version. But comparing DKJr to Halo 3 is kind of absurd. For 1, Halo 3 isn't available. For 2 , they're totally diffrent KINDS of games. ... Which goes back to why I still play the older systems. I LIKE the simplistic gameplay. Sure a deep and involved action-adventure is great, but so is just blowing the ever-living sh!t out of stuff for a few minutes. Macross looks pretty atrocious next to anything modern I've seen. But the story is still good, and that's why I'm here. Same with games. Sure River Raid is blocky and Asteroids flickers like a mofo, but the gameplay is the same. What's more, it's a style of gameplay that's not done very often any more. Hence the market for retro-gaming compilations. Interesting you mention that. My favorite games tend to be randomized. Asteroids is never the same game twice, though the difficulty ramp-up may be similar each time out. Everything does. It's just a matter of what limits you choose to look at. I don't know of any games I have with choppy scrolling. Flicker's not usually a problem in the titles I play, and tiny sprites are nice sometimes. Let you get more action on the screen. Speed... depends on the game. Defender can hold it's own today, for example. But it all depends on what's going on. Ninja Gaiden's no less of a bitch for the slower pacing. The sounds... there's some damn fine PSG noises out there. Graphics and animation... I don't mind the blockiness, as long as I can tell what's going on. And NES Metal Storm should torpedo any arguments about limited animation. I don't think I've ever played a tape-loaded game in my life. But I HAVE felt that the BIOS screen, developer splash screen, publisher splash screen, title sequence, menu, and intro sequence haven't been worth it on several newer games. I am too. I can emulate all that stuff I don't have. Seriously, I enjoy modern games too, and appreciate the things the more powerful hardware's brought. I just don't see a major problem with the older stuff. I own and play a little bit of everything from the 2600 up through the current generation. NES, Genesis, PS1, Dreamcast, whatever. It's ALL good. Exactly!

Ghosting and washout. 340069[/snapback] Im assuming your talking about the old sp, Yah. The new backlit SP has no display problems that I can see. Heh. I'm pretty sure it was just so they could use the same screen in both systems, though that WAS the reason the original GB and GBColor weren't lit. Possibly GBA even. But the SP could've been backlit. OLED still isn't ready for prime time.

Actually, people did. The violence controversy(as opposed to the generic "video games are evil" debate) started with 1976's Death Race, where you ran a car over stick figure "gremlins." Allegedly this was the first video game to be banned, though I can't find anything saying WHERE it was banned. 1980's Phoenix was another hot-button controversial title. You were shooting "realistic" birds instead of abstract space ships or generic stick-figure assemblages, and people were worried about desensitization.

Ghosting and washout.

As a proud owner of one of the brighter GBAs, I think they should've just exercised more control over what LCDs they accepted as usable. There's nothing wrong with the design, excepot that they accepted a much wider range of LCDs than they did on the GBColor. And the SP didn't do a very good fix. It was a sloppy retrofit that added 2 issues for the one it fixed. They COULD have taken their time and done it right, but the GameBoy name isn't about taking your time and doing it right. GameBoy is all about rushed, sloppy, half-assed products. People were annoyed that they had a GBA since launch and a new model came out. ... Actually, I saw people bitching about the GameBoy Color when they owned an original gray brick. "You're mad they upgraded after a DECADE? Boy, are you in the wrong hobby." I prefer my original to the SP for the most part. My "ultimate" GBA would be the display and buttons of the new SP in the case of the original GBA. ... Of course, I just described the bottom half of a DS. Too bad it can't play my 8Bits. Microsoft solicited suggestions? Than how did the XBox make it out with that Althena-forsaken brick they dared to call a controller? Anyways... no one complained about the GBColor. They were using the same display tech as that system(and hte NGPC, and the WonderSwan Color), so why solicit commentary on a proven tech? Had they kept the same standards for display quality, it would've even been a fair assumption. ... As for Circle of the Moon, I strongly believe it was never playtested on actual hardware. I think the SP release hit more than early adopters. 2 years later is well into a system's expected 5-year lifespan. Anyways... those same Nintendo fanboys that bashed people for calling out GBA flaws bashed me for pointing out the little flaws with the SP. Rough paraphrasing: Washed-out display? Tough, it's what we have, so it is perfect. Especially since original GBAs only project a gray rectangle and not a picture. Ghosting issues? See above. Now find something worth complaining about besides image quality problems. No headphone port? Who cares? Stereo sound from half-decent speakers is inferior to a single crappy-ass buzzer! ... Actually, they may've had a valid point with this one, as the GBA has really lousy sound quality and headphones just serve to emphasize the fact. Moving on... Too small? Hurts your hands? Whaa-whaa. Being really cool and tiny is more important than being really comfy and playable. And you're a freakish ape-man if your fingers are longer than the SP is wide. Non-standard proprietary batteries? Batteries never die on people, so being able to change them doesn't matter, and you are silly for liking the idea. Battery expected to fail in 10 years under optimum conditions, and less than half that under real-world conditions? Replace it. If replacements aren't around, that means there's a new Gameboy, so no big deal. As we've since seen with the DS and Micro, backwards-compatibility is NOT as assured as people were claiming. And I still play my NES and 2600 so you'll excuse me if a system with a maximum expected life, and thus maximum guaranteed software usability, of a single decade is less than appealing to me. I've never owned a launch system, and quite likely never will. Paying twice as much for a system with very little software isn't my idea of a good plan.

That was part of what I meant. I also think it's absurd to continue to churn out new versions of the old system a year after introducing a replacement*. Not that Nintendo's any stranger to this. They did the NES2/AVFamiCom well after the SNES. Sega at least can claim that Majesco did the Genesis 3 and they weren't involved. But I don't think ANYONE has maintained two diffrently-named identical pieces of hardware at once alongside the replacement. If nothing else, they should pick A GBA, instead of maintaining the SP AND Micro at the same time. * "ZOMG DS AM THIRD PILLAR!1111" Right, and the Micro is the next-gen GameBoy. Sure. Uh-huh. Even at the height of their arrogance Nintendo wasn't that stupid.

That would have been an *extremely* bad idea. The GBA is still and very viable, and more importantly profitable. Sega learnt the hard way what happens when you prematurely an older system to focus on it's successor. 340026[/snapback] Atari learned the hard way what happens when you have too many products in the same market. They turned the 2600, XEGS, and 7800 all against the NES at the same time, and where one of them may have actually met with a degree of success, all 3 at once served only to subdivide their marketshare and confuse customers. And the DS is ready. This isn't like killing the Genesis for the Saturn here. It's like killing the NES for the SNES. ... Actually, it's not even like that, as the DS can play ALL GBA GAMES, so even if the DS had no software, there'd still be GBA titles coming out. So it's more like killing PS1 for PS2.

Well, except for the reactor structure itself, if it's ever decomissioned, but it won't stay radioactive anywhere near as long as fission waste will. 340016[/snapback] Yeah. The reactor itself. And how long the fission byproducts are an issue depends greatly on the fission reaction. While uranium byproducts are an issue for several thousand years, it's possible to reduce that to a couple hundred by running them through another reactor. Could pr'ly run that through a THIRD reactor to reduce it further, but it would stop becoming feasable after a certain point. The series of reactors is essentially a forced acceleration of decay. Though the reactors approach it diffrently.

Oh dear... My apologies. I'm used to people knowing of what I speak, even if they've never seen it. DO NOT LOOK FOR THE GOATSE GUY! YOU DON'T WANT TO FIND HIM!

Yah. Too bad none of it's useful to me... I shoulda let that one slide. But I was on a roll. Minovsky particle = dilithium crystals. Yah. Electricity will work in the real world. Drop a 9-volt battery underwater, and bubbles of O and H start growing on the terminals. Don't think you can split it fast enough to power a reactor without using most of your reactor to split water, though. Nah. It's the anti-nuclear protestors that hold back nuclear power. There's some issues with fusion currently, but we could make MUCH better fission than we do now. I think I mentioned breeder reactors recently. To the BenderMobile!

Heh.

Yah. I've got an NGPC too. NGPC might would've toughed it out had SNK not been going through financial problems at the same time. The Wonderswan DID last for a while, but there wasn't much effort expended on making it competitive past the GBColor. On the upside, it ended the reign of the monochrome GB, and got us to the GBA. Exactly why I drag the Gameboy out every time someone says "I wish everyone else would just quit making hardware and do Playstation games instead." Monopolies are good for nobody but the person holding them. The DS is the system to fight the PSP. And I think it's a bit early to be upgrading it, unless you like cheesing off your existing users. Not quite a year old yet. It can't thwomp a PSP, but it can hold it's own. I'd leave it be for another year or 2.

Mmm... I've never heard that. It WOULD have been better as a home unit. Especially since it is anyways, essentially. Gotta have a table to set it on, a chair to sit in, and I've only ever used mine off AC(I gather it sucks batteries like mad, though). I know they couldn't get the resolution they wanted in LCDs of the time. And the blue LED wasn't ready yet, though they could've gotten a more limited color range with red, green, and yellow. If I were designing one NOW, I'd likely use a cool lightsource(like white LEDs) and twin 854*480 DLPs. Add color wheels for RGB. Of course, I'd need a major power upgrade to drive the higher-res displays. May as well take it polygon while I'm at it. They're better suited to 3D graphics. Wouldn't need as much power as the next-gen systems, since I wouldn't push for every tiny bit of eye-candy, and I'm not going for HD resolutions. A current-gen system driving my display would do nicely. Of course, the controller is getting dated. Run with a Saturn Analog Pad knockoff, pr'ly. ... Maybe theef Sony's original Dual Analog joystick. I'm not going for a portable, so I don't need a gamepad. Okay, coming back from Dreamland now... Blurry? Mine's always been crystal-clear, and there's nothing in the tech to cause blurriness, unless you don't adjust it right. ... Or take glasses off. Thing's designed to be played with glasses if you need them. Heh, ROB. His sole purpose was ACTUALLY convincing retailers that the NES wasn't another game machine like the ones that'd burned them so badly just 2 years ago. I'd like to have one, just for kicks. Already determined that it'd be a VERY cumbersome way to play Gyromite, and I don't even OWN StackUp(much less the ROB parts the game came with). From experience, there's a few possible headache causes. With workarounds. I only ever got slight headaches, though. The biggest is the display is 50Hz refresh, with no pixel persistence. Turning the brightness down helps a LOT on this one. At full brightness you can actually SEE the flicker. At... I think about half... it completely ceases being relevant. IMO they should've capped the display brightness somewhere below max. Preferably gone with a faster screen, or a persistent one(like LCDs, and damn the headset size). The second is depth of the image. That's where the auto-pause forced break feature was supposed to come in. There's also a depth control in several games that's adjustable. Reducing(not eliminating) the depth of the image helps this one. I can't really describe it well, but there's an odd feeling my eyes get when it's too deep that I use to guide the adjustment. I actually know what causes this one from some recent research into 3D displays in general. It's a problem common to all attempts at 3D that don't involve actually projecting a 3D image. The brain gets upset because it's not having to move the eyes to aim at diffrent objects. If you look at a close object in reality, your eyes point closer together than if you look at a distant object. With a simulation using twin 2D displays, both eyes are staring at the same place regardless of distance, and the brain doesn't like it one bit. Mis-adjusted IPD could also do it. I can't say I've had ANY experience with this one though. Even the store demos I went through the boot-up adjustment sequence on. It'd also exacerbate the second cause. This one was a major problem I saw with the VB at the time. It had a relatively involved setup, and people didn't take the time to go through it. Most people tend to not even read manuals, much less take the time to configure their games. A modern VB would be almost guaranteed to have auto-adjusting IPD to avoid this, though it wasn't feasable when the system was created.

Where is the best place to buy this flip top? When you say flip top, are you talking about just buying the slim PS2 that has a top that flips up rather than the slider that comes out then using one of those CDs that somehow trick the PS2 into thinking it is a japanese version? 339830[/snapback] No. The fliptop is a case replacement for the front-loading PS2 that adds a door on top, so you can change the disk without the console realizing it's happened(since there's no open switch on the door). It has nothing to do with the slimline.

And to add to that, that there's lots of things dubbed radiation that aren't even particle radiation. I bring it up up because I recently heard someone confusing EM radiation with particle radiation. Related: I thought gamma radiation was only applicable to the x-ray side of photons. Am I mistaken? Less impressive than it sounds, really. Plasma comes in relatively low-energy forms as well as the high-temperature plasmas we know and love from fusion reactors and sci-fi. Fire is an example of a low-energy plasma. Makes sense, though I don't know of a chemical reaction that can break water apart. But you'd just fill up with H2O, and crack it on the way to the reactor. No mucking about with pressurized fuel tanks or carrying high explosives. ... Hell, could use it in a conventional internal-combustion engine too. Just crack the water, pump the H and O into the cylinder, fire the spark, and when it burns you'll get water back out and send it back into the fuel tank. Sounds like a perpetual motion machine there, but you've got losses going on. Not all the H and O will recombine when you burn it. And you've pr'ly got consumables at the crack stage, but even if you don't, again it's not 100% efficiency. Sorta true. The mass and inertia is all still the same, you just have a hell of a lot less friction eating away at your momenteum once you start moving. On the other hand, you have to spin around and apply opposite thrust to slow or stop. And while you aren't constantly fighting gravity, every up/down motion requires a further expenditure of reaction mass, because there's no lift. In an atmosphere, once you get your speed up going down is free, and any direction but up takes a lot less fuel. Hence why unpowered flight is possible on Earth, but not space. Sure you're always going down(unless you catch a thermal), but you can still maneuver. To add to that that, the "reaction mass" in an atmosphere is air. In space everything has to be carried onboard, because you can't use a vacuum for propulsion. It's not a clean and simple advantage. It's not a "mini-star" except in the loosest sense possible. Exception is made for singularity-driven generators(I think it'd be possible to use a singularity to drive a fusion reaction). Not only is the gravity not enough to hold it together against the energy released by the fusion reaction, it's not enough to CAUSE a fusion reaction. It takes a constant, and typically LARGE, injection of energy to start and sustain the reaction. Which is part of the problem we've had with fusion. Using the tokomak reactor design(this is the only one that makes extensive use of magnetic fields), the plasma's not even in a sphere. And I've never seen a donut-shaped star. Only loosely. Gundam, for example, makes extensive use of a fictional "minovsky particle" emitted by He3-He3 fusion to explain away any problems. Macross hasn't even dealt with the technological issues. It uses thermonuclear reactors based on alien technology, and that's all that's been said. They originally chose that power source because it sounded cool. </nitpicks_part2>

I'm not surprised, look at what that man did to the Virtual Boy? He killed console VR and lost Nintendo one of their best hardware and software developers. I was under the impression that Yamauchi wasn't exactly involved with teh VB either. Way I heard it, the VB was Yokoi's pet project, and he was allowed to do whatver the hell he pleased with it just because he was Gunpei Yokoi. Actually, as I understand it, Yamauchi had very little to do with the nuts and bolts of the operation as a whole, and just ran the corporate side with an unparalleled ruthlessness. Closest he got to the guts was something like playing Super Mario for 5 minutes once. You want to know who killed console VR? Everyone that said "OMG RED GAMEBOY" when the screenshots came out, and refused to even try it. 339740[/snapback] There were plenty enough of us that tried the Virtual Boy and thought it sucked Come to think of it, I've never talked to anyone that actually liked it. 339744[/snapback] Everyone that's played mine has liked it.

Who else could play Captain James T. Freaking Kirk and still manage to get type-cast as something else?

I'm not surprised, look at what that man did to the Virtual Boy? He killed console VR and lost Nintendo one of their best hardware and software developers. I was under the impression that Yamauchi wasn't exactly involved with teh VB either. Way I heard it, the VB was Yokoi's pet project, and he was allowed to do whatver the hell he pleased with it just because he was Gunpei Yokoi. Actually, as I understand it, Yamauchi had very little to do with the nuts and bolts of the operation as a whole, and just ran the corporate side with an unparalleled ruthlessness. Closest he got to the guts was something like playing Super Mario for 5 minutes once. You want to know who killed console VR? Everyone that said "OMG RED GAMEBOY" when the screenshots came out, and refused to even try it.

Gods... the depths these people will sink to to protect "their" show... I've heard the classic "3 seasons of Macross" referring, of course, to the Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA portions of Robotech, that Robotech was the original and Macross was the adaptation, and even that the Robotech events, while not original, have been backported into the Macross chronology.

Not yet. The MalWart I checked didn't have it. Got another couple to stab at.

You should keep it for the sexy box.