JB0

NES-era storage space is messy, to say the least. The NES/FamiCom was concieved right at the end of the single-screen black-background arcade paradigm, as scrolling gameplay and background imagery was just coming into fashion. It was hopelessly inadequate almost immediatly. Virtually every NES game has bank-switching "mapper" chips to multiply the ROM address space massively(sidenote: NES has a ROM bus for graphics and a ROM bus for code, so there are 2 seperate busses to bank). These "mappers" also tend to add more RAM to the system, and a few have extra sound channels or interrupt hardware. Without bank-switching, you run out of space trying to do anything more advanced than Super Mario Brothers 1. WITH bank-switching, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, Megaman, Gradius, and a whole host of other titles become possible. Some are obscure(Metal Storm, which is among the most graphically impressive NES games as well as damn fun, and really deserves far more attention than it gets), some cult classics(Blaster Master), and some are among the best-known titles on the system(Super Mario 3) Now the SNES and Genesis never used bank-switching(I THINK the GEnesis didn't anyways). However, towards the end the SNES DID get crowded. Data compression was used to keep the ROMs smaller(for cost reasons more than address, though). 5 games make use of a coprocessor designed explicity for extreme grpahics compression. If I recall, 2 games DID manage to fill the SNES' entire ROM address space(Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean{which also used one of the graphics compression coprocessors}). CD-ROM lasted for 2 generations(remember, the SNES/Genesis era had a healthy CD-ROM market on the SegaCD, PCEngine, and computers ). Admittedly, there was a lot of disk-swapping at the end of that second generation. But that first generation had a lot of pretty crowded disks. DVD is ending it's first generation with most disks being half-full.

Also note that if you take a perverse joy out of annoying Agent ONE then watching Mac7 becomes mandatory. Personally, I think the show has a lot of interesting elements, but few are explored to any signifigant degree. And it all collapses in on itself after Operation Stargazer returns home, and not even the Max & Millia VF-22s can save it, partially because they get about 5 seconds of very low-quality screen time. On the other hand, DURING Operation Stargazer we get to see Max kicking roughly 37 diffrent kinds of butt in his VF-22. ... Which really makes me question what the REST of the fleet is there for.

I feel obliged to note that only 2 of Atari's 5 systems have enjoyed any real success(both of the machines that were released in the pre-crash days), as well as other American companies did have quite successful machines, most notably the Intellivision and Colecovision.

MGREXX HAS preached the Robotech angle several times. Something about it being a fresh and vital license while Macross has shrivelled up and died and we're all delusional ninnies holding onto a dream that has died.

At this point, I seriously doubt that you actually have a Master's. Unless, of course, they give those out from clown colleges. it could be one of those "honorary masters" some colleges give out to ummm "special" people. shame he got a custom title. cmon make mine "evil and proud of it" don't make me assault the world with a spice girl or micheal bolton cd. HAHAHA! That's beautiful.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "Turn it upside down and it'll work." "Unplug it when you aren't using it, or it'l quit working." "DISK READ ERROR" Enough said.

I hope BluRay fails just to spite you. That's why everyone else is sticking with DVD. It's not even being used to half capacity most of the time, and no one wants to be stuck on the wrong end of the format wars. Not really. The stats are very diffrent in many cases, and you seem to be using the japanese statistics. You REALLY need to do something with your life. You derive far too much joy out of mentioning your diploma. That's an urban myth, perpetuated by the PS1/Saturn price wars. People just couldn't believe that 2 systems that launched at 500 could still turn a profit at 200. And they were half-right. One system couldn't. But the Saturn was an ANOMALY. Not the norm. The argument has about as much validity as "*insert system here* spins the disk backwards so it can't be copied." It's idiot fanboys quoting a "fact" that they made up to fit their preconcieved beliefs. Stop confusing me with mikeszekely, that's not cool. As for the rest of your nonesense, I don't consider cheap, low grade third world consumer electronics as legitimate product lines. But you'll buy Playstations? Oh, the hypocrisy. Anyways, regardless of what price level a DVD player has to be before you'll consider it as actually existing, the fact remains that outside of Japan DVD had pretty much taken over from VHS well before the PS2 launch. I rather not buy extra crap just because a company can't get their $hit straight and give me a decent systems with everything I need out of the box. I am not falling for MicroSofts BS by having to buy a DVD remote to play movies and having to pay them BS monthly fees to go online. Sorry. penny wise, pound foolish. Why would you want to play mvoies with a game console anyways? As for the "BS monthly fees"... SOMEONE has to cover the costs of the servers. Bandwidth ain't free. Neither is hardware. Do not blame SONY for their past, since they are not the only ones. Tehy're far and away the worst about it. You mean embrace them because they gave us a bunch of blind fanboys incapable of seeing anything other than what Sony tells them to. They did it with FF cutscenes for the PS2 too. But there wasn't a PS2. Real-time doesn't mean it's on the hardware they claim it is. Only clueless Sony fans would type that sort of drivel.

You know, for the next release of the original Trilogy, all 3 ghosts will be replaced with stick figures.

I've taken a heck of a lot of pics of my baby with my cell phone camera when he decides to do something cute, which I would otherwise have missed due to not carrying my regular camera with me. Good! Cute baby pictures are great things, and anything that increases the odds of getting one is good. Honestly, I'd be less likely to have the cellphone on me than a dedicated camera in most situations. Dun make much use of phones. And yes, I gather that I'm in the minority here. Yah. Personally, I prefer a bit higher resolution. Gives me room to crop the image later, as well as just having more detail. And as I said, there's still no room for a really good lens, which is one of the big things holding them back currently. It's hard to get a very sharp image with the limited lens spae. *chuckles*Yes, so you've been told. I'm sure this is all word-of-mouth.

I thought that the ASS ship was damaged and they needed to understand it all (reverse engineer) to get it working and to repair it? (they mentioned using "recycled parts" I think) Parts of it needed to be understood. Others, not so much. And the stuff that got repaired was likely in good enough shape that only a few small patches were needed. Otherwise it'd be like someone running up, dumping a pile of car parts in front of you, and saying "fix it." (I'm going to assume you don't rebuild engines for a living, because it makes the metaphor easier) I think reverse-enginneering had more to do with duplicating it than fixing it. But they may as well put the originals back. And I suspect that they only allowed non-destructive studies, or studies on spare parts. Wouldn't do to bust your only microfusion generator/convergent-energy cannon/other cool piece of overtech without having the capability of making a replacement. *makes note to watch Mac0 again* Can't place the scene in question, but it's likely. That's how I remember it. They were only just ready to launch the Macross on it's shakedown cruise when the Zentradi showed up. But I think they pegged the malfunctions on the unplanned main cannon firing in Global Report. I'd have to check to be sure. ... Either way, that unplanned firing is evidence they were recycling parts. The ship's computer was of alien origin and still had the original code in it. As I understand things, yeah. Their version of repair work was apparently sending in a guy with a broom to remove the glass shards from Breetai's bridge. But they still made extensive use of fold generators and antigravs, demonstrating the safety of the technology.

Actually, all 512 colors of the Genesis pallete can be used at once, through suitable software trickery. Anyways, blast processing is a half-truth. It's an idiotic marketing term to hammer home a fact that most people in 1990 didn't understand. A processor that gets more done per clock cycle and runs at a higher clock rate gets more done. The Genesis' 68000 CPU stomps the SNES' 65816 badly. Which system is better depends on what you want. The Genesis was THE fast action platform, free of much of the slowdown issues that plagued the SNES for it's entire life. But the SNES enjoyed audiovisual capabilities far beyond Sega's limited hardware, and in a situation where speed isn't critical, you could pull all the stops out and pull some truly beautiful scenes out, making the SNES the preferred adventure/RPG platform.

You do know that the XBox 360 demos at E3 are using about 1/3 of it's true capabilities? That's probably why they don't look as great. As long as I'm seeing it... I was under the impression that the PS3 had nothing to show but video tapes. Given even when Sony has a real-time interactive demo there's no guarantee it is what they say it is, why should we believe them when they have a non-interactive video?

Provided the overload isn't an unavoidable flaw in the design. The main gun was programmed by the supervision army to go off. not our fault. If I recall, the antigrav and fold generator issues were supposed to be due to the improper firing of the cannon, not anything we did to them. The antigravs and fold generators were original equipment, not reverse-engineered replacements. It was safe before. The zentradi, supervision army, and protoculture used the devices for millenia. Space is vast. Keep a certain distance should work since the explosion won't be as massive as the sdf1's barrier overload was. (I seem to remember vf1's being fast enough to clear the area before the big sdf1 barrier explosion went off, so with the speed of newer valks it isn't such a huge demand for them to haul ass to a safe distance with a smaller scale explosion) Yah. I'm being overly cynical here, in retrospect. Among other things, a VF barrier can't absorb as much as a ship-sized version. That greatly limits the potential damage of a discharge. And due to the rapid spread, a VF at anythign mroe than "point blank" range will absorb but a tiny fraction of what their barrier can take.

Yes, I am certain. All consoles have sold at cost or below when they debut. SONY is no exception. What the companies do, is figure out a way to produce them cheaper (and smaller) down the road and recup their costs. Actually, most systems are launched at a small profit. It's generally a bad thing if they start being sold at a loss. That's one of the things that hurt Sega during the Saturn/PlayStation wars, was that the PS was just much cheaper hardware. At 200$ a deck, Sony was still making a mild profit, but Sega was bleeding red ink all over the place. Sega just oculdn't afford to go much below 400 at US launch. The XBox is an exception, because Microsoft doesn't really CARE if it's a profitable venture. Just that it expands their market share. Who cares about your brother. He does not represent the USA. In fact, you really need to think before you post. It is a fact that DVD disc sales jumped dramatically after the PS2 launched because at that time, it was the cheapest DVD player on the marker. People bought it because it was a DVD player and a next gen console. Quit citing Japan as indicative of the world. It's true that IN JAPAN it was the cheapest DVD player, and that IN JAPAN DVD sales rose sharply with the PS2's release. In point of fact, IN JAPAN PS2 software wasn't selling at launch, just decks and movies. But all of this was IN JAPAN, not the world as a whole. IN AMERICA, I had a 100$ DVD player hooked to my TV before the PS2 even launched in Japan, much less the US. Now drop the whole "PS2 was a cheap DVD player" bullshit. smacktard? Is that how you react when you are being shot down and put away? How immature. Regardless, I will continue to school you. Hideo Kojima dod in fact make that statement. Why does this remind me of the whole DOA2 fiasco onteh Dreamcast? "Yeah, it sucks, but we have tha t1 gig disk full tot eh brim, and we can't fit anymore in. But it's the only version we're gonna make, so go buy it anyways." "Yeah, we know we said the DC version was full to the brim, and the only version we'd make, but guess what? We made a PS2 version! And fit MORE STUFF into a 650 MB CD than into a 1GB Dreamcast disk! And we won't port this back to the Dreamcast, so go buy it again!" "Yeah, we know we said we wouldn't ever port this back to the Dreamcast, but we lied. So go buy it a third time!" The fact is that developers need to embrace teh full capabilty of DVD, and quit running in terror from layer 2. Don't give me that weak $hit man. unplug it. Is that what you do when you run out of plugs in an outlet. Sure we are talking about something else but you get my point. Why do you thing that newer computers have more and more USB ports and the like compared to older computers. They are a must. The same holds true for consoles. They are turning into media centers that you will be able to merge your digital and Internet lifestyle to. You will use it for many devices, like cameras, psp, mic's, keyboards, etc...... Multiple ports will be a must and unplugging them is a moronic solution unless you don't have a digital lifestyle and that means you are old. Buy a 5$ hub, you cheap fool. Do you know what the future holds? No? Then shut up and stop trying to pretend that you do. I sure don't but SONY is trying to and it's better to be ready than to not be ready. Oh and that statement that MS proved that the future of mulitplayer is online. That is a bunch of bs and you know it. Did you know that out of all Xbox live accounts, only 20% of those members are actually online for more than 4 hours a week. That hardly shows that onlime gaming is the future. It might be there on day but right now, online gaming and communities are at their infancy and nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. But either way, a 7-way splitscreen JUST DOESN'T WORK. 4-way spilt is too dang crowded already. WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please wait while I run out of my house and loose a lung laughing outloud. A demo running on a development kit gives a sense of how the end will will eventually turn out. Microsoft is getting ready to launch the Xbox360 and those demos are pretty close to completion. Well, they pale in comparrison to the PS3 demo's which have only been in development for less than 2 months and they still have at least 8 months to go. PS3 had no playable games at E3 because they are all early in development but MS had plenty of Xbxo360 games that were playable which means that they are farther along and the PS3 demos looked better. What does that tell you?????????? It tells ME that Sony's doing what they did with the PS2. Firing up a render farm and churning out animations that match what they CLAIM the PS3 can do. You're falsely implying that Sony had demos running on devkits. All they had was some videos looping. The XBox 360 demos were real, playable software. Remember the PS2 demo that rendered FF8's cutscenes in realtime? Know why none of the released games did that? The FF8 "demo" was never on a PS2. It was running on an array of SGI workstations. And this time out? They aren't even bothering with realtime. Just setting out some videos and letting people assume. Sony's track record does NOT encourage one to believe those are real PS3 graphics, unless they're a fanboy whore.

If you hit the wrong ones, he does seem to use a few too many 10-cent words. But there are also short entries. . . and some that are quite breezy. Don't give up on it too quickly. Here's one of my favorite (humorous) entries: HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Okay, I'm gonna have to look through this one.

Note to self: avoid firmware updates. *slaps on an eyepatch* Arr, matey! Ye be boardin' the HMS Rawmz this fine day? We be sailin' the seas o' the internet fer m4d l00t. I'd say it's a good day fer it, but EVERY day's a good day fer our kinda booty. ARR!

"IGNcube: Coming back to power. We apologize, but if we don't get some answers our readers are going to go insane. What are the tech specs for Revolution? Or, to put it another way, is Revolution as powerful as Xbox 360? Shigeru Miyamoto: You know, in regard to the power of the Nintendo Revolution versus, say, the Xbox 360, we're looking at making a small, quiet, affordable console. If you look at trying to incorporate all that, of course we might not have the horsepower that some other companies have, but if you look at the numbers that they're throwing out, are those numbers going to be used in-game? I mean, those are just numbers that somebody just crunched up on a calculator. We could throw out a bunch of numbers, too, but what we're going to do is wait until our chips are done and we're going to find out how everything in the game is running, what its peak performance is, and those are the numbers that we're going to release because those are the numbers that really count. I do think it's very irresponsible for people to say, "This is what we're running on. This is the power of our machine," when they're not even running on final boards. I think the professional's job is to not believe those numbers. " A nice dose of realism there. While there is an implication in the first sentence of the reply that the Revolution will be less powerful than the other 2 decks, he quickyly shifts into "But the competition's full of crap anyways. They can't know how well the system will perform until they finish the system and start running code on it."

Not necessarily newest and best. Admittedly, I'm not big on quick snapshots. It might could give a GBA a run for it's money. Not sure what the high-end phones are capable of AV-wise. But I get easily annoyed by sub-optimal controls. I just won't play a shooter if I don't have a joystick available anymore. I've tried before, and I just get frustrated by the gamepad interfering with my game(which it does, I consistently perform signifigantly better with a stick than a pad in that sort of game) Admittedly, most of my annoyance with cellphone gaming is that the cellphones have some exclusive titles that I want(Dang it Namco! Port that Tales game to something else!). Fair enough.

It could've also just been covering his failure. Millia comes in and harrasses him for getting his butt handed to him repeatedly. He automatically goes "Nuh-uh, it's not my fault. They got some crazy pilot over there that just ain't human... zentran... whatever he is, it ain't normal." Then added the bit about maybe being a threat to Millia just to annoy her.

And you get fried by their barriers. Yay! I don't think it WAS non-explosive at the end. There were just so many other explosions going off at the time that it didn't matter. If I recall, the issue was ultimately that the omnidirectional barrier absorbed energy when hit, and didn't have a safe way to shed it during combat. And when it overloaded, the barrier shed everything all at once. ... Hmm, if you could control the discharge, you'd have a barrier-powered cannon...

Although, you have to hope the splash damage from those other missiles don't do much damage. It's like wearing protective gear. Let's say you wear the knee pads, elbow pads, helmet, and gloves (ah heck, let's throw in the crotch guard) and those would be like your PPB system. Let's say a missile storm is like a Homer Simpson-style injury. Obviously you can't protect it all and something is going to affect another and we have a cascading injury effect. Yah. I was thinking the only way it'd REALLY be useful is if the disks "cupped" upwards around the missile. Which there's no evidence they can do. It's not good for anybody in the blast radius. Imagine you and your wingmen pinned down in an area like...<insert financial district/busy area of your city here>. That part of the city plus anybody left there, is going to be gone if a ODB system overloads. Yes. I was understating the issue somewhat, as well as assuming space battle.

I'd bet no, though it's just a guess. Not supprting the 8bit GBs means they can scrap a processor(the z80-ish thing isn't available in GBA mode), as well as ditching the hardware needed to sense 8bit games and supply 5v to the cart slot instead of 3.3(if I recall the voltages right).

Sad part is... the hype machine not only buried the Dreamcast, it desecrated the corpse. I've talked to several people recently that SWEAR the Dreamcast had "no good games." After some prodding they'll amend it to "Well, okay, but Soul Caliber was the ONLY good game for the system." It's disgusting.

Yes there was a regular edition of Lunar but it came out years after the edition that you have... I have it cause I didn't have a Playstation ever(until PS2) so I never got the old release of Lunar. I'm the opposite. I got my Silver Star Story on launch week, THEN got a PS1 to play it. But I was a Lunar fanboy before most of the english-speaking world heard of it. Cousin had a SegaCD and the Lunar games when I was a kid. Actually bought his Genesis setup off him for the sole reason of playing Lunar(I was a Nintendo fanboy at the time, and was pretty sure Silver Star and Eternal Blue were the only 2 games worth owning on the Genesis).

Ahhhhh! Must....get.....in......to...E3!!! I'm considering trying to go and just walk in (hey, always works for me in restricted pits at races...), but I'm afraid I'm gonna end my day smashed and on a plane with a one-way ticket to Tokyo. Yes, but then you'll make friends with a ninja, buy a Cool Thing, and go insane. And everything looks more interesting when you're insane.