Joe is Hungry Really enjoy this guys overproduced videos on new fast food items. Not always in agreement with his reviews or how he approaches everything but the dedication and production quality are so exciting. Here's one of his latest ones and also an older one on the KFC Double Down (one of my favorite food items of all time! Please come back soon!!!)

Video Game Reproductions I got really excited when the announced the TurboGrafx-16 mini and remembered having one as a kid. Really cool machine that unfortunately didn't make a lot of headway here in the states- it has its problems for sure but it hits that perfectly weird middle ground of game play between the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. It's got some really interesting hardware decisions too. I believe it's the first home console with a CD add-on- we know the famicom had a diskette add-on so it wasn't that revolutionary but it's interesting to see what came before the Sega CD. I could talk about the original hardware all day because it's really neat, but not the point of this topic.

Because it didn't take off here games are really expensive and difficult to find if you want to get into them. I definitely won't get into collecting them like I wish I could. I discovered PCE Works who make reproductions of these games though- not bootlegs trying to be authentic but a totally unique and different thing from the official thing that is just lovingly made like a dedicated fan would do. The PC Engine is the perfect platform for these kinds of reproductions too- the media is either a CD (which most of their stuff is) or a special credit-card like cart called a HuCard that doesn't have any special chips or anything like that which you'd find in other older consoles making it much more difficult to make new games for them.

I discovered them from this video, which is a great overview of what one of their reproduction collections can be like:

Watch Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLTTN9wFsgs

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I think it's really cool to see something like 'here's what this release would be like if it was done by some fans' as well as supporting this old game hardware- I'd love to see more stuff like this.

What do you all think about unauthorized reproductions of old games?

Microsoft Bob is on all XP CDs http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.07.windowsconfidential.aspx

wow

finally got my ps2 set up to run games off of the hdd we talk about homebrew kinda stuff here occasionally so i figured it'd be worth making a thread about this; plus i figure it'd be good to log all this stuff i did and/or write a guide because i had to scrap together tons of info myself. this is actually mostly from memory so some things might not be exact but it definitely has the right idea overall

A while back I found an English patch for Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix+. Kingdom Hearts II is one of my favorite games and everything I had heard about Final Mix+ was that it was a massive improvement on the original. (Unlike the first game's Final Mix, which really wasn't significantly different from what we got in the states anyway). Anyway I had played through this on emulators a few times, and figured it'd be cool to check if there's any way I can play this on my PS2. I don't remember any significant issues with running it through an emulator but it's definitely better on the original console, i think.

(as far as this patch goes, it's great. It's not perfect though- some of the text seems to be off by a few pixels so you'll notice weird artifacts at the top of subtitles and maybe some other areas of text. The images that give you instructions for minigames aren't translated at all for some reason, and although this uses the Japanese input style (O for attacking/selecting and X for jumping/canceling) the info boxes that tell you what buttons to press are ripped straight form the English version so the buttons they tell you are wrong lol. There's a few other minor presentation issues with it, but overall it's the game in English and a pretty awesome job for a fan translation of a PS2 game.- but this isn't what this post is about )

I have one of those old PS2s, got around the time the PS2 first came out. Big, clunky, but it does its job pretty well. (We actually have 3 of these PS2s in my house, lol) so here's what I discovered you needed (and luckily for me it's all stuff I had lying around!) I think this is a pretty cool project to invest in for anyone as you wouldn't have to worry about dreaded Disc Read Errors for your games anymore as well as getting faster read speeds for your games as reading off of an HDD is faster

A computer running windows or some gnu/linux distro
A PS2 of the original model
The network adapter (modem?)
an IDE HDD compatible with the PS2 network adapter
The PS2 Memory Card adapter for the PS3
Some means of connecting the IDE HDD to your computer- I have a IDE/SATA to USB thing personally. this isn't exactly necessary as you can transfer things over the PS2's networking instead, but I'd recommend it as PS2's networking is extremely slow. it's also what I did anyway so I can't really help with the networking

Software:
ps3mca-tool-fmcb-1.8c.zip and ps3mca-windrv.zip (if you're using linux the windows driver is unecessary) - this allows you to manage the data on the PS2 memory card through your computer. it also comes with an installer for the Free MC Boot software, which allows you to run homebrew content off of your PS3. Make sure you backup your memory card before using this though, as it requires formatting it!
openPS2Loader - this allows booting games off of the PS2's harddrive
HDL Dump/Dumb this allows you to copy PS2 game ISOs to the harddrive so they can be run by OpenPS2Loader

first plug in the memory card to the adapter and then to your computer and run mc-format.bat and then full-install.bat. then extract the open ps2 loader files and copy the OPNPS2LD.ELF to the directory the ps3mca tool stuff is in. then open a command prompt and run and that'll install open ps2 loader on the memory card. Now the memory card is all set and next time you boot your ps2 with that memory card inserted, it'll load up Free MC Boot.

Next you want to load up Free MC Boot with the HDD installed in your PS2. Run ULaunchElf from the PS2 menu and it'll open up a file browser of sorts. if you head to the MISC section there should be some HDD browser tool that'll format the HDD to the filesystem the ps2 needs. after you do that you can shut down the ps2 and plug the HDD into your computer. use HDL_DUMB and pick the ISO you want to copy to the HDD or put the disc you want in the disc drive and use that instead and repeat for each game you want on there. Afterwards put the HDD back in the PS2, boot up ULaunchElf again and this time head to mc0:// or mc1:// (whichever memory card slot you used) and open /OPL/OPNPS2LD.ELF and hit circle and it'll show the games you have installed and you can boot them from there.

so far everything's working fine for me, so i hope this might help someone else interested in this sort of thing

Would something like this be good for fangames? I'm sure at least some of you have heard of Bugzilla, even if you don't know what it is.- It's a bug tracking system, people post bugs or issues and there's a whole comment system for it and it's great for development of any kind of software.

I was looking for something like that (don't really like using Perl systems if I can help it), and I came across Redmine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redmine

It's a huge project management tool, supporting a bug tracking system, a wiki, support for version control systems, and just overall extreme usefulness for software projects.

I figure something like this would be really cool for fangames- but at the same time I'm not really sure about it. I don't develop games myself, so there's a few things that I don't really understand.

Do version control systems work for fangames? They're really great when the source code is text files, since you can compare the differences really easily between commits. With fangames I know a lot of them use some proprietary format for the source so version control would only really be useful for backups of older versions- you'd probably have to compare changes yourself... so it's probably not that useful. I know Game Maker has GML so there's some text editing going on but I don't really know if that stuff can be stored externally or what.

Are Open Source projects good for fangames? I know there's a lot of issues with people using Hello's engine all the time, with people saying "i don't need to do much work, all these resources are here for me already!"- but I think the real issue there is that it's not really a collaborative project, it's just whatever Hello releases. If we could produce some projects where anyone can join in and contribute or fork I think that'd be great- but I don't really know. I'm pretty sure everyone probably wants to do their own thing so there might not be that much interest in collaborative projects like that.

I'm sure there's other stuff to talk about too, i just took a quick look at this and wondered if it'd be good for fangames, maybe you guys can raise other questions too

DRM is toxic to culture http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/10/drm-is-toxic-to-culture/index.htm

pretty good article, worth a read i think

Good Things in Games probably the opposite of Topic #779

here's some things I can think of:

• New Game+ type stuff- I love beating a game and having the things I do actually matter for a future playthrough. This might be something like carrying over the stats of characters in Chrono Trigger so you can more easily get the different endings, or just something simple like getting a special item or two like in Metal Gear Solid.
  
• When games aren't too long- idk I just can't get into really long games anymore. Shorter games with lots of replayability are more what I like to see.
  
• Games with good art styles- not a big fan of the whole super realism thing and sadly games that do that look extremely dated after a while. Games that try their own kind of art style usually still look good years later.
  
• Sequels that try something new and different in a big way but still capture the feel of the previous games in the series. Metroid Prime and the Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker are perfect examples of this.

Other forums/communities Don't have to be in a strictly forum format, but that's the type of community I'm interested in here- no facebooks or whatever lol.

What other communities are you a part of and/or recommend?

and some reasoning would be cool too, but I don't want any outside disputes or whatever- I suppose its ok if you have a general comment about a community but nothing about specific users or anything too flamey please.

so i have this tv stand and it has this ridiculous glass shelf in the middle. I never really thought much of it, but I come home today and the thing's totally smashed. Glass pieces everywhere around the area. I don't think anything was damaged except for it, but uhh does glass normally break for no reason? There wasn't even anything on it besides an n64 which I hadn't even touched in forever. I'm not too familiar with this kind of thing, it's not really the kind of thing I'd get in the first place (and definitely not any time in the future) but it just seems kinda strange