S1500

Yep, I couldn't get past 2/3rds of it. I am in no position to make fun of anybody's voice or regional dialect. I've been known to mumble, and I have a distinctive Northern accent(as indicated by 2 women from VA I ran into in England). But the delivery is really bad. He's like the anti-Chad(WHAAAAA HA HA HA HA). Hard to keep up on what the heck they are talking about, all the while pondering how the heck is a 3 hour podcast "special". I doubt the hosting provider's wild about it. Is there some sort of one-upsmanship in the podcasting community to go for the world's longest podcast? Doctor Ashens is great. He's the Jeremy Clarkson of really bad knockoff videogaming hardware. Wonder if he has an RSS feed. C'mon people QUALITY RETRO PODCASTS!!

So when is Grand Theft Auto 4 or Gears of War coming out for it already? Jeesh.

Retrocore.com just released a THREE HOUR SPECIAL. Are people taking my advice(which is just my opinion) and doing the exact opposite of it? *insert loud Chad laughter here*

If there's gauntlet talk, I gotta buy it. Probably will read it on the plane.

I finally made some time for GTA4 single player. I HATED the "uncle vlad" mission. Vlad got away way too easily. But I checked the vehicle departure location (ie where do you leave it parked) in some youtube vids, followed suit, and did good. Ah the old mission improvisation is back. In earlier attempts, I blocked vlad's car with a delivery truck, but no go on that.

I'll have to give those config files a try. Of course, Friday night I want to play some vids again, and no mp3s showed up whatsoever, and the server string changed(showing percent signs where there should be strings). Yet videos work, yet the 2 videos I added stil don't show, even after a refresh. Ugh. Wonder if a cronjob is in order to do daily updates of media when I add/remove stuff? Hmm

I tried out "retrocore", but it is THE most unprofessional podcast ever, I'm sorry to say. The main host sounded tired & took the last episode in a half-assed manner. His cohosts always sound like they are talking through a Pringles can. Apparently Skyping co-hosts always sound shitty, no matter if you have Mutt Lange doing the audio. Of course, there's volume descrepancies, with the Windows sounds(& skype) coming in the loudest, but you can barely hear the human hosts. All the other podcasts I tried that were new to me were from dead sites, thus expired before I could try 'em. I'm glad to see RetroGaming radio is now podcastable. Didn't see it initially since the host refers to it as "mediacasting". He could easily split his 3-hour episodes once every 3 months into 1-hour episodes monthly. Everyone's happy.

I almost feel bad doing this practice. When I first got my xbox 5 months ago, I bought a few cheapie titles. One of them is "Yeager", and not once have I made time to play it. A few weeks ago, I bought "lego star wars" on clearance. Never played it yet. Did you ever buy games & not once play them for months? I once sold my dreamcast without ever playing my copy of "berserker: guts rage" or whatever it was called.

I haven't had any videos not work yet. But I had to work a bit in the configuration files as some settings required changing for the 360. That's why I said to let me know when you were ready for configs so I could provide you the changes I had to make. Let me know if you want them. I'm curious about the transcoding stuff. With the xbox update, I'm assuming the xbox update as of recent, the "transcoding" is not necessary. still a bit confused about that part.

After much toiling & trouble, I got it to work last night. Wherever you see the xbox declaration line & false(which showed up in a few places), turn them to True. Things suddenly start to work. A good deal of AVI files won't work, but I assume that is expected due to codecs.

Well, I've gotten a wee bit further. I got past .configure & make install, but it won't run upon executing "fuppes": "fuppes: error while loading shared libraries: libfuppes.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" Ugh. Something didn't compile right.

I'll give the above-mentioned link a try. I may have seen that last night, but got sidetracked installing all the required packages to satisfy the compiler script. Thanks.

I got a bit further in the 20000000 step process of the install. It now bitches on sqlite3 not being installed, but here's the funny kicker: it IS installed! Can you believe that!?? I mean [email protected]#@!# It's shit like this that reminds me why Linux isn't a mainstream OS. Seriously., I know this fuppes thing doesn't owe me anything, but really, couldn't you make a nice little binary package that works out of the box? I don't want to manually install 3300 different "dev" libraries just to get one thing working.

Okay, here's the config.log. It appears that I can't compile jack squat. config.txt

I'm a programmer. I can make sense of them. Are you compiling from SVN? I wasn't compiling from the SVN. It was just a straight download from the website. Did the expected ./configure and it stopped at when it was testing gcc. It was expecting an output file and didn't find it, thus aborting everything. When I get back home, I'll post what it hath outputted. It's about 20 or so lines in. This is on the latest rev of Ubuntu.

I can't even get fuppes to compile. God dammit. Of course, trying to make sense of the error messages & such just talks, but doesn't say anything.

How good & easy to config is fuppes? I stream from the linux box to my 360, and it tops out at 500 tracks, and is very flakey.

I would like to see Apple's clickwheel be incorporated as a paddle controller in games. Nice & fast, and no moving parts to break.

Many moons ago, I was at a Goodwill and saw a flightstick for sale. Nothing fancy about it ,but it had a gameport plug. Here's the kicker: it had an adaptor to USB! I regret not spending the paltry 3 bucks to get just that adaptor. I have an old Microsoft gamepad, that has a handful of buttons(6?) and a d-pad, but no analog. But, with my modern computer, it has done away with the gameport. Anybody know where I can get a gameport to usb adaptor, and will MAME, etc handle it just fine? You would expect radio shack to have it instore(you have answers, we have CBs!), but eh, I'm not feeling it. Or better yet, can one be made if the adaptor itself is a bit pricey? I wouldn't mind getting that gamepad back into use.

Taking a trip to Krakow this December. While probably as not as lucrative as Taipei or Tokyo for video game stuff shopping, anything in Poland I should hunt for? Wouldn't mind another funky Famiclone or 2600 knockoff.

Sorry......I didn't feel like playing any Duke Nukem last night, man. I decided to play some Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I've been playing less multiplayer lately. Ahh that was you(I can''t match atariage & xbox names right). I was surprised anyone on my friends list had Duke. I think a few more mutuals have DOOM.

I wonder if in some parallel universe a video game company released games in 8-track cassette format. That would be a hoot. If I had the resources & technical know how, I'd rig something up.

For the 360, I just want a freakin' d-pad that works. You see, when I hit Down, I want to go Down, not Right. This shows up quite a bit when I'm trying to shuffle around the xbox dashboard menus.

I feel bad I don't think I've completed any games on my PS2 or xbox as of recent. Wait, I did complete DOOM, and now I'm on Duke Nukem. I feel bad I never went through all the GTA games. Any time I'm trying to go through a GTA game(when I have free time), another one comes out and I'm on that one. Heh

Sadly, nobody's into doing coop matches, save for one guy. Him & I did one level for 3 hours, then it was time for bed. Good stuff.