JB

It is, but it's only part of the equation. There's several parts between the video encoder and final output. Edit: Okay, I was double-checking stuff, and it looks like the primary difference IS the video encoder. MOST Genny2s had the Samsung clone, but a few early ones had the Sony part. If I recall, they're completely swappable. I'm not certain, though.

If I recall, Genny2s pretty much all have bad video out. Genny 3s are even worse.

Yeah. Screen shake was pretty much the first thing I messed with after I met it. Kisrael, I did that too for a while. Hell, clearing easy mode gets you the almost-best, actually-worst, really-cool laser sniper rifle. Carries 3 seconds of charge, and isn't reloadable. But for those 3 seconds, it is OBSCENELY powerful. 100 damage a shot, 60 shots a second. You may want to take your guns from later normal/easy levels and go blast some early hard-mode bugs, though. It'll make life MUCH easier on you(I actually HAD to do that to dig out enough firepower for the later normal mode stages). D3 has a list of guns, along with when they start dropping, at http://www.d3press.us/files/Earth%20Defens...sc_EDF_2017.doc I love that they left their press sites accessible to the public.

The only REALLY bad one is the Intellivision. There's like 2 pounds of solder welding it shut.

I used the spider intro on hard to farm items. Sniper rifle or rocket launcher, plus an assault rifle. Blast the closer ones, then start sniping the big mass of bugs at the end of the street. They'll just sit there for a LONG time before they start looking for you. Use the tank, if it seems viable(I can't recall if it's still useful at that point). I didn't beat the game past normal, though. Stages 1-16, plus 18 and 19 on hard. I REALLY liked listening to the sidekicks shout, though. Almost as much as the bowling noise when you killed a spider. SEND 'EM ALL TO HELL! YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! EDF! EDF! EDF! The laser rifle you get for clearing easy would be a LOT more fun if it was reloadable. Also: Gunpods are completely, irrefutably awesome for the stage where you have to clear out the spider hive. You know, the one where they warn you not to fall down. Just walk up to the edge, throw some gunpods down, and activate them. No muss, no fuss. Vehicles are also grossly over-rated. The tank is useful on the lower levels, but everything else is near-worthless. And once you get a few items under your belt, your guns are more powerful and your armor is thicker than the tank's.

There's 2 classes of hub in the USB spec, powered and unpowered. Powered hubs are better because, when connected to the wall, they can support more curent draw than the USB host device can supply.

Identical. Both suck.

They did? I thought it was card-edge connector. I admit to not owning one, and having only very limited time with anything older than a 2e.

Fine, free-scrolling parallax. I KNOW that eliminates Crisis Force, and I'm betting the Battletoads levels concerned are the bike levels. Without the free-scroll, it's just an animated background. That's much easier. I admit to not playing the others you named(well, not for long in CV3's case). Another one I've seen tossed out is the Ninja Gaiden train level. Which isn't. It carefully layers the mountains to avoid overlap between the tile layers, and just scrolls different stripes at different speeds. The illusion also breaks down when you're in motion, and some of the mountains start scrolling BACKWARDS. It's funny, but not effective. The same illusion is used on home versions versions of Moon Patrol, but with far more effectiveness due to the game's control of the scroll rate. The arcade one uses a fully animated background to simulate parallax, like Crisis Force does. True parallax effects are rather rare. Fake parallax isn't quite so rare, though it's still uncommon.

Yes, but they handle video in different ways. To the NES, everything's a character or a sprite and those are all stored in the cartridge. All you need to create is a list of what goes where (this is also a limitation in some ways). While the Atari can generate graphics in a similar way, many things are still done with a regular bit-mapped screen and that takes RAM. To add to the discussion... the NES RAM isn't static. It was designed to be expanded. Cartridges can, and usually DO, have more RAM inside them. Or ROM mapped into the VRAM area. Parallax is possible, though rarely coded. If I recall Ninja Gaiden 3(select levels only) and Metal Storm are the only examples of it.Metal Storm is the best example, as it features THREE background layers. I looked into the prospect of coprocessors once, and became FAR more impressed with the NES. About the most advanced you get is a programmable interrupt generator.

maybe the members of this forum can post what usb hubs they tried. and we can post them here in a list. here's the one i tried: Radio Shack Cat. No: 26-139 illuminations Mini USB 4-Port 1.1 Hub reading that now for the first time, i see that it's only a 1.1.... I bet the 360 needs a 2.0 usb hub, Am i right? would that make a difference? -rick It shouldn't. Keyboards are USB1 peripherals. Always. While the 360 controllers MIGHT be USB2, there's no sane reason to do it. They don't need even a fraction of the additional bandwidth. I'd bet they're USB1 as well.

This the PS2 version? Because I don't see how you CAN run low on ammo on the 'Cube. It throws bullets at you like popcorn.

Kool-aid man is the game I have problems with. The game comes on in the module, but it does all kinds of crazy things. And it's not just some fluke cart. My other Kool-aid man does the exact same thing! KoolAid Man doesn't even work on all 2600s.

Well, I wasn't specifically talking about the XBox 360 either. All that waiting is a problem on systems as old as the Colecovision. Reminds me of my Vectrex. As I turned it on, my finger smacked reset, so I never saw the startup logo. I had it down to a science. Became instinctive pretty fast, once I figured out it was skippable. If only there was a similar trick for the game title screen.

That has to be the most awesome failure mode in gaming history. I hope to never see it on my own baby, but...

Not if you went to Japan in 82 (Macross, Mospeda, etc.) Peace Which isn't the same as Robotech. All 3 shows were rewritten to make a semi-cohesive whole.

There's actually a lot that can be done to get around text length restrictions. Especially when the game is coded from the start with an international direction. As long as there's enough space to insert the needed dialog, it shouldn't be an issue. THAT'S the big catch. As you noted, japanese text has a better info-to-character ratio. Certainly kanji, which uses single characters for entire words. Katakana uses characters for syllables, so it depends on the specific words involved. But anyways.... in the old days, people did what they could with the ROM space available. Then they started adding compression schemes to cram more text in. Now? Who cares, when you have an endless plane of aluminum foil to store your data on? Space restrictions are dead and gone, as far as text is concerned. The length of a given text box is usually defined by non-printing control characters in the text itself, so it's really not a problem. Anyways, that's almost certainly the reason the old 8-bit software text was so slow. They were too lazy to adjust the printout speed during localization(or just couldn't find where it was in the code, if they weren't given well-documented source).

That's.... lame. If you have to redesign the Genesis to make your hack work, you've done something wrong. They need to rework things until the whole ROM image is <4 MB, since there's no Genesis bank-switching scheme that I'm aware of.

Yeah. I can't fire on a diagonal worth crap with the stock stick, and it's not an ability I'm willing to sacrifice.

Well, as co-owner of the company, it's hard to off him. I've never figured out how 3D Realms has remained in operation, though. They must have some good investments somewhere. Max Payne, Max Payne 2, and Prey (all of which are great games) helped I am sure. Okay, but what did they do between Max Payne and Duke3D?

SNES SCART only carries RGB and the switching signals.

Well, as co-owner of the company, it's hard to off him. I've never figured out how 3D Realms has remained in operation, though. They must have some good investments somewhere.

Indeed. There's that FCC notice on most RF devices, explaining how they 1) "must not cause interference" and more importantly 2) "must accept any unwanted interference". By the wording you'd think it'd prohibit shielding altogether. 1 means it can't get out. Since you can't stop it from generating it, that means shielding is required. I think 2 means unwanted interference can't make your toy go kerblooie. It's possible they just mean it can't activate a small minigun to blast the source of the interference.

I am suddenly compelled to get this. Haven't played a good gravity-control/explodey-death game since Metal Storm. It's a perhaps-unsurprisingly small subgenre.

Is the beveled one the easier one to remove? I remember having trouble pulling the straight-up ones out, but I went with beveled for aesthetic reasons.