skid

"Now Loading..." screens in arcades still ain't right.

Yup, learnt my lesson buying the first batch of 6800 series cards. They didn't even have a full featured PureVideo implementation. Am gonna buy an el cheapo 7600GT until these 8 series cards come down to the $250-$300 mark.

The other day I walked into the local EB Games here in Australia and Battlefield 2142 PC DVD is selling for $110 (US$73)... and that's the game with ingame online advertising?? How much do you guys pay? I can see the games for PS3 easily hitting US$80... the next Gran Turismo game I'd bet will be priced around there. And it'll sell by the boatload.

hahaha.. that made me laugh. I remember when I first started with emulation. I found something called VSMC "Virtual Super Magicom" on a BBS back in 1994. It was a SNES emulator. When I started it up, I got my SNES Street Fighter 2 cartridge and then wondered where to plug it into the PC. VSMC is still available on the net: http://194.100.161.11/Apaja/Kopioi.asp?Tie.../VSMC70PR%2EZIP

For real? I reckon the results would be more accurate if they had gotten the women to fill in the survey. 17.44 minutes foreplay + 18.64 minutes to climax? I doubt it would be that long.

Err.... no. They converted a 5 minute snippet of the Terminator 2 SE movie in less than 4 minutes. E6600 will be my next CPU. Forget the X2 4800+

Agreed. Other things to consider are that the BT client is not updateable with new BT tech (e.g. encrypted transfers) and why add in the cost of a 160GB HDD when I would want one bigger than that to start with? I am waiting for the 11N standard to finalise before buying a router.

How did the police find out it happened? re: old laws... i think they are still around cos nobody cbf changing them. it ain't easy to change the law once it has been established.

Not sure if Mooney was sarcastic there. You're right about ATI and Nvidia being neck to neck. However, Crossfire seems to me to be a rushed technology to keep up with SLI. For the moment, I think Nvidia and ATI will just try to squeeze more speed out of their current technology. Later when DX10 is near release, I'd expect some real technology advancements. I saw today in various news articles that Nvidia are aiming for photo-realistic graphics. The CEO is aiming for "Superman Returns" type graphics as its end-goal. On the physics side, I think it will take at least 3 years after Microsoft incorporates physics into DirectX before we'll start taking physics accelerators seriously. Right now, the game makers are writing non-standard physics code (I don't see Havok as a standard - it is more an API). They are happy enough to do that. This is panning out similarly to how the first generation of 3D polygon graphics started.

Conan 3 (think there are only two Conan movies) and Terminator 4 are fine. Commando doesn't need a sequel. This Rocky trailer was pretty good. Made me want to see the movie. Most of the Rocky movies were good. Trailer was a bit low res, tho. Edit: The Quicktime version is hi-res (28MB) The WMV was low res (1.7MB)

Try Virtual Audio Cable

Rename Psplus_1.0\Psp1.0\psplus.1.0.exe to Valis_3_SwordEvolution(Starlight)_OC_ReMix.mp3 Not a bad remix but kinda short.

Downloaded the "emu" from this link. The main exe is an ocremix MP3 renamed into an exe. I didn't bother starting up the emu.

Yup, those pen and paper games were great fun. We also played Battletech in addition to those two you mentioned. Memories of playing 4 player Gauntlet in the arcades are still with me. I'm talking about the 1985 version. Other great multiplayer games include Microprose Soccer and Bomberman.

After restructuring, at least part of the rom would need to be modified so that kof2003 knows it has been restructured. For example, the part of the rom that says, "jump to point b" would need to be changed to jump to the place where the code has been moved. I don't think this would be an easy thing to do. I think that is part of the protection. Try commenting out this line in the driver and you'll find that the game resets just before a new game is started. This is typical for what protection schemes do - they allow the demo to run but won't allow anybody to play the game. Since it is only at the one memory location, I'd guess that this should be easy to crack. *(((unsigned char *)memory_region(REGION_CPU1))+0x58196)=kof2003_tbl[0xff9]&0xff; I also found that mslug5 uses only 4 banks and all of the banks are at 1meg boundaries.

Yeah, I didn't want to be the negative one, but your current course of action is not going to lead anywhere. It was based on the assumption that the p roms have been split into 1 meg parts. This is not true and the kof2003 driver does not indicate this. I'll explain why further down. The trick is that kof2003 is using a different type of bank switching. The bank switch is performed by this line: bankaddress=((kof2003_tbl[0xff8]>>|(kof2003_tbl[0xff9]<<)+0x100000; What this piece of code means is "take the 16 bit value in address 0x2feff8 & 0x2feff9 and add 0x100000 to it to get the new bank address for CPU1 whenever a value is written to the memory between addresses 0x2fe000 & 0x2ffff9". Like cosmic_lord, I was hoping that it would have used the same type of bankswitching as mslug5. But the mslug5 driver uses a different type of bankswitch: bankaddress=neogeo_ram16[0x10/2] + (data>>12)%0x03; Translated this means "to get the new bankaddress, read the 2nd to 4th bits of the value passed into 0x2ffff2 & 0x2ffff3 and add the value at address 0x05". This is nothing like what kof2003 is doing. Even if we could unwrap the kof2003 bank switching, we'd need to translate the p rom to standard neo-geo bankswitching so that it works in kawaks, neoragex and nebula. In the standard neogeo driver, the bankswitch is performed by this line: data = data&0x7; bankaddress = (data+1)*0x100000; This line means "take the bottom 3 bits of the value passed to any of the addresses between 0x2ffff0 and 0x2fffff then multiply it by 0x100000 to get the bankaddress". The standard neo-geo machine allows 8 banks. And that is where I gave up hope of hacking the kof2003 p rom. I used a log and found that kof2003 has more than 1500 banks. According to the driver, kof2003 can potentially have 16777215 banks (0xffffff) by using 48 bits from ff8 and ff9. There's no way that we can fit that amount of banks into the standard neo-geo driver. It might be okay if kof2003 performed some bankswitches early in the game, but it performs bankswitches throughout. The banks are also not aligned to nice boundaries (like 1 meg), I found that some "chunks" would only be 2 bytes in size. It may be possible to disable most of the bankswitching, but this might require changing the memory pointers in the code. That'd be like chopping up kof2003 into really small pieces then sticky-taping it back together. Possible, but not fun. I'd like to understand how the "universal" p rom for mslug5 was made. The universal rom does not seem to bear any resemblance to the original rom. Where did the universal rom originate? aquasync, I first thought that the table was part of the bank lookup, but all it really is, is to simulate RAM between 0x2fe000 and 0x2fffff. The really crappy thing is that the table is not static once initialised. kof2003 writes different values into the same location in the table at different points in the game. I'd love to be proved wrong and I don't claim to know everything, but I think our best chance is to sit tight and hope that the emu authors will release the emulators with new bankswitching code.