April 2000

Saturday, April 29

wazzup!!!!!

Check This out, you will like it. The AP tried to get it shut down or something, but it's all over the place now :)

Posted by brian

Sunday, April 23

Hehe

Feds Seize Cuban Hacker

Posted by brian

Friday, April 21

Finals

Well, I studied over 8 hours yesterday, and plan to do the same thing for a while... So, don't bother e-mailing me until finals are over in a couple of weeks, because I won't respond. I'm too far behind to care about things that aren't critical.

Posted by brian

Friday, April 14

Microsoft vs Netscape

This is pretty funny... it almost seems like a hoax. Retrogames found this article on CNET which reports that: "Microsoft said its engineers included a secret password using the phrase 'Netscape engineers are weenies!' in Web site authoring software that could allow hackers to gain unauthorized access to potentially thousands of Web sites."

Yes, I hate Netscape as as much as anyone at microsoft, but that was a stupid move to compromise security like that. Yeah, an easter egg in frontpage 98 with something calling netscape engineers weenies would have been pretty funny. But a security hole like that is lame. I just upgraded to frontpage 2000 today, so I'm glad. Hopefully those guys will get fired.

Update: I just found another Updated article on ZDNET.. It it worth reading if you are interested in this story.

Posted by brian

MP3 Player Released

The first Portable MP3/Audio CD player has been released. It is definately cheap enough, at only $99... And if this works well, I see no reason to buy an mp3 player that uses flash memory, or something else... Because with this, you can store 650 MB of mp3's compared to 32 or 64MB... AND play your regular audio CDs in it. If it works like it claims, I think it will be a big seller..

In other news, I formatted my HD last night, so I'm still re-installing stuff :(

Posted by brian

Monday, April 10

Vegas 0.92

A new version of Vegas has been released, and a lot more games run. Although most are still slow. But that's ok. If you had been around before nesticle was released a few years ago, you would understand.

I didn't try many games, but a few that worked are:

36 great holes starring fred couples
Doom 32X, although it's missing some graphics
FIFA International Soccer 96
Pitfall 32x
Primal Rage 32x
Shadow Squadron 32x
Spiderman Web of Fire 32x
Star Trek Starfleet Academy Simulator 32x
Toughman Contest 32x
Virtua Racing Deluxe 32x

Also, give it a minute before giving up on a game. Sometimes it takes a little while for it to load and start.

A couple of (probably) genesis games that I had in the same folder that ran at full speed:
NBA Allstar Challenge
Rockman X3
Sonic Spinball

And there were some that I think were genesis games...I don't know why they were in the folder, but they ran at full speed.

Oh yeah, and there was a new genesis emulator released with quite an odd name: genital, I would have named it genetal... I guess they got the idea from nesticle?

Posted by brian

Thursday, April 6

Sonique 1.5

Sonique 1.5 has been released. And adrox over at Emusphere is right, it kicks ass. This will definately replace winamp as my default mp3 player. The music sounds better, the interface is much cooler after you figure it out (in about 10 seconds), and it has a COOL visualization thing. You have to check it out in full screen. If you haven't tried this one, and have stuck with winamp all this time, go download it now. You will definately like it.

Posted by brian

More on the 32X Emulator & Netscape 6

It is reported by emuhappenings, that only the following games work:
------
The following games work, Blackthorne 32X, Brutal Unleashed 32X, FIFA International Soccer 96 32X, Judge Dredd 32X, Kolibri 32X, Star Trek - Starfleet Academy Bridge Simulator 32X, Tempo 32X, and T-MEK 32X. The rest of the games do nothing at all, or a small few may load.
------

Also, Netscape 6 Preview 1 was released today... supposedly is was supposed to be "improved". In my opinion, it is a peice of CRAP. Almost every site I've viewed it with looks like crap. Tables are not layed out the way they should be, pictures don't load, etc. In my opinion, netscape 3.0 or even lower worked better. I know it's not a final release... but still, after delaying it for a YEAR you would think they could get something done. Looks like the AOL morons don't know how to run the open source thing or something..?

Also, the interface is one of the worst looking I've seen in any program. You should only Download it if you like to waste hard drive space.

Posted by brian

Wednesday, April 5

32 Emulator

Ooooh, looks like a 32x/genesis emulator has been released today.
You can download vegas over at emusphere, because I don't feel like uploading it right now :)

You will need the bios. Unlike every other site that says "look around on the net", I'll tell you where to find it. Look at the newsgroup alt.binaries.emulators.sega (which also has a ton of 32x roms, most of which were dumped by Genesis Power), or emuhappenings.parodius.com, or just download directly from Angelfire.

I've tried it out. Yes, it works. Doom 32x doesn't work well, and other games are rather slow, but I think I just neet to reset to get it to work better. My machine is crashing, so I had better submit this..heh...

Posted by brian

Tuesday, April 4

Meka 0.52

Meka 0.52 Released to registered users:

Compatibility rates as of version 0.52:

Master System: 99.72%
(not perfect because of the Japanese version of Ys).
Sega Game 1000: 100.00%
Sega Computer 3000: 100.00%
(excluding emulation of optional peripherals such as the Sega Printer)
Game Gear: 95.03%
(excluding gear-to-gear emulation used by certains two players games)

- Fixed the minor glitches in:
- Back to the Future 2
(black section flickering between the road and status bar)
- Gangster Town
(little line of skyblue pixels on the top of the car in the first scene)
- Operation Wolf
(minor graphic glitches on the top of the bottom bar when shooting)

Tested Wonderboy in Monsterworld on a real system and confirmed the minor
glitch when the menu is vertically scrolling is a bug in the game itself.

Did some research about Ys (J/FM), with help from Toshi.
It is not considered anymore as a bad dump. The bug happening in Meka also
happens when using a real Game Gear or a Megadrive with an adapter.
However the game show a perfect status bar on a Japanese Master System,
so the bad behavior is considered as a bug of Meka, even if in the first
place it is due to a bug in the game code taking advantage of an odd
behavior of the Japanese Master System.

Also:
- Improved run-time TMS9918 video mode detection.
- Fixed Hyper Pro Yakyuu 92 (GG).
- Reduced flickers in NBA Action (GG).
- Fixed freezing until a key is pressed when loading the Japanese BIOS.
- Fixed yet another silly bug introduced in previous version and screwing
some SC-3000 software such as the Sega Basic.
- Added new entrys to compatibility and checksum lists. Also redone
SC-3000 list with names corrections for Japanese educational softwares.
- Fixed potential VDP bug - wasn't affecting any games, but could have.
- Implemented MAME Z80 CPU Core but did not enabled it in the public
version as it doesnt bring anything better than Marat's core: they
are on par, but MAME license is quite limiting.
- Improved documentation inside of the MEKA.BLT file.
- Fixed a bunch of minor bugs. Fixed handing of ROM smaller than eight
kilobytes. Fixed empty entry creation in the VFN database. Fixed a bug
in windows repositionning when changing resolution.
- Reduced executable size.

And also:
- Added background picture caching for a faster switch to the GUI when
a big image is used on background.
- Added a bunch of new themes into the distribution package.
Background pictures for some of the themes are available on a new
site at http://www.emucamp.com/meka/themes
- As of now the PICS/ directory should be considered as the one everyone
have to use to share themes easily. You can still have your own themes
pictures stored anyway, anyway.

Posted by brian