Two Stop Bits | Darkstar's comments

Darkstar 469 days ago | parent | on: The Sword of Kumdor - RPG for NEC PC‑98
There is no such thing as a "NEC-98"... The system this game is for is called NEC PC-98.
The article has it correct. The title and the tags in this post are wrong.
Maybe someone can fix that?
Other than that the article is quite interesting, and the effort that went into translating it must have been enormous.
- bmonkey325 469 days ago
  Done. I free handed the title so that it wasn’t just Sword of Kumdor.
  Sometimes the tag system lacking hyphen sucks a hairy meatball:
  Bec pc98 or necpc98 and not nec PC-98
Darkstar 471 days ago | parent | on: 84-24
wow that site's UX is terrible...
This is the new Flash, shitty animated sites for content that would be better presented as simple text, and I hope it will die the same death as Flash did
- komadori 471 days ago
  I opened it on my phone and it displayed the following message:
  > This is an “old school” website, crafted for leisurely reading on a large wide screen like a tablet, laptop, or external monitor.
  ...and suggested that I schedule a time in my calender to view it on a suitable device at a later date. I suppose that terrible Flash sites are a certain kind of "old-school", but HTML 3.2 is more what I had in mind.
- bmonkey325 471 days ago
  It’s in that parallax style that Apple uses where it animates and scrolls into view as you roll down the page. On my iPad it was oddly satisfying. I thought it was just a Lorum ipsum place holder page until I noticed I was reading the version in Italian.
  I posted it because thr animations were cool but I didn’t get the gist of it. Especially toward the end where it said $149. Sold out. Kidding. We never shipped anything. Or something.
Darkstar 472 days ago | parent | on: Sega TeraDrive
I wonder why people keep confusing "Tera" and "Terra".
This drive has nothing to do with earth. Maybe someone can fix the title?
- jgrahamc 472 days ago
  I fixed it.
- bmonkey325 470 days ago
  Fat fingers, autocorrect snd a phonetic spelling. I:-). Just like the people who’ say and spell Sherbet. Ice cream as Sherbert.
Darkstar 489 days ago | parent | on: SoftRAM95: “False and Misleading”
I remember back in 1995 when the German magazine c't published an in-depth analysis showing that SoftRAM did not work at all.
That was way before Mark did the analysis for DrDobbs. However I guess since it was in German, the rest of the world didn't really notice...
Darkstar 489 days ago | parent | on: Small VT100 scale model with working keyboard
He claims a working keyboard but I can see no pictures of that?
Also the base system seems to be much smaller than 1:3 scale which supposedly the keyboard uses... so I think they would probably look rather strange in combination?
Darkstar 499 days ago | parent | on: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8,000 emulator-r...
This is nothing of the sort. No matter if one thinks whether the Yuzu takedown was justified or not (As I understand it, they distributed the decryption keys for the games, and they took money for providing special builds that were designed to run obviously-pirated games that were not even released yet).... You can't get more "hey we're pirates!" than that... This was not a lawsuit against emulation. It was a lawsuit against commercial piracy, plain and simple.
> People are out there doing really fun, cool things. Sonic and Mario on the C64, for example.
True, but they're doing that with the IP of Nintendo, and often even copying artwork (sprites, background) pixel-by-pixel. You can cry and moan as much as you want, the law is pretty clearly on the side of Nintendo here in those cases. And this is not about some old, obscure license or character that they have almost forgotten about. It's an IP that they're still actively developing, promoting and selling. I hate stupid useless lawsuits for obscure and forgotten stuff as much as everyone, but in this case I can't help but side with Nintendo (as much as it pains me to say).
- ddingus 499 days ago
  Like I said above, I just do not care. This event in isolation? I agree with you.
  But it is not in isolation.
  Expressing my general disgust over the general IP scene is neither crying or moaning.
  This will all play out like it always does --a mess.
  Peace.
Darkstar 508 days ago | parent | on: The Rise And Fall Of The LAN Party
Funnily enough, I'll be joining a 400-people LAN party in about 3 weeks. Very much looking forward to it, even though the games being played are much different (many games are online etc), and the "feeling" is also different (i.e. no binging a single game until everyone falls asleep from exhaustion)
We still do 2 or 3 smaller, private LAN parties per year at a friend's basement. Over a weekend, with like 6-8 people. Those are very close to the "original" LAN party feeling (whatever that may mean), i.e. junk food, chips, pizza, energy drinks, beer, and playing one or two games until early morning hours, sleep, repeat.
Yes, maybe I am overly attached to the past, but I enjoy it :)
- bmonkey325 507 days ago
  Envious. Alas in my peer group that is 50+, 9:30 is the new midnight...
Darkstar 511 days ago | parent | on: Atari Portfolio: Pioneering palmtop PC from 1989 t...
that's actually the cover from the Shadowrun 2nd edition core rulebook :)
- bmonkey325 511 days ago
  True story. I remembered the image from a gaming con from long ago. in researching the origin I believed something I saw on the internet as true.
Darkstar 511 days ago | parent | on: Atari Portfolio: Pioneering palmtop PC from 1989 t...
I got one of these from a co-worker. Really cool little device! I wish I had one back in 89 that would have been awesome
Darkstar 518 days ago | parent | on: 40 years of Sopwith!
cute. Sopwith was probably the first PC game I ever played. On the IBM XT(?) in a friend's dad's office, sometime around 1987 or so.
The PC speaker sound and simple CGA graphics are still burnt into my brain and I get nostalgia every time I see this game :)
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