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pparently the good people at PlayGeneration have taken it upon themselves to help with distributing Sonic Eraser. They are also selling the King Colossus, Pulseman and Battle Mania 2 translations by MIJET, as well as Neverending (NE) Soft Team’s Shuihu Fengyun Zhuan (水浒风云传).

While I am flattered my translation of such a shitty game would ever appear on cart, a complimentary copy would have been nice.

It would be a real shame if someone were to e-mail SEGA of Japan about two of pirate versions of its games being sold at most likely what appears to be without license.

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hose who have been stalking me might remember Manufactured the “album” byuu and I made back in the earlier part of this decade. After six years of being unavailable on the Internet in any form, I have decided to re-release our monstrosity.

Last year when the Der Langrisser translation project drew to a close, byuu and I talked about revisiting the concept and doing better songs. At the time, we were really just screwing around. The album is incredibly unbalanced, and you can figure out precisely how we learned to put this together if you listen from the first track to the last.

At the moment, the script we used to generate the songs is missing in action, but I will try to explain what we did below.

Continue reading The best music in the universe

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fter considerable trials, I finally have a new lens for my Nikon. This gets me past the limits of the Nikkor 18-55mm kit lens it came with and puts me up to the 210mm range, meaning it almost equals the 10x optical zoom of my old Sony Mavica CD-1000.

The Mavica’s optical zoom was near legendary as point-and-shoot cameras go, and I’m glad to have something that can get me into that range again since I enjoy dabbling in macro photography.

Endless thanks go out to scorpio5361, the best Taobao seller ever and a really good guy in general. It’s hard to imagine a seller going to the lengths this guy did to make us happy.

Continue reading New lens is a Sigma

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f you have been watching the torrent sites, you may have seen a “Windows XP for Asus EEE PC” floating around. Its first edition came out in January, but a new “2.0″ was released this week. For those reluctant to sail over to a certain bay of pirates, I will summarize.

The “EeeXP” carries a 45MB RAM footprint one booted and requires only 289MB of disk space, bringing it into the range of Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition. Not only that, but it promises boot times so fast that the XP splash screen can only scroll its blue loading bar once before displaying the desktop.

Seeking to reinstall my cluttered Windows XP virtual disk that was up to a whopping 5GB, I decided to give this one a whirl using innotek’s VirtualBox on my clunky old Gateway laptop. The results are staggering.

Continue reading Howto: Use EeePC XP in VirtualBox

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retired my Sony Mavica CD-1000 this month — just in case I had not told you already. The Mavica was my camera from 2000 to early this year, and it was really showing its age.

While it did take some great pictures over the years, it was very limited. Manual focus did not really work, and auto-focus always chose the wrong subject for every image. My first three years with the camera were spent learning how to trick it into doing what it should have been smart enough to do.

Still, it had some incredible mileage. I filled more than 40 CDs with its images, and still have a spindle of an extra 30 Mavica CDs left over. Unfortunately, since the advent of SD and CF cards, those CDs are increasingly difficult to find, and lugging around a camera with a built-in CD burner just shows what a relic the device was.

Continue reading Retiring the old Mavica

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he new translation patch for Der Langrisser is finally ready. This version fixes two more bugs in the original Japanese version of the game, rewrites several scenes that were poorly translated due to not knowing the speaking characters and enables Demons, a dummied-out hireable unit.

You can download the new patch from the Langrisser Projects blog.

This new patch is distributed in byuu’s new UPS patch format. It is a replacement to the limited IPS format, and will be the Vorbis to NINJA3’s Ogg. A Windows version of the patcher is available from byuu’s page, and a Linux version is available from the CinnamonPirate.com Ubuntu repository. daemoncollector has released an OS X-based patcher for Cocoa.

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intended to write something for March 19 to coincide with the day I left RPGe. Real life jumped in and this is coming 10 days late. Hey, at least with this delay it is now 10 years and 10 days, and that has a damn nice ring to it.

A decade is not a short time.

RPGe died 9 years ago. I left it in a total mess. I am not sure if I gave MagitekKn the e-mail addresses of the group’s other members. It was a disaster — one that made me look bad and crippled what was the first translation scene group, and up until that time the biggest.

Everything is gone. The older patches were never archived. The Web site, despite having more than a million hits, never made it into the Wayback Machine. Only one page survives, dating from the summer of 1997 — the first time I considered jumping ship. It is a humbling experience to see how something that was the talk of every Squaresoft fan page — then a huge chunk of the Internet — can be so easily lost.

Continue reading 10 years since RPGe

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must apologize to all my readers. Dave Shadoff told me last week that when he posted a comment, he was immediately dumped to a dead page and never shown a Captcha. I failed to investigate why his comment never arrived in moderation.

Now I know.

There are some problems with my Spam Karma plug-in, and everyone’s posts are being flagged as karma “?” and held in limbo. The problem has apparently gone on for some time, and even comments on Final Fantasy VII were trapped.

I especially apologize to those who commented on the Tibet article. I was stunned how few comments it received. Now I know why: my page was broken and discussion could not take place.

I have restored all the comments which were stuck in limbo: they can now be viewed. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. Aside from one extremely racist comment, I have not censored any. I do not run that kind of Web site. I will approve all comments until I can fix the plug-in, so there may be some delay until your post appears.

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t seems my recent Titanic post is making its way around the Internet. Again, most sites were classy in their write ups. Kotaku took a few lines, insert credit took a few lines, but it was perfectly fair use and necessary for their work. Each said who wrote it, and that makes each kick ass.

But where does fair use end? It ends when you steal 100 percent of the article, steal all my pictures, translate it into your own language and violate my license by not even naming me.

No name. No link. No shit.

That is what Chinese news site MyDrivers did when it hijacked my content at http://news.mydrivers.com/1/102/102033.htm.

The title is especially endearing: “A look at the domestic RPG ‘Titanic’: some foreigner played it”

Continue reading I do Chinese games better

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ext up, we have the infamous Dragon Quest VIII, a game which has little to do with dragons, quests, Dragon Quest or the number VIII. The game was published by Waixing Science & Technology, one of the first Chinese mainland development and publishing houses for original Famicom games.

When Waixing began, it was famous for its attention to detail and the quality of its packaging. Unfortunately, I do not have an early sample of its games. My only sample of a Waixing cart is Dragon Quest VII and admittedly late addition to the company’s lineup, and one released at a time when it was going very, very downhill.

Waixing Science & Technology still exists, but it is mainly a factory which makes cartridges and systems for other developers. I speculate that it makes Nanjing Technology’s cartridges, and it has been in cooperation with SUBOR, the first and most successful Famicom clone developer, for the last several years. It currently produces SUBOR’s game systems and multi-carts.

Continue reading Know your Famiclone carts: Waixing

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