Here is an interesting article about the trials and tribulations of Disney Animation, and why although there is a special edition of Lilo & Stitch in some stage of development, few people are talking about it and when they do they’re inconsistent. Also explains why the most successful Disney animated movie since The Lion King didn’t get the two disc treatment initially.

I recently tried out Nintendo 64 emulation again. Back when I had a PIII 500 and a Voodoo3, I fiddled with UltraHLE, which was of course the first N64 emulator. Since it was Glide-only, it ran pretty much perfectly on my Voodoo3, but it only ran like 12 games and most of those I either owned or wouldn’t play exclusively on my PC. Other emulators, like Nemu64, 1964 or Project64, ran more games but were slow on my system. When I upgraded my video card I tried some of them again but while their performance had improved, they still were unplayable.

Then the other day I realized that I should probably tinker with it again seeing as how my CPU is so much better now. I was pleased to discover that not only do most games now play at full speed, but that most games play perfectly in one or more emulators. I’m now on a mission/quest to get all the Nintendo 64 ROMS, or at least “good” copies of all the US and Japanese ones.

By that logic it’s weird to download and play games for a system not gone for very long. We’ve only ended the first year of the official death of the Nintendo 64, which I count as the day the GameCube dropped (since there were a few games released in the last months of the N64). Many of the games are fairly recent, which is interesting. I’m used to old systems and old games but some of these games date back to only 2001.

Several other things I find interesting. For example, Daikatana on the PC consists of a 550MB+ installation, but the N64 version fit in 16MB. Compression, shorter levels and different developer aside, that’s still impressive. Several games used sprites to keep the polygon count and draw in distance low but it’s not really all that noticable until the resolution gets bumped up as a result of the emulator and the sprites stay the same. Interesting that at the same time that Electronic Arts was doing their best to kill off the Sega Dreamcast, they continued to come out with sports titles on the N64 – even Madden 2002 came out on the N64 (though Madden 2003 even came out on the PSX).

The bit with the rental-only titles is odd to me. I can’t help but wonder how Blues Brothers 2000 ever even made it to a rental cart. I also wonder what was up with certian ports – like DOOM 64 and Mega Man 64, which was only a port of the PSX title Mega Man Legends, which wasn’t too good to begin with. Another odd thing that tended to happen with N64 titles – lots of hype led up to little fanfare. Jet Force Gemini was hyped up alongside Donkey Kong 64 and Perfect Dark, but JFG sucked, DK64 was merely passable, and Perfect Dark got delayed past its relevancy. This was probably the reason Nintendo dropped Rare.

Then there was the oddball PC ports. Command & Conquer was ported, and was even “in 3-D”, something the original franchise hasn’t even done. I guess it wasn’t too successful a marriage, since I never hear people speak of it. Same thing goes for the N64 port of Starcraft, though that may have more to do with the uneasy marriage between consoles and RTS games. Then there were the seemingly quite good games like Glover, Izzy’s Reckin Balls and Penny Racers that got completely ignored. Contrast those with the one-off games that didn’t seem at home anywhere, like Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, which was to be the first in a series of Mortal Kombat side-scrollers. Baffling.

In the category of “quick and forgettable” ports there’s Virtual Pool 3D and Virtual Chess. Not sure why these got made. Then there are the games that decided two tries were neccessary – Castlevania 64 got re-released as the marginally better Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness, angering those expecting a sequel, and ClayFighter 63 1/3 was re-released as Clay Fighter: The Director’s Cut. Madness. Not to mention the three indistinguishable RUSH games.

Apparently the reign of the N64 came none too soon for the game publishers – while the trickle of N64 title died off a few months before the GameCube shipped, there are still PSX titles shipping to this day, like the aforementioned Madden 2003 and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – in theory if even a small number of the PSX owners buy it, you’ll still sell better than a decently popular XBox or GameCube game. Sure, part of it is that people didn’t neccessarily get rid of their PSX abilities with the PS2, but why would you come out with two versions of a game for one console, one of which is graphically poor? Lowest common denominator only goes so far. Interestingly the Harry Potter 2 game is one of the very few Game Boy Color games released since the Game Boy Advance game out, which hurts the “lowest common denominator” idea that fuels the idea as to why the PSX still has so many games made.

A short while back I lamented the lull emulation seems to be in, but now it seems to be even worse. Emulation of consoles wasn’t viable until 1997 or so when NESticle, the first viable NES emulator, was released. Suddenly the rush was on to emulate every old console ever. At the same time there were a few wackos trying to emulate “current” consoles, like the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Emulation was always in a gray area, and for as long as the only emulators around were slow unviable ones using ancient disk images from companies long since dead. Despite still being illegal, no one complained or cared.

Once NESticle came around things changed a little – suddenly a lot of people became interested in emulation (like me), and ROM images were less for studying processor architectures and more for actually playing games. More attention came to emulation, which was seen as a bad thing, since some of the attention came from the copyright holders themselves. Few if any companies complained, but Nintendo was one of them and they shut down many websites posting ROM images. Still, no one died and no one denied the fact that, at the most, some very old games not for sale anymore were being traded online.

Then in 1999 two things happened – UltraHLE, the first viable Nintendo 64 emulator, was released, and Bleem!, the first viable PSX emulator, was released – commercially no less. Sony promptly sued Bleem, LLC, and though they never won a court battle against them they did eventually run them out of business through legal fees. Nintendo would have sued the authors of UltraHLE if they could have found them, but the Internet afforded them sufficient anonymity, not that it would have mattered – the program wasn’t written for profit and didn’t use or do anything illegal.

Nintendo even went so far at one point as to declare any and all emulation illegal, likening emulator authors to theives. They eventually retracted this position, but their disdain is understandable. They lost no money on NES games being free all of a sudden, but a company has to defend their copyrights or they will lose them. What if they had decided the NES was sufficiently old (in 1997-8) to not worry with (Nintendo cut off NES support in 1994)? Fine, what about the SNES? In 1998 Nintendo had even re-issued the SNES in a new sleeker case, so they probably didn’t want people to emulate the SNES or games. Fine, give it some time. So say you’re writing a Nintendo 64 game in 1998 – how would you like to know that the company you were publishing for wasn’t going to fight for the copyright you were depending on? Remember that console developers have to pay the console makers royalties – for this they expect the console maker to defend certian things.

But now it’s 2002. The NES has been emulated, more or less perfectly. Same as the SNES. Same as the Atari 2600. In fact, most consoles prior to 1994 have been emulated, so that left the consoles from the N64/PSX/Saturn generation. The N64 and PSX have been emulated, but the Saturn has still proven elusive, though at least one emulator is showing promise. There are a handful of consoles left to be properly emulated, but as a general rule, most of the popular consoles have been.

Which leaves the current crop of consoles. The Sega Dreamcast is going to be tricky, namely since it uses a proprietary disc format, the GD-ROM, so the only playable games would be pirated ones which kills the one advantage PSX games had – that in theory you still had to have the original CD. I suppose if the format of the mini-DVD’s the GameCube uses is readable by DVD drives then GameCube emulation is possible at some point, but both DC and GC emulation, as well as PS2 emulation, will all suffer from the same problem as early (~1997) emulators for the PSX did – getting enough processing power. Which is why I find the lack of XBox emulation intriguing – it is PC architecture, unified memory or not. What I’ve heard is that the DVD’s the Xbox use have their data on backwards, so they’re more difficult to read somehow. Perhaps its really that Microsoft kills off efforts too quickly.

One of the things that made emulation interesting for me again, for a time anyway, was the movement to the Sega Dreamcast. As soon as hackers reverse engineered the MIL-CD format and were able to get code to boot on Dreamcasts using CD-R sessions, it opened the door for amateur development. Of course, the first thing to be ported were any open source emulators. NesterDC 7.1 is nearly flawless NES emulation, a port of Stella brings the Atari 2600 to the DC, and even Bleem was able to bring some PSX games to the little white console. Of course, Bleem’s promise of 100 PSX games proved impossible, and they went out of business after three single game releases. SNES emulation has proved elusive, with the one serious effort – DreamSNES – apparently reaching a stall in its efforts to achieve 100% speed. So now Dreamcast emulation is at a lull – most goals are either too elusive or have already been attained.

And then there’s the beast that is Game Boy Advance emulation. Emulator authors had working GBA emus before the system even shipped to stores, and since that system isn’t very technically advanced then pretty much everyone can run the emulators – and therefore the newest GBA games. This brings emulation back into the piracy arena. The only thing that hurts this argument is the apparent redundancy of playing a GBA game on a PC.

So we have a basically stale emulation scene, whose goals are either attained, impossible (at the moment), or obscure. Perhaps this is what it needs to be – the retro thing was cool for a while and it still has its charm and its place, but now we can move on and actually enjoy new consoles and content. Or perhaps the next big emulation thing is right around the corner, and I’m just impatient.

This morning I got a call for a job offer in Washington (state). I of course politely declined but that’s strangely motivating.

I finally saw Bowling for Columbine. Very good documentary and easily the best thing I’ve ever seen Michael Moore do. Some observations:

1. It’s 2 hours long. To me this wasn’t a big deal but to Wendy’s friend Jason, it was pushing it.
   

2. It’s not a popcorn movie. Leave the kids at home while you’re at it.
   

3. It’s not an anti-gun movie. I’d elaborate but I’ll let the movie do this.
   

4. There’s a sequence in the movie where they show a series of gun deaths on film in a quick montage fashion. One of the clips is of a man commiting suicide. Quick but disturbing – be warned.
   

5. What’s more shocking than Marilyn Manson being one of the most intelligent, coherent people in the film? The fact that Matt Stone (South Park) is even more coherent and intelligent.
   

6. During the sequence in the film showing the footage of the Columbine killers in the school, I could feel my heartbeat in my ears. No one gets killed in the shots but its powerful.
   

7. Whatever your opinion of Charleton Heston is prior to seeing this film, it will be lowered after it’s over.
   

8. Most interesting was the reactions of the theater. People pretty much laughed and didn’t laugh at the same points.
   

9. I’m completely right for relying on The Daily Show for my news.

Anywho, those are my thoughts. Go see it, if you can.

I now have my resume posted online, so if any of you are in the Dallas area and want to hire a programmer (and preferrably a .NET programmer), give it a look and drop me a line.

This late night post is to appease the blue haired Update Nazi. I had a good post in mind but I can’t remember it right now, so I’ll just post this and go to bed.

Apparently the General Mills company has made a deal with Jim Henson Entertainment to include some DVD’s in with some of their cereals. Honey Nut Cheerios is one, Cinnamon Toast Crunch is another. There are four titles – one disc has 2 episodes of Jackie Chan Adventures, another has the DVD-ROM game The Bear In The Big Blue House (which says something if your PC is lagging behind your cereal box). One of the discs is the 1997 Rene Russo movie Buddy, whose protagonist is an eccentric woman who keeps a gorilla in her house (for some reason this is the one DVD whose characters aren’t pictured on the box).

But one of the movies is 1987’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. I had to pick this one up. It was worth it to have Joan Rivers say “Don’t push it, pig!” on DVD.

The same “free movie on DVD” rules apply – full screen, no extras, no additional audio tracks (though in these cases the “real McCoy” on DVD is either just as spotty or nonexistent), and these even force you to watch an AOL commercial at the beginning (the AOL software is also on the DVD). But hey, it’s still a great deal.

Early on in a format, it’s held in some holy regard to where no one thinks of putting anything trite on it. Then it becomes more and more accessible, then it becomes trivial. It used to be that something that made its way to VHS or CD was important, nowadays anything can get on those formats. Heck, nowadays anything on VHS only is considered cheap.

DVD is now entering the more accessible phase, and is hitting it quicker than anyone expected. Recordable DVD players are on television commercials now – CD’s took much longer to reach that point. Someday DVD will be so trivial that we’ll wonder how it ever moved cereal boxes to begin with.

I picked up Buddy as well. Might as well, right?

Dress to Kill hits DVD next week. Cake or death?

In the last several weeks and months, my posts on this blog have been at least attempting to be “high writing” – something other than someone bitching about their life or how someone else’s opinion is lame and stupid. I’m not trying to write the Great American Novel or justify video games, I just want to write down my thoughts (even if they are short novels) and apply a reserved objectivity to keep from sounding like a fanatic.

But what I really want to do is write stuff like this from this guy. Holy crap, I think I’ve found a new regular read. It’s kinda Slashdotted at the moment but at some point do yourself a favor and read that article – it’s good for even non-programer types.

If you’ve been getting little popups in Windows Messenger (the NetBIOS messenger, not the MSN Instant Messenger) from degree mills and the like, here is how to disable that. I haven’t tried it myself but I will soon.

Okay, I’ll preface by saying this one’s a little odd, since it deals with football and I’m hardly a knowledgeable football fan. Nevertheless I figure it will be short and probably interesting since this is from the perspective of the opposite of the football fan.

Anywho, as far back as 1985 (I think), my Dad took us all to football games. Specifically Texas A&M football games. Suffice it to say that early introductions to the A&M campus more or less constituted the neccessary brainwashing to convince me and my sister to go to A&M. I remember being particularly impressed at eight years old to see that even the scoreboard of Kyle Field was a large building.

A&M went to the Cotton Bowl three years in a row, from 1986 to 1988, and we went to it one year, 1987 (the one out of the three where A&M lost). At this point in time, the Cotton Bowl was seen (if I recall correctly) as the Super Bowl of college football (in the south anyway). Somewhere along the line, the Cotton Bowl, as a bowl game (it’s also the name of the stadium in Dallas where it’s held) kinda went downhill. I don’t recall exactly when but it might have coincided with the neighboorhood the Cotton Bowl was in turning into a ghetto (or perhaps it was always that way).

In any event, at some point in time another thing happened – bowl games started getting sponsors. Like I said earlier this is all from memory, but suddenly one year it was no longer the “Cotton Bowl” it was the “Mobil Cotton Bowl”. Mobil has since sold the Cotton Bowl to Southwestern Bell, so it’s the “SBC Cotton Bowl Classic” (though I’m not sure when the “Classic” showed up). The “Sugar Bowl” is now the “Nokia Sugar Bowl”, and in 1998 A&M went to that while I was in the Aggie Band. Amusingly, the scoreboards in the stadium had some permanent ads for a different cell phone company, which were covered up during the game (we saw the original ads during a rehearsal).

Now I’m not some prude that thinks advertising is an evil thing, but it has given way to some embarassing gaffes in the past. The best one I can remember is the “IBM OS/2 Fiesta Bowl”, which showed commercials for OS/2 during the breaks. I just wonder what they were thinking – that the armchair quarterbacks of the world would change to something called OS/2 because they sponsored a bowl game? I mean, “IBM OS/2 Fiesta Bowl” just doesn’t roll off the tongue.

Now changing gears for a second, Texas A&M is simply put not doing so well in football this year. Apparently A&M had never lost at Kyle Field versus a conference team since they switched conferences to the Big 12 a few years back. They’ve lost four times at Kyle this year. And despite being the “Winningest Coach in A&M History”, fans are now calling for the head of R.C. Slocum on a stick. He’s like the Mariah Carey of football at this point. Popular consensus is that he’ll still have a job next year but short of a miraculous comeback that will be it for him. A&M got a new President this year and he apparently has a goal for A&M to become National Champions in three years. I wonder why no one thinks it might be the players’ fault that the team sucks. Apparently since A&M isn’t the “named school” for Texas (the University of Texas is), the best players don’t seek them out first.

But this past weekend A&M won a game at Kyle Field versus Oklahoma State. This wouldn’t be too significant, save for the fact that it helps Slocum hang on to his job a little longer, and the fact that Oklahoma State was the #1 ranked team in the country and A&M’s never beat a #1 team before. Now Oklahoma State can’t be the National Champions and A&M might go to a bowl game.

Dad explained it once to me how they determine the “National Champion” and now I don’t remember, but you basically have to be either #1 or be #2 at the end of the year and beat #1 or something like that. In any event, A&M hasn’t done it since 1939, and that was the only time they did.

But tying this back into the bowl theme, it used to be that there were only a few bowl games, and you only got to go to one if you were good that year. Now it’s like belts in wrestling – there’s a ton and now it seems as if the bad teams just go to the crap bowls. So since A&M wasn’t even in bowl running says something about how bad it was doing. Last year A&M wasn’t doing so bad but they went to a pretty bad bowl – the DiscountFurniture.com Bowl. Suffice it to say, it was embarrassing simply because of the name of the bowl. I don’t know if DiscountFurniture.com took over an existing bowl and ditched the name or if DiscountFurniture.com just didn’t bother with a “real” name, but it might as well have been a porn company sponsoring the bowl. In their defense, Discount Furniture is actually a chain of very big time furniture stores and not some fly by night dot-bomb.

But in any event, Saturday’s victory probably bought Slocum one more year of employment (at least).

Still, if A&M does go to a bowl game this year, let’s hope it’s not the FreeOnion-Loaf.org bowl in Minute Maid Park or some crap like that.

Chinese Democracy to be released in February. I’ll be very interested to see if lightning can strike twice…