Daeval

That's a good question. I'd imagine if the box was set up to not bother with region-encoding, then it probably wouldn't check the region on old games? Wild guess though, obviously.

Yeah, I'm not real worried about the sound card. The audigy still works, and my speakers haven't gotten any better, so meh. By "remaining parts" I meant stuff that was staying in the system. The only things being replaced: -P4 2.8 Northwood, 800MHz FSB, HT -2x256MB some really bitching 2-2-2 rated PC3200. It's some super-chip variety of mushkin black if I remember correctly. -ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe mobo -GeForce Ti4600

GI Joe on the C64 0wned. Defender, Jumpman Junior, and Choplifter also roxored the C64. NES - Megaman 2, Mike Tyson's Punch Out, Super Mario Bros 3. Contra was my first true console love on NES. SNES - Street Fighter 2, because the SNES and this game led to my love for fighters. Secret of Mana and FF2(US), ditto for RPGs. EVO, Ogre Battle, and Battleclash. Genesis - Jurrassic Park. I have no idea how I ever beat that game as a kid, but I loved it. Sonic 2 and 3, Virtua Fighter and Star Wars on the 32X. Arcade - Primal Rage, Fighting Vipers, and the 8-player version of the old X-men beat'emup. I whooped ass at the first two, and nothing annihilated social boundaries like 8 strangers beating on the blob.

Ok, I got a sudden increase in funding (via a trade-in deal with a friend), and the resulting rig is as follows: New Parts: Pentium D (775) 930 3.0GHz Presler ASUS 975X P5WD2-E Premium MSI GeForce 7800GTX 256MB 1GB (2x512) Crucial PC-5300 Ballistix Remaining Old Parts: Antec Sonata chassis 400W Enermax Low-Noise PSU 120GB Low-Noise Seagate Baraccuda NEC 16x Dual-Layer DVD-R Lite-On DVD-ROM Sound Blaster Audigy With the increase in funding, I decided to bypass the future SLI upgrade for the immediate GTX upgrade. I may also need a beefier PSU to handle the GTX, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I may have to find a 775 replacement for this baby, depending on how the stock cpu cooler sounds: http://www.nexustechnologyusa.com/c/ntusa/PHT-3600_1.html That thing was freaking silent and ran cool enough. Nexus makes a 775 cooler, but I can't find any reviews on it.

Ok, an anandtech review of the board said this about it: This seems to imply that you can pair up NVidia cards in the board, no? Am I missing something here? Edit: Ok nevermind, apparently SLI is on boards with NVidia's NForce chipset only. This is weaksauce. This means my choices are "Upgradeable with Conroe core chipsets and 800MHz RAM" OR "SLI"... Hmm.. I'm tempted towards the SLI.

Ok, so I'm planning a new rig (thanks Oblivion... ) for a tight budget and upgrade-ability. What I'm looking at: Intel Pentium D (775) 820 ASUS 975X P5WD2-E Premium BFG GeForce 7800GT OC 256MB You might notice that the mobo is rather fancy compared to the rest of the parts, and that's because I want to leave my upgrade options as wide open as possible on this box. I go the intel route because the fine gentleman who funds my college education works for intel, so the bias is sort of obligatory. Let's not waste time with that argument. Anyway, it's been a while since I've done this, and I had a few questions that I can't seem to find answers to... 1) RAM - how do I know it's compatible with my CPU? DDR2 comes in everything from 400MHz to 1000MHz. The mobo specs say it supports 800, 667 and 533. How do I know which of those my CPU will be compatible with? 2) Video Cards - The mobo boasts 2x PCIe x16 slots. I'm only looking at one video card for now, but does this mean I could get another of the same card later on and throw it in for uber performance? The board says it's ATI crossfire ready. It says nothing about SLI, which I think I've figured out is Nvidia's dual-gpu technology? Does this mean I can't get all wonder twins with Nvidia cards on this board? Thanks!

For anyone who was wondering.. no, it won't work on a GeForce 4 Ti. The card doesn't support "Pixel Shader 2.0" and so everything is shades of white. With enough acid this might be fun, but I didn't have that much on hand so I installed an FX 5200 that one of my roomates had lying around and now it should work. It's a damn shame though, my Ti4600 beat the pants off of everything for years, including this 5200, but its just missing that stupid pixel shader. It was the little card that could, man. It ran Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 without a hitch. When a man known for making 3d engines says a card will last you years, as Carmack did for this thing, he damn well means it. A eulogy for a video card. Update: For the record, no, the FX 5200 didn't cut it. Textures were shown, but you could measure the frames per second in seconds per frame. The funny thing is, the all-white version ran pretty smooth on the Ti4600. Ugh. Time for a new system.

What's your rig?

This is going to be the determining factor for my pc too. I'm hoping the 128 megs on my GeForce 4 Ti will save me, but I've already mentally constructed a new PC with a PCIe slot that I have no hope of affording just incase. I ordered the game already (since I will play it eventually, and I wanted the dvd collector's edition), but I won't be getting it until next week sometime. You other people with low specs let me know how (if) it runs for you.

An unhealthy amount of hotness.

Yeah, the 7800GT is a solid freaking card, as is the GTX version. One of those two is going to be in my next (hopefully soon) rig.

Don't cry about it too much. I've been waiting for this game since the first day I played Morrowind, and I'm going to have to run it on my ancient GeForce 4 Ti because I don't have the seven hundred dollars to replace everything in my computer just for a PCIe card.. The most irritating thing is that everything except the graphics card is as powerful as I really want it (top of the line old-gen parts), but because it's a socket 478 cpu I'd need to replace the mobo and the core just to get the slot I'd need for the expensive graphics upgrade. Ugh. The game looks like it's going to be great fun though, even in low-res. I've got my collectors dvd edition on order from Amazon. I figure the delay inherent in shipping will keep it from eating up all my study time for finals.

I saw River King briefly at E3, but was the last I've heard about it. It looks Harvest Moon-esque, which makes it worth a look. Time to find some reviews... Oh yeah, and Oblivion came out... and it's finals week...

That's the n00b song, literally the easiest song in the game, which was probably why you heard it so often. My roomates play this game just about every friday night with a group of largely non-gamer friends, and "I Love Rock 'n Roll" has been outlawed.

American tax dollars better not have gone toward the recovery and reattachment of that dude's schlong.

I still don't think what you're thinking will happen. I think what we will see is a selection of PS1 games that Sony has modified slightly to adapt to the PSPs controls. These games, as Sony stated, will be made available to download for some sort of fee. Your idea about a specially designed PC program that watermarks rips for play on the PSP sounds nice, but I doubt Sony will do it for a couple of reasons. One, someone will figure out a way to allow the program to rip and watermark burned copies of games, and Sony won't want that. Two, no money for Sony. It might help move more systems out the door, but the systems cost Sony money. So Sony would have to be confident that people buying the systems to play PS1 games will actually buy enough legit PSP games or accessories to give Sony a profit. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> omg, a well-thought-out conversation. What is going on around here? Well put. I wasn't implying that I actually thought all that would happen with this announcement though. I was just saying that there's already a precedent for backwards-compatability, and extending that to handhelds wouldn't be a huge leap if the technology was there. As you've pointed out, the technology isn't there at the moment. Most obviously, the hardware has the wrong number of buttons, making direct-emulation with ripped images entirely impractical, nevermind the potential piracy issues. I guess you could sum up what I intented to say like this: If Sony could let you play your PS1 games on a handheld without endangering their IPs, I think they would. Obviously that "if" condition isn't met at the moment, for a number of reasons. I think this not because I think Sony is kindhearted, but because the extended library would be the same good business it is on the home consoles.

I think you're probably right about the first part - they're probably not going to let people rip their own games. They may let people play their own PS1 games games though, with the right infrastructure.

the Basement? And yeah, Guitar Hero is pretty cool. Once you get over rocking out on a playskool guitar, it's a lot of fun, especially on the harder difficulties (you have to work your way up though or you'll die). There is quite a bit of "original" music as well, but you have to unlock it. There are probably as many indy bands you've never heard of as there are well-known songs on the tracklist, and most of them arent' half bad. One play-through on the normal difficulty should get you all the tracks unlocked.

Y'know, as long as they had a way to make them un-tradeable (like maybe a piece of pc-software that did the ripping and made a specially watermarked image or something), it wouldn't be such a surprising move for them to let you play your old PS1 games. They already let you play them on the PS2, and reportedly on the PS3, so except for the technical aspects, it's not that big a leap.

So I was looking for some info on Guitar Hero when I came accross this sillyness - How to turn a Guitar Hero controller into a midi instrument for "freestyle" play. Skip to the last paragraph for the interesting info: http://home.comcast.net/~jason.cecil/nerdstrument.html It's an obvious process now that I've seen it, and I'm kind of surprised I didn't hear about it sooner. Here it is in a nutshell: 1) Plug the Guitar Hero controller into the PC via a standard PS2-USB converter. 2) Nab a midi keyboard program. He recommends Bome's Mouse Keyboard, which is postcardware and worked for me. 3) Map the controller's buttons to keyboard keys via.. a program that does that. Anyway, I used JoyToKey instead of the key assignment program he recommends, since it's free. Here are a few JoyToKey configs I threw together while I was messing around, if you just want to skip to the messing around too: http://www.geocities.com/daeval_sx8/JoyToK...itarConfigs.zip I'm trying to think of what to use button 5 (the Star Power switch) for, but I don't know enough about the midi program to figure out something interesting. Now, go goof around!

I wish this article gave more info on the reasons for current unemployment and the details of the bill they're angry about. And there's always some idiot who thinks property damage is the best way to get a message accross. If you're going to get arrested for your cause, at least make it meaningful...

Agreed. To me, it feels like the filler episodes are written by the same people who write american cartoons these days. The other naruto stuff wasn't exactly amazingly deep or adult or anything, but it was much better than the filler to be sure.

Eh, that's a personal taste thing. People said the same thing about the Wind Waker and I thought that style was a refreshing change of pace for that series. Graphics are always subjective unless you're focused purely on technical aspects.

I run a linksys at home and it works fine, although I don't run any printers on it. You do have to reboot it once in a great while as Tynvar mentioned, but I've also heard that has to do with firmware and can be fixed with third party stuff (which I haven't tried).

The last time I checked; the series is still running even after three years! Are you sure the series ended? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I think he meant a metaphorical death. I haven't read the manga and even I can tell you that the filler episodes are dreaful compared to the rest of the series.