It’s spring time and like many people I’m sucking down air conditioning, but I decided to take a look at how one of my PC’s is using electricity like it’s an all you can eat buffet.
Here’s some information about my current HTPC that is relevant:
Intel Pentium Dual Core
Gigabyte/Intel G31 motherboard
GeForce 8400GS PCI Express
WD Caviar GP 750GB (variable RPM)
Windows Vista Home Premium
Runs all day
Windows Vista has a lot of new power options that are available for tweaking; after all it’s very cool to be green these days. Whether you are running a datacenter or using a laptop on a battery these settings can be an important way to get a handle on your power usage. Vista and 2008 server are definitely the best Windows platform for power management so far. This blog is a best effort to provide meaningful information for a technical person to evaluate power options, it’s by no means a definitive guide – and I’d like feedback.
Since the release last year I've been working when I could on fixing bugs that cropped up over the last few months to put out a subminor maintenance release. This release also includes all of the languages that have been submitted to me either here or on Emutalk, putting this package together was a bit of a challenge since I also wanted to keep track of who submitted what. I tried to squeeze as much into this release as practical so hopefully a few people will notice things they had been asking for.
As always want to take the opportunity to the thank my Beta Team, Gent for his never ending support as well as squall_leonhart and Iconoclast for staying with me as I tried to get these bugs fixed. At this point I'm pretty content with Jnes for the near term, my focus will be keeping it stable and probably trying to do some new things. If you haven't noticed Project64 has awaken again so I might dabble in that a tad, always something to be done eh.
E3 apparently showcased some Megaman 9 for WiiWare, the most impressive thing I took away from this is how accurate they stayed to the capabilities of the NES hardware in terms of using original graphics and making music.
I was a little shocked to read that a version of Megaman is coming out on WiiWare. According to the designers they want it to look and sound like an NES game, whether the game is actually written to be compatible with the NES hardware is another story we'll have to keep our eyes on, but it would seem unlikely. The bosses in the are your classic Megaman collection of randomness:
Magma Man, Galaxy Man, Jewel Man, Concrete Man, Hornet Man, Plug Man, Tornado Man, and Splash Woman.
Other information I skimmed from the Nintendo Power article says the designers are aiming pretty high, aka at Megaman 2 widely regarded as the best of the series on the NES. I'd say let's start with some more screenshots before we get ahead our selves. All in all tho, it's really cool Capcom is doing this, it goes to show though how much of a retro crowd is around enough to market something relatively obscure like this to.
Let's face it, there's been quite a few versions of Tecmo Bowl over the years but the original, and arguably best is on the NES. Following in tradition of Capcom remaking some of it's classic games, Recently Tecmo announced that a new incarnation is due out on the Nintendo DS titled Kickoff. From what IGN reported it's similar to the NES version in terms of play and content, which is is a good thing.
The best part is that it will take advantage of the DS wifi connection, so you can spank you friends in football from your couch on a Saturday morning. Sadly, since EA owns the license for NFL teams this will not feature real team names which is a real let down, no more Bo Jackson unless you add him yourself. Check out the preview below.
Like most of you, I have a few more computers and devices than the average person. Every few years they need to just be gutted and replaced. My media center PC aka HTPC has fallen off a cliff in terms of it's ability to keep up with modern high definition content and apps. I decided to do a performance analysis of the pre and post upgrade as well as reviewing the individual components while I upgrade. I will also throw in my somewhat outdated workstation for just an extra comparison.
I put this together as it's very entertaining for myself to have a record of this and I figured someone else might find it interesting. Also interestingly this is some of the hardware I've used to develop and test Project64.
As you can tell from posts on this website I've been slowly working on Jnes since the last release almost two years ago. Unfortunately between other projects and a full work schedule Jnes usually doesn't get much of a time slice.
I decided a few months ago that it was time for another release as there was enough accumulated changes to start a release effort up again. This release has some really cool new stuff and also has a version number that reflects the maturity of the project. You can find a full changelog and release in the downloads section, here is the top three things
Localization support
Kaillera full screen chat
Movie capturing
It's probably worth mentioning that this version no longer supports Windows 98/ME, I honestly stopped testing on that platform anyway. Over the coming weeks I plan on putting together the following things as well;
Thumbnail packs for the rom browser
documentation for the new features (like movies, etc)
Translations to other languages
So make sure you check back for those things if you're interested. I'm looking for people to translate Jnes into other languages using the example message catalog in the ZIP file.
One feature I've wanted to try for a while was recording movies with Jnes. With video sharing websites like YouTube so prevelant and accessible, this kind of feature is particularly meaningful these days. I decided to take a simple approach to this implementing this for the next version, similar to other emulators.
The feature breaks down into a recording mode that captures and initial jnes save state and subsequently records input at each frame to file. The playback mode can obviously then restore this movie and play it to the screen. While playing a movie back you can capture this to an AVI File using compression codecs such as XviD and DivX with audio.
I've been looking to get a portable computer for a while now, but I couldn't find any that I thought would be worth the investiment in time and money. As you can guess I've completely disregarded the entire PDA scene as a little too geeky for my taste.
My view is you shouldn't always need to be behind a keyboard locked to your desk. It would be nice to have as many of the conveniences from your computer as possible in a nice device that doesn't frustrate you but becomes part of your daily life and facilitates more communication with your friends.
I don't normally find hidden treasures on your typical game review website these days. It's a rare occasion when the content stands out above and beyond your typical screenshot description blurb about a game or series.
Like all good treasures, I stumbled across this first on YouTube when I was looking at Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess trailers. After watching a few Metroid episodes tho I knew this was too good to not share. Like most gamers, I have a deep appreciation for Metroid and Zelda series, even before watching these. These videos definitely helped fill in some blanks about timelines and stories, I think you'll enjoy it as well.
One of the things I've ignored for quite a few years is allowing most of the user interface to be translatable (L10N to those in the biz). I decided a few weeks ago to get Jnes working in Unicode so I could play around with it and I got most of the user interface to allow external message catalogs, check out japanese.
I set out to answer that mythical question about the best way to do that infamous "DVD Backup" due to my facination with compression and home theatres. I thought it would be interesting to post some of the results I had encoding things, as well as sharing what settings I use and a little explanation behind it.
This blog isn't going to necessarily provide scientific analysis, it's my personal experience using the tools I have had good success with, and the settings I have found are realistic. Your mileage may vary and I'd love to hear from other people.
I'm somewhat of a media center fan as well as video compression, if you couldn't tell. One of the great things about Quicktime is that they have a plethora of trailers in HD on Apple's website. mp4/h264 is the upcoming industry standard container/compression for content and from my experience really do a better job than Xvid/Avi.
My installation of Media Center 2005 couldn't view Quicktime .mov files or decode any mpeg4 content in the "My Videos" area. This creates an interesting problem -- how is one to view all these lovely trailers on their MCE boxes? These are the steps I had to take to get these problems solved, it's probably worth mentioning that this can vary based on what mpeg 2/4 decoder software you have installed (I use WinDVD), and you should probably have QuickTime installed as well if you intend on decoding that content.
Captain N was a show many children watched in the late 1980's, when Nintendo ruled the world. It will come as no shock that being part of that generation means I have a special place for this particular series. Many fans have eagerly awaited the release of this, any others, on retail DVD.
Jabosoft in general hasn't had a decent website for quite some time. Over the last several weeks I decided to write a custom content management system in php, this is the result of that. There is probably opportunities to make things a little nicer still, but I think this is a huge improvement over what I had originally.
The latest jnes release is now available for download on the site, the major new things are the cheats interface, the updated rom browser and better input device support.
In the short term I'd like to issue a small update that fixes a few minor issues with this release, look for 0.6.1
This was released back in June, so I decided while I was reformatting some of the website to put this new version up. For those of you who haven't downloaded it from the message board, the most notable bugfixes in here are for windows 98 and netplay.
The next release isn't due out for a while, this version is more or less stable enough to end the 0.5 series, stay tuned for the next release.
It’s spring time and like many people I’m sucking down air conditioning, but I decided to take a look at how one of my PC’s is using electricity like it’s an all you can eat buffet. 
Since the release last year I've been working when I could on fixing bugs that cropped up over the last few months to put out a subminor maintenance release. This release also includes all of the languages that have been submitted to me either here or on Emutalk, putting this package together was a bit of a challenge since I also wanted to keep track of who submitted what. I tried to squeeze as much into this release as practical so hopefully a few people will notice things they had been asking for.
I've been looking to get a portable computer for a while now, but I couldn't find any that I thought would be worth the investiment in time and money. As you can guess I've completely disregarded the entire PDA scene as a little too geeky for my taste.
I don't normally find hidden treasures on your typical game review website these days. It's a rare occasion when the content stands out above and beyond your typical screenshot description blurb about a game or series.
Publisher: 
