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Oh, IA...you had one job ?

The personal things regarding JW themselves, especially the older stuff, are a different matter and a bit more actionable. Even so, it might be rather difficult to nail them for these, since a lot of the claims are very hard (or downright impossible) to both prove / disprove and there might be many legal avenues giving them wiggle room. Which is presumably why the actual case they're in still drags on? Anyway, I was referring to these nebulous claims regarding Athena's operations, which are written in a supremely vague language on purpose. There's no way you could possibly use any of this in court with success. Even the "5 years" claim could be easily dismissed with some tale about how they thought about it or worked on at home on their laptop, etc... It's not just them btw, it's the same meaningless language used on most corporate websites because it's safer this way (though at least they have something to show for it) and also for all other "projects" which are just wishful thinking or downright honeypots.

Yes, yes. But how can you sue this?

It's just more investor-baiting. Gazing at my crystal ball I can see that maybe they eventually will "reveal" something, and "work" on it for quite sometime, and that this something will be an absolutely piddling and at-best-average equivalent of gaming elevator muzak. But, hey, there is no law against posting mindbogglingly bombastic and fantastical claims regarding your "projects", so the grift goes on...

This is not really a good argument, because I wouldn't pay even 1$ for a baseball card or a Pokemon figurine, and yet there are people going gaga for these things, and I can understand that. Similarly, VHS was the first time video media became available to general public on a mass scale, and so these releases can also be important cultural artifacts, or collector's items for various reasons - the recording quality has nothing to do with it. The real problem is not with collecting itself (of anything), but with speculectors moving in and trying to artificially distort the market and profit from such shady moves.

*popcorn.gif* ?

Played it on MiSTer, great job. It's pretty wild. For some reason reminds me of old punk rock zines

Umm, yeah, of course I'm not going to trawl through multiple videos and scattered forum posts to hear what's rather obvious anyway (that it's a mess), and what could be summarized in a paragraph or two.

Fantastic! Any chance you could bundle them up in one package and upload to archive.org? That would both increase the exposure and made downloading much easier. Thank you!

Hi Chris, another "thanks for all the fish!" post. Apart from the obvious big guns such as EF or BoP, I also really appreciate the far-out brilliance of the Legacy Of Siboot. It was innovative titles like these that made me obsessed with the "computer games" style. It's funny to see your post here, seeing as I was recently reading your "The future of wargaming" article in the 1st issue of CGW, written no less than 41 years ago. Time flies, eh And quite prescient stuff too, seeing as most of these things came true (RTS genre, online gaming, next gen machine replacing both Apple/Atari - though who would've thunk back then it'd be a PC?)

I wouldn't call Eliza a game.

Happy Birthday!...from a die-hard Spectrum & Amiga fan I wasn't exactly a fan back in the day, and did my fair share of ribbing, but it was never malicious. Now it's all good, with 65XE & 1040STFM featuring prominently in my retro collection.

Jade from Beyond Good & Evil and D'Arcy Stern from Urban Chaos deserve a mention. The latter is another from my "seriously underappreciated" list. An interesting question could be who was the first ever female protagonist in videogames (including microcomputers)?

I hear you, but yeah, as we said the 480i has some sort of original value, and also this console is just a side interest for me so I'm not that bothered about the video output. Plus, I don't know anybody around here who could attempt to do it and I have zero soldering skills. I guess I could also look at forcing 240p via emulation on my crtemudriver PC. Nice find. Back in the day I was vehemently anti-FMV, probably with good reasons too, but now can enjoy these games quite a lot and aim to explore this genre much more. They have certain cheesy-funny charm, and some are even quite playable...

Are the ladies from these games actually playable? Off top of my head I can mention Battle Mania 1/2 (Genesis) and Cotton series STGs. Especially the former, as it's really fantastic yet fairly unknown.

It seemed like an investor honeypot from the get go. I don't even care about JW, that's what they have been doing for decades after all, but how on earth all these other, seemingly serious people allowed themselves to be associated with such a crummy operation?

There are no Windows drivers for it, only DOS. The manual says they're not needed for Windows and that the generic one should do. I did look anyway and couldn't find any, only a firmware update. Anyway, the case is closed since my laptop somehow resurrected itself and I was able to burn some discs today. I suppose getting that CDRW burner working in my old comp is doable, but it could be one of these rabbit holes where you spend 2 days looking for answers, and seeing as I don't really need it working now I'll leave it alone.

I just got a 3DO, Japanese FZ-1 model in a pretty good nick with one pad. Paid ~200 USD, not sure if it's a lot or not, but my main motive, like with all my recent purchases, is that these things are NOT going down in price anytime soon, if ever. So, baring some unfortunate accident, it's just a fun way of saving money. I quite like the machine itself, and it's really exciting to own this piece of history which I couldn't even dream of affording back then. Especially because it was such a wild, bombastic project. And it's got an interesting library of games too. I'm not gonna do any mods to it, currently using composite which I think is rather poor for a 1993 machine, but just ordered a S-Video cable and I'm pretty sure it'll be enough for my CRT. I'm somewhat skeptical of claims that 240p would look better, even if I prefer the original look since most of these games are not so imporatnt and/or might be FMV-heavy. The prices for various ODES really look ker-razy, so happy I'm not at all bothered by burning CDs. And big thanks to these guys for not making the life of future enthusiasts hard by employing some sort of protection.

Shouldn't be long now, methinks. Surprised it lasted 5 pages anyway, since it really is...

Yes, just back up your Folders first then copy and/or overwrite the one from the zip. Some people say that filter is "unreliable", I don't know. It might miss some games seeing as the selection is somewhat arbitrary and these lists change often. There might be another way of doing this using catver.ini from the same site. Also, there's this: https://arcade.mameworld.info/ ClrMamePro is a tool people use to filter and build/rebuild romsets accoring to official .dat files. It's quite powerful but also rather complicated and I've never really used it myself.

Get category.ini from here https://www.progettosnaps.net/index.php Extract the inis from there to your "Folders" dir in MAME. Then in MAME choose Category and one of the suboptions, preferably Arcade Working Clean. That's what I remeber (vaguely) doing some time ago, there might be more to it if you want to precisely fit your current set (probably need to rebuild with CLrMAMEPro) or apply more filters or some such.

So...finally, the mystery got solved. The problem was with the Flashrom board itself. I have a FinalGrom99 now, and it works fine with all the SD cards I've tried previously. Big thanks to @Hans23 for helping me out with this and selling me the FG99, which is otherwise unobtainium here in Europe. Now I can finally enjoy this exciting, and fairly rare here, vintage machine Got a question about a joystick. I understand that an adapter is needed. I can ask my cable-making guy to use this schematic and make me one, I'm just curious if it's okay to make it for one joystick only (ie not bother with the second male DB9)?

Thanks, but this is not about moving files, I do it with USB already. I've jut bought a 3DO console and would like to burn some games for it. And this PC is the only one I have with a working CDRW, seeing as my laptop just up and died few days ago. Of course, I know I can eventually do something else, like buy another burner or try to move this one to my other PC and see if it works, was just hoping there is some simple fix for the current situation. There is no reason why it shouldn't work in theory.

So, a long story short, I found myself in a situation where I need some CDs burned pronto, but only have a Win98 PC with CDRW drive to use. At first I was elated to remember that this machine has a CDRW drive, so I don't have to buy a new laptop/separate burner, but, predictably, I hit a snag instantly: ImgBurn does not see the drive as a write-capable machine, only as a "generic DVD ROM". The PC is P4 based, I have used it for some time as my DOS / older Win gaming machine. Works pretty much ok. The only question mark in Device Manager is some "PC Communication Device". The CDRW is Samsung SW-252F, have used it before to read CD roms no problem, it shows oks in Device Manager. I looked for drivers but their site says none are needed and that Windows one should be enough. I have installed the ASPI 4.7.1.2 driver and tried it with latest ImgBurn, also tried the 1.3.0 version of ImgBurn and Nero 6 Ultra - no dice. Posting here hoping somebody might have an idea on what I might be the problem...

I can't say I care much for these, because they are written from modern POV, which is quite often a very one-dimensional perspective. The authors of these reviews frequently dismiss old games without putting even a little effort in, with some theatrical exaggerations as an excuse. And in doing so they miss out on a wealth of interesting content and ideas, while being completely oblivious to a historical angle. Regarding text adventures, they had - and still have - a very strong fanbase, so while it's true that many have been lost, a great number has also been preserved. And many of them, even from lesser know authors or software houses, are really playable and brilliant too.