On my long list of things to do but gone in the limbo there was a page where I wanted to collect some detailed informations to configure all the japanese RPGs I used to love on the PSX and that are always not too simple to make work flawlessly on the emulators.

Well, it seems I don’t need to do that anymore. I just found out a brand new PSX emulator that is quite amazing (the version I’m using is the 1.2).

Till now every PSX emulator worked with complicated plug-ins that were rather hard to configure properly. This one is the siplest thing you can desire, no plug-ins or configurations at all. It works right away and better than everything out there. It’s great. And, in particular, it’s being actively developed, so it can only get better.

There are actually a few minor issues and things you need to sort out before being able to run games. To begin with you still need to find over the net the original PSX rom (SCPH1001.BIN – if you cannot find it over the net you can try with a filesharing program) and put it the “bios” directory, then you may have problem running the games from the CDs because the program requires a wnaspy32.dll file. Even this file shouldn’t be too hard to get if you see the program asking for it. I had a copy in a cd-burner program and I copied it directly on the emulator root directory and everything worked prefectly. There’s nothing else you need to figure out, if not configuring the controls, memory card and full screen resolution (the emu stutters if not in fullscreen).

The emulator works right away. The image is perfect, the sound is perfect and the full motion videos smooth as silk. No need to dig and mess with obscure options. Just load the CD and play. On my computer the CPU usage of the emu is INCREDIBLY LOW, something around 10% or less. So it should run smooth on every configuration without a problem.

I’ve tried it with various games that usually had many problems or quirks with the other emus. Chrono Cross works absolutely perfect, Legend of Mana is perfect, Metal Gear Solid is perfect, Vagrant Story has very minor problems with a few sounds (like the steps), Dragon Quest 7 has a minor problem with the interface not shading properly (some menus overlap), Valkyre Profile is perfect (and this one always had sound glitches with other emus that I was never able to sort out completely) and Breath of Fire 3 is perfect. I own nearly ALL RPGs that were out on the PSX so I’ll continue to run more test as I have time.

Other annoying general issues I encountered and that I hope will be solved in the next versions are the aspect ratio of the screen not set correctly in some games running in non-standard modes (for example Dragon Quest 7) and some configuration problems with the joypad that seem already know. If I try to configure my joypad with the support to the analogic sticks the game crashes, but it works ok if set it as a “normal pad”.

The emu also works with compressed CD images (.cdz), the program to create them is under the /util subdir.

Important note: The emu stutters and seems to run slow if you play in windowed mode. This isn’t because the hardware is not powerful enough since the CPU usage will always be rather low. If you switch in fullscreen (alt+Enter) the games should run smooth as silk.

It’s Monday, CAN YOU FEEL THE THRILL?

Signe:
HRose, your avatar series is creeping me out like that movie The Ring did. Can you please just tell me what happens at the end? Can you reassure me it can’t get out?

Fun with a webcam, part 2. No, I promise I won’t become a camwhore :)

What is odd is that the previous time I filtered the colors, while this time the images are taken “as is” from the webcam. It looks even crazier.

And next, the revolution.

I made also a black&white version.

My father brought home a webcam because he needs it for school, so I toyed with it for a while, making faces at it like a two years old. It was lots of fun.

So yes, that’s me.

I collected the rest of the pictures here. I’m sure many of you were waiting to use my face as your desktop wallpaper :D

Tomorrow the nekkid pics! (I’m joking!!)

I decided to interrupt the usual blathering to explain some of the “mysteries” surrounding the name of this site and the nicknames I use here and on the forums. There isn’t anything elaborate or secret and, no, HRose isn’t “horse” mispelled.

The Cesspit: This site is my “repository”, my memory, my virtual workroom. It’s really an idea of space that I then fill with whatever I need and where I pass my time to elaborate ideas and fantasize. The “cesspit” isn’t a negative reference against the mmorpg industry or a “definition of intentions” of a rant site. The term is actually auto-referential. It pertains me and my things. I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those chaotic persons. My room is a mess, but REALLY a mess. It’s really hard for me to make my way to the bed because my room is filled with stuff (mostly paper). It’s actually a nice room and it’s clean (beside some dust) but it’s still a chaos. A chaos that corresponds to a perfect order for me and where I find myself at ease. It’s like me surrounded by my interests and work-in-progress.

So for me the “cesspit” could be translated into “junk”. A bunch of stuff messed together. The images I used on the header of the site are taken from a black&white cheap japanese cyberpunk movie (Tetsuo) that focuses on this idea of junk. If you refresh the site you could see a guy nearly completely covered with scrap metal (or junk) at some point. That’s Tetsuo, the iron man. Which is also a principle: discovering value in what’s considered junk. The reality always need a point of view so that there can be a value. Poetry, in my definition, is a way to rediscover the value in some commonly used words (as opposed to use words that are rarely used). So there’s this sum between the two parts: the cultural interests and cues I receive from the internet, and my point of view. The ideas and revisions.

This is also referred to the possible readers, since this isn’t a private text file on my computer. This place is a collection of junk. Every kind of junk. It follows my interests and my ideas. It’s MEANT to be biased and absolutely subjective. This is why I didn’t want to “buy legitimacy” through a more friendly name. There is no purpose to write for an audience or buy the esteem of someone. I’m not trying to reply a Lum the Mad and create a “point of reference”. This is just a junk deposit. A window to my room. And yes, you can take what you like, if you find something you can use.

HRose: This is the nickname I started to use when I “migrated” to the american mmorpg community. The one I used before opening this site. Originally it was “Hunter Rose”. This is the real name that was then contracted into HRose. It’s a character by Matt Wagner. Maybe you know the mask, “Grendel”. Grendel is a comic book character that is the perfect concept of “alter-ego”. There isn’t just one Grendel, it’s more like a cult, a culture. So each time has its own Grendel. Hunter Rose was the first. The romantic anti-hero. Since I love Matt Wagner, the character and the idea that fits so well with the multiple identities of the online (and non) games, that’s the name I started to use, long ago, pretty much everywhere. Every character I created in the pen&paper games (well, beside “Stephan Scarsdale”, but that’s a story on its own) and computer RPGs had that name. It was contracted into “HRose” when I started playing the Q3A multiplayer, so the “roleplay” name was converted into a “tag” that was more appropriate. And then I started to use it more and more simply to have something recognizeable. Also because not every forum and game allows to set a name and surname.

Abalieno: This is the name I use on this site and it started with the site. The main reason is that HRose was giving bad ideas to people (like “horse” mispelled). Abalieno is a latin world (so my origin) that also fits with my personality. It means “enstrange” and it’s also near the actual english word: alien. It’s that word turned into a verb, to alien. So it has the meaning of “Stranger in a strange land”. Both because I write from somewhere else, in a language that is not my own and because people see me as strange and stranger in the real life. I don’t fit anywhere. I’m like a distorted note in the harmony of reality. I also look a little like Charles Manson when it was arrested, or the cover of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, just younger. Abalieno also means “insanus”, mad, insane. As you can see it’s really appropriate :)

Innsmouth: This is the name I use on this site to reply to the comments. Innsmouth is a city in Lovecraft’s mythology. Lovecraft is another of my old passions. In particular Lovecraft as a person, more than Lovecraft as a writer. The “nickname” was used becase the engine of the site asked to make two separate accounts. So it’s just the site admin, which is still myself. I use it because I’m logged in like that by default and I cannot change my name on the fly, without having to log out and relog as Abalieno. So it’s for practical reasons and the quirks of the engine.

Kadath: This is another city from Lovecraft mythology. I often use this in the mmorpgs, in particular when I play dwarves. I use this because Hunter Rose is usually not possible since most of these games only accept one name with no spaces. And neither “hunter” nor “rose” would be appropriate alone.

That’s it, all the mysteries are revealed :) As you can see it isn’t anything too odd.

To conclude, a note about anonymity. I would have no problem to post under my real name (you could also get my real name by looking up to who this site is registered). If I keep using aliases it’s exactly for the opposite reason: to be recognizeable. On the internet noone knows me under my real name. So I would be more anonymous using it instead of an alias. If I stick with these nicknames it’s because I started to use them along with everyone else and now I’m stuck with the habit.

Lum, this is for you.

I just read an interesting entry on Alice’s blog. It’s about a service in beta that will allow the users to save entire websites in a cache, so that you not only have an online bookmarking service, but also the pages saved locally. So that they remain there even if they got deleted.

The idea is a good one and Yahoo seems to have already a free service in beta without limits to what you save. I toyed with it for a while and it seems good enough but it has four crucial problems that don’t make is as useful as it could be:
– You cannot save a whole site all at once but only single pages.
– You can share the links with others, but not the links to the saved copies, so that feature is only available locally on your account.
– Still no media content available (images and such).
– The cached URLs, even in the case they were shareable, are insanely long.

It’s a shame, because I was really looking to start linking directly the cached pages instead of always have broken links everywhere on this site or on the forums.

The Hanzo:web service seems to solve all of these problems. It saves entire sites locally, it saves the media and it also seem to make all the content available publicly. But a free accounts will only allow to use a maximum of 100Mb of space. Then you’ll have to pay (and if I create different free accounts?).

I also don’t understand what they mean with 100Mb “per month”. The account says: “Your quota will be reset on the 1st of each month”. Does this mean that it’s cumulative? Will the archived pages be deleted after a set amount of time?

EDIT- Btw, it’s too late but I saved Lum (and still half broken since it doesn’t seem to go deeper than two pages *BAH*).

I just ordered Civ 4 and Dungeon Siege 2 from Play.com – I’m happy.

Why I bought DS2? Because I wanted to try the Ultima 5 remake on DS1. Some of the guys in the community are involved and from the word of mouth it seems rather good. Now this doesn’t have anything to do with DS2, but just now a game magazine in Italy is being sold with DS bundled. Perfect timing!

Now I never bought or tried DS. I *hated* Summoner and disliked basically everything about NWN (design, gameplay, graphic. It’s clunky and dull. I hated it all and I still love so much more the previous games from Bioware and Black Isle). I’m also one of the few that never felt so hot for Diablo 2. I find it straining (I only liked the mess-battles with zerg of enemies).

So I always considered DS a “lesser” clone to keep as far away as possible. Yesterday I got the magazine with DS so that I could play the Ultima remake (still downloading). I gave it a quick look… and loved it.

Yeah, it’s a simple game, it isn’t anything crazy. But it has a so good interface, and controls, and mechanics. This game is really good, simple but functional to what it wants to be. It lets you play and enjoy the flow. It doesn’t get in the way. It isn’t annoying or unresponsive. Smooth. Sleek. Polished and well planned.

I loved how in just a few minutes your character has so many patterns available, all accessible. So you don’t have to just choose a weapon and swing it till the boredom kicks in. Instead you can quickly swap between melee, ranged and spells. I loved how I could swap to the bow to take down the enemies running to me and then swap back to a mace to finish them off when they were close enough. I liked how smooth and functional are the controls and how everything you need is easily accessible and serviceable. It has the best layout/UI of the genre.

This is an “action rpg”. The purpose of an action rpg is exactly to be serviceable and let you play it. Enjoy the flow. It’s all about the execution and I find the execution in DS very good. The battles are fun and I just loved the graphic. The game is old but it still doesn’t look bad to me. In particular it looks SO MUCH BETTER than NWN. The woods are decent and not just a tiled texture along the borders and I loved the z-depth in some parts of the game and the variable height, while, on the other side, everything in NWN is so flat, featureless and generic. In DS you feel inside an environment, in NWN you feel inside a shoe box. It also doesn’t have all the annoying quirks of the NWN engine (which does a so bad work with the structures covering the visual). The animations are also so much better compared to those in NWN.

I fiddled with the editor and loved it too. Fuck the tilesets, here you can at least connect the terrain the way you like (it feels like playing Legos) instead of just pasting together generic areas that look like shit. I cannot even suffer the player-built modules in NWN because everything looks too much the same and plays always so horribly (there’s just no way to shrug off the dull mood and create something that doesn’t feel exactly the same. You have the dialogues and that’s it).

I really find DS so better under most of the aspects. It may be more superficial but I still wonder why the mod communities didn’t use it instead of that clunky NWN or, even worst, Morrowind. DS seems to have very solid basis. There’s some space to build on top of that and give it some more depth, if you want (then I don’t know how flexible it is, I’m curious to see how the Lazarus team modded it).

That pretty much explains why I suddenly went to order DS2. If it’s better, I want.

EDIT: The more I look into this the more I LOVE it. You can basically do everything you like with the game. From rebuilding the UI till messing directly with the DLLs. It’s wonderful.

If you are searching for a host do it now.

I’m not promoting them because I gain something from it (see the lack of referral in the link), but because they really went insane this time. I’m actually a bit worried about this. If I chose Dreamhost (that’s where this site is currently hosted) it’s more for the quality service and the professionalism than the sheer power. They do a wonderful work on the technical side, they use my preferred Linux distro (Debian) and update the services regularly (php and mysql, for example), with even the possibility to compile and use your own stuff if you are that leet. All this while still maintaining a very good uptime from my point of view. The technical support has always been also very good.

It’s always hard to judge those qualities because you need to have a direct experience to know about them, so the market is mostly driven by the sheer power, that also doesn’t equal with quality. Well, now Dreamhost is really blowing up. I’m on the Level 3 offer which is just insane right now, but even the first available is as crazy as it can be: $9.95 monthly (there’s the one-time setup fee though) for 1 *Terabyte* of bandwidth per month and 20 Gb of hard disk available. And it’s not even all because these will grow month by month till you remain subscribed (+8Gb of bandwidth and +160Mb hd). The other offers available just go through the roof, and they all applied this retroactively to all the accounts.

Now you can see why I am worried. I hope that this huge sell out is within their possibilities and that it won’t bring to a degrading, overall quality. For now it feels like Christmas and if I’ll ever have again the possibility to host some hot rumors or screenshots (like it happened two months ago with Blizzcon -now restored-, or last February with the nekkid warrior protest), I won’t have to worry about my bills growing all at the sudden.