Zombeaver

I finished up The Technomancer over the weekend; ended up at 34.8 hours and I did basically every quest (except for the ones for the Vory, because they're a bunch of a-holes). I really enjoyed it - not perfect by any stretch but very enjoyable. It's got a cool setting, good characters and story, good character progression and crafting, and really fun combat. The only major complaint I have is that the side quests involve way too much backtracking through the same areas over and over, where you'll end up fighting the same respawning enemies over and over. It might not have been as bad had I not done every quest, but I don't think that's really an excuse - the content's there so there's no reason to let it slide just because it's optional. It didn't bother me too much at first but by the end of the game it starts to wear on you - I just kindof groaned "Welp...back to Ophir again I guess...". The ending's not amazing either - it's too abrupt as far as I'm concerned. I think what bothered me about it was that it kindof summarizes the ramifications of your decisions throughout the game (and not just the ones you made in the last 30 seconds, which I appreciated) but it doesn't really go into detail about what happens to your fellow party members afterwards, which frankly I would have found more interesting than the resolution to the actual overarching plot. It mentions a few of them briefly, but I felt like there was still a lot of stuff unresolved with them. Overall, I still enjoyed my time with it - I'd recommend it at a sale price. I got it for $17 on sale and don't regret it. GOG had the DLC for The Witcher 3 on sale recently so I picked those up. I put quite a few hours into The Witcher 3 last year (I was level 17) but never beat it. I decided this would be a good opportunity to just start over from scratch so that's what I've been playing - currently level 7. I really love that game - I just have the tendency of going full-bore OCD-must-do-everything-mode in these games and in a game the size of The Witcher 3 that's kindof an unhealthy approach, which led to burn-out last go round. I guess I'll have to do a better job of pacing myself this time.

Saw this post in the SKSE64 reddit thread and thought it was worth posting here. It's from 2 days ago (11/30) from behippo (one of the SKSE devs): "Alright - here is a smaller update than I was planning. A good deal more progress has been made. Since my last update I have done a first pass decoding of Spells, Magic Effects, References (TESObjectREFR, Actor, PlayerCharacter), ExtraData and the Inventory. I have successfully tested functions walking over the player's spells and printing out information about them. I have tested getting and setting various values on the Weapon class. I have decoded new information about Light objects (found while investigating magic effects.) Some of the corresponding papyrus functions do not work right out of the box and will need investigating. Some examples: Spell.GetMagickaCost() doesn't seem to be returning the expected value; Actor.SheatheWeapon() doesn't seem to be working. The first is likely a decoding error or scripting error on my part (or the costs really are that low). The second error calls directly into a virtual function on the Actor class which may mean the virtual table layout changed which will take more investigation. None of the Inventory code has been tested yet. So I didn't make enough progress to have a good enough set of interesting functions to do a demo video. I will work on that and hopefully will be at a point sometime next week. Brendan has been making progress on our plugin code and we may be able to show off a plugin in the video if the timing works out. No matter where things stand I'll do another update early next week." Glad to hear progress is being made!

Which is why I've never submitted actual delete requests on the DB when I've seen them - I realize that it's sortof a matter of personal taste. I just think it makes things look disjointed and mishmash so I don't keep them in my library. Here's some examples of what I was talking about: Batman (Genesis) Batman Forever (Genesis) Batman Forever: The Arcade Game (Saturn) Batman Forever: The Arcade Game is particularly hilarious given that one of them is from Batman Begins and the other looks like a screen capture from a VHS tape The other two have what is clearly just a generic Batman wallpaper that has nothing to do with the game itself. Again, it's a matter of personal taste, but if I had a "vote" it'd be for them to be game-specific.

Hell, in some cases I'd say we're doing good if it's even series specific. I've seen some stuff that's extremely questionable - like various Batman games having really generic Batman desktop-wallpaper-looking "fanart" or Alien games having what looks like promotional artwork from the movies... I delete this stuff from my personal library as soon as I see it. It seems to me that unless it's something that's actually associated with the specific game it shouldn't be accepted. Personally, I'd rather have no fanart at all than shoehorn in stuff that has little to no relation to the game itself.

Yep, if there's one universal rule for Steam Link, it's that you need to be using Xinput with everything. I bought one of these when I bought my Link. It's extremely handy. That is a useful tip though.

Wow, I honestly didn't even know that view existed. Chalk me up as another interested party in in-line editing and saved positions. For bulk-editing purposes that'd be killer. I'm a hopeless list/spreadsheet nerd myself...

MAMEUI works via Steam Link, that's what I use. I'm not sure how you have yours setup but Big Box needs to be added to Steam as a Non-Steam Application and then when you start the Link, you connect to the host in Big Picture mode, then start Big Box, launch your emulator; when you quit it'll drop you back to Big Box and when you quit Big Box it'll drop you back to Big Picture. One thing to note about MAME is that it doesn't accept simulated inputs which means that Launchbox's controller automation quit function doesn't work for it - you can, however, add in a custom combination of buttons (I use select + left bumper for example) to quit through MAME's own tab menu, and that will allow you to quit while running it over the Link. As to the crash, I'm not entirely sure what the issue would be. You might want to try enabling the "attempt to hide console window at startup" box in your emulator entry in Launchbox. That resolves some issues with Link streaming in some cases. It might also be an issue with the video mode setting that you're using - if it's set to D3D, try switching to OpenGL or vice versa. Those would be the first two things I'd try. If that doesn't resolve the issue, I can provide you with screenshots of various settings that I'm using when I get home tonight. EDIT: You could also try out the various MAME cores for RA since you've already got that working. Standalone MAME is generally better, but it's an option.

I definitely like that. Right now I have separate emulator entries for things like "Retroarch - Super Scope", "Retroarch - PSX Dual Analog" and one or two others. Being able to eliminate those would definitely be nice.

Unfortunately there's not a great way to do this currently. Your options are to either add them in one at a time manually via new (Ctrl + N I believe) or to drag them in in bulk, indicate that they're "roms", tell the importer that they're Windows games, choose an emulator (you have to choose one, but which one doesn't matter), and once the import is complete, select them all with Ctrl + A, and then bulk-edit the emulator field and blank it out. Scraping shouldn't be an issue either way though - we have Windows games in the DB. Now, whether or not a specific game is currently in that DB is another matter - that's a huge pool of games you're talking about so obviously there will be some gaps.

Nice. This has always felt awkward to me. I remember them mentioning that they were planning on doing this and it's a very welcome (and overdue) change. I hope this will help alleviate the mystery of some settings for people. Some of this stuff has been far too opaque for far too long. Too often you're relegated to either digging through forum posts for information or just experimenting and hoping that you can pinpoint the difference (which isn't always apparent). I'm not sure what I think of this yet. I guess I'll have to mess around with it to see. When I heard they were doing this a while back I was worried it was going to screw up some of my configs but after a bit of testing it didn't seem to, so that's a relief. Still, more experimentation is necessary. RA has always had an odd and arguably convoluted approach to this, so I just hope this doesn't make it worse. Neato! That sounds like a good change. I'm definitely looking forward to digging into this stuff once it's released as stable. Thanks for the info!

Both are awesome games! Elite Force 2 is actually really good too. Unfortunately neither one seems to be available anywhere digitally (I'm sure it's a licensing thing) so you're limited to physical copies currently It's really a shame because I'm sure there are groups that would love to re-release them. Night Dive Studios (the guys that port a lot of the older PC games that you'll see on GOG and Steam) worked for years to be able to re-release No One Lives Forever and No One Lives Forever 2, but it's tied up in license limbo so it's basically impossible. NOLF 2 is one of my favorite FPSs of all time (and the first one's great too). I think it's a complete shame that there are people that'll never get to play these because of this kind of nonsense I'm hanging on to my physical copies for dear life.

Yeah, I wish Xbox emulation was a thing. It's really not at the moment though. I check in on it at least once a year and there never seems to be any movement. I'd love to play Phantom Dust, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Breakdown, Otogi 1 and 2... without having to break out my OG Xbox Some of those work on a 360, but not all; and of the ones that work, not all work well. Phantom Dust has horrible slowdown on 360. Conker has some occasional graphics glitches. There's an English dub of Shenmue 2 for DC so that's something we can emulate at least

No problem! There are other options too, you just have to dig around a bit. Emumovies is certainly the easiest/least-time-consuming option, in no small part because it's integrated directly into Launchbox, but the alternatives aren't too troublesome.

Yes, I can't recommend the WHDLoad versions highly enough. That's really what the video was designed to be used with, though ADF games do work too - I have a number of games setup with ADF versions where a WHDLoad version isn't available. WHDLoad is significantly easier to deal with though and, like you said, significantly faster than ADF. In general it's just a much more hassle-free experience.

Most people around here would say it's a worthwhile investment. I don't do premium personally though. There are enough alternatives out there, between youtube and other sites that I just don't find it necessary. I have videos for basically everything in my library, though keep in mind that's only about 3000 games across 31 platforms (because I curate everything) Arcade Forever Youtube Arcade Punks Youtube MAME Video Snaps Youtube

There's a fix for that! I use it and it works great! Err... well maybe not then. That link is just a VBS script. You do see the emulator UI for a split second. It's really quick though.

I've been playing the hell out of The Technomancer. I picked it up 3 days ago in the Steam sale and have put 24 hours into it in that time haha. It, like the rest of Spiders' games, wasn't particularly well-received by critics but also like those games I've been having a blast with it. Spiders tends to make games that are flawed but full of heart and character. I've come to the conclusion that I just have a penchant for imperfect games whose good qualities vastly outshine the bad. Some of my favorite games of all time fall into that category - Anachronox, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Arx Fatalis, Gothic II, Stalker: Call of Pripyat, the Metro series... they all have some very real problems but are absolutely fantastic in spite of that. I'd put Spiders' games squarely into that category, and among their games I think The Technomancer is probably my favorite. If you like Bioware-esque choice and consequence RPGs, and you like science fiction with some interesting world-building and lore, you might want to check it out. It's the sort-of sequel to their game Mars: War Logs (which I also liked a lot) but I wouldn't say you have to play that game first - the plot isn't really related to that game, but there are some shared concepts between them (and, of course, they're both set on Mars).

I wish I could, but I just can't deal with the audio in some games in the DeSmuME core. The core dev was kindof a complete jerk about it too. He can call it "bad code" all he wants, it doesn't change the fact that it sounds like crap in his core and doesn't in standalone, period. Beyond the fact that it's pretty disrespectful to bad-mouth the person upon whose work you're building, it's especially egregious, as far as I'm concerned, if he's not going to actually address/improve upon the issue that he's complaining about. The resampler thing he mentions there is a complete non-answer too - the only way you can fix it with that is to drop the high frequencies so much that it sounds like it's being played about 50 feet away from you in a cave. After messing with that for a good hour, I just said screw it and have been using standalone which sounds fine.

Where a RA core is available, I prefer them for everything except for PSP, DS, DC, and in some cases 3DO. Oh, and MAME but that's for other reasons. Unless something drastic has changed recently, the PPSSPP core has never been on-par with standalone PPSSPP, both in terms of performance and stability. Audio quality in the DeSmuME core is complete garbage - and the issue isn't present in standalone DeSmuME. Reicast still isn't as good as Demul. Standalone 4DO has compatibility with some games like Crash n' Burn that don't work in the RA core (the ones that are compatible - which is most of them - I still use RA for though). Mednafen PSX was actually the motivating factor for me moving over to RA in the first place. I'd been a long-time ePSXe user, and had kindof just accepted the fact that some games like Jumping Flash 2 just weren't ever going to look right, and then found that they were perfect in Mednafen. PSX is my favorite platform of all time (well, it and C64) and once I made the switch from ePSXe to Mednafen I never looked back. I love the hell out of Mednafen.

This is covered in the video - it's in section 11. Pay attention to the part about adding the disk images. They need to be added to the floppy drive(s) to load from the start and added to the swapper in order to switch between them while it's running.

-fullscreen is the command line parameter for fullscreen mode with Hoxs64:

I use CCS64 myself. Hoxs64 and WinVice are good too but I prefer CCS64. It has a really nice feature called Maximum 1541 Speed that will automatically increase the emulation speed while data is loading and then drop it back down to normal once the load is complete. It's really really handy. CCS64 is pretty easy to setup too, and doesn't require any command line parameters to work with LB (although it does have some optional command line parameters that you can use if you so choose).