I highly doubt it, there are moments where we get the upper advantage on U.S. releases(sadly cant think of example atm) still youd be suprise at the slight differences in some games japanese and us releases, final fight is a good example on subtle difference(such as blood coming out when you get shot), as well i hear the japanese version of shadows of the empire is better from reading an old gamefan artical.
On my 100th post I would like to congratulate you on this nice episode 6. Gotta love BitTorrent for sharing that . That last game reminds of Strider 2 for PSX. Hope you won't have any hardware problems again so we can have retrocore on April .
Really? What was better/different about it? SotE is one of my favorite games, I'd like to see if the Japanese version is different enough to be worth getting. As far as gaming advantages (stuff included here and cut in Japan), I can think of very few examples where the American/western audiences haven't gotten shortchanged. There's been a few occasions where a game is released here first (i.e. Metroid Prime/Prime II, but Retro is based out of Texas), but it's usually Japan with the first releases, the special editions, the goodies... And for the 32X discussion a while back, what about Kolibri? I absolutely love that game! And Virtua Fighter is pretty amazing, if for nothing else than being such a historical piece. And how can you NOT like Star Wars Arcade??
Retro Core Volume:7 is now available on BT from http://kedora.net/index.py?mod=channel&op=view&cid=27 or FTP from my server. FTP login details can be found at http://www.segagagadomain.com/retrocore.htm Yakumo
Great show, yet again Yakumo. was the date on mercs incorrect, i thoguht it said 1998? Also did you mean what you said at the end that retro core 8 would be out on april 10th...i.e. sunday?? Anyway, must get to bed, its 1:30....
watched it and must say this new format works good, especially the editing, but i was curious on this one you seemed alot more quite and your voiced seemed different, sick im guessing? Also was the screen flickering dark sometimes when virtua racing was shown from the game itself? Still it was a good show and i must admit the quality is very good considering the amount of time you have to make and edit this show, is by any chance the new format speeding up the process on how fast the show is made?
Oops, I made a mistake there with Mercs. I probably forgot to change it. Oh well. As for Retro Core 8, that's another mistake. It should have said May 10th :-( Yes, my voice does seem different on this video but it is me. I was feeling a bit stressed when making Vol.7 plus I used a real mic which probably made my voice sound different. The flikering screen on Virtual Racing was due to the custom lead (cable) I made so that I could do direct recording from the Mega Drive to the new Video card I bought. I think one of the wires came loose. As for the new style being faster to produce, well................. Filming is easier thanks to the new capture card running under XP (Cost bloody 18'000 yen) but I'm still having real trouble converting Flash to video. I noticed that it's near impossible to read the text on the flash sections. Also the show goes out of sync near the later half after Elevator Action but I know why that happened.... bloody MP3 audio :-( Volume 8 should be ready for May 10th. Yakumo
What capture card did you get? It better be good at the price! Is it an MPEG one or can it do any sort of AVI output too? And on the subject of outputting Flash to video, do have actual Macromedia Flash? That can export to AVI, but it's a bit picky to what colorspace you're using - I think you're best off just outputting from that as "uncompressed" video (it'll be RGB24 - it doesn't say that but that's what it is, I think), then encoding it to whatever you're using in VDub or whatever. And have you considered using Ogg Vorbis for audio instead of MP3? MP3's tend b0rk things up in videos, and Ogg Vorbis will compress better too. Don't suppose you know much about other video containers, like MP4, OGM and Matroska, as opposed to decrepit old AVI? They can make better use of space, so you can end up with a smaller filesize or more space for extra bitrate, and are much more efficient for seeking and stuff. I dunno how to make them though -_-
The video Card I got is by I.O. Data and called GV-MVP/RX2 It has a built in TV tuner plus loads of digital filters which means I get a far better TV image on my PC than the actual TV. It's also got a built in MPEG 2 encoder chip to save on the PC's CPU. I made a mistake on the price though, it was 15400 yen not 18000 yen. It's actually a very good card but due to my PC not having enough memory the image & sound are lagging by 1 second. I need to buy more memory. This isn't a problem if I'm coding something from the TV tuner or say something doing a rolling demo plugged in to the card. The problem comes when playing games. You see the image on the monitor 1 second after it's actually happened which makes playing games impossible. So I made a custom cable that will display the image on my TV and the monitor (via the capture card) at the same time. that way I play the game while looking at the TV while the capture card captures everything 1 second later. Sounds bit crazy really. I need to buy more memory for my PC to sort out the problem. Yakumo
Just watched the show...The different sound of your voice needed some getting used to the first few seconds i thought somebody else had done the game comments. Also..in some game reviews like darius..your voice can be barely heared over the games music and sound which made it quite hard to follow at times. these few things asside..i really enjoyed it like always..keep up the great work mate.
thanks for your comments SilverBolt. You may notice sometimes that my voice just cuts out. This is because I had the volume setting on the game too high. So when the game produced a loud sound like an explosion or something it actually cancels out my voice not just go over it. Very odd the way that happens. Still, better than vol.6 where each part of the show had a different volume :-D I'll get it right one day. Yakumo
I don't think it's a memory problem - it's a common issue with capture cards, especially ones with hardware MPEG encoding. A lack of memory would just lead to dropped frames Capture cards don't really need that much RAM anyway - it's only with software encoding when that gets really important. How much do you have, by the way? And good stuff with the custom video cables - I do that all the time! I made my own s-video cables for the PS2 and DC, just cutting a cheap s-video cable and using plugs (for the PS2/DC) from composite cables. Picture turned out kinda grainy though as the s-video cable was cheap unshielded crap (it's supposed to be 2 co-ax wires, not 4 crappy little wires!), but I'm gonna try it again with cable TV co-ax instead! ^_^ Are you using s-video cables, by the way? The improvement is quite amazing over composite. Due to the way capture cards work, s-video pretty much ends up being twice the quality of composite. This reminds me - I should download your video when I get home! Surely anything can play MP4 videos? Good point, but if people used decent players like Media Player Classic and BSPlayer they should be able to play MP4s, MKVs, OGMs or anything, pretty much.
So long as they've got the codec installed - and you really can't guarantee that. It's not the media player you've got to be worried about. I've not had much experience with MP4, although I do have some music files in that format that Winamp (5.something) refuses to play (mental note to self: find a decent alternative MP3 player)...
I didn't need any extra codecs with Media Player Classic. Actually, why would you need new codecs? MP4/OGM/whatever aren't codecs, they're containers - you can still put MPEG4 (i.e. XviD/DivX) video and wav/mp3/ogg/whatever audio. I think it's just a matter of your program having support for these more modern containers. Maybe Winamp's thinking those MP4s are video or something screwy? I still use Winamp for music too ^_^ - too lazy to change to anything new!
Sir, there's either something wrong with my machine, or something weird is going on, but I just couldn't read the letters in the intro - you know, the part about "E.A. Generic Crap" Other than that, the episode is great, as is usual with RetroCore.
Well yeah, but supporting the container is one thing, having the codec the container requires is another. Media Player Classic does not come with Divx/Xvid video stream support, nor Ogg Vorbis. I don't know, my Winamp's been giving me shit for some time now. Sometimes it plays files helium-style (ie pitch shifted up a bit), it never, ever organises files properly when I add them (ie orders the 5, 2, 1, 3, 4 etc), refuses to use the rear two of my speakers, and assorted other nonsense. I'm so close to deleting it and trying something else, it isn't 1997 any more and I shouldn't have to put up with this sort of bull. There's got to something better out there.
ah i see, still dont stress yourself on getting these done, its a free show after all(alot better then some of the crap thats been made before and on g4 as well), still cant wait for the next.
I just watched the first one and it's really great. Fantastic job Yakumo! I wish I could do something like that. I'm going to share them with my friends on another board, I'm sure they will like it too.
