FF7 NES

Well I'm starting to warm to the new logins google have set up, for those blogger users who want to know were everything is, it can be found under Dashboard and then blogs weirdly enough, you just have to login.  I still hate broken old Google+ though and they're right cunts google for forcing it on us, as its broken and horrible, I'd rather use the old fashioned way of engaging (or not) with my subscribers via comments rather than the broken system they have now.

Anyway this isn't another google rant but rather a nice announcement instead. Lugia 2009 finally released his epic rework of  Final Fantasy 7 for the NES.  Lindblum (and a few others) did the original translation and hack of the Chinese original but left many of the maps and sprite artwork untouched.  This is a massive revamp along with new sprite work and scenes as well as some difficulty rebalancing as well. 

Much more information here complete with link to patches but no ROMS. 

The original game was a homebrew remake of the original game for the NES by the company Shenzhen Nanjing.  Its pretty strange as both its cart and board are unique running on Mapper 162 from one rom bank.  Wikipedia has a pretty good write up here if want more. I had a look on Bootleg Wikia but they've just used what was already on Wiki already.

Old geeks.

This is getting beyond a joke, I've spent most of an afternoon working in getting the Bearorbust youtube page into some sort of working order and failing at most steps.  God damn omniaccount my arse this is seriously shite I didn't want a google plus account and I certainly don't one foisted me just because Google can't give them away.

Anyway what I wanted to talk about this week is the end of Eltham branch, our cactus society.  I've posted before about our Christmas party (one of our first posts fact fans) when we still had the late Chris Moore as our treasurer shortly before he passed away.  It all started from a few things such as the terrible snows at the beginning of the year and a switch over of treasurers, meaning that our numbers dropped to an unsustainable level and continued to remain that way for the rest of the year, so much so that this christmas party is more like a wake than a celebration.  The only silver lining is that we will be joining Bromley branch in the new year over at Keston not that it is any easier to get to. 

So for our last ever slide show we were treated to a trip to Madagascar the massive island off of the coast of South Africa, home to lemurs, Chamaeleons but mainly succulents.  The guy doing the talk was a pretty awesome photographer and he was running a small slide show off of some of his spare images as the talk was done via laptop.  Madagascar itself was a revelation, a mix of crashing poverty and habitat destruciton combined with some startling endemic species.  He had a few shots of the aforementioned Lemurs and Chamaeleons creatures along with Baobab and Giraffe Weevils the beetle equivalent of a construction crane. What we came for were the succulents, and Madagascar doesn't disappoint.  They have a few species of Baobab, thick of trunk like some redwood sized bottle replete with stick nest branches and cannonball fruit, Alluaudia with its spiny trunk and  its graftable onto various species of cacti as its a distant relative.  There were also various euphorbias and Pachypodiums as the countryside changed from the (depleted) rainforests of the north to the dry arid areas of the south, via the mountain lands in the middle. Most odd of all there is a solitary species of cactus, a Rhipsalis that is the only endemic cactus to be outside the new world.  Its unknown how it reached there but Phil Maxwell thinks it could be a hold out from Cretaceous times from when Madagascar was part of the super continent Gondwana.

Its a fitting end to Eltham in that we held out so long but are now (soon to be) extinct.

Fred Flintstone PH fucking D.

Looks like caveman thinking is catching, the long hated renovation of Youtube (goodbye most of my subs videos) and  its forced adoptance of  Google Plus has come to pass, pissing off everyone I know and consolidating everything into one confusing mess.  You can't comment without it and even if you do it returns errors, Google plus is of course the Red headed stepchild of social networks.  Incidentally thats where I found my log in now as part of manage your blogs rather than going to your homepage (I did want to bugger off to Wordpress or even Tumblr before looking through this so if anyone else is in a similar situation check to see if it hasn't been borged into your Gmail log in).  Even worse I had a trip down to my aunts as she wanted to pick up a new car and I wanted to do some computer stuff (basically run virus and Malware scans and update everything) but it didn't turn out like that.

I wanted to shift across some home videos she has of my family onto DVD via a Videograbber that didn't really work at home.  She has an old dell PC that I've used in the past and I generally boot it up to play stuff via FBA and a few other emulators.  However this time when I booted it up I was met with an error message upon start up that a System32 file was corrupt and pressing r to repair it (can't remember it offhand).  She had long moved on to a small laptop with horrible track pad for email and Internet surfing so it wasn't a problem for her but I wanted to get to the root of it for old times sake.  I decided if windows wouldn't boot I would try Linux and download Mint to see if it would boot via CD. Short answer yes but wouldn't accept cinnamon at all, prefering to go into Fallback mode minus any log out options.  I decided to download Ubuntu and try that as well and it worked a little better but with various crashes, both times it refused to mount the main drive and gave back error messages to check it in windows. 

Finally I Decided to run some benchmarking tools including Dells own set of start up recovery stuff. Ubuntus own drive benchmarking and Seagate tools (for we found it was an old Maxtor drive) DOS start up disc.
The upshot is the drive was knackered and the only thing for it was to take it out and replace it.  Luckily it was never used for much I lost a song I was working on in Aodix and a few replaceable roms, All the photos on there I migrated across to a cd ages ago so nothing much was lost thank dog. 

Caveman days

Its finally come to this that Google have fucked around with the blogger template so that I can no longer log into this blog via Firefox and have to use Internet Explorer instead (I can't update this blog when I use my aunts PC so its nothing new).  To me it's akin owning a car and instead of filling up with petrol ripping out the engine and adding a coal boiler instead just because steam worked so well in the 19th century.  Truly prehistoric. 

Incidentally this is just what this post is largely about, cavemen thinking and outdated ideas being posed as some sort of brilliant new idea or solution, but to show them up for what it is prehistoric nonsense.

I've moaned about the gap between the age of consent and being able to star in porno before and didn't realize that there was a similar gap between smoking and being able to by tobacco products.
I don't smoke so don't really care much for it but when I was younger it was also something you could also do at 16 if you really wanted to die young of cancer. It wasn't until a young guy who works on our team asked if I could get some fags for him (we're English so it isn't what you were thinking) that I found out there was a big difference in the ages you are able to legally smoke and being able to buy your own fags.   

Then I found out that a few of the many filehosts have been blocked on certain ISPs here, Rapidlibrary for starters and Filecrop for hosting copyright material in a futile attempt to stop theft.  I suspect a VPN or tor would get round this but for now one of my favourite waste of time games has been taken down.

I call it the Rapidlibrary game. For this you will need to pick a word off of the top of  your head and enter it into the search box.

Next hit enter and check the last 10 search enquiries on you left and see which is the sickest porn you can see on that list.  You get no points at all just for doing this and never ever download anything you'll find on that list (most of its highly illegal).  Its just a fun diversion and also proves that most of the people searching on there are massive perverts.

Finally, M and M games have a new home in Croydon, moving out of their previously tiny place in the little arcade and into a much larger and nicer premesis out by Cash Converters. I was massively impressed by the amount of retro game stuff there including a shedload of Super Famicom carts (I clocked a Star Ocean and a few Romancing Sa.Gas loose as well as a few famicom games for good measure).  Makes me sad that my SNES went to its great graveyard in the sky ages ago, not that my Nihongo is any good.
Just proves that some old stuff is still good.