Frontiers

One of the joys of the Xbonio system is finding that stuff your old PC wasn't powerful for is now doable. And that is Elite: Dangerous. Did my first mining run today thanks to working out where the limpet drones are held. Advanced maintenance on stardocks, if you want 'em, they're about 100 CR each. And with fuel scoop and a basic refinery was able to harvest some silver and praseodymium Pro tip: get a better refinery set up. Otherwise you'll be seeing resources unallocated a lot, meaning you'll have to empty it, manually. 

I know there are guides out there which'll have you mining platinum and stuff, but its also fun just to rock up to a place with a hold full of limpets and see what you can blast out. Maybe take out a few pirates for combat practice, but they'll leave you alone if you holding nowt. Which leads me to this thought. 

Programmer Dave Lowe's music disks and programs that he worked on are being digitised on Archive.org which includes Frontier the predecessor of Elite: Dangerous. It struck me, looking at this how a 3DS port of this would be the ultimate version of this. 

Of course it would have touch screen inputs for the space station parts and revised combat so you don't have to do autopilot chicken with ships just to get a few hits in. But, as the New 3ds has dual analogue sticks you could use this for pitch and yaw along with shoulder buttons for thrusters. I know they used FFWD style controls to skip time. A predecessor of the Frame Shift Device in Dangerous, but the 3DS has enough buttons to make it halfway between Frontier and Dangerous. 

Finally, the only reason this is on 3DS is because you can view it in 3d thanks to the slider. I never put it on myself, but I can imagine this being quite cool. I'm pretty sure that due the 3DS being a weak follow up to the DS and coming at an awkward time in the industry, coupled with the fact that Frontier Developments still are a smallish company, that it was never considered. But I wouldn't mind seeing this as homebrew, nonetheless.

Edit. Now running a Cobra MKIII, decentish hold, and managed to find a place to mine Palladium like in the tutorial. Go for dinner, find out I'm being targeted by pirates and get killed. Respawn in Alpha somewhere and now have a barebones ship and no docking. But finally manage to land manually. Life can be a bitch sometimes.

3DS Stuff

Was going to talk about a Kew article I saw about decolonising botany, but really cannot be arsed. Better people have done a much better job than I ever could. Nothing needs decolonising, just more support for local people in the countries where those plants grow, oh and of course some cash to fund those parts.

No I'm going to talk about how I managed to hack my 3DS and a few notes about the guide to do it here.

I'm 90% there at the moment, gotta download the alt CFW and apply a few bits and pieces so an old flashcard can run again, but it's a lot less painful than doing the Vita, no command line fuckery for certain, just a long line of things adhere to.

So those notes then:

An easy way to get the ID0 folder number for Seedminer. As this is the first folder you should see when you double click on the Nintendo 3DS folder, open a file in notepad and right click on the ID0 folder and go to properties. You can then copy the folder name there and paste it into notebook. Typing it out will not work using some one else's ID0 file will not work. 

Later stages your DSiWare folder is officially called the Nintendo DSiWare folder.

Here is a picture explaining where it is (unless you've bought no DSiWare games then it does not exist and will have to be created). You can follow the guide as normal from now on.

Hope that helps out a bit.

Picross

I've been getting well into Picross recently.  You may know it under a load of different names but essentially it all boils down to using co ordinates to fill in a grid to make a picture. I'll explain how to do it below.

Pikachu I see you.

The numbers at the side state how many in a row or column there is to fill in so in a 10 by 10 grid if you see a 10 it means you can fill in the whole row. Numbers that are split (like 4 /5) have a space between them so you can fill in 4 spaces leave a space and fill in the rest.

Further rules come into play as if you have more than 6 spaces to fill in a row.  Instead of taking a guess on where they will be, count in the number you have from the edge and then put a cross at its furthest extent, do the same from the other side, finally fill the squares from the cross to the other cross including the squares with the crosses on.  If any of these are at an edge it will give you another chance to fill in some squares as it gives you a base to work from.  There are other better explanations for more advanced techniques out there but these are the basics and the built in tutorial is actually pretty good at explaining.

The downside of this apart from it being a freemium game and all that it entails, (limited energy for puzzling and move sets, pay for extra energy etc etc) is that what you are drawing isn't made clear, in fact I'll go as far as saying that unless you are a Pokemon and know intimately what it looks like from a blown up sprite, then you are going to be scratching your head quite a bit of the time.

It doesn't ruin it but then again it does make it bastard hard especially on the rare 20 by 15 grids.

In further news I've added a few PS3 games including Oblivion, Dark Souls 2 and the PS3 version of  Marvel V Capcom 3 which I played in HMV ages ago.  All that is moot though as I found out why its been chucked out, there are heatsink / GPU problems causing it to glitch like a bastard.  I'm of course going to get it fixed but if its not economical to do so then I won't bother.  Its the only reason why I didn't go all in last gen (that and always on internet connectivity), you can't rely on the hardware anymore.

More on Legend of Legacy

Happy Easter everyone, hope you had a lots of chocolate and not succumbed to the usual jesus bullshit that this time of year brings.  I'm a strict bunny and chick person no god here.

Anyway the heading promised more on Legend Of Legacy and i'll also talk more on an old PC I'm trying to resurrect.

Legend of Legacy actually has quite a few things in it not well explained, another legacy of its SaGa roots.  Magic can be awakened as well as skills kind of like the light bulb moment from the original SaGa.  I've only got this once so far and it sort of makes it permanent, so you don't need spirits to power it.  Another thing is running away what I call Benny Hilling, enemies will chase you and you can end up with a few following sort of like the old sketch but minus Yakety Sax playing in the background.

Its a real pain updating drivers, most of the driver updaters are actually pretty horrible and the driver sites out there are hardly any better. Most will download a malware ridden installer or offer a horrible driver checking experience.  Tweaking Hardware do a good offline checker that you can use to see whats installed and whats required to get it working so far I've managed to update the soundcard drivers for an old PC and get sound working but apart from that nothing.  We have an old Buffalo Wireless G Airstation dongle that really needs some drivers that aren't for XP but have no luck.  We want them for win 7 but no one seems to support them at all. 

Legend of Legacy Review.

A trip to Croydon and I've finally snagged this in the wild which is proving to be quite a nice little RPG, like every RPG on the 3DS its produced in minimal numbers so even if its not your thing its probably going to be a collectors piece especially the EU version.  Anyway on with the review.

Its, as I've mentioned, an RPG in the style of the SaGa games, notably the first SaGa Frontier for Playstation as both gave you a choice of 8 protagonists to play through.  It has a few bits and pieces in common with SaGa as well in its choices of stats and stuff, also in its difficulty too as its bastard hard.

You do not get LP like you would in SaGa but you have a max HP score instead and if you get knocked out then it gets reduced by an amount.  You can be revived by cure spells but unless you escape and go back to town your Max HP will not increase.  You don't get WP or JP here but SP instead which are used to power your weapon specific skills.  SaGa fans will be pleased to know that you can awaken and learn various skills in battle just as you would a normal SaGa game and I'm guessing that the spirit skills will yield up magic and stuff though I haven't sparked that yet.

I don't really know the names of any of the characters except my own which is called Liber and is a treasure hunter kid. His scene opens with him eating a whole bunch of stuff while a pal relates to him the story of the Star Graal and the newly arisen island of Avalon.  So far my party consists of healer woman (Eloise) who is genuinely useful (no really she's the only one who can heal at present) and knight guy (Meurs not to be confused with Ollie) who's handy with a shield, there is also a frog prince (Filmia) with a neat line in spear skills.

The main town of Avalon is also the only town, being as it is a gateway to the frontier.  After all cut scenes are through, you are dumped into a forest outside town with various shadowy things and a brief to complete the map and find stuff.  Soon you come to a scene where you can take a few exits and look at a few things in the landscape. We came to a rock that sparked a boss battle which we barely won against a giant bird, bosses here are tough, we are currently pushing our luck with a bastard of an elemental boss to the right of the main map and running from battle will only send you back to the entrance which is cool but annoying at the same time.

When completed the map can be sold on for cash much more than you'd get in battle.

With the elementals freed we can add water to some attacks which boil down to a minimal regen effect at the end of each round.  Sometimes you'll level up an old skill which is cool or awaken an old one as I've mentioned also you'll get stat boosts at the end of the round  and rarely an item or gold (st).

The graphics remind me of SaGa Frontier 2, they're 3D though but still have that nice pastel vibrancy that SaGa Frontier 2 is known for. Music seems nice and there is some speech to it but mostly I've been playing in a place with a lot of noise so not noticing much.

At present its a solid 7/10 from me.
Atlus / FuRyu main site here

New 3DS.

We've finally gone and done it and updated from our much beloved  DS Lite to a brand New 3DS.  It was going cheap in Cash Generator (£90) and as an early birthday present decided to snap it up at that price.

Was still shivery for a good hour later as its a lot for me to just buy stuff like that as its way out of my comfort zone, but it feels good to finally be part of this generation now.  First of all we have a generic charger bundled with it that does DS / PSP and DSi onwards.  What I didn't know was that they redesigned the charger port for DSi onwards so those with lite or the old fat DS's are out of luck when it comes to charging.

Secondly we decided to give it a test out of my old DS games, starting with Castelvania Portrait Of Ruin and working through various imports up until we tried our R4 to see if it would play Etrian Odyssey 3 or Pokemon Silver from the flash card and we got nowhere, which to be honest is to be expected.

Firmware is quite nice with a PSP style home button and 3d which gives me no problems but is switched off due to battery consumption.  I even went as far as making a Mii version of myself although I can't see myself adding it to anything.  Face raiders is horrifying as it ignored my mouth and proceeded to put another one in my chin, so I effectively shot at 2 mouthed freaks.

Finally we have Bravely Default 2 today which is really nice and feels like something that should be on a major console like a PS3 or 4.  You can use the analogue sticks to move in and the d pad to navigate the main menus.  Cart itself is white with an extra tab to prevent confusion with old DS games but so far, yeah this is nice, could do with the region locking being disabled which is still disgraceful for a handheld console but it gets my thumbs up so far.

Round up 2015

Haven't had to do one of these for a while but here are some updates to a few previous blog posts and news stories.

Avery Hill to close.

Been looking through the archives and I don't think I ever detailed my trip to Avery Hill in Eltham sometime in the autumn of last year.  I have an Inkling I did it years back when it was still under renovation but the Council can no longer afford to run it as it costs a million a year in upkeep.  There is a small story from the Greenwich Tories here as its the winter gardens that I'm most interested in as if you've been reading this blog for any length of time you'll know I love my cacti.

A big Bushman's Candle patch.

Assorted Cacti looking a bit barren.

News shopper laughingly calls it Elthams answer to Kew which is laughable as although it may match in size I found it underwhelming with mislabeled plants and general feeling of decay, like looking at a once loved seaside resort running into ruins.

3DS Emulation.

This is still in its primitive early stages so far, but this seems to be legit and not a virus or scam pusher site as previous links to "3DS Emulators" have all too often been.  Its called Citra and has its own github page, so far it plays a few commerical games very slowly and some homebrew (which may get a shot in the arm now the Smealums exploit is out in the wild), so don't get your hopes up for another year or 3.  See also PS3 emulator for PS3 emulation which is in a similarly advanced state (i.e some stuff goes in game and may run slightly better than a slideshow).

Gateway 3DS

This is probably the bestest thing evar to hit the 3DS a flash card that if its correct will see off the hated region lock that Nintendo* have lumbered the 3DS with.  There is a big list of questions here as well as a massive thread over at GBAtemp forum.

People are speculating that this is the beginning of piracy on the 3DS and to be honest it will be something I would warrant as I really don't fancy downloading anything from Nintendo's overpriced online Eshop. Especially since certain stuff will never, ever be officially on cart in Europe, Shin Megami Tensei 4 and a few other things that are deemed not commercially viable here.  To be honest this is what I use my PSP for playing back ups of  UMDs and rarely Emulation.  Would be great to see this scene explode on the 3DS, along with the inevitable NES / Spectrum Emulators maybe even get some emulators working.

The DS generation gave us Colours art package, Moonshell, Nitrotracker and a homebrew version of Tetris 3 the grand battle before it was pulled and disappeared into internet oblivion.  The 3DS is much more powerful and would love to see what could be made in the right hands.

*Until Nintendo update firmware that kills it off of course.  >;*)

Round up time.

Feeling better this week, last time I wasn't in a good place wishing death and misery on the ignorant and generally being a nasty bastard.  This week I have some round ups of something I've been wanting to do including a bit of Children's Channel news for those of you who are following (relax its nothing that exciting).

Scarfolk 2048.

If you've been living in a hole for the past 84 years you would know that  this is a thing sort of like Flappy Bird but without the inclusion of Super Mario's green pipes.  It is, at its heart, a sliding puzzle kinda like the ones where you have to put all the numbers in order but in this case it starts off empty and adds an extra tile when you move, when two tiles of the same type touch they morph into a higher number.  For instance if 2, 2 tiles touch, they will make a 4 tile.  The aim is to make 2048 and as a tile is added every time you move it becomes increasingly tricky.  When all the spaces are filled and you can't make any more numbers then the game is over.  Like Flappy bird I've already seen 8 bit ports of it including a Master System port a Spectrum version and of course a version for the trusty C64.

My high score is currently 7104. Can you do any better?

Air Assault.

One of the oddest things about reading about Mame development is that sometimes they throw up stuff that you've played but didn't realise was so rare.  Air Assault is a western conversion of  Fire Barrel, for ages it was housed in an egret cabinet in the Trocadero in Leicester Square, before it was shut down and everything sold off.  I can remember that this was a pretty tough game and that they wanted 50p a play when the norm was 30p a credit.  I also had no idea that it was so rare, that it was never dumped or included in mame, not until I read it on Haze's development blog.
Here is a system 16 link with more info and a warning about acid leakage on these types of boards (covers R Type Leo as well as a few others).

Telecat / Telechat.

Where as the previous two items are interesting this isn't so much fun.  Chriddof has posted a video containing audio from an old show from the Children's Channel, I can't place it but thanks to a link from some later posters, it looks familiar.  Especially the ostrich who had a right posh accent in English.

Oh god I remembered that this used to be on in the morning alongside Spoon Obasan and other bizarre anime on Sky.  They had a talking broom and a weedleish cat with his arm in a cast presenting a show.  I'm not sure if it had bizarre idents like False teeth from beyond the stars (it was the very excellent Round The Bend).  But I do have the idea that for some reason the broom caught alight one time making it fucking disturbing viewing, and the posh ostrich (Octavia) squawking away.  Relive your nightmares here in french.


Edit you were supposed to have an article about someones epic work on decapping the chips in a 3DS as a tribute to our lame Nintendogs April Fools but for some reason I just plum forgot about it.  Oh well have at thee with this.

Losing Neverland

We didn't realise until it was posted up on Siliconera but the company Neverland is going into liquidation.
Though mainly known for the Rune Factory series of games they also did the Lufia series for the SNES and later other systems, which I've never played but have been really well received (IIRC Superplay gave it 79%).  So with heavy heart its time to give the first 3 Rune Factories a good raking over.

Rune Factory.

The original but not the first Harvest Moon Spin off, and if you've played Harvest Moon you would be at home here.  Basically its Harvest Moon with combat and a few bits and pieces to add to it.  You can marry and have children just like Harvest moon and they will not do anything much here though later series will expand on this.

It still starts the same you turn up in some no mark village with amnesia and have to take over a plot of land to turn it around.  You'll gain tools by talking to people and have a small cave to explore at the end of your land.  Where it differs is  that there are generators in there that spawn monsters and your farm tools will deal damage as well as dropping items that can be used to craft more weapons and armour.  There are a few ladies to court and settle down with, theres no gender selection here though until  I think 4 and beating the first dungeon (Clemens cave) will give you a chance to take on other caves dotted around.

I haven't played this in ages and had IIRC Sickly Felicity from the store as my partner, though I could have had the girl who ran the bath house.  (Pro Tip: exploit the bath house you'll get back all your energy and it only costs 10 gold, you'll make that back easily selling random weeds).  I remember the vicar was a miserable cunt called Wesley, and that the fisherwoman Sabrina was a total lush, sadly not dateable they have a thing against milfs.  The kid in this Cecillia becomes a date option in Rune Factory 2 predictably she is a maid character.  

At a glance what is new here.
Many caves to defeat, though this would be reduced to 4 seasonal caves in later games.
Combat with recruitable creatures that could be sent to work on your farm.
Thats it

Rune Factory 2

This is a continuation of the story set in Alvarna, you still have amnesia and for some reason you are in a different part of the country.  Your dungeons have been reduced down to 4 and worse part until you settle down with a nice young lady, knock her up and more crucially build a school you won't actually be able to explore any of the dungeons fully (and only then as your offspring).  Incidentally you'll do the ultimate dead beat dad thing and bugger off a full two days after all those things are implemented (though those townsfolk saps still hold you in high esteem).  So with school built and lessons to go to your child can learn recipes for making things and due to some pretty harsh unlocks it'll take ages to level up and make the best weapons and food.  Our bride here was Yue a travelling merchant and cutie in a kimono, although we could of had wannabe teacher Mana or Cecillia one of the only recurring characters from the original Rune Factory.  I still haven't beaten this as the bosses are tough and it takes ages to do stuff, plus time really drags here and your day takes what seems like a week to pass.  This is the weakest in series definitely.

At a glance whats new here.
Reduced caves to fight in.
Generational story that lets your kids fight your battles for you.
Days that drag on for weeks.
Takes ages to actually cobble together anything for making.

Rune Factory 3

This is a more modern version and isn't really inspired by anything that went before.  You still have amnesia and you still get a plot of land  to cultivate, however this time you get the upgrades from the later Harvest Moon games.  This boils down to you can throw items without them disappearing and seeds only fill one plot of land rather than a 3x3 square.  You can also grow seeds that will grow into monsters that will help you out, we have a floating lillypad to help us get around and something that becomes a sword.  On the downside everyone without exception of the ginger bird on the box is a mental or shapeshifter of some description, (Spoiler as are you as it turns out, you can turn into a yellow sheep for no apparent reason, maybe its set in Wales.)

Your choices are limited to.
Ginger bird (Shara), reasonably normal has a little sister called Monica who is a brat.
Narcoleptic shop keepers daughter, wants to go to the big city but is too lazy to do anything.
Raven. Near mute weapons dealer.
Pia. Squid loving mermaid runs the bath.
Sakura. Reasonably normal girl that runs the junk shop.
Sophia. Opposite speaking daughter of fat bastard mayor Jasper.
Collette. Perpetually hungry daugher of the innkeeper.
Daria. Flaky artist who lives outside town. Really loves rainbows.
Marion. Runs the clinic and is basically Joseph Mengele in a fucking dress, always experimenting on Collete.
Carlos the fishermans daughter, a tomboy.
Finally they've spawned a village in desert that holds a village of monsters you can date their leader even though she has a horn. I've yet to pick a bride but will probably plump for the narcoleptic shopkeepers daughter out of consistency.
Edit we've married the narcoleptic shopkeepers daughter who promptly gets herself kidnapped.

Combat is much better here and they've tightened up the time issue from before now the clock ticks down even when you are in buildings.  You also learn stuff by eating recipe bread that the innkeeper bakes, which makes no sense but is a nice touch.

At a glance whats new.

Systems imported from later Harvest Moons, i.e. Throwing stuff, limited seed placement.
Your house is basically a great big tree.
Most of the women you can date are borderline psycho or shapeshifters.

Raum 102

We'll not lie to you this is going to be yet another round up of tat.  One in which we break the holy grail (mentioning work).

3DS.
A trip up town finally, got us a play on an actual 3DS.  All I can say is this, the 3D does work and yes there is a slider to make it more 3D or less.  To be honest all we played so far is Pilotwings in 3D, a nice little tech demo in which you use the flimsy Analogue stick to fly a plane around a town looking for rings to fly through.  The 3D bit makes it look like you are seeing right into the middle distance which is nice.  Other stuff noticed is that when you crash your pilot parachutes out of your compromised biplane.  Apart from that and the fact that the cunts have region locked it (inexcusable for any console let alone a handheld) its not a bad piece of kit.  Also my eyes did feel a bit funny afterwards though that could be due to an early start also.

Work features in an advert.

According to a workmate they have a new Virgin Holidays advert for Jamaica filmed around work.  Now don't get your hopes up, we do NOT work in Jamaica, the ad was filmed around here.  A guy came up to us while working and said that they were filming (we didn't ask what) and would his car be OK (yeah we have no clamping here.)  I haven't seen the ad but in true Amazon reviewer tradition its the most excellentist thing ever.