well i totally changed up the message board again. i mean i know no one posts on it but the sort of 90s-web-design-meets-80s-colour-scheme thing was starting to look less charmingly retro and more... shit. now hopefully less shit? maybe.
the super a'can is emulated! :O
seriously. in mess. (and about two weeks ago, i just feel like i should mention it here ... and i'll probably update my stupid super a'can temporary information page to reflect these developments too.)
three roms are available so far: boomzoo, super dragonforce and sonic dragon. boomzoo is completely playable and i can get to the menu before a battle in super dragonforce (it's probably possible to pass that bit, i just don't know what i'm doing), though both lack sound and have certain graphical glitches, and sonic dragon doesn't work at all. screenshots ahoy:
so yes! good times to be a fan of weird obscure old taiwanese game systems. speaking of which, maybe the gamate could be next? it won't be, but it could be.
it's 2010! the future! and somewhere near this site's 5th anniversary. sort of. i've completely lost every news post from its earliest incarnation (the one that seriously nobody visited, as opposed to the like three people and twelve spambots that visit this one) thanks to a knackered hard drive. okay, i do prefer to blame the hard drive, but honestly it's equally my fault - it just so happens that the drive broke right after i'd formatted it having forgotten to back up the directory containing the file in question. but still! i can estimate, based on timestamps and the like, that the site that would later become this one was created sometime in january of 2005, which conveniently means i can upload this 5th anniversary/2010 redesign thingy whenever i get around to finishing it. which is today! woo.
it looks a bit different in ie6 because that browser doesn't support transparent pngs properly, and although this design could almost certainly be achieved without them, no one's paying me to do this and i'm too lazy to sort it out. sorry! but if you have any thoughts or notice any problems in any browser newer than ie6 (or indeed any in ie6, since it should only look different, not broken) it'd be much appreciated if you left a comment or something.
Fucking SUNSOFT is back! I love Sunsoft. Although they never really went away. They were only hibernating; waiting for the right moment to re-emerge. And that moment is now! They've re-established a US publishing presence in association with Vic Ireland's Gaijinworks - which in itself sounds pretty excellent, even though I don't live there - but I'm pretty confident that the inevitable success of this venture will bring all the original Sunsoft developers back together to revive the Hebereke franchise as the definitive best thing ever and the global megahit it always should have been. There'll be a movie and everything, you mark my words.
i've updated the Gamate pages with a whole bunch of new stuff - new games, company info, PCB shots, and much (okay, a bit) more. so, check it out! if you like that sort of thing. and why wouldn't you?
comments are now displayed on the same page as the posts, and said page is now styled to look the front page. basically it's a bit less half-arsed than it was before (superficially anyway), when the comments system was bolted on from another site i abandoned years ago and the previous news post display thing was even older than that. so, if you have any comments, leave one. yes!
yes! an update! content! really! it's a look at what i'm calling the GM-95 Series, a series of unlicensed Taiwanese Mega Drive games claiming to be from a variety of different publishers (but mostly by the same related developers) with product numbers in the format "GM-95XXX". yknow, hence the name. it's been kicking around for a while, unfinished, but i kept finding stuff to add to it, then eventually decided i didn't like the colour scheme and changed all that up, and then added rounded corners which makes everything better but doesnt work in every browser. sorry IE and Opera users :( i still love you, just in a squarer way. ANYWAY enjoy it. up next: who knows?
french publisher DHM Interactive just came to my attention. their lineup is looking pretty awesome, from a "localising obscure japanese games"-kinda perspective. maybe i'm just biased because i love gen-san, but still.
see. as promised in the last update, i have indeed added an RSS feed. well, an Atom feed. (you may wish to note that if i were in fact using RSS, this post would have a title hilariously playing on the similarity between the acronym "RSS" and the word "arse"). but it seems to work and everything, what more could you want? actual content? possibly. said feed being added several years ago, when the rest of the internet was doing it? certainly. but it's there now, so enjoy it!
i doubt anyone (apart from the interminable spambots) visits it regularly enough to notice, but i've totally just upgraded the board software. to version 0.7 beta 2. that's right... 2. with this update comes the exciting promise that the user experience should be exactly the same, give or take a few things being maybe a few pixels off where they were before.
it's just a bit more flexible now, given that i have rewritten all the HTML in a manner more befitting something amateurishly slapped together this century rather than last. and yes it still works in (bloody) IE6.
(i swear to god i'm going to update with some actual content soon. maybe i'll add an RSS feed as well. just you wait.)