Like most of you, I have a few more computers and devices than the average person. Every few years they need to just be gutted and replaced. My media center PC aka HTPC has fallen off a cliff in terms of it's ability to keep up with modern high definition content and apps. I decided to do a performance analysis of the pre and post upgrade as well as reviewing the individual components while I upgrade. I will also throw in my somewhat outdated workstation for just an extra comparison.

I put this together as it's very entertaining for myself to have a record of this and I figured someone else might find it interesting. Also interestingly this is some of the hardware I've used to develop and test Project64.


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As you can tell from posts on this website I've been slowly working on Jnes since the last release almost two years ago. Unfortunately between other projects and a full work schedule Jnes usually doesn't get much of a time slice.

I decided a few months ago that it was time for another release as there was enough accumulated changes to start a release effort up again. This release has some really cool new stuff and also has a version number that reflects the maturity of the project. You can find a full changelog and release in the downloads section, here is the top three things

• Localization support
• Kaillera full screen chat
• Movie capturing

It's probably worth mentioning that this version no longer supports Windows 98/ME, I honestly stopped testing on that platform anyway. Over the coming weeks I plan on putting together the following things as well;

• Thumbnail packs for the rom browser
• documentation for the new features (like movies, etc)
• Translations to other languages

So make sure you check back for those things if you're interested. I'm looking for people to translate Jnes into other languages using the example message catalog in the ZIP file.


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One feature I've wanted to try for a while was recording movies with Jnes. With video sharing websites like YouTube so prevelant and accessible, this kind of feature is particularly meaningful these days. I decided to take a simple approach to this implementing this for the next version, similar to other emulators.

The feature breaks down into a recording mode that captures and initial jnes save state and subsequently records input at each frame to file. The playback mode can obviously then restore this movie and play it to the screen. While playing a movie back you can capture this to an AVI File using compression codecs such as XviD and DivX with audio.

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I've been looking to get a portable computer for a while now, but I couldn't find any that I thought would be worth the investiment in time and money. As you can guess I've completely disregarded the entire PDA scene as a little too geeky for my taste.

My view is you shouldn't always need to be behind a keyboard locked to your desk. It would be nice to have as many of the conveniences from your computer as possible in a nice device that doesn't frustrate you but becomes part of your daily life and facilitates more communication with your friends.

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I don't normally find hidden treasures on your typical game review website these days. It's a rare occasion when the content stands out above and beyond your typical screenshot description blurb about a game or series.

Like all good treasures, I stumbled across this first on YouTube when I was looking at Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess trailers. After watching a few Metroid episodes tho I knew this was too good to not share. Like most gamers, I have a deep appreciation for Metroid and Zelda series, even before watching these. These videos definitely helped fill in some blanks about timelines and stories, I think you'll enjoy it as well.

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One of the things I've ignored for quite a few years is allowing most of the user interface to be translatable (L10N to those in the biz). I decided a few weeks ago to get Jnes working in Unicode so I could play around with it and I got most of the user interface to allow external message catalogs, check out japanese.



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Introduction

I set out to answer that mythical question about the best way to do that infamous "DVD Backup" due to my facination with compression and home theatres. I thought it would be interesting to post some of the results I had encoding things, as well as sharing what settings I use and a little explanation behind it.

This blog isn't going to necessarily provide scientific analysis, it's my personal experience using the tools I have had good success with, and the settings I have found are realistic. Your mileage may vary and I'd love to hear from other people.

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I'm somewhat of a media center fan as well as video compression, if you couldn't tell. One of the great things about Quicktime is that they have a plethora of trailers in HD on Apple's website. mp4/h264 is the upcoming industry standard container/compression for content and from my experience really do a better job than Xvid/Avi.

My installation of Media Center 2005 couldn't view Quicktime .mov files or decode any mpeg4 content in the "My Videos" area. This creates an interesting problem -- how is one to view all these lovely trailers on their MCE boxes? These are the steps I had to take to get these problems solved, it's probably worth mentioning that this can vary based on what mpeg 2/4 decoder software you have installed (I use WinDVD), and you should probably have QuickTime installed as well if you intend on decoding that content.

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  Publisher: Shout! Factory
  Content: 1989, 570 Minutes
  Release: February 27th, 2007
  Discs: 4






About the show and this review

Captain N was a show many children watched in the late 1980's, when Nintendo ruled the world. It will come as no shock that being part of that generation means I have a special place for this particular series. Many fans have eagerly awaited the release of this, any others, on retail DVD.

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Jabosoft in general hasn't had a decent website for quite some time. Over the last several weeks I decided to write a custom content management system in php, this is the result of that. There is probably opportunities to make things a little nicer still, but I think this is a huge improvement over what I had originally.

The latest jnes release is now available for download on the site, the major new things are the cheats interface, the updated rom browser and better input device support. In the short term I'd like to issue a small update that fixes a few minor issues with this release, look for 0.6.1

This was released back in June, so I decided while I was reformatting some of the website to put this new version up. For those of you who haven't downloaded it from the message board, the most notable bugfixes in here are for windows 98 and netplay. The next release isn't due out for a while, this version is more or less stable enough to end the 0.5 series, stay tuned for the next release.

This a few links to some interviews I've done in the past

Interview At Retrogames.com
Pretty cool interview conducted with Opi of retrogames.com, topics discussed in regards to Jnes

Interview At Emulation64.com
More recent interview with Redah of emulation64.com includes co-author Zilmar of Project64

Interview at Emutastic!
Most recent interview by Gent, the man himself! Wide range of fun topics, fun read!

I see people are downloading old versions from this website, so I'm uploading the latest version that is on the message board for your convenience.