The Dreamcast was released almost exactly 25 years ago. That’s the difference between the end of Gerald Ford’s presidency (what would have been Nixon’s second term) to 9/11. So I don’t know what time warp you fell into.

In real time it’s been longer than it was from NES to Super NES. For the teenagers clearly doing most of the commenting on these Nintendo posts, they were in elementary or middle school at launch. Now they’re in college.

How can someone look at all these different styles, let alone the ones that literally look like they’re drawn by a six-year-old, and think, “Yeah, that’s fine”?

It’s all bad

Buy Astro Bot

Here are the salient details, minus the fluff:

The haul had an estimated value of €47.5m, Mr Langella said, a figure which includes the value of the consoles and hundreds of licenses for the pirated programs.

They were “all from China” and were imported to be sold in specialised shops or online, Mr Langella said.

All the devices were fitted with non-certified batteries and electrical circuits and did not meet EU technical or safety standards. The seized games have been destroyed.

Nine Italian nationals have been arrested and charged with trading in counterfeited goods. If found guilty, they face up to eight years in prison.

No, it’s up to Capcom to produce a product that people want to buy. That’s how markets work.

A coworker just told me he made an offer on a $1M house. I congratulated him, but privately I thought, “But how many years does this add to your date?”

When I pay off my house, I’m never moving again unless there’s absolutely no alternative (family size, etc.).

You can play just about anything via FPGA with the Analogue Pocket.

I can’t get the vibe of this movie. Is it “W” or is it “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Or, god forbid, “Reagan”?

Facebook offered him nearly a billion dollars personally. I don’t think many people would do something different there.

But I don’t think most people would go on to start a military subcontractor. Between that and his politics, he’s pretty shitty.

Facebook and Luckey both say they fired him for reasons that don’t have anything to do with politics, so there’s probably something else that makes him shitty that we don’t even know about.

The game looks cute. I’m sure it’s only like three hours of gameplay, but I decided to preorder a copy. Also picked up Dragonhym (nice art, and they claim 10-15 hours of gameplay) and Kudzu (fantastic music) while I was at it. My first modern Game Boy games.

There was a multi-year animated series on Netflix just a few years ago, and evidently it must still do well given this announcement.

the publishers note that a live-action Carmen Sandiego movie is also in the works at Netflix

What a voice, what a life. Sad to see him go.

No, they patented a plastic shell containing buttons which charge capacitive screens but do not rely on transference. In other words, they can be used with gloves or anything else that inhibits capacitive touch.

They cited about a zillion other patents for what you described: plastic cases with capacitive buttons (physical keyboard attachments, etc.).

This is a perfectly acceptable usage of the patent system.

Read it for yourself: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180275769A1/en?oq=20180275769

Incidentally, this company tries to cite their own patent:

PlayCase – U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 63/668,169 (filed on July 6, 2024)

But a provisional patent is not a patent. Depending on its claims and citations, it’ll be interesting to see whether or not it’s granted by the USPTO, but my money is on no.

They also use unlicensed trademarked images on their webpage.

It’s based entirely on the appendices from The Lord of the Rings, so for legal reasons anything that was in The Silmarillion but not the appendices had to be altered.

Reminds me of the commercial with the Turtles song

I haven’t watched the second season, but I remember more than one sigh during the first one. I really liked the costumes and decoration, but I just kept thinking, “Why did they need to tell this story?” I didn’t hate it, but I thought the entire exercise was pointless and unnecessary: apathy is worse than hate.

The question is rhetorical, of course. They couldn’t get ahold of the rights to the Silmarillion, and the machine hungers.

Yes, but it’s very unlike Nintendo to just do a hardware bump with similar form factor; the closest I can think of was DS to 3DS, and that added stereoscopic 3D. So I’d expect some kind of new feature to go with it.

CDs are particularly susceptible to this. DVDs far less so, and Blu-ray (modern games) will likely outlive all of us—if not stored in a shed.

Fortunately, ripping the games most at risk is usually quite easy.