The Spam Thread!

[RAMChYLD]

BTW, what GB/GBC Games do you have?

Only 2:
- Hamtaro 1 (J)
- Warioland 2 (J)

Warioland 2 was the Japanese version because back then Nintendo was still distributing the NTSC/J versions of their games and consoles in Malaysia- they only switched to the NTSC/UC versions in the mid-2000s after they found out the real reason people pirated their games here was because people in Malaysia want English games.

As for Hamtaro 1, I imported it out of curiosity. Needless to say I don't understand it at all. Nevermind that the game was a weird little title to begin with- some sort of love meter/compatibility meter thingamajig.

I used to have Pokemon Red as well, but I gave it away to my cousin a long time ago.

[huckleberrypie]

I've seen clones of the GBA being sold on video shops as well as game dealers that sell bootlegged warez releases. Most of them come in an SP clamshell form factor, and either come with embedded games or a microSD slot for ROM dumps.

Makes me wonder as to how'd they duplicate the functionality of the original hardware, but given that it runs on an ARM7TDMI, it wouldn't be that hard to mimic.

[RAMChYLD]

Makes me wonder as to how'd they duplicate the functionality of the original hardware, but given that it runs on an ARM7TDMI, it wouldn't be that hard to mimic.

Well, the GBA has a BIOS. Emulating the BIOS is usually the hardest part of it. The rest can just be remap of processor instructions like Wine in Linux.

[huckleberrypie]

Makes me wonder as to how'd they duplicate the functionality of the original hardware, but given that it runs on an ARM7TDMI, it wouldn't be that hard to mimic.

Well, the GBA has a BIOS. Emulating the BIOS is usually the hardest part of it. The rest can just be remap of processor instructions like Wine in Linux.

Probably, or you could just reverse-engineer it as what they did with most 8-bit processors back in the 80s.

EDIT: The K1 GBA site stated in their FAQ that their clones were reverse-engineered from the original system, but no other specifics were mentioned besides an SoC and a variable clock speed. They could be emulating the GBA rather than use a true hardware clone of it, like the ARM-powered Genesis TV games, but given that the ARM7TDMI seems trivial enough they could've licensed an IP core and tweaked it instead.

[cpd2009]

EDIT: The K1 GBA site stated in their FAQ that their clones were reverse-engineered from the original system, but no other specifics were mentioned besides an SoC and a variable clock speed. They could be emulating the GBA rather than use a true hardware clone of it, like the ARM-powered Genesis TV games, but given that the ARM7TDMI seems trivial enough they could've licensed an IP core and tweaked it instead.

Emulation is probably the best guess since the one in the video can't play GB or GBC games off a cartridge, and GBA games that have extra hardware like a tilt sensor don't work properly. You probably can play GB/GBC games via ROM dumps though.

And, yeah, I do have ARM-powered Genesis clones... two of them; one as a small plug-n-play console, and the other being a handheld. The sound emulation is very poor though... some games sound fine with the lower pitched sound but others become completely unlistenable, like "Rocket Knight Adventures". Good thing I do have a proper reverse-engineered Genesis clone at hand. However, my little handheld Genesis emulator accepts ROMs off an SD card, and I loaded it with Chinese original games and homebrews like "Squirrel King" and "Sonic Jam 6".

Here is another review of a similar device called a "Game Box", and it appears to run a very similar OS to the GBA clone. Fun fact: Later proper GBA clones were released in a similar form factor to the GBA SP and were called the "Game Box Advance". :lol:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogvEsLy8pVQ[/youtube]

[huckleberrypie]

Yeah, and from what it seems NES clones have been more or less becoming rare these days in favour of GBA clones or Allwinner/Rockchip-powered tablets.

[cpd2009]

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I never really complain about changes to any major website I use, be it YouTube or Facebook. But this may take the cake....

I can handle unskippable 15-second ads on YouTube fine, because, well, it's a streaming video site. But forcing Facebook users to sit through 15-second ads in their newsfeeds?

I already hate it when sites like Wikia think it's great to start playing a video advertisement with sound at full blast. Now, those wonderful ads may be making their way to your Facebook news feed.... three times a day.


I'm about this close to installing AdBlock in my browsers because I seem to be more subjected to intrusive forms of advertising than I have been in the past. I tend to hate banner ads that automatically expand open when you don't want them to, or vertical banners that slide in from the side as you read your news article. Even more annoying are those little DHTML boxes that beg you to take a survey, appearing right over the news article that you are trying to read.

Another kind of banner ad that I am increasingly loathing are ads made by some company called "Criteo". They make banner ads for HSN, which IMO is a great little home shopping channel. But their banner ads are designed to annoy you. After you visit HSN for awhile, these ads begin appearing on various sites you visit through the wonderful magic of cookie tracking. These ads showcase various products and their brief descriptions and prices, which is fine in it's own right. Where it get's annoying is these ads constantly flash the descriptions back and forth, or keep scrolling through a small gallery of products. And the animations don't stop. Never. This is highly distracting if you are trying to watch a video on a site with one of these ads sitting right next to your video. Going into full screen helps, but if the video is low quality, then full screen doesn't help either.

I also recently discovered a more hideous form of intrusive advertising... video ads that appear right in the middle of your news article you are trying to read. ExtremeTech is the worst offender of these kind of ads. You scroll down on any news article a little ways, and a video ad slides in out of nowhere pushing the rest of your article down the page!

And Pop-ups.... yeah. But I found a nifty pop-up blocker for Chrome that takes care of those. Too bad Safari's pop-up blocker isn't as good.


Why should people resort to using ad-blocking software just to get around these ads? Can intrusive advertising be regulated by law without going into full censorship?

Asking for federal regulation of any kind is horrible, I know, because we all know about SOPA. Any kind of federal regulation can lead to unnecessary or mistaken censorship. But these ads are becoming so annoying and intrusive... I just have to share my idea for regulating these ads.

*For starters, all auto-expanding banner ads should be outlawed from auto-expanding. Such ads can still appear on websites, but they should only expand if the user clicks on them.

*Secondly, video advertisements can still be allowed, but with the sound muted. There are already some video ads on the internet that play muted, but once in awhile, you come across one that starts playing bad techno music and you frantically start clicking on browser tabs to find where that bad techno music is coming from. YouTube should remain exempt from these rules, as well as other streaming video sites because at least we expect commercials there.

*Third, any animated Flash advertisements should only start running their animations if the user rolls their mouse over the ads. This will prevent the ads from being distracting to the user as he/she focuses on the content that she wants.

*And finally, outlaw intrusive ads that slide in the middle of news articles. I know that websites need advertising revenue to remain free, but are they becoming this desperate?


I hope these ideas don't sound too heavy handed, but advertisers need to know that pushing these types of ads in our faces won't give them new customers. They will drive most of them away....and they will probably install AdBlock. Then again... if such regulations are ever introduced in the halls of Congress, the advertising industry would probably freak out and file a federal lawsuit to stop them, or launch a massive campaign against it.

I sometimes long for the days of simple banner ads that were animated GIFs and didn't play any intrusive animation or music.

[RAMChYLD]

tired.

[Blackberry Bun]

2 weeks holiday because of Eid Al Fitr.

[RAMChYLD]

2 weeks holiday because of Eid Al Fitr.

I only get 4 days, and it only starts the day after tomorrow >.<

Although I took a day off today to get my car to the service center just to change the oil again. This will be the final time (the warranty clause requires me to have an authorized service center change the oil for me 3 times to remain valid), after this my dad will be changing the oil for me.