Pictured: One of Yoko's alternate costumes that I initially took for !mao-wave cosplay
A few days back I made a post where I asked if there was interest among Hexbear users to get together to play Resident Evil Outbreak on the Outbreak Resurrection fan server.
Turns out there was interest, probably enough to fill two lobbies, in fact. Now I'm just left wondering what the best way to co-ordinate times with other players would be. I guess Discord is the default these days but I imagine many folks here do not either want to use it in general or just don't want to give their usernames out to randos.
Feel free to make a suggestion
Yeah, you can play the game upscaled to any resolution you want and in widescreen, and it looks very nice (apart from the widescreen patch occasionally displaying stuff that was not intended to be seen):
The reason for the fan server only working with the Japanese versions of the games is because the JPN region servers were what the team behind the fan server managed to reverse engineer. The US and European server were killed in 2007 while Capcom kept the Japanese servers going on for 4 more years. There's actually a video about the creation of the fan server on Youtube.
I guess I don't need to sleep if its a weekend 
It is, actually. The wiki at obsrv.org has instructions on how to set things up on a real PS2 and in fact recommends it as the most stable option. Not sure if there would be load time shenanigans between a PS2's DVD read speed and emulators running on all sorts of different devices.
http://wiki.obsrv.org/index.php?n=Main.HomePage
It looks like you can also play on a PS3! Neat.
Note that you will need a way to run the patched Japanese isos at the very least, unless you have the original Japanese discs on hand and the region locking isn't an issue.
Remember that you don't need to hard mod your PS2 in this day and age with things like FreeMCBoot.
PCSX2 has a Linux version so you should be good to go. (Steam Deck users can play the games online too, in case any are reading this)
I think I saw someone mention somewhere that the Xbox port of PCSX2 works with online games including the Outbreak fan server, so maybe the Android version does too? 🤔
Edit: Looked into it and netplay was never implemented. It does indeed work on XBSX2 though, according to this post
I've been playing Outbreak, the semi-forgotten online PS2 co-op Resident Evil spinoff with friends recently and I've had a great time, but it'd be fun to play the games with others as well, especially now that I have some idea of what I'm supposed to be doing.
They're free, have low requirements (pretty much any semi-decent computer made in the last decade should run PCSX2 just fine) and you won't need to worry about exposing your Steam/Xbox/PSN/Nintendo username as you'd just be using a free Outbreak fan server account + an ingame alias and the game allows you to set up 3 different aliases per account.
There'd be no need for voice chat either if you want to have the classic PS2 Outbreak experience and rely on the ingame ad-lib system
You'd need
- PCSX2 (Windows, Linux, Mac), XBSX2, (On Xboxes with dev mode unlocked) a PS2 or a fat PS3
- Patched Japanese roms of Outbreak File 1 and 2 (easy to find)
- Memory card files with the required online settings files ( also easy to find)
- An obsrv account
Here is a tutorial video that goes over the setup process (for Windows). The memory cards mentioned above are linked in the description. Instead of patching the Japanese roms into English yourself, you can find them pre-patched on 💿Romance
And it's actually Mark that Kevin dislikes. Kevin's a great character mechanically, I just think it's funny that those Japanese devs, either intentionally or not, painted a very realistic picture of these characters relationships...
To be honest, I don't think Kevin's a particularly realistic-feeling rendition of an American cop. He's way too friendly and laid back, and he reminds me more of Dante than your typical 
, not that I'm complaining
Yoko's another great character for beginners. 8 inventory slots is a game changer in this game
Funnily enough, the two noobs in my group are Kevin and Yoko while the veteran is using characters like Jim and Alyssa.
If you're looking into setting up the games, this video's pretty good, but you can skip all the stuff about iso patching since CdRomance has the required English-patched Japanese isos ready to go. Honestly, waiting for the roms to download is probably the longest part in setting the game up:
I, uhh... kinda like Kevin since he's a very simple, noob-friendly character with his potshot ability, strong starting pistol, kick and good speed & health stats 
. Is Jim the one he dislikes? I know the two of them have a funny special ending in the final scenario in File 1
I never really got into the game that much because it felt lacking as an offline experience. 20 years later I'm finally enjoying it in co-op, and I encourage you to give the Resurrection server a shot if you still want that itch scratched. You could probably have both File 1 and 2 running in less than an hour. The hardest part would be finding people to play with, though I think you can look for people on the Outbreak Resurrection forums and Discord. Maybe there's enough RE fans on Hexbear to get a game going 
Kiss my ass bitch!!
You can even hear him say this in the video. Was that the Jim player actually using his ability? I didn't see what was happening so I thought he was just getting pummeled by the boss
Got some friends together to play through both Files and it's been a blast so far. If you like the old Resident Evils but never had a chance to play Outbreak online or if you did play it online and want to play it again I recommend checking out the fan server on a PS2 emulator.
I run out of shotgun ammo at around 0:30. Watch as I spend the next 20 seconds going to get some more but pick up the wrong box of ammo as I fiddle with the inventory !chefs-kiss
I had never really played Outbreak too much back in the day since it just didn't appeal to me as a single player experience even though I loved all the other Resident Evil games. As soon as I heard about the fan server I knew I had to try it out with some friends.
From what I understand the fans reverse-engineered the server by analyzing the packets the PS2 was sending out to the official game servers, not that I really know what that means 
It was just unbelievably cool to get to experience the PS2 online experience 20 years later and I have nothing but respect for the sorts of people who make things like emulation and fan servers possible 
Having done a couple of test runs with a few different friends, I can agree that yeah, the adlib system is cool... but I definitely wouldn't want to have to rely on it. If Capcom made a game like this today (which they won't since they seem to prefer failed live services like RE:Verse or that Resistance thing) a proximity chat system like in Lethal Company would probably be a good fit.
Resident Evil Outbreak File 1 and 2 were the last "classic" style RE games that came out before RE4. They were also multiplayer-focused online co-op games... on the PS2. In 2004. I said "still playable" in the title but honestly, even for people who were RE fans back then, it's probably more like "actually playable for the first time." The fan server is also definitely not some new thing- I think it's been around for like a decade at this point.
If you've ever wondered what it would be like to play an old school survival horror game online with friends, these are the games for you. They're also pretty hard though, even if you're someone who can breeze through every other game in the franchise.
The tutorial I linked goes over through this stuff as well, but you'll need the following to play:
- An account on the fan server forums (free)
Legitimate American and Japanese copies of both games, ripped to a PC so you can run the required patchers to patch the Japanese isos into Englishlol just kidding, just grab English-patched Japanese isos off the Internet- Memory Card files with the required online data on them (linked in video description)
- PCSX2. As long as your machine can run PCSX2 and has an internet connection, something like a Steam Deck should work fine too (you can also apparently play the game online using an actual PS2)
You'll probably also want to wrangle some friends to play the game with you, which in my experience is the hardest part !kitty-cri-texas
After I take the SATA cable out and put it back in: Just kidding I'm fine :)
Oh you little rascal you !Care-Comrade
spoiler
Don't worry, I moved all my data off that drive years ago. Not exactly sure why I keep it in my system !shrug-outta-hecks
Thankfully it looks that way. I was just disappointed it was once again something specific to AMD hardware.
Turns out some tracks in Mario Kart 8 don't play nice with AMD cards.
Another victory for us Radeon owners !yes-honey-left
Yes, both Ryujinx and Yuzu can do multiplayer by emulating the Switch's wireless functionality, though Yuzu's servers have been shut off for obvious reasons. You can still play online on Yuzu through Hamachi or similar though.
Other emulators also have multiplayer, several PS2 multiplayer games are playable on PCSX2 with community servers and there's an entire Xbox Live replacement service for the original Xbox.
Might be fun to mess with some multiplayer Switch emulation with Ryujinx 🤔
Somehow this plain family car makes perfect sense as a collaboration between huge German and Japanese corporations.
But it's not even a cool product placement car 
Well when I say Fortnite monetization, I also mean that the intent seems to be to also buy into existing licenses and throw a bunch of disparate IP together. It looks like they have Spongebob out the gate and plan to get characters based on streamers (ick)... but just to give an idea.
Not gonna lie, that sounds pretty grim
Monetization seems like another thing MK8D has over CTR:NF from the looks of it. From what I can tell MK8D only has simple DLC packs that add more tracks and characters where CTR:NF had a whole battle pass arrangement with the usual loads and loads of ugly skins and cosmetics. When I first unlocked all the DLC and Pit Stop content I went 
at all the ugly character recolors and distracting, animated skins that were suddenly populating my races. Oh cool, it's a green Neo Cortex whose tires leave behind rainbows
(not antinatalist, but do hate mk8d babies)
I don't care for them either. Mario and Luigi don't even have the same art style as their adult counterparts, looking like they're from some European comic book. I actually think the character selection is a bit lame overall in Mario Kart 8D. Maybe it's because I'm not a huge Nintendo head but so much of it is wasted on random generic Mario mooks who don't have much personality. Nintendo has so many franchises but the only ones represented here outside of Mario are Donkey Kong, Animal Crossing, F-Zero and Zelda. Where the fuck is Pokemon??? That's like an entire game's worth of track concepts right there.
There's a pc kart racer in development that looks promising called Oh Baby Kart. It doesn't look as bad as most PC kartracers, at least from early screens.
I probably wouldn't care about a kart racer without an established license even if it was good, sadly. It feels weirdly integral to the entire appeal of the genre
Certain recent events in the emulation space reminded me to emulate some more Switch games, so I got the Crash Team Racing remake since Activision never bothered to bring the game out on PC. Honestly it probably worked out better this way since I could get all the DLC and Season Pass shit unlocked for free !shrug-outta-hecks
Me and my friends wanted to play CTR online after we found out both Ryujinx and Yuzu had online multiplayer, but since they work by spoofing the Switch's wireless LAN connectivity and Activision couldn't be bothered to make a LAN mode for CTR:NF, we just downloaded Mario Kart instead.
After playing most of the tracks in single player to get my shader cache built for multiplayer and some test runs online, I have to say I kinda prefer Mario Kart's mechanics over CTR:NF's, and this is coming from someone who grew up playing the original CTR and never had Nintendo consoles.
I always found the timing of CTR's drifting and boost mechanics kind of finicky and annoying but in Mario Kart you literally just hold the drift button down to build boost and it feels really easy but satisfying to pull off. It also feels like the game is gently but firmly guiding you along even when you turn off all of the assistance features and that you'd have to be deliberately trying to get completely left behind. In comparison I find myself awkwardly reversing out of walls and corners in CTR:NF fairly often, usually after fucking up a powerslide !boohoo
I was about to say that it's not that bulky actually, but looking them up apparently the backbone part retracts completely on the Kishi v1. I assume there were probably issues with the cable in there breaking since that seems to be a problem with all of these collapsible controllers.
When I bought the BSP-D8 I also got a cheap Nintendo Switch case/bag for 3 bucks that just about fits the phone and controller. The old phone I use as an emulator handheld is pretty old, with a 5 inch display. If I used anything bigger I'd have to take the phone out of the controller and keep them separate in the case. Maybe there are other sorts of knockoff cases on AliExpress 
Kishi is a usb connect not a bluetooth though, so it can't really substitute for a PC controller.
I mean, with a long enough USB cable it's definitely usable on PC that way. In fact, when I used the BSP-D8 on PC I just used a cable since I didn't want to bother with Windows' bluetooth pairing process.
I've had my BSP-D8 (the black controller) for a couple of months now and overall I really like it. In terms of ergonomics and build quality it's a VAST improvement over the D3 (well, mostly) and I would highly recommend one if you're looking for a cheap but decent Bluetooth controller for your phone and can get it for 20-30 dollars or less.
I got my D3 (the red and blue controller on top) back in May last year to play emulators on an old Android phone and while it mostly did the job it was a pretty compromised experience. The sticks and face buttons are tiny, with the latter having sharp edges that combined with the aforementioned microscopic size made it feel like the buttons on a Tamagotchi or a pager or some other tiny gadget. Even worse, to ape the design of a Nintendo Switch, instead of a dpad they just had a second set of these awful buttons, making any kind of dpad-heavy games miserable to play. The shoulder buttons and triggers feel cheap and flimsy (the shoulder buttons especially) with all being incredibly mushy switches, meaning no analog trigger functionality whatsoever.
The company making these is a machine though and by November they had already put out four new controllers building on the original design, the D5, D6, D7 and D8. (No D4 because China). There's already a D9 and I think there's a D10 coming out. These are a bit more expensive though, with the D9 costing about 50 dollars when I checked.
Like I said, the D8 is a huge step up from the D3. This might be mostly because it's pretty much a direct clone of an existing, more expensive name brand phone controller instead of an original design. It feels like an Xbox controller in a telescopic form factor and is really nice to hold in your hands.
The sticks and face buttons are a standard Xbox form factor and feel perfectly fine to use. The back of the box says they're Hall Effect sticks which has apparently something to do with magnets and means they're less prone to develop stick drift. Hall Effect sticks seem to be all the rage now so that's cool I guess.
The triggers are actually analog on the D8 but are shaped more like the DualShock 4's L2 and R2 than Xbox triggers. They're okay and a huge improvement over the D3. The shoulders are the least improved part of the controller, still feeling a bit mushy, but they're still better than the D3.
Most importantly though, the controller has an actual dpad this time around. It's not the greatest dpad ever, with the directions bottoming out and pivoting oddly when fully pressed in but it's certainly enough to make platformers, etc playable and I even managed to play some fighting games with it.
There's a couple of things the D3 has over the D8 though. For starters, the D8's Start and Select placement sucks, with Select being placed above Start below the face buttons, making pressing both at the same time basically impossible. I have no clue why they didn't just copy the placement of the Start, Select and the power/menu buttons from their earlier models. The D8 also lacks the programmable back buttons the D3 has which is a shame.
The D8 does have a rumble feature which the D3 doesn't but it's so comically pathetic I don't think it adds much- not that I have been able to get it to work on in any of my emulators anyway.
As for build quality, the controller feels less cheap overall than the D3, though the print on the face buttons looks very crappy in person. My unit came with one flaw right of out of the box- when you rotate the left stick, it doesn't feel quite smooth with a small bump at about 10 o'clock. It doesn't seem to affect circularity in any gamepad tester I've tried but you can definitely feel it. I'm half tempted to open this thing and see what the stick is catching on but I'm afraid of breaking it.
As for connectivity, the D3 and D8 have several different Bluetooth modes they can boot into with different button combinations, with each one emulating different controllers, including Nintendo Switch and a standard Xinput Xbox controller. You can also plug it in via USB-C to use it wired with a PC or PS3/PS4. Each mode shows up as a separate controller which makes using it on multiple devices convenient.
All in all, as far as cheap Chinese knock-off devices go, the D8 is pretty decent and it feels good enough to use that I've even used it on my PC a couple of times which is something I can't say for the D3. If you are on the lookout for a phone controller for much less than the 60+ bucks the big name ones are going for and can find one for cheap (and are also willing to brave the chances of getting a dud) I highly recommend it.
In CTR's case I believe they weren't even strictly gated behind microtransactions, being also "earnable" but still requiring you to interact with an online component. Though I think the game also had a Battle Pass system which means some of the content was probably vaulted because that FOMO has to be leveraged.
With the whole Yuzu thing going on I decided it'd be a great time to acquire some more Switch games and finally tried the CTR remake after hoping for years a PC port would come out. Thank you Nintendo for allowing my PC dreams to come true !owl-wink
I don't know why but they completely fucked up the difficulty. I started playing Classic Adventure mode and spent over an hour trying to beat the second race in the game. I could swear the original wasn't this difficult so I jumped into that really quick and proceeded to beat the first three races in one try. Classic my ass !angery
As you can probably guess, the podium girls did not make it into the remake, which I remember hearing caused a lot of !pronounjak-rage at the time.
They were instead toned down and turned into unlockable racers. Turns out that they and the VAST majority of the game's other new characters are only available through some bullshit online shop which means they will become unattainable in a year or two. Luckily this was easily fixed with a couple of cheat files.
And I thought woodland mansions were gigantic
I hate always online licensing DRM schemes !cursed-woog
I presume the answer is "yes I can" but I just want to make sure I've got the process right.
The 240GB SSD I've got my Windows 10 installation on just turned 5 years old, and from what I understand 5-6 years is where they start to reach the end of their lifespan. Also, between my Windows install and modern game sizes 240GB is pretty tiny and I haven't been really been able to put much on it anyway.
The motherboard I upgraded to a year ago has two M.2 slots and I'm thinking of getting a 1TB NVMe drive and cloning my OS onto it. In 2022 I had trouble with faulty hardware corrupting Windows several times and during that time I made an AntiX boot device for troubleshooting that I've still got.
I assume the process would be
- Install M.2 drive
- Boot into AntiX
- Use the disk manager utility (can't remember what it was called) to clone the contents of the SATA SSD onto the M.2 drive
- Open BIOS and change the boot drive to the M.2
- Boot to Windows
Would the M.2 drive be recognised as the new C: drive or will Windows get confused and give me trouble?
!frothingfash >You can't eat me, I'm HERBERT MOON!!!!
John Marston just basically shrugged his shoulders when he got eaten !miyazaki-laugh
I'm enjoying Undead Nightmare so far. They didn't even attempt to take the premise seriously and it's essentially just Red Dead Redemption: Halloween Special. The moon's a sickly yellow color and there's black goats and vampire bats in place of normal animals
I completed the Xbox 360 version of Read Dead Redemption on Xenia Canary some months back with the only enhancements being a 60 FPS unlock patch (I don't think my rig ever really hit 60, in empty wilderness scenes I got around 40-55 FPS and in towns and heavy combat I got maybe 22-30) as well as some antialiasing and smoothing filters applied to hide jaggies since I didn't think my RX 6600 could've handled resolution upscaling.
I still have Undead Nightmare to beat, but the PS4 and Switch versions got announced while I was getting to the end of the main game, and now that they're out I'm wondering if I should try Switch emulation for the DLC.
I did some quick googling and it seems emulating the Switch version on RyujinX has better performance visuals and less graphics glitches than Xbox 360 emulation, but I'm not sure if my Ryzen 5 5600 and RX 6600 are enough to make it a better option than the 720p with unstable FPS and lighting glitches you get on Xenia.
It's got twice the capacity of the stock battery though! !soypoint-1
You have to love these small Chinese companies and the speed with which they come up with new controllers, emulator handhelds and other gadgets !rat-salute-2
These are a series of cheap (10-30 bucks depending on the seller and when you get them) Chinese Bluetooth controllers intended for use with phones and other mobile devices. The one I got was the D3 which I believe was the only model that was even available back in May, and it looked like this:
As you can see, it was very heavily inspired by the Switch, and that unfortunately extended to the dpad, or lack thereof. I've used it to play emulators on an Android phone and while it feels cheap, I've actually really liked it and my only real issue with it has been the horrible separated dpad. Trying to do any sort of diagonal movements on those tiny little round buttons has just made me map the dpad to the left joystick where applicable and made me avoid 2D platformers.
The last 3 models- D6, D7, and D8- have all had a proper dpad instead, with the D8 looking like the best controller design they've done yet. The reviews I found for it seemed to agree so I ended up ordering one from AliExpress' Black Friday sale. Apparently it has Hall Effect joysticks and analog triggers, but all I need is for the dpad to be actually passable this time around. Here's hoping I won't get a lemon🤞
Looking on Reddit it seems like these are all designed by one guy who posts videos on Douyin and he's already teased what the D9 is going to look like. While the D8 looks heavily inspired by Xbox controllers, the D9 looks to be even more heavily inspired by something else that recently came out:
Once again, you gotta love these Chinese companies, no shits given
So at the beginning of summer I repurposed an old Android phone into a dedicated emulator. The phone's old enough it has an honest to god user replaceable battery so I decided to get another one and keep it in my backpack to double my gaming time.
A few weeks later I got caught in a thunderstorm and got absolutely drenched head to toe. I got home and found the phone and bluetooth controller were just a bit damp but okay, but I completely forgot the spare battery until the next day when I discovered it still in my backpack and absolutely soaked. I dried it and left it to dry on a shelf, and noticed some bluish corrosion forming at the contacts the next day that I promptly scrubbed off. I noticed more corrosion a few more times in the following days, but it's now sat on that shelf since June and looks normal.
How bad of an idea would it be to put it in the phone and see if it still works or holds a charge?
Now, which one of these 999 save state slots was I using in my last session !cowboy-cri
Is there a way to toggle between save states you have saved or see them in a list instead of just trying different slots until you find the right one? I'm on Android
