quintin3265

To be exact, the number of FF6 remixes, not counting overclocked remixes, is 127, enough for about 10 projects I think an FF5 compo would be great. Don't get me wrong on that. But when a compo is dedicated to FF5, there is what economists call an "opportunity cost," or the time and money lost doing something when something else could be done instead. If remixers can produce 30 FF5 remixes in a month, then one presumes they could also produce 30 Tales series remixes in that month, and the Tales series has some good music that has not been remixed. Changing topics to the 24-bit discussion, I can definitely hear a difference in 24-bit music. This discussion actually came up at the VGMdb forums recently, and one of the points was that many people listen to remixes using poor-quality equipment: computers with integrated motherboard audio, cell phones, earbud headphones, and the like. You need better equipment, first of all. I listen on a 9.1 receiver and stream the audio using foobar2000 for the receiver to decode, so that the computer is out of the loop. But second, I think that many people don't realize that Windows defaults to 16-bit audio, and few people know how to change it. You need to right-click on the volume control icon in the taskbar, display the audio devices, click properties for the device you're using, and set the bit depth and sampling frequency higher. People who didn't make this change will never hear any difference because the output is always 16-bit by default. If you want to experiment with lossless and 24-bit video game remixes yourself, click on the banner in my signature and search for "djthesdotcom." Most of his music is 24-bit lossless. The MP3 versions of the songs are auto-converted from the exact same 24-bit files, so it's a fair comparison. You can be the judge of whether the bit depth is noticeable or not. I personally notice a slight difference. It's not like the difference you hear in Santana's "Shaman" DVD audio, but I attribute that to lack of knowledge in the video game community of 24-bit mastering, which will improve over time.

Personally, I think that 24-bit versions of remixes are more important than lossless versions. Properly compressed WMA 24/96 can be as little as 12-13MB per song, which is far less than a 16/44.1 FLAC. Most professional music is mixed at 24-bit, and most production programs provide the ability to render in 24-bit as well. Even if the original samples aren't 24-bit, there should still be some improvement when they are mixed together. FYI, I've been compiling statistics about remixes recently, as people were talking about final fantasy 5 - but I'm not sure we need more FF remixes. About 9% of all remixes I've identified from the remix community are of final fantasy 6 - alone. That's 1 in 11 remixes of any video game that's ever been published.

FYI, RAID 1 is simply a copy from one disk to another. All you're doing is having the operating system make the same changes to the second disk when changes are made to the first. RAID 5 and 6 have advantages, but don't use RAID 1. If you have an extra disk already, then just download a copy of "Karen's replicator," a free program. Buy an external case on eBay for $10 and connect it for 5 min/night (or 5 min/week), and run Karen's replicator, then unplug the drive. Simple backup is almost always better than RAID 1 because RAID 1 replicates deletions and viruses. The odds of human error causing data loss are higher than those of a single disk failing.

This is VERY IMPORTANT but is actually incorrect, or sort of. I made those letters big because few people realize the differences between RAID systems. There are three types of RAID: 1. Hardware RAID (Excellent): A PCI card that plugs into a motherboard, which the drives then connect to. The card takes care of all the RAID functions, even when the OS isn't booted. Windows 7 and older systems don't even detect that there are more than one disk behind the card. These are like mini-computers, with their own CPU and memory. To move drives to a different computer, you take out the card and drives, plug it into a new computer, and there is no change. You can go from Windows to a Mac or Mac to Linux with no issues. 2. Software RAID (OK, but Obsolete): Windows 7 or lower, or Windows 2008 R2 or lower, performs all the computations using the CPU. You can't use the drive outside of Windows, you can't boot from the drive, and it is slower because a percentage of the CPU is dedicated to performing computations. With Windows, as long as you take all drives to another computer, it recognizes the array in any order. 3. Firmware RAID (VERY BAD, AVOID AT ALL COSTS): Available on almost all motherboards nowadays. This segment has been taken over by Intel Matrix RAID. This is buggy and can be dependent on drive order and motherboard type and motherboard firmware version. There is metadata stored in the last sector of each disk, and if you change a few bytes, the array is marked as failed (even though no data is lost). The size of the disk reported to Windows is smaller than the actual size because the metadata sectors are removed. Using "3TB" disks from different manufacturers might not work because a "3TB" disk from Seagate might have 5860000000 sectors and a "3TB" disk from WD might have 586000125 sectors. Uses no less CPU than software RAID and cannot be optimized by the operating system. If the motherboard fails, the data is not lost, but you need to send out for data recovery, which is about $5000. The bottom line is that if you can afford it, buy hardware RAID. I spent $400 on a MegaRAID card, but it has had zero issues for six months - the data is worth more than that. If you can't afford hardware RAID, then buy a copy of Windows 8, which is only $39.99. Windows 8, which will be released in 26 days, has a brand new feature called "storage spaces," which replaces software RAID. It allows you to connect any number of disks, of any size, speed, and type, and allows you to specify the number of copies of parity data stored across the disks. You can create a storage space where one drive, or two drives, or zero drives (!) can fail before all the data on the array is lost. Windows performs automatic maintenance like consistency checks to ensure the data never gets corrupted. Conclusion: if you have money, hardware raid is the most reliable and is faster than one disk. If you don't, buy Windows 8 and suffer some speed penalty, but have working storage spaces that are compatible with any 8 or higher (or Server 2012 or higher) computer, and which are the next generation after RAID.

To those interested, I've now processed (exactly) 2,000 songs and posted them. I estimate that there are an additional 3,500 that have been created in the history of the video game remix community that I have yet to process. Some of those songs were posted on Overclocked ReMix, and I haven't decided what to do with those yet. While zircon has said to post them, the Internet doesn't need another copy of Overclocked ReMix's canon and that wasn't the purpose of going through all this music.

When you are considering hard drives for backup purposes, you need to be careful of issues, but you may be worrying about the wrong issues. Here's why. Between these three types of drives, it doesn't matter whether you use "green" or "black" or "blue" (but "red" is different, see below) for backups. All of these drives are differentiated by speed, price and power consumption, not by storage space. Thus, green drives are clearly superior to blue or black if we just consider those three, because speed is irrelevant for backups. What you need to worry about is something called an "unrecoverable read error," which tends to happen once in about every 10TB written to green/blue/black drives, which nowadays is unacceptably high. If you are backing up 2TB of data, for example, you have a 10% chance of 512 bytes (one sector) of that data being destroyed by corruption. These errors usually occur as the drives sit in storage over time, because cosmic rays and magnetic fields slowly eat away at the data. I have two zip files from 1997 that I just discovered had succumbed to this error at some point. A one-in-ten-trillion shot sounds like no big deal, but this is a serious issue because if you are backing up huge files, like a 30GB mail inbox, one byte out of order can destroy all the E-Mail. The issue is made worse by the issues of compression and encryption. Encrypted files are stored out of order, and sometimes the next block of data depends on the previous block of data being able to be successfully decrypted. If you encrypt or compress a hard drive, and then it develops an unrecoverable read error, all of the data on the drive can be lost. There are two solutions to this problem: you can buy "enterprise grade" hard drives, such as Seagate Constellations, which are ten times less likely to develop the issue and far faster than standard desktop-grade drives - but they cost twice as much as desktop drives. The second solution is that, every month, you run a program that reads every single byte of every backup drive and compares it to the original. Since unrecoverable read errors are more likely to occur when bytes haven't been read for a long time, reading frequently reduces their likelihood. Myself, I have 12TB in a RAID 6. Every fourth Saturday and Sunday, I retrieve four cheap 3TB green drives from work and synchronize them to the main array, and then have the computer verify every byte on all backup drives. But if you don't have a RAID, and you are just copying one drive to another, you don't have that initial redundancy from the RAID. In that case, consider buying an enterprise-grade drive to use as your main drive (since it will be fast, and those drives rarely fail), using the current cheap drive as the backup for an absolute last resort, and reading every file from the backup drive when you perform a backup. Most likely, the enterprise drive will never fail and the desktop drive will be more useful in the case you get infected with a virus. Note: this solution is expensive. It will likely cost $200. Keep in mind that data recovery is more expensive, and desktop drives are failure-prone. Believe it or not, I had one of the desktop drives fail WHILE IT WAS MAKING A BACKUP - and Kroll Ontrack wanted $6,000 to recover it. I was able to do it myself by teaching myself about NTFS from the ground up, losing four entire Saturdays and Sundays and still paying $1,700. Remember, people think nothing of paying $500-1000/yr for expensive cameras or cell phone service with cameras and videos - and then after ten years, they place their $10,000 worth of videos on a $50 backup drive (if they back up at all) and wonder why they lost all the pictures.

The issue with receivers did used to be a problem in the past, but with modern receivers, it is no longer a barrier. Almost any receiver sold after 2008 supports HDMI input, which can take 7.1/24/96 in raw PCM. HDMI 1.4a can take 3D along with Master Audio or TrueHD. Even low-end $200 models now include these features. I have a PC running Windows 8 connected to an Onkyo TX-NR1009 and it works great. I can play DVD-Audio discs and watch 3D movies no problem. The only issue is that you need to buy something called an "HDMI detective," or else AMD's and Nvidia's drivers reset the display when you turn the TV off. If you want the PC to run all the time to host a server for web development, as I do, you need to buy one of these devices so that you don't have to restart every time you turn on the TV.

I think that the reason split-screen has gone downhill is because it wasn't that good of an idea to begin with. It sounds like a great idea in theory, but it's nearly impossible to get four people together to play a game for even half an hour without someone getting bored or getting distracted by his phone or leaving. Has anyone on this thread been able to get people together to play a splitscreen game together in the last ten years, outside of giant venues like MAGfest? The Internet replaced split-screen because it was a better solution from the start. You don't have to worry about coordinating schedules because there is always someone available to take over if someone quits.

There's a great article on the Internet about Target's marketing practices. They did some research and determined that there are "life events" where people change their buying habits and are willing to try new brands; otherwise, it is difficult to get people to change brands. Two of these life events are moving to a new city and pregnancy. Their algorithms at predicting pregnancy got so good that they saturated teenagers with marketing materials based on their purchasing habits when the algorithm predicted these kids were pregnant. These teenagers' parents threatened to sue - that is, until they found out that their kids actually were pregnant. I'd wager that the Ouya will face a similar dilemma. These people who haven't picked up the Wii since they beat Mario are people who bought the Wii solely for Mario. They played Mario because they know that all 20 or 30 iterations of Mario have been generally good games, and now they're in their 40s still playing the games they were introduced to as teenagers. These people are not willing to change consoles without a significant life event, like getting married or having kids, changes their financial statuses or opens their minds to new possibilities. The real market for the Ouya is going to be limited to young people, who don't have preferences made up yet, and to developers. Developers aren't going to be buying others' games, because they are programming their own, so we ignore them here. And I think that with the young people, playing video games is going out of fashion. The bored 15-year-old nowadays doesn't go home and play video games like the 15-year-old did 15 years ago; now, the 15-year-old goes home and does "social networking" on facebook and by sending text messages. People are missing that the Ouya isn't competing against other consoles. The older market is set, and in the younger market they're competing against things like text messaging. At an incredible 1300 (!) text messages a month, the low-income, young, most open-minded market is too preoccupied by "social" activities to play games on the Ouya.

This is a misleading argument. Making games doesn't cost money. I could decide to go home on Friday night and start work on a game written in Java, using MySQL as a backend, and Javascript as a client-side tool for facebook. Or, I could start with C++ and compile my 3D game using openGL. I could do all of this on a cheap netbook you can buy on eBay for less than $50. The costs are the opportunity cost of what developers are not doing instead. If I'm writing a game, I'm not making money at a normal job. I'm "paying" by losing the opportunity to make money elsewhere. Thus, money is lost even though it costs nothing in parts to actually write a game. Frankly, I'm surprised every time I look at the number of iPhone or Android apps. There are so many software development jobs out there that I don't understand why anyone in today's environment who knows how to write games would waste their days writing low-quality indie games that have a 1 in 1000 chance of success. They could get a job making $60-80k/yr with health insurance instead. The market is flooded with games simply because it's so cheap to create them. The Ouya will be so inundated with indie games that few, if any, of them will make as much for the developer as a standard software developer position could earn.

I would agree with your dislike of mashing "X," but I don't agree that Final Fantasy XIII-2 involved much mashing of X because it was more difficult than the first installment. I think you mistake "mashing X" with being "too easy." Games that are too easy often have great battle systems, but the player just ignores all that great stuff because it's so complicated and unnecessary to win such an easy game. The first Final Fantasy XIII was too easy, and so you could win most battles by mashing X even if you didn't really know how to play the game. By the way, if you think that these games are too easy, play Tales of Graces f, and set the difficulty to Chaos mode. It's the only RPG I've ever played where the game is actually difficult enough that you need to use every last bit of the battle system to win battles. I had to replay some battles 30 or 40 times, and have gotten to the point where the boss needs one hit to die after an hour of battling, but I have all life bottles used up, one character alive, a huge attack on the way, and less than 100HP remaining. That's a game you can win by mashing X in Easy mode. In Chaos mode, there are times like the one above where you pause and spend minutes trying to figure out the exact sequence to save the battle quickly enough before you die. The difference with mashing X is all about difficulty in any game.

I apparently don't have this song. I did a search for Final Fantasy 5 music and I discovered two issues: first, many of the files are *.mid and *.it (impulse tracker) files. Second, in the 90s, a large proportion of systems still used 8.3 filenames, so the songs have filenames like "ff4ahwtw.mp3." I'm still going to download the entire Overclocked ReMix canon and run Similarity against them, and then I can put online the ones that don't have a 100% match. I should have time on the weekend of August 25-26 to write a program to bulk add those to Game Remixes, so make sure to check back then.

I haven't posted here in several years, but I got an E-Mail saying that this thread had been modified, and I probably have this song you're looking for. I have about 20k video game remixes on an array of hard drives, as early as 1996. I never got around to uploading them in 2009. Some of these songs may be the only copies that exist. Your post convinced me that I need to get these online if only to prevent culture from being lost, as there may even be artists who no longer have these songs through drive failures. A lot of it is probably duplicates of stuff from Overclocked ReMix or VGMix, but other stuff is unique. Someone familiar with the Overclocked ReMix canon could be of significant help in determining which music is valuable and which is already online elsewhere. If someone is interested in assisting me in attempting to identify some of this music by listening to it, please send a reply.

Hi, Voting for the remixsite Composition Combat is now underway. The competition challenged contestants to write a main theme for a fictional fantasy/sci-fi game. The winner of the challenge will receive $500, and the runner up will receive a free video game. Please take the time to listen to some incredible music and to vote for your favorites. The prizes will be awarded entirely by community vote. Voting is simple and your vote can be registered simply by clicking on the rating you wish to grant to a song. One vote per person is allowed, and you may vote for as few or as many songs as you would like. Since more votes will ensure a fairer and more accurate result, I encourage everyone to spend a few minutes and offer your opinions. You may also, but are not required to, post a detailed review along with your rating to provide the contestants with more direct feedback. Note that the currently displayed ratings are padded with dummy votes nightly to randomize the standings; these dummy votes will not be counted in the final tally. The displayed ratings do not represent the actual rank of the contestants. Visit here for a list of songs entered into the challenge. Good luck to all the competitors and I hope you'll stop by to help us choose the winner!

This movie sounds awesome. At least, it better be, considering they spent $237m on producing it. I didn't have any complaints about the 3D scenes in, for example, Harry Potter V. I thought they were amazing. If people are saying that these scenes are even more incredible, then there has to be something to it.

While hardware can be expensive, listening equipment is not. You can buy extremely high-quality surround headphones for just $25. Look for a brand called "Listen to Believe." The headphones have a simple USB plug - you plug it in and then you can listen to 5.1 music. Because the speakers are closer to your ears, I've found that these headphones can actually sound better than a huge expensive speaker system. And the headphones do actually improve the quality of stereo remixes. If you listen to "Rhymes with Elixir" by The Scuba Divers/Liontamer using these headphones, and set the bass redirection to 60Hz, Pro Logic II algorithms can easily separate the voice of the male and female rappers (the center channel) from the instruments (left, right, and surround left/right) and the booming drums (sub). The effect is awesome and that song isn't even written in 5.1.

Recently, I've been looking around to see if I can locate any surround remixes of game music. 5.1 music in other genres is becoming more common, and you can find DTS cds and even 7.1 TrueHD Blu-rays, but I have yet to find a single video game song that someone has remixed into 5.1 surround, even if the original was in surround. Is anyone aware of any mixes like this?

Excellent song. The only thing I think could be improved is perhaps to make it shorter. The one part that bothered me was around 2:15 or so, when things slowed down and there was little melody. I just wanted things to get going again and to move on. But then again, that's the way techno is - really, really long, and I am sure there are those who would say it's part of the genre. Either way, the song is great and hopefully it will be selected.

I agree with this comment. The remixers did a good job with what they had. The problem I had is that there just wasn't enough source material for all the tracks that were on the remix album. Look at the VGMdb - the remix album is almost three times as long as the original is.

Every time I've had cards or processors break, the clock speed seems to cause the problem, so I agree with this underclocking idea. But if you go on eBay, you can get another card for as low as $10-20. You'll probably waste four hours working on this problem, and it may break again two weeks from now. Even if you make minimum wage, you'd easily make more than $20 in 4 hours. Unless you're extremely poor, I'd say to nott waste any more time here and just order a new card to be done with it.