MGAceman's AI Blogger

To start, thanks Gerben, I know about the separator and I see your point about the R4 skins looking a little 'stretched', I didn't see the need to use it before as I liked to see the whole picture, but maybe I'll give it a try... ;) A new Need for Speed trailer has been released for the upcoming title, Need for Speed Pro Street as well as 5 screenshots. You can see the trailer and screens on the temporary Mental Gamers site here . It appears that Pro Street is the 'Next Gen' title that was announced a little while ago, so if you're on QuakeNet IRC, come to #NFSPS where hopefully people that will be playing the game and/or are interested will be chatting about it. Big Brother 8 has started and they're all female contestants (so far), here's my brief summary of them (in the order they appear on the Channel 4 site): Sam & Amanda, the stick twins, annoying. Carole seems ok, might stir it up a little with her 'political' views. Chanelle ...

Putting a skin on the R4DS is easy, it's just the matter of making 4 8bit or 24bit bitmap (.bmp) images, naming them correctly and transferring them onto the R4 (well, Micro SD card). Making the skin 'work' better is how the text looks and that's where the theme.ini file comes in. In that file are the 'color' commands to tell the R4 what colour text and stuff should be and this post is to show you which 'color' is for what. You can download a basic ini file from here which has the info in the pic on the right there (click for bigger pic) --> There isn't a specific way to 'tell' you how to change the theme.ini, it's just a case of opening it up in notepad and changing the values of each hex number, there's a chart below which has all the basic colours, but if you're after a more obscure colour, using a paint/photo imaging program would be more useful. There is the chart of all the standard colours which should get you started o...

It's been a while since a tune has stuck in my head so much and as you can probably see in my last.fm box, I've recently listened to the Kaiser Chiefs' new album, Yours Truly, Angry Mob. I happened to watch Jonathon Ross' show when they were on and played Everything Is Average Nowadays, hearing it even just that once I had the chorus going through my head and so got the album . It's not too bad and rather rocks somewhat, I'll need to have a few more listens before making a proper judgemen, but first impressions are good.

While I'd normally still be adding stuff to the Mental Gamers site or playing something, since MG will be moved to new webspace soon (hopefully) and a TV that likes to switch into standby at the most inconvenient moment when watching or playing something, I find myself not having anything to do. There isn't anything going on either which is crap considering the kids are on the half term holiday from school, that's what makes the UK pretty boring compared to the US where there's something happening somewhere most of the time. Even fellow blogger, Skip Jenkins has been out and about to one of those Fanime conventions, something I'm not particularly interested in, yet would go to one for a laugh and something to do. I'm only blogging for something to do, I don't really have anything to say. I've even updated my 'main' site to look a bit like this blog, but then again, it did need a bit of tweaking due to not hosting files there any more. I've ...

..hits the last 2 days. Due to information seekers wanting to find out more about the R4DS, I'm pleased to announce that aceman Onblog has had over 200 hits on Friday and Saturday. As far as I know, they are unique hits due to the way the stats work and if so, that makes it even better! When I hosted my blog on Mental Gamers web space, I probably managed 200 uniques a month, now as the blog stats say on the right there (at the time of posting), 2,389 hits have been made since I 'joined' WordPress.com on April 11/12th. That's just over 6 weeks ago and works out at nearly 400 hits per week ! Ok, so the mass amount of those hits have come from people looking for info about the R4DS, but if I hadn't moved to here and was still on my 'own' web space, I don't think I would have had even half as many hits. I'd optimized the blog as much as I could to get search engines crawling all over the place, but still the hits were low, I like to think I'm provid...

It's been a while since I put a VC update on here, so on Virtual Console today... Blazing Lazers, Turbografx, 600 points Mach Rider, NES, 500 points Super Mario Bros. 2, NES, 500 points

Sorry to do another R4DS post, but people really do seek out information about it and this blog has had over 140 hits every day for 4 days because of newbies wanting info. I'm not calling people that come here for info 'n00bs' in a bad way, in fact, I'm still a n00b at the R4DS myself, I've only had it about a month and even I've been asking people and searching on Google for help and info about stuff to do with the R4. You could say that I'm a n00b passing learned experience onto other n00bs, there's no shame in it, everyone is a n00b at one point. ;) I'll just be covering the main consoles here Master System/Game Gear, Mega Drive/Genesis, NES and SNES. To start with the awkward one, the SNES emu has to go in the root directory with the cfg file and you create a folder called SNES to put the ROMs in... and it only works with .smc files, not .srm, so if you were looking at playing Sim City or F-Zero, you can't. It took me a bit of time to realis...

The kernel for R4DS has been updated to version 1.09 and has the following fixes: Optimization delete process; Solve the 0991 issue; Solve issue to some of the games without displays of icon and the title; Support master switch of action replay cheat for real-time game (opening cheats by L+R+START+UP, temporarily closing cheats by L+R+START+DOWN); When cheats to the same game are in both the official database and the users database, users can choose to use the cheat in any database; Solve the 1070 archiving issue; Solve the 1085 issue; Update Cheat code editor v1.01; Released the list of cheats. The list of cheats can be found on the R4DS site here and you can download the zip file (for those of you that don't have a way to extract rar files) from my box.net account here ). To update, just drag and drop to overwrite the files, but if you have themes on there you want to keep, just copy over the files separately.

I've covered setting up the R4, putting ROMs on it and skinning, now it's time to do video... It's all mentioned in the video (except that I said AviSync when it should be AviSynth and I can't be bothered to record it again) and now here is the simple guide to adding videos to the R4DS. You will need 3 things: (BatchDPG and AviSynth can be downloaded in one file if you click here ) BatchDPG - the user interface through which to encode the video AviSynth - a codec of which BatchDPG needs for it to work properly (it tells you if you don't have it after installation of BatchDPG) Microsoft's .NET Framework 1.1 When they're all installed, open BatchDPG and click the Browse button at the top to locate the file you want to encode. If the video has subtitles, click the Browse button for that to locate the file, then click the Browse button to locate a folder to save the encoded video to. The video settings won't really need changing since they're preset a...

{edit}I tried a few themes, but now I’ve gone back to the original theme, due to it being the only one I’ve found that ‘works’ well. Coming next is a post about adding video to the R4DS…

I'm not a fan of soap operas, never have been really, but the wife watches Emmerdale and Coronation Street, so whenever I pass through the living room to get to the kitchen while it's on, I have a quick look at what's going on. And what's going on in Emmerdale is Debbie Dingle, known in Real-Life™ as Charley Webb. She is so gorgeous, oh .. my .. giddy aunt... If anyone can find a fault in her looks, they're either jealous or are being obnoxiously nit-picky as although she's not perfect (nobody is), she's pretty damn close. It's babes like this that make us men that suffer soaps being on before the footy more tolerant and enjoy the wait, we just need more of them. Linda Lusardi is still looking good as she's also in Emmerdale, so there's one to look out for if you're a MILF hunter. ;)

When my mum visits, she brings a pile of magazines for the wife to read such as Woman, Womans Own, Take A Break and that kind of thing, in the latest pile was heat magazine that featured some famous people looking not so trim. The image you see on the right there was taken from heat magazine (of which seems to have no proper official website to link to) and shows Fergie in a pool or something with a distinct flabby tummy. It's understandable that some people aren't going to be as active as usual when taking a break, but when you consider how she looks in those Maxim shots, it's quite a difference. She's usually fit and looks so slender (as can be seen in my old ' Fergie looking Fergalicious ' blog post), so what's going on with the flab?

That was strange, I didn't notice my custom banner was missing until I'd erased the cache and rebooted... I remember deleting an image, but didn't realise it was the banner, do'h! Due to previous encounters, I've learned to keep everything that goes onto my sites/blogs in folders on my computer in the event of such occurrences, it's always useful to keep a backup of everything ... ;)

I noticed on my Flickr account that the Fergie Maxim picture has had quite a few hits, so I've made an R4 skin from the picture if you would like to download and use it (image is just for show, clickable link is on the R4DS Skins page). I also couldn't resist making a skin out of the Lauryn Hill picture, so there's one available to download for that too. Remember to put them in the _system_/Themes folder and they should work perfectly. :) (Links are on my WordPress blog )

Actually got the photo's from the last Most Haunted Live event and stuck a few up as I planned to do with Pt.1, if my camera battery hadn't decided to give up on me. I tried to recharge it the other day and it seems that it is the battery that's had it, so it's either get a new battery or new camera, the battery is obviously the cheaper option, but I've been thinking about getting a new camera with more megapixels for a while, so that's added to the list of other stuff to get. Anyway, as mentioned in Pt.1, it was better for actually meeting them and the missus had her pic taken with almost all of them. They're such a great bunch of people who will actually take a brief moment of their time (or more in some cases) to stop, have their pic taken, sign autographs and maybe even a little chat about the show or anything in particular. I'm not sure why, but a while a go my blog had a hit from someone searching for 'karl beattie hate', now, they were ei...

As usual when I come to check on my blog (whether I'm posting something or not), I look in the Tag Surfer which shows posts from people who have blogged about something with the same categories as me. That was when I saw this post about Lauryn Hill and saw the picture of her... Wow! I used to think she was hot before in the Fugee's days, but I haven't really heard about her much until now, so I hadn't seen how she looked and damn she looks good. I'm a fan of big hair, so when I saw the pic, I just had to find a bigger picture to see it better. Check out the post I've linked to for a link to hear her new song, it's a good tune! I think I'll have a listen to The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill while I do my next post...

I've passed the 100 post milestone and this is post 101, quite an achievement considering I wasn't originally a fan of this 'blogging' thing a couple of years ago. When I found out I had some ISP webspace, I used it as a 'kind' of blog as in, I would update it once or twice a week with info, downloads and other stuff, but it's only been the last few years I've gradually become a 'blogger'. Anyhoo, while I'm here, I'd just like to mention that I've got ToeJam & Earl working on the DS, but unfortunately, no sound. I've probably got the folder structure wrong and that certain things need to go in certain places, but at least I have it working in some form or other. I've also got a couple of SNES emulators to work, but they only seem to work with .smc files and not .srm, I don't think you can just rename the files as .smc, so I'm not too sure how to get .srm files working. If anyone has a solution, please, let me (and ...

Ben is such a big baby and is really so full of himself, what I can't understand is why is he the 'leader' when he was the one who joined the 'others'? Was it because he killed his dad? Is that the initiation that puts you straight to the top and makes you boss? Is that why Ben got Locke's gun and shot him with it, because he had 'killed' his dad and would (should) become the new leader? Once again, so many questions, but I guess what is the BIG question now, who or what is Jacob? (Click the image to see a bigger version) I really don't get that involved with TV progs and I'm not too fussed about the whole mechanics of the thing, if people want to waste their lives analysing everything by making up stories and delving into every single possibility, making references to shit that hasn't and probably never will happen, that's up to them. I just watch these programs as entertainment and for brief discussion, I don't think too deeply into...

So, I'm almost caught up with this weeks TV and just couldn't help but give a little laugh at Sony trying to get us to believe that even the kids in Heroes, in fact, one of the 'Heroes', Micah who has been kidnapped by the sinister Mr Linnderman and being held by a morpher, play on PS3's. I'm not saying it's a bad thing that Sony wanted to stick their product in one of the most popular series on TV at the moment, oh no, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why the Xbox 360 or even the Nintendo Wii weren't sitting next to the nice big TV that... might or might not be a Sony TV. There appears to be the usual piece of tape conveniently covering up the brand name, so I guess the TV wasn't provided by Sony or they only made a deal to plug the PS3.

Got a bit fed up with the old theme being a bit too plain and having everything down the side, so I've gone back to this theme (Connections) which was the first theme I properly settled on and so decided to use it again. I didn't really know what to blog about as I haven't really done much lately except play a lot of Crackdown, I've moved the Xbox 360 into the living room so that I can play it for more than 20 minute intervals at a time. I downloaded the Free-For-All pack and had a go at the 'Key to the City' bit where I could set Godmode and infinite ammo, but you can't save your progress which is a bit of a shame as you could use it as practise for the actual game in which you play for the achievements and stuff.

There, I said it. Year after year of crap costumes and crap music (except Lordi who actually rocked, but their costumes still sucked) with an excuse for Terry Wogan to take the piss out of our European cousins which is amusing for 2 minutes, I gave up watching it years ago due to it being staler than Moses' bread. If you like it, fair enough, that's your choice, I'd rather stick my head in a bucket of H²SO4 to be honest though...

I very rarely use the word 'hate' as it's such a strong word and emotion that I consider it only to be used in extreme cases, in fact, I searched through my blog to see if I had ever used the word and it appears in none of my posts... until this one. Anyone reading this may be thinking, 'huh, what an ironic idiot saying he hates bloggers on his blog', no, I don't hate bloggers in general, that would mean I hate myself (cue emo music). What I strongly detest .. or even .. yes, hate about some bloggers is when they set their blog to show their posts as Monthly. Not like normal people that show the last 8, 10, 20 posts on the front page, but a whole months worth that takes a whole lot of bandwidth sapping, CPU intensive, RAM eating time to load up. You can see the scrollbar becoming smaller and smaller until it's around 2 pixels thick at the top, you hear your CPU crunching away as it churns out the processes, your RAM depleting rapidly as it tries to cope w...

As there hasn't been much else to do lately, so I've made some more skins for the R4DS and put them up on their own page ( On my WordPress blog ) with a preview image so that you can see what it looks like if you want to download and use one. I'm not too sure how many you can go up to as it seems if you set it on auto, it chooses a different skin each month (which is why the default skins have a calendar) from Jan to Dec (12 skins), so I might just make 12 and put them up for download or maybe do themes as in Babes, Games, TV, etc. Anyway, be back when there's something I want to blog, I may even do *drumroll* ........ a Vlog!

Well, I haven't really been up to much lately, which is why I haven't blogged about anything. What I have been doing is tweaking the colours for my new skin I've made to use on my R4DS. The latest one is of 'Red Hot Lauren' who is a redhead with long hair (I like women with long hair :oops: ), any skins I make of 'babes' to download won't contain nudity by the way. So, if you'd like to download this skin to use on your R4DS, just click to download and remember that it goes into _system_\themes, the zipped file is theme01, but you can rename it to themeXX (XX = 01, 02, 03, etc) if you already have a skin there that you don't want to overwrite. That's about it except for Crackdown finally came from Play-Asia today, but haven't played it yet due to my TV not wanting to stay on longer than 30 minutes and I'd have been so close to ordering a new one if 3 bills hadn't suddenly raped the funds. :(

This will have to be in 2 parts due to my dumbass camera deciding to do it's battery draining trick whenever I go somewhere that I want to take pics of, we didn't even get to the event and the battery was half drained before I'd even switched it on and taken one photo. So, I'm waiting for a couple of pics from my neighbour that she took to add... So, that left us with a mobile phone camera that takes half decent pics as long as the s ubject (and picture taker) is perfectly still... which is why the pic of Karl Beattie that the missus took is skew-whiff. One photo that turned out well is one of Paul Ross signing a napkin that my neighbour was taking to everyone she could and it was a good turnout, better that at Llanelli with Lesley (the historian), Stuart, a brief appearance of David Wells and even Ciaran O'Keeffe. Well, what can I say?! Considering we went with only 'standby' tickets, we managed to end up with better seats than some of those that had queu...

Well, a bit of a surprise... Checked emails last night to find that we'd had an email from the ticket people saying that we could have standby tickets. What that means is, if everyone that had 'full' tickets has turned up, but there are still spaces, people with standby tickets get to fill up the spaces. So, Most Haunted Live standby tickets have been printed and are ready for producing when we get down there, although they're not 'full' tickets, we'll 'book in' at 4pm-ish and then spend the next couple of hours just wondering around until the doors open at 6:30pm. Just another 4 hours or so until we leave for the drive down and arrive at around 2:30-3:00pm as we're sure of where the place is thanks to Google maps and won't have to search for an hour when we get in the area.

...But this time, we're going without tickets in the hope of people who did get tickets don't turn up. Last time we went (June 2006, Llanelli), people were queueing up and as we got talking with a couple of women in front of us, it appeared they were quite local and had turned up in the hope that there was space for them to get in, so that's what we're basically doing. It's in Bristol this time and according to Google maps, is only around 1hr 40mins away as it's pretty much a straight road down the M5 and just a few turns when we exit, so it shouldn't be like last time which took us about 3 hours and then had to ask someone who even got in their car and guided us to Llanelli Leisure Centre (very nice people there, friendly and helpful). So, yeah, and this time, I'll remember to take my camera to get some pics done that I forgot to do last time...

Ok, it was something I was going to do anyway, but someone actually asked if I could make a vid to show how to put skins onto the R4DS and here it is (well, after the jump anyway). To start, you will need 4 24bit bmp images like this (exact size)... I don't know why imageshack changed it to .png, but I've linked it to the bmp which needs to be renamed logo.bmp if you want to use it. The 4 256*192 images should be: bckgrd_1.bmp bckgrd_2.bmp icons.bmp logo.bmp They all go into a folder called themexx (xx = a number from 01 to 12) and that folder goes into the _system_\themes directory on the R4. Also, the theme.ini file should be in there which contains the info about text colours and stuff, the skin I made can be downloaded from here which has a theme.ini for you to take a look at and change to whatever you need. Then it's just a case of dragging and dropping the folder over (the unzipped folder if you've downloaded it) as shown in the vid. :) (For people watching ...

Another big brown envelope was dropped through the letterbox this morning and I saw it had 'Gaming Newz' on it, I thought it was from another PR company that keep sending stuff that relate to the old name of Mental Gamers , but it wasn't, which is why I was doubly surprised. I wondered what game was inside, so imagine my surprise when there wasn't a game inside, but a Hessian sack. Inside the sack was the usual PR gubbins such as info sheets and stuff, but also inside were a couple of 'stones', one was a piece of iron pyrite and the other was a rock crystal quartz, so once again I was treated to a kind of 'goody bag' from the PR guys. It's little things like this that make working on a gaming site worthwhile. ;)

It's been quite a while since I was last so addicted to a game and now it's happened with what would probably be one of the more unlikely games I would get addicted to. Pogo Island is what has been keeping me busy for the last few days and that's why I haven't blogged, the game that has had me most addicted is Tri Peaks Solitaire. Last night I decided to start the 'adventure' part of the game which sees you going around the island to play different games, but if there's one game I just don't like, it's Squelchies. I don't get it, it's one of the most pointless games I've ever played, so I try to avoid that one and play the others instead. Anyway, just off to continue playing the adventure part and only need to do a bit more before completing it.