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Okay, so, I finally got over myself and decided that modding stuff myself is a lot cheaper than trying to find pre-modded systems.
I followed mmmonkey's guide and started modding my MD2. After installing the 50hz/60hz switch, I decided to take a break and check if I'd actually done it right before putting in the second (language) switch. The results... um:



Let me explain what's happening here. I boot Sonic 1 with the switch set to one setting. Black and white, slightly stretchy, but that's because I haven't received my RGB cable yet. Game runs at a smooth 60hz, now I can finally play Sonic properly. So I turn off the system, flick the switch to the other setting and boot. 60hz again?! Well, yes, but with the awesome bonus of only the PSG channel giving any sound.

I asked a bunch of people for help while doing this soldering stuff, but none of them were really experts on console hardware specifically. We got as far as determining via multimeter that the switch is technically working exactly the way it should be. So my question to you guys is: what the hell did I just do, and how can I fix it?

EDIT: Okay, I've somehow fixed it by resoldering one of the wires that looked a bit iffy... but I'm still really interested to know why it caused the effect it did.

Right, so I've had my fill of shitty emulation and questionable ports so I'm just gonna bite the bullet and get myself a Sega Saturn. Now, the question is, what's the best purchase? I want to avoid modchips and the like because I'm an idiot and I would probably break the console. Thankfully, it seems that an Action Replay would let you play region-free, but there's still the problem of PAL vs NTSC (and judging by this list, a vast majority of the games I'm interested in are not PAL-optimised), so I'd have to get a Japanese or American system.

What I'm trying to ask is, am I right about this? And if so, what's a good price for one? Is there a difference in price or any other convenience between Japanese and American Saturns? (The plug shouldn't be a problem—I have a stepdown converter for my PC Engine and from experience it also works for things from the US, so I should be good with connections.)

Okay, so, I'm trying to put some videos together that require game footage. The only problem is, I can't get any of these screen capturing programs to work right, no matter what settings I use. I've tried Fraps, CamStudio, Camtasia and like a bajillion others, but depending on what codec I use, I either end up with a horrible frame rate (despite the fact that I specifically use settings to make it not do that) or they just plain crash. The only thing that works is to just used uncompressed video, and, well, that's not very efficient. The only program that sort of works is BSR Screen Recorder which actually makes a decent-looking video but the audio gets all screwy, either being very skippy or playing way too fast.

Does anyone know of a decent solution? Are my codecs just messed up? I think I reinstalled CCCP a bunch of times while trying to figure this out, but that didn't help.

I'm messing around with the PS2 version of Mega Man Anniversary Collection, but I'm not getting very far. It seems that most of the stuff in the game is packed inside big archives with a .AIF extension. Of course, it's nearly impossible to google that shit, and the only thing I found was a dead link to an app that supposedly extracts the music. Does anyone have any idea how I can extract (and, more importantly, repack) these things?

I've decided to get into ROM hacking. I figured I'd start with something simple, so after reading a couple tutorials I decided to start by hacking the text in a NES game. Now what game could possibly need a text edit?

Ah, but of course.


Before improving the actual text, the first thing I decided to do was add a lowercase font SO ALL THE TEXT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE THIS.


After editing the script to make the above sentence use the lowercase letters, and making the text overflow out of its box in the process, I realised something: even if I mess with the pointers to give me more space to put in some decent sentences, the text box will be too small! So here's my question: where do I begin? Or is this a really complicated thing to change, and should I focus on something simpler first? I've considered that maybe I could find the place where the game stores how to draw the box by using a cheat search to find which addresses change between talking to someone and not talking to someone, but I haven't been able to find anything useful. I used the addresses I found and froze them to a certain value in the hope that the text box would pop up by itself, but no luck. Even worse, when I tried the same thing again later, all the addresses I got were different!

(Also, I was going to ask this at romhacking.net first, but they have manual approval on forum accounts so I figure I'd ask here in the meantime.)