Newer Rom Collection

I knew there was Dreamcast, PS2,  Gamecube, Wii ISOs back in 2005, but they were all torrents with 0 seeds. Ten years later, these roms are on FTP servers. I began downloading NDS roms in 2007, because those were only a couple hundred megabytes and are on my old list. In 2010, I was downloading Saturn and Dreamcast ISOs.   Last year I began downloading  2 Gigabyte ROMs for Gamecube, PSP.

Gamecube

Super Mario Sunshine  (1.0 Gigabyte)
Super Smash Bros. Melee (1.0 Gigabyte)
Mario Kart Double Dash (1.2 Gigabyte)
Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes (2.4 Gigabytes 2 files)

Playstation Portable

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (850 MB)
 Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles (603 MB)
Daxter (975 MB)

These Roms for the late 2010s when Retro-Bit manufactures Gamecube clone, PS2 clone, Wii clone for $80 once these patents expire like what happened with NES, Super NES, Genesis and GBA patents.

Videogame reviews killed my videogame job

The negative reviews at  IGN.com (6 years ago) and Gamespot ultimately decided my career.  I grew up with N64 and looking at what happening to Wii U and console. It wasn't a good fit.   I like collecting them and completing them. Also the industry looks to be changing constantly and the turnover seems higher than information technology.  The gamespot and the IGN blogs were testing this industry for FREE! It seems as though these are pretty dark times to be working in the gaming industry. Square-Enix and Capcom have seen much better days. Far from their 90's glory, but I don't think they will fade quickly. However, the gaming public is sick and tired of paying $60 for crap games only to have to spend more money for DLC. , cause everyone loves those shallow pointless games. was once a huge Final Fantasy fanboy but Squaresoft was purchased and the series has gone to hell, so there goes my interest for a console. A 360 would have interested me for Lost Odyssey but one game isn't worth a $400 bill. The gaming industry never ceases to amaze me with its stubborn refusal to adapt to market demands and its inability to learn from its peers in the entertainment industry pertaining to its current hot issues. It's probably going to take a few more major firms going under and/or splitting up before they get their acts together.

As CEO of Sega of America in the early 1990s, Tom Kalinske oversaw the company during its glory days, when all eyes in the industry were glued to the titanic struggle for console superiority between the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

Times have changed, to put it mildy. Kalinske left Sega in 1996 and soon signed up with educational entertainment company LeapFrog, where he remains a vice chairman today. The intervening decades have seen Nintendo's best days as well as its worst, and the company sits in a distant third place in the current console race. Meanwhile, Sega hasn't been the same since Kalinske left. The Sega Saturn bombed. The Dreamcast signaled an end to Sega's days as a first-party hardware maker, and the ensuing decade-plus as a third-party publisher hasn't been all wine and roses, either.

"[Sega] seem to have made the wrong decisions for 20 years."

Kalinske spoke with GamesIndustry.biz earlier this month at the DICE Summit, just days after Sega announced staff reductions and the relocation of its San Francisco offices. Though Kalinske said he doesn't keep especially close tabs on the mainstream gaming space these days, he was shocked to hear his old company was pulling out of San Francisco. And while it might have seemed a foregone conclusion that Sega couldn't compete in the gaming industry once giants like Sony and Microsoft got involved, Kalinske dismissed the notion.

"It was not inevitable," Kalinske said. "It could have been avoided if they had made the right decisions going back literally 20 years ago. But they seem to have made the wrong decisions for 20 years."

Regardless of Sega's ability to best the deep-pocketed intruders, Kalinske said it could have joined them had the right decisions been made.

"One of the key reasons why I left Sega is when we had the opportunity to work with Sony, when [Sony Interactive CEO] Olaf Olafsson, [Sony Corporation of America president and CEO] Mickey Schulhof and I had agreed we were going to do one platform, share the development cost of it, share the probable loss for a couple years on it, but each benefit from the software we could bring to that platform. Of course, in those days, we were much better at software than they were, so I saw this as a huge win. We went to Sony and they agreed, 'Great idea.' Whether we called it Sega-Sony or Sony-Sega, who cared? We go to Sega and the board turned it down, which I thought was the stupidest decision ever made in the history of business. And from that moment on, I didn't feel they were capable of making the correct decisions in Japan any longer."

Regardless, there's still hope for Sega as a brand. And Kalinske should know, having helped breathe new life into flagging brands numerous times over his career, from giving The Flintstones a jolt with the introduction of a line of vitamins to bringing Barbie back from the brink in the early '70s. There's never a shortage of experts willing to pile dirt on a brand before it's truly dead, but as Kalinske emphasized in his DICE talk, "The Experts Are Always Wrong." That said, brands aren't immortal, and Kalinske did identify one thing strong enough to kill them.

"You have to really make a lot of mistakes to kill a strong brand."

"Stupidity," Kalinske laughed. "They're hard to kill. You have to really make a lot of mistakes to kill a strong brand. I do think some great brands obviously have been destroyed, Atari being one of them. Why didn't that survive? I think there's a lot of bad decision making involved in killing brands like that. I hope Sega isn't the same thing."

But even a destroyed brand has some value, some potential for future success. The Atari brand still exists, and people are trying to resuscitate it with a mix of familiar franchises, real money gaming, and fitness apps. Kalinske said even he and original Atari founder Nolan Bushnell saw value in it, as they attempted to acquire the name somewhat recently.

"And we failed in that effort, obviously," Kalinske said. "It was maybe five years ago. We weren't able to put it together. At the time it was owned by the French, and the French didn't want to sell."

Moving back to the big brands of today, many analysts and experts have called on Nintendo to get out of the hardware market and bring its valuable stable of intellectual properties to new platforms, specifically mobile devices. While it's another case that might fall under Kalinske's "The Experts are Always Wrong" dictum, he thought they might only be half-wrong in this case.

"I don't think [Nintendo] should give up hardware or consoles," Kalinske said. "I am surprised that they haven't formed a division to extend the IP. I'd love to play some of their games on my iPhone or iPad. It's really a form of marketing for them in a sense. They wouldn't even need to make that much money off it, but it would keep their brands relevant with the users, including people that are older, like me. So it seems to me it's a marketing mistake, but I don't think they should give up what they're doing because they're damn good at it."

"I don't think [Nintendo] should give up what they're doing because they're damn good at it."

In some ways, Leap Frog faces the same dilemma as Nintendo. It has its own hardware and software built using a proprietary language, so anyone wanting to play LeapFrog content has to play it on LeapFrog devices. And while the company makes consoles and tablets, they aren't exactly as ubiquitous as an iPad.

"We're struggling with that," Kalinske acknowledged. "It's a big internal issue and there's a lot of work going on in that area I really can't talk about. But from my perspective, I would love to see a way [to have LeapFrog content on mobile devices]--so long as it was profitable, because you don't want to do these things if they're not at least a little profitable. And that's what they're struggling with, because most of the education content on iOS doesn't make a profit. Almost none on Android makes a profit."

Kalinske's complaints with the educational app market on mobile devices should sound familiar to anyone who's worked on entertainment apps in recent years.

"There's an awful lot of stuff available that's losing money and isn't very good," Kalinske said. "So you have a mess out there right now. This is one of the criticisms I have of Apple. They should take a look at all the educational content on their site right now, it's terribly confusing to parents, and they ought to do a better job of curating that. Put some standards in and make sure that anything saying it's educational actually is, and get rid of a lot of stuff that isn't very good."

That seems unlikely to happen in the near term. Kalinske has been in the interactive edutainment field since 1996, and one constant he's seen is that the seismic overhauls that reshape interactive entertainment every few years don't seem to happen at the same pace.

"It's really hard to make a profit off doing education well. It's pretty easy, relatively, to do entertainment well."

"Education's been much slower," Kalinske said. "The adoption of really good technology has been much slower. It's still slow. It's still happening. It's great to see Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS), but it's not great to see MOOCS that are boring. My whole thing has been to figure out what the great curriculum is, and then figure out ways to make it fun and interesting, whether that's for a young child or a college age student. Why does it have to be dull and boring lectures?"

There's a reason behind that slower pace of adoption for educational games, and it's one Kalinske said he learned back when he was still at Sega.

"We were doing the Pico, and Pico was a really good system for young kids," Kalinske said. "And we were doing $100 million in business from the Pico and its software. But it had a lower gross margin on it than obviously, entertainment software. And this is again during that time when Japan was making decisions for me. And they said to me, 'Stop wasting your time on that. It takes too much effort and too much money. You could just do another Sonic title and do a lot more revenue, a lot more profitably. It's easier.' And it struck me. That's why Disney hasn't been that good at education, or any of the other big entertainment companies, like Sony. Because it's hard. It's really hard to make a profit off doing education well. It's pretty easy, relatively, to do entertainment well.

"With the amount of storage that one can do today at a reasonable cost, no matter what the subject is, if we wanted to present that curriculum to children or even teenagers in a way that was most interesting to them, we could do that today," Kalinske added. "And we're not doing it. And that frustrates me."

Bought some overdue Retro Bit Super RetroTRIO

I bought a Retro Bit Super RetroTRIO Video Game System for playing 16-bit videogame carts. I watched so many youtube collections or speedruns with 16-bit videogames and Room of Doom website, where getting rid of any of 16-bit, Playstation, Saturn games gets rid of my karma I spent money on. Unlike my FC Twin I bought 10 months ago, this Retron 3 also plays Sega Genesis. The FC Twin is $80 now and a Neo Geo X system is $150. I remember when FC Twin was $30 5 years ago.
 
If FC Twin is going to end up like Gamepark Cannoo and cost $300, I'm glad I got it now.  Owning since 2014

 
Owning since 2015 and the build quality is great.

I lost my Action Replay for Saturn to play Radiant Silvergun, DoDonPachi I also bought Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. The RetroTRIO and the Neo Geo X game system bought in 2012, I supposedly increased my karma. Some of the 16-bit games are worth $60 in good condition so I don't know why women don't like old games. I bought a Retro Bit Super RetroTRIO Video Game System for playing 16-bit videogame carts. I watched so many youtube collections or speedruns with 16-bit videogames and Room of Doom website, where getting rid of any of 16-bit, Playstation, Saturn games shrinks the karma. THe karma these days aren't like on Playstation Universe.

The most entitled generation is Babyboomers! (not me)

That generation is the millennials – our generation are the most unemployed in american history.
The culprit, say some social commenters, are millennials themselves. In this telling, we are a lazy cohort of entitled and narcissistic brats — the proverbial Generation Me. But this is a classic case of blaming the victim.
The true cause of this unfortunate situation is clear: It’s the economy. The Great Recession stymied economic growth, halted job creation, kept older Americans in the workforce longer, and encouraged younger Americans to continue debt-financed schooling.
Moreover, the Great Recession was not merely a one-off calamity — it was a symptom of economic ills long perpetuated and ignored. And the criticism and labels that have been heaped upon millennials bear much more resemblance to the type of intergenerational stereotyping that has always existed (“darn kids these days”) than to any measurable reality.
The truth: The economic tragedy of the Millennial generation was written before many of us had even learned to read — Baby Boomer parents and grandparents who, at once, genuinely love and care for us, but have also created or perpetuated institutions, policies, and economic realities that have now hobbled us.
Our generation has been called “entitled.” We beg to differ. If any generation is entitled, it’s our parents’ and grandparents’ generation: the baby boomers.
True entitlement is tripling the national debt since the 1980s and using the proceeds to spend lavishly on tax cuts and government programs that primarily provided short-term economic boosts, while refusing to raise the Social Security age of retirement or to reduce benefits, even as the gluttonous program careens toward unsustainability.
AAP Image/NEWZULU/ZOEA protester at recent Australia climate-change rallies in the lead up to the UN climate summit in New York.
True entitlement is allowing the reasonable minimum wage that Baby Boomers enjoyed when they were our age to deteriorate while opting to cut taxes on the gains from stocks and bonds that they accrued during periods of debt-driven economic and stock-market surges — creating an economy where wage earners at all income levels, as of 2012, receive a smaller portion of economic output at any time since 1929.
True entitlement is, for decades, enjoying the benefits of the lowest energy costs in the world while refusing to price-in the external costs of carbon emissions, exacerbating the real changes to our planet that pose profound risks to the environment and economy for which millennials will soon be the primary stewards.
These grave consequences were entirely foreseeable — but they happened. Young Americans have been fleeced in order to fund the transient excesses of the old — and yet millennials are labeled “entitled” because we were given “participation trophies” and “personal tutors” before we were old enough to vote ... ?
Give us a break. Millennials are not entitled. But we are frustrated.
We’re frustrated, because the same baby-boomer bloc that created or tacitly perpetuated the policies that have hamstrung millennials now makes up almost a third of the American voting-aged population and holds nearly two-thirds of the seats of the US House of Representatives and Senate. This, during a decade-long span when incumbent House and Senate members are richly rewarded for being the most unproductive legislators in US history, respectively winning reelection 94% and 87% of the time.
ITU/Rowan Farrell
Granted, many members of our generation need to learn how to vote every two years, not just every four. And we need to begin to fulfill the civic-minded label — “The Next Great Generation” — which social scientists have bestowed upon us. When we do begin to regularly share our opinions in the voting booth, not just on Twitter, you can be assured that we’ll act to keep this country great. We’ll make the “hard” choices the baby boomers have refused to make.
Already, we’ve learned how to be fiscally responsible — with the most student debt of any generation in history, we’ve had to. More than any other generation, we eschew expensive possessions like cars and large houses, opting instead for bikes and shared living spaces. Sure, we would like to own all that fancy stuff someday, but we realize that we can’t have everything we want.
We know that our government would be better off spending more of our tax dollars on jobs and education, and not just on Social Security and defense. We overwhelmingly recognize that the war on drugs has been an embarrassing waste of money and lives, and that anyone should be able to marry whomever they love.
Perhaps we millennials are entitled: We seemed to think that baby-boomer politicians would enact much-needed changes while we fiddled with our smartphones. We were definitely wrong on that one.

2015

1) Wearables continue to tank
This is yet another case of the industry looking for new growth opportunities and a chance to expand by driving something the public doesn't really want. People don't want another device to carry or remember to wear, they are often inaccurate, and the newness wears off quickly and they get tossed in the drawer.
2) IoT proves a hard sell
Take what I said above and multiply it by 10. I don't know anyone screaming for an Internet-connected refrigerator. Then again, Steve Jobs did famously say “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” But with concerns about privacy by government and corporate snooping, security from all the hacks and general public tech illiteracy (the Silicon Valley is so myopic about this), IoT will be a hard sell.
3) BYOD chickens come home to roost
Many firms established BYOD rules when the trend first began, and they never revisited them. Eventually, there will be a reckoning where companies have to set down rules concerning data security and loss prevention, not to mention who pays the bills. It's only a matter of time before we get stories of employees giving up on BYOD and telling their boss to just provide a device.
4) Stock market crash and burn
The stock market has been going gangbusters, but it won't last. Every seven years, the stock market melts down like Chernobyl. We all remember 2008, and the recent "Cromnibus" budget deal in Washington has set us up for a repeat. In 2001, it hit the skids due to the Dot Bomb crash and 9/11. In 1994, the bond market went into the toilet. And in 1987 we had Black Monday with the massive sell-off. And if you don't believe me, maybe this guy's words will carry weight.
5) AMD finally bottoms out, Qualcomm acquires it for IP protection
AMD is in a real tough spot. Its CEO change caused a collapse in confidence and stock, neither of which has bounced back. Nvidia is gaining market share and is now over 70%, according to Jon Peddie Research. There are hints of big things to come but nothing concrete, and the company has been through endless rounds of layoffs.
Nvidia wouldn't be allowed to buy the company, unless it was torn in half and it got the x86 business (and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has repeatedly said he doesn't want an x86 business), with the GPU side going to Intel. A more likely outcome is Qualcomm grabbing the company primarily for IP protection against Intel.
6) IT continues to dump its own data centers in favor of the cloud
The trend of shutting down an on-premises data center in favor of a cloud solution has been going on for some time, but it will take off in 2015 for one very good reason – Windows Server 2003 is reaching its end of life and there are 10 million 2003 server installations out there that need upgrading. Many companies may decide it's easier to move to the cloud than buy new servers and go through a rip-and-replace routine.
7) Windows 10 is a hit, mostly
Windows 10 seems to have a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings around it, and it will likely revive PC sales, especially in the enterprise. The only thing that will mute Windows 10 at this point is declining interest in PCs. If the trend toward tablets as PC replacements continues, well, there's nothing Microsoft can do about that except get the tablet experience right, which it seems to have done with Surface 3.
8) Big Data's growth will be hampered by talent shortages
Big Data is an important new trend in tech, but it's also a significant change in how computer science is done. It requires people with specialized, advanced degrees, and there are not a lot of them on the market. In fact, there have been repeated predictions of talent shortages of data scientists and other people to make Big Data work. The people who have that kind of experience, however, will make some serious money.
9) Tablets will crash and burn
Tablet sales are already slowing down and the trend likely won't reverse in 2015. Some experiments have failed, like the Los Angeles Unified School District's $1.3 billion tablet boondoggle. I expect as the batteries start to die on these things and they are not replaceable, that will also hurt. The main problem, though, is that tablets don't have an advocate. Steve Jobs was the big champion of the tablet and no one has stepped forward to take up the mantle.
10) MMOs start dying off
My one consumer prediction. For some time now, every game company and a whole bunch of startups had massively multiplayer online games in the works. Then they all started failing. "Star Wars: The Old Republic," "Final Fantasy XIV," and "Elder Scrolls Online" all bombed recently, and when an "Elder Scrolls" game bombs, that's a big warning. Many other MMOs have faded into nothing. And Blizzard killed its MMO codenamed "Titan" after seven years of R&D. The reality is these games demand too much time and people who play them frequently suffer from health problems for their addictions.