Got a new Sapphire HD 3850 (ATI Video Card)
August 5th, 2008Yes, this is another one of those, "I’m going to show pictures of my computer" posts.
I got a new graphics card in the mail today. It’s a Sapphire HD 3850, which is a (you guessed it) ATI Radeon HD 3850 manufactured by Sapphire. The cool thing about this card, other than it uses PCI-express 2.0, is that the thing is fanless. Yesterday I had a fanless MSI card with an ATI Redeon HD 2600XT chip in it, so I was ready for an upgrade.
Here’s what came in the box. The card (which looks kick-ass) and an S-video to component, S-video to composite, and DVI to HDMI adapters. 
FRI Version 1.4.0.1
April 26th, 2008This is just a minor update to version 1.4.
Change Log:
- New Feature: "Release Year" values can now be edited manually.
- New Feature: ROMs can now be individually removed from the library.
- New Feature: ROMs can now be deleted.
- Tweak: "Super Nintendo Entertainment System" has been added as another name for "Super Nintendo" in the Platform Vocabulary
- Tweak: When there are ROMs listed, but none are selected, the status bar now reports that "none are selected" instead of "none is selected".
FRI version 1.4.0.0 Setup & Usage Tutorial
April 23rd, 2008I have been working The Fantastic ROM Indexer (FRI), a multi-emulator frontend/ROM indexer, since last August or so, and it has come to the point where it is pretty easy to use. The problem that it attempts to solve is simple: With thousands of ROMs from a multitude of various consoles, it can get a bit difficult to just pick out a game to play and play it. With FRI, all of your ROMs show up in one list, and finding a ROM to play is as easy as typing in part of the name. For a more advanced search, the user can even filter down the list by platform, language, number of players, ratings that they have given to the ROMs, etc. Starting the game is as easy as a double-click on the ROM, because emulators can be directly integrated into FRI by the user.
So here’s a demo/tutorial:
More information about FRI version 1.4.0.0 is available here.
FRI Version 1.4.0.0
April 22nd, 2008
Change Log:
- Fix: emulator compatibility is now caps-insensitive
- Fix: emulator selector centered and has correct icon
- Re-Write: Emulator loader re-written. The emulator selector now looks finished. Note that ROMs can no longer be opened in bulk.
- New Feature: Image Health (good dump, bad dump) can now be searched.
- New Feature: The default size of the Advanced Search window is now just the right size to fit all of the content.
- New Feature: The default size of the Emulator Selector window is not just the right size to fit all of the content.
Here is the Emulator Selector when I select a PlayStation ROM to play. (I don’t have any PlayStation emulator configured to work with FRI, so it just shows all of the emulators.)
Here is the Emulator Selector when I select a Game Boy ROM to play. Since I have more than one Game Boy-compatible emulator configured in FRI, it gives me a choice.
- New Feature: More-detailed status messages in the status bar.
- Tweak: Many improvements to program responsiveness. Previous versions of FRI freeze temporarily when scanning for a large number of new ROMs, or when populating the ROM list when a large number of ROMs. Various tweaks, combined with the new status bar messages, ensure that FRI remains responsive and keep the user in control.
- New Feature: Maximum number of players can now be an implied meaning of a File Tag. This means that if a ROM has "[p1]" in the file name, then FRI will recognize it as a 1-player game. As always, the user can create new tags, so if the user has a lot of ROMs with "(1 player)" denoting that it is a 1-player ROM, then he can easily add that to the File Flag Vocabulary.
- New Feature: FRI now has the ability to randomly-select a ROM in the ROM-list, or (if multiple ROMs are already selected) to randomly-select a ROM out of the selected ROMs.
- New Feature: Now when FRI is closed it only saves the database if changes have been made.
FRI version 1.3.0.0
April 5th, 2008Main Window: 
New File Flags Vocabulary: 
Updated Platform Vocabulary: 
Change Log:
- Fix: The "Net Play" window’s icon is now the FRI icon instead of the default Visual Studio icon.
- Fix: The "Net Play" window now opens in the center of the main window.
- Tweak: When checking for updates, if the received message is blank then FRI will no longer display it.
- Tweak: Sorting has been improved. Now "unknown" fields always sink to the bottom.
- New Feature: The user can now customize which columns in the ROM list are shown.
- Teak:: Items in the Settings Editor and the Advanced Search dialog are now sorted alphabetically
- Tweak: "Cancel" is now spelled correctly everywhere.
- New Feature: FRI now supports region information.
- Tweak: Fields in the ROM list that are unknown now appear blank instead of "Unknown".
- Tweak: Platform Vocabulary has been updated to include many more platforms.
- New Feature: FRI now supports release year information.
- New Feature: FRI will now interpret "flags" in ROMs’ file names. For example, a ROM named "Super Cool (US)(2008).rom" would be detected as an English ROM with a region of the United States, a release year of 2008, and a title of "Super Cool". The user may edit File Flags in the new File Flag Vocabulary.
- New Feature: Previously the user could tell FRI to infer missing ROM information, but now the user can tell FRI to also overwrite existing information. This is a useful feature for after the user updates the File Flag Vocabulary.
- New Feature: "File Name" and "Full Path" fields have been added to the ROM List.
- Tweak: FRI now more accurately infers ROMs’ platforms.
- New Feature: FRI now automatically scans for new ROMs when a new ROM Library Folder is added in the Settings editor.
- Tweak: When scanning for ROMs, FRI now shows that it is scanning in the status bar.
- Tweak: The Settings Editor is a little wider now to accommodate more information.
- Tweak: The default columns for the ROM list are now "Title", "Platform", "Language", "Release Year", "Players", "Rating", and "Image Health".
- New Feature: FRI can no generate a "Default Settings File" based on the settings in shown in the Settings Editor. A default settings file is basically the regular FRI database file, minus the ROM and emulator entries.
- Fix: Now the "Default" buttons for the Platform Vocabulary and Language Vocabulary reset the lists instead of append the default values to the existing list.
Note: "Region", "Release Year", "Image Health", and "Public Domain" fields are not directly editable or searchable yet. For now their values can only be changed through File Flags, but the ability to edit the information directly is coming.
To upgraders: To get the updated Platform Vocabulary, go to the "Platform Vocabulary" tab in the Settings Editor, and click "Defaults".
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