FMecha

Multinational antitrust is the issue here. I probably see this as also requiring antitrust approval outside of Japan and there is no way foreign regulators will allow that.

>A fair number of sites hosted and operated outside the European Union reacted to GDPR by instituting blocks of EU users, many returning HTTP 451.

My outlook on doing this is that this is not the way to do it because these things exist:

- EU citizens living in non-EU countries (isn't GDPR supposed to apply EU citizens worldwide?)

- EU citizens using VPN with exit node to/IP address spoofing a non-EU country

Either comply with GDPR or just don't exist, period.

For antitrust reasons, I do not see this as actually happening.

>In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that era couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language and character set. Gaming was all that remained, and if you only wanted gaming, you could just as well get a NES (known in Japan as Famicom), which was much better suited for the purpose.

Some, much complex, JRPGs such as Falcom's titles (the Ys series), began on Japanese computers (though they did end up getting NES ports anyway).

There's also the proliferation of smut on Japanese computers, since you can't have that kind of stuff of consoles. This also eventually trickles down to some "underground" computer magazines in Japan having that stuff on their pages and coverdiscs - the stuff you would typically find on their weekly gossip magazines.

It was also popular in Indonesia, but the userbase eventually moved to WhatsApp and Discord.

People who run "official accounts" on LINE in Indonesia eventually moved to Twitter (the Indonesia-specific "base"/"menfess" accounts/culture were originally from similar LINE accounts allowing users to send anonymous messages so it can be relayed to many users, as well as from K-pop roleplaying on Twitter) and Instagram (for news, after LINE Today, their news aggregator, closed), too.

In 2014, a Polish driver modified their license plate to also contain an SQL injection in effort to thwart speed cameras: https://hackaday.com/2014/04/04/sql-injection-fools-speed-tr...

Microsoft faced the same threat in 2000 but the outcome of elections that year prevented that. Will it be the same?

>I think they’re trying to prevent people from developing hardware alternatives to Nintendo Switch, next logical step after stable emulators.

They waged war against Famiclones in the past - see NTDEC (which had trademarks involved, since NTDEC stands for "Nintendo Electronic Company") and Power Player Super Joy III cases. However, they did lose the PocketFami case (in Japan, mind you) due to patents expiring and the fact it does not come with built-in games.

>so the company itself has no means of earning revenue from Wii U sales

Nintendo's de facto method to do this is to simply re-release them on Switch - though this only matters for first-party titles.

> Emulation is legal.

For now.

This is just baby steps to Nintendo weaseling themselves into Supreme Court to get Sony v. Connectix overturned. MGM v. Grokster attempted to overturn Sony v. Universal (VCR lawsuit), but while the movie studios did win, it was not an overturn of the VCR lawsuit.

>While an emulator does not infringe on copyright and is illegal per US court precedence

At least until Nintendo manages to overturn Sony v. Connectix, given recent SCOTUS trends.

Apparently this is the aftermath of Valve v. Zaiger case.

>The biggest irony is that professional sportsmen (it's always men) keep getting bans for gambling on their own sport

People pointing this out often leads me to an impression that athletes should be allowed to bet on their own games. Problem is, that leads to match-fixing.

Indonesia is also having an illegal online casino epidemic, too. That is in a country where gambling is currently illegal and will continue to be.

In American motorsports such as NASCAR, the term "tech inspection" is used for those stuff.

>The FM Towns relied on Intel CPUs, but the rest of the hardware was designed more or less like any other Japanese system of the era with specialized graphics and sound hardware.

This was also true of PC-98, too, to some extent.

This is what traditional forums excel at - for instance, a niche-specific forum may also contain off-topic boards for topics unrelated to the niche, such as general current affairs or media.

wrt to Reddit, I mean, Lemmy does exist, but much like Mastodon instances try to be "another Twitter", Lemmy (instances) also tries to be "another Reddit". At the end of the day, it's a human/userbase problem of "platforms change, hivemind doesn't".

That does not even account for offline ads, such as billboards.

>(btw, the FM Towns, IIR, also had specialized graphics hardware to produce arcade-like graphics with tiles and sprites and so on, making it even more different)

I originally thought might have confused it with the X68K, whose it's closeness to arcade hardware such as Capcom CPS-1 allowed for near (but not fully, contrary to popular belief) perfect ports possible at the time. (Capcom even sold a Genesis/SNES controller converter for X68K for the Street Fighter II ports.) However, the FM Towns does have its own share of arcade ports, mainly involving Sega, Taito and Capcom titles, such as After Burner, Operation Wolf and Super Street Fighter II, respectively.

On FM Towns side, their commercial games list appears to be intermediate between X68K's "arcade at home" experience and PC-98's graphics that prioritize RPGs and visual novels (often smut in nature) due to PC-98's graphics capabilities that benefitted static graphics. (No PC-98 mention/discussion is complete if eroge is not brought up at one point anyway.)

>In a YouTube video about the history of OS/2, I learned that ole Microsoft back in the 1990s before their mob tactics were curtailed, used to send suited thugs to Japanese PC manufacturers to chastise them for even offering users the mere option of buying PCs with OS/2 instead of Windows..

That, out of context, gives an impression-implication of Microsoft's Japanese operations having ties with the yakuza.

And for PC-98 and FM Towns, versions of Windows were available for them (with FM Towns' uniqueness diminishing gradually as Fujitsu embraced DOS/V).

Many Japanese PC games and desktop applications aimed at the home market, from small to large developers, also do sort of these things. Just look up the word "AppLocale".

And the rest is nowadays mostly gacha developers, to which South Korea and China are also eating up their lunch, even at home.

Are there even unions for open source maintainers/contributors?

I used this one: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2006?amount=700

PS5 Slim trade-in value is already tanking because of the PS5 Pro, though [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/Jebailey/status/1833540904797528080

Adjusted for inflation that PS3 is $1,100 now.

PC games are also for most part digital-only nowadays.

>there is no digital substitute

Flash carts exist that can bridge your own digital ROMs to original NES systems.

>On the PS5 refresh, no, an internet connection is required to activate the drive, whether or not it came in the box.

Because the disc drive and the main board are required to be paired with each other since the PS3/X360 era. People who repair PS3s (except super slims, for some reason) and PS4s need to re-pair the disc drive board with the main board (or failing both, replace both boards with one that has been already paired) every time there is drive replacement: https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Remarry_Bluray_Drive (for PS3)

I originally thought this might/could be an US portion of the Stop Killing Games campaign - until I read the "hardware" part of the title.