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aubrey

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  • Real Name
    Aubrey Lewman
  • Location
    Stockton, CA
  • Occupation
    Programmer/Analyst

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  1. Yep! That is exactly what I meant. I haven't seen a copy of that book for almost 20 years! I'm impressed that you have one on hand. With name in hand, I was able to procure a digital copy of the book and further go back down memory lane. It even mentions the Konami Code in the section for Gradius. I bet that is how everyone came to know it. Thanks for the pic! -Aubrey
  2. For Super Mario Brothers, I was visiting an arcade and saw some guy bounce on the turtle for tons of extra lives. For the minus level in the game, I heard about it as a rumor among the school kids. For the Legend of Zelda and several other popular NES games, there was a black strategy guide that EVERYONE had at the time. I can't remember the name of the book though. It was a bible that was well worn by the time I was done with it. The second quest really stumped me. They introduced that new game mechanic of pushing through some walls, and nobody told me. My aunt pushed against a wall and went through, and then the rest of the second quest was easy. Obviously Nintendo Power was a great source of information. There was a cheats and tips section that would contain the kind of information that you'd get from gamefaqs now. Before that there was the Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter. If I remember correctly, one of the fun clubs mentioned about how you could get to secret areas if you let some of the doors close on samus, which was good information for WEEKS of fun exploring hidden areas of Metroid. Actually, it was an exercise in frustration with "DAMN IT, SAMUS IS STUCK IN BALL FORM IN THE WALL. I WAS SO CLOSE TO GETTING TO THE HIDDEN AREA" Mike Tyson's punchout.. I have no idea where I heard the 007-373-5963 code to start at Tyson, but I used it so many times, I don't even have to think to recall it. At my best, I used to be able to beat Tyson in about 1 out of 4 tries. 1 out of 10 if people were watching. It is sort of like the konami code on contra. As far as I know, everyone knew the konami code right when the game came out, and we naturally tried the code on every konami game we owned, with some success. I never could beat Ghosts and Goblins. That game was too hard man. I got to near the end, and found out that I needed to play through again, and said 'f this! I never beat Battle Toads either. I did get past the cycle part that is so brutal one time, but I totally remember being crazy frustrated with how exact the timings needed to be. GRRRR. I suspect that a lot of information came from the Nintendo game Hotline. They used to advertise that pretty heavily in the game pak manuals. I called a few times myself when I was stuck on some adventure game (Zelda: LttP, Battle of Olympus) and my impression was those game counselors were gods. I have no idea how they could figure out my problem from an over the phone description for some random game and give me back a correct answer in no time flat. It was amazing! From what I gathered, a lot of my friends called more than I did... I'll agree with others that mentioned that we had a lot more time to spend on games. I typically got a game for my birthday and christmas. Six months with a game that takes 4 days to beat.. Think about that. Somewhere after the first month with a game, I'd try to find glitches. Lots of the old NES games had problems. Take Rygar, a pretty cool game with what I personally consider to have the best musical track for the NES (Sagila's Cavern)... I found that if I calibrated my NES Advantage controller to press buttons as fast as possible, that I could slowly 'fall' from the top of the ropes in the game, and glide/fly practically anywhere. There were all kinds of hidden areas to explore with that trick. Of course, unless the controller pressed the buttons at exactly the right times, Rygar would fall to his death, so calibrating the controller was a must. I'd calibrate the joystick using the options screen of the game gyromite. It turns out that when you press a button in the options screen the game beeps. The NES advantage had a dial on it that you could turn to calibrate the speed of the turbo button presses. When the audible beep on Gyromite was constant, that was the fastest the NES could accept auto fire presses. For reference, if you turned the dial to the max setting, the timings worked out such that it was NOT be the fastest possible setting. So anyway, I don't think that what I did was particularly special. I think we were all doing similar things back in the day. So, it probably represents the amount of effort a lot of us put into the few games we owned. The accomplishment that I am most proud of is beating this crappy game called Deadly Towers for the NES. I never had a guide, or an instruction manual, or anything. I never got hints, and I made it to the end after months of on again off again effort. God I hated that game. At least the ending music was pretty awesome. So, that is my take on how we got our information before gamefaqs and emulators. -Aubrey
  3. FYI SuperTux, the server that has been hosting the OCR tracker for many years, has lost its network hosting. I had a great setup going and have no complaints. Anyway the tracker will be back online soonish. The SuperTux OCR mirror, probably not. -aubrey
  4. FYI, I'm upgrading the disk array used by SuperTux this afternoon, so the tracker will be down for several hours. -Aubrey
  5. It was down for several days because of some power work that needed to be done in the datacenter. And for whatever reason the system didn't come back up on its own. However, it is back now. -Aubrey
  6. It depends on a lot of things. If you have the torrent port on your router blocked off, then yes, 40k is pretty good. If it is open like it should be, then you could be getting several hundred k a second. But that isn't guaranteed. It of course depends on the quality and number of the peers that you are connecting to. It also might depend on the quality of the networking equipment on your end. Downloads usually speed up over time. "If you can get several hundred K per second downloading from other torrents, you should be able to get several hundred K per second downloading from VotL." -Aubrey
  7. FYI, the tracker will be down from July 3rd-6th because of some electrical work in the area. Sorry for the inconvenience. The server will be back up as soon as possible. -Aubrey
  8. This happens when some of the database tables the tracker uses to keep track of transfer statistics gets corrupted. It happens a fair bit more than I'd like. If you see this behavior, send me pm on the topic and I will repair the table. -Aubrey
  9. It is possible that there were some errors with this 'lockdown' as there was a lot of other stuff djp and crew wanted to acomplish to coincide with the release of OCR01500. However, from the ones I have checked, whatever id3 tag reader you are using doesn't seem to be reading the tags correctly. If you open up the Seiken Densetsu 3 remix or the Chrono Cross remix in winamp, it clearly shows id3 tag information. Final Fantasy 9 does have http://www.ocremix.org/ for the album field, And the Secret of Mana remix is tagged as a game in the genre field. I didn't look at the rest of the remixes. Anyway, I have ran into this problem before with the id3 tag reader I uses on remix.supertux.com. If there is a certain character that appeared in the id3 tag, the reader got all confused and said the remix doesn't have an id3 tag. I imagine that the issue with your reader is something similar. As for a real answer, probably one of the remix lawyers would have to chime in as to what is going on. -Aubrey
  10. Try: http://www.ocremix.org/backend/manager.php?style=xml The original url as published in the old torrent readme files doesn't do what you expect anymore, but the above link will get it to work. I am curious though... the xml list of remixes wasn't included in the torrents because we didn't think that many people would care about it. I personally figured that people would really just want the remixes. So, what were you doing with the xml version? -Aubrey
  11. This is going to sound bad no matter what, but I'm really only meaning it to be informative. Since my server displays tracker information that gets posted on the main page of this site, I can (and do) check out the browser stats for the several hundred thousand uniques that visit this site each month. Internet Explorer has not been the browser of choice to view this site for quite a while now. Here is the break down for last month: 52% - firefox 39% - internet explorer 4% - opera 3% - safari 2% - other (netscape/mozilla/camino/konqueror) Kinda neat huh? -Aubrey
  12. Well, the tracker could display something different for the links at least, even if the torrents themselves stayed the same. It would certainly be an improvement over what we have now. If you are coming up with standards, make the site projects release in some CD quality format. Besides for giving the remixers a chance to shine using the best possible format, it makes the tracker stats go up faster, which is almost as important! -Aubrey
  13. Dang! You take the "Please keep the torrents open after your download completes" messages to heart! -Aubrey
  14. Oh, it will still be quite a while. Only a few are posted per week and we are only at 1412. There is also a chance that there will be some sort of clean up after 1500 in order to finalize , or lockdown submissions 1001-1500. If that happens the 1001-1500 torrent will be delayed for a while longer after that. There is a torrent floating around for remixes after 1250... If you download from that you should get current without too much effort. -Aubrey
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