If you went to BYOAC today you'll have noticed that the forums are blocked due to the SOPA protest. Because this little site is so low on traffic I thought rather than block the site, a better use of my time would be to try to educate everyone a little about how SOPA would effect the average page. You know, like this one. ;)

SOPA is advertised as a way to fight piracy, I'm not necessarily opposed to that, but their definition of piracy is so broad that it would effect far more than you can imagine.

Before we begin the breakdown understand that I am not a lawyer and I am merely posting examples based on how I understand the law. Also understand that I'm giving a worst-case scenario based upon the amount of power the law would give censors.

So lets have a rundown of how it would effect this site shall we?

Applications:

Virtually every one would be deleted. You see under SOPA emulators are considered tools for piracy and thus not only could any emulator be deleted but any tools aiding in the use of said emulators. So mamehooker, my wrappers, my front-ends, my emulator helpers... all gone. What about my original games? Those would be gone as well. The 3d games I made re-create old em machines that lack any copyright holders BUT they include artwork from said games and thus are considered to be in violation of copyright even though the copyright owners are no longer in business. My microsoft pinball arcade wrapper? Yup even that would go because it could be considered "hacking" pinball arcade and thus violates the DMCA.


Links:

We'll those are all gone as well. Even though my links don't go to sites that contain roms they DO go to sites that contain information about roms and/or copyright artwork. So those are all censored. Actually, by SOPA law they could merely block my entire webstie due to the collection of links. This would be due to laziness more than anything else. The law is worded so that you can block an entire site for violations simply because that is easier than modifying the site and removing offensive links.

Blog Entries:

Not only can hosting applicatiosn or linking to applications be considered a violation, but giving information in regards to how to use this applications or how to hack things are considered violations as well. So 90% of the blog posts could be censored as well.


The Website Logo:

Even though it is an original work created by yours truely, I used other artists' work as a base. Now even in the art community this is acceptable and not considered stealing so long as you adequately modify the source material to create an original work (which I have). But under SOPA artists rules don't apply, I used copyrighted source and thus the logo could be pulled.

Long story short if SOPA were to go into effect and they used it's power to the fullest extent this site would probably be blocked. If not then probably the only thing remaining of the website would be the post you are now reading.

This seemingly well-meaning bill gives too much power to the goverment and history has shown us that when the goverment is given power they eventually start using it to it's fullest extent.

Anyway, to anyone you stumbles upon this I hope it inspires you to take a stand against online censorship.

It has been brought to my attention that the d3d dlls I included in the latest build generate some files, that apparently try to mess with your proxy. They seem fairly harmless (they are trying to dl an configuration file for the dlls apparently) BUT.

For the d3d8 dll you'll get this:

[PROXY]
EnableProxyLibrary=0
InitProxyFunctions=1
ProxyLibrary=
[GLOBAL]
PartOfENBSeries=boris-vorontsov.narod.ru



Change it to this:

[PROXY]
EnableProxyLibrary=0
InitProxyFunctions=0
ProxyLibrary=
[GLOBAL]


And make the file read-only


The d3d9 dll has a gigantic ini called blahblah.arc that allows you to fully tweak the render engine.

Just change the settings in the proxy section to look like this:

[PROXY]
EnableProxyLibrary=0
InitProxyFunctions=0
ProxyLibrary=

This one will remember settings.

Now keep in mind this is just a precaution. I checked my proxy settings on my computer and they are just fine. Better safe than sorry though.

Lately I have been doing pretty consistant updates and I like doing that when I can, but the real world is closing in and I'm going to have to take some downtime, probably for a month or so.

The Heater Core in my car busted yesterday, so unless I want to bathe in Anti Freeze I'll need to remove the dashboard, somehow become a contortionist, and get that swapped out.

Also the brakes on my mothers car went out at the same time, so I'm going to try to fix those for her as well.

I have other things going on as well but I won't bore you with details.

Needless to say updates and new software is going to be sporatic right now.

Stay tuned, as an update to mamehooker, and outrun drivers for mame will hopefully get released before the summer is out!

Ok I found some dlls on the net that fix a lot of problems with the Taito X Games.

I've also cleaned up a removed a lot of bulk in my wrapper.

The combination of the two is the Taito Type X Wrapper Pack 1.2

It allows you to rotate all of the Vertical Games (except Raiden IV), hide the cursor, and also display bezels.

It also fixes the following bugs/issues:

Homura / Shikigami III - Proper Framerate
Matrimelee - Intro Video Now plays, Quicker Boot Time.
Street Fighter IV - Intro Video no Longer Locks Up.


It's in the misc downloads section to the right and as usual it comes in a no artwork flavor.

Enjoy!

Yup the link to the no artwork version of the rotate wrappers was broken. The php garbled the link, sorry. It's fixed now, so have fun!