Hey All,

Just want to get everyone's feelings on putting in for a Master of Orion series. My request for Master of Orion (2016) was recently accepted, and we now have enough (3) Master of Orion games for one.

Additionally, I asked the Mod and community of Master of Magic if they'd like to be a part of this as well. The idea would be to make it a more general "Master of" series if they want to join, since the early games are designed by the same folks and have a similar older 4x style and are arguably part of the same series.

Either way, my understanding is that nothing would change for the individual boards and the mods of the current boards would now also have series mods permissions, and be able to create new game boards in the series. There's also the added bonus of being able to see the whole series in an organized fashion on the site I should add. That's the nice feature I really like.

What does everyone think?

Hi All,

I recently got the Master of Orion (2016) remake approved on SRC, and we now have enough Master of Orion games to make a game series. But...

I wanted to see if the community here would like to be involved in that though, since MoM, while unique in it's own right, is fundamentally by the same designers and is a 4x "Master of" game. So instead of just a Master of Orion series, we could make it a more general "Master of" series and include MoM.

My understanding is that nothing will change for individual boards that become a part of a series, it's just that the current game board mods would also be promoted to series mods and be able to create game boards in the series.

Figured since the Caster of Magic Mod is being actively developed and there are rumblings of the new IP owner possibly looking to rebuild or remake the game from scratch, it might be useful for the community to have series control.

Let me know what you think either way! I'm fine with just seeing if folks want to do a MoO series, I just didn't want to exclude folks.

Yeah, I doubt there will be any interest in the PS1 version, considering the language barrier for western players, and there's very little interest in the game in general outside of western spaces.

I did this more just to show it exists and see how close it is in mechanics, so it can live untracked for now.

This exists, but it's only in Japanese:

I decided to do a speedrun of it last weekend for fun. It's Japanese name is Civizard - Majutsu no Keifu. Pretty faithful with improved graphics in some places. Very, very slow to play. Doesn't appear to have mouse support in my tests. The menus are 1 to 1 with the PC version, making it pretty easy to mess around with. Only light use of google translate was needed!

There's surprisingly little footage of it on the internet, and even less of it being beaten.

There's a PC-98 version as well, but I haven't been able to find a copy of it, legit or otherwise. Seems pretty close to the DOS version.

Hi @Beliaz, just added a variable for this.

All set.

Sorry, a little busy at work lately. Will be getting to the category later tonight.

Fraps should be fine, but you should look into OBS. It's much more full featured, free, and way more stable. Any official version of the game is fine, and of course DOSBox and other emulation is fine.

Heck if you want to use the 1.50+ fan patches I'll add a variable for them as well. I'd already promised @Beliaz that in another thread.

We can certainly add a Category! Would you be interested in Huge/Impossible/Max players (probably the most difficult), or just Huge/Impossible 1 player?

And no question is dumb! It's cool.

Hi All,

Just a heads up, I'm taking over moderation for Berserk:BoTH. If anyone has any questions or changes they'd like to see, feel free to ask here!

@Roxy_Rose if you'd ever like to come back and mod, please feel free to let me know and I'll add you!

Set this up. I moved the runs already but they might take a bit to show up. No need to resubmit. Old ones will be deleted once we're sure everything moved fine.

EDIT: Aaaand we're all set.

We could do this. Doesn't really matter to me either way. We could also add per level Categories if wanted, either with the level features or much like the training stages in a main tab.

Hello there! I'm looking to request moderation of the following board:

https://www.speedrun.com/berserk_and_the_band_of_the_hawk

I have something like 7 runs submitted over the past 3 weeks, and the only method of contact for the current mod available to me has been sr.c. Twitter is deleted, Twitch I can't message due to friends only restriction, and I haven't been able contact over discord yet (pending friend request). The mod has not logged in for over 9 months.

Just in case anyone was wondering about why only Higan, BSNES, and the SD2SNES are allowed for emulation:

The gist is, after 40 minutes, SNES9x is over a minute ahead of all the others, and after only a few seconds is very visibly out of sync with some specific early timings.

Other FPGA solutions need to be tested, but I can confirm that no other well known PC SNES emulator is accurate enough. Most other Super FX game boards either ban unofficial emulators or require highly accurate emulation as well.

While most of the software you need to speedrun Excel 95 is freely available at WinWorld (<- Link here) and is fairly easy to get running, the full trilogy can be tricky. There is a bit of a legal grey area with some parts of the specific emulation I use and with Office 2000.

I'm not necessarily concerned with the emulation software - the BIOSes it uses are murkily licensed, but unlikely to cause any real trouble, and there are enough free and clearly legal alternatives.

Office 2000 is another story...

A few sites like WinWorld are allowed by Microsoft to distribute all but Excel/Office 2000 for archival and educational purposes, and what we're doing would fall under this. While you can certainly get Office 2000 products from sources like Archive.org, I feel uncomfortable linking to Office 2000 in this way. On a side note, I really don't know why that is. Much of the rest of the software from that era is hosted, it's literally just Office 2000.

Even more mysteriously, by several sources - Office 2000 is similarly allowed for educational and archival purposes, it's just that Microsoft doesn't allow it to be freely available on these sites. I'm inclined to respect that wish and not directly link anything to do with it here.

That said, if you are interested in a preconfigured emulator to run either Hall of Tortured Souls or the Full Trilogy, please feel free to reach out to me on discord or twitter. I can at least help there.

I personally use PCem (an early PC emulator) and mostly resources from WinWorld, though I do have access to original disks. PCem tends to be more accurate and capable for the later Direct X based "magic" than alternatives like DOSBox because it attempts to accurately emulate specific processors and graphics adaptors. You can get it all working in DOSBox, sure but it's more work than it's worth.

Link for PCem: https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ Link for Winworld: https://winworldpc.com/home

I'd consider it if there was any real benefit. Plus, I'm somewhat doubtful it fits. Those games are built in's on one version of the OS or another, or free/paid packs that came with the OS. This is not that.

The expansion (and Fan patch it's based around) is a bit hit or miss. Definitely makes the game a bit more playable with multiple CPU opponents, but some of the charm and useful bugs got squashed. Certainly makes casual play interesting though!

I still love the darn thing. There's really nothing anyone's done that has matched it's style.

There's an official expansion for it now too if you haven't heard!

While I certainly don't agree with anyone policing what is and isn't a game simply by the time it takes to play, and have in the past argued for notability being the metric, I certainly don't appreciate the shade being thrown at my boy clippy and me.

@EchoStorm - and others...

The Easter Egg in Excel 95 is notable as being one of the few times a company primarily known for business software developed a hidden, fully functional game inside a productivity product. It's a fully 3d engine based on Doom, written for Windows 95, and running on top of Excel. It's a technical marvel for the time. Since there is an end goal as stated by the developers, and that goal does provide a level of challenge, it's especially notable for being one of the only Easter Eggs in a retail product like this that you can speedrun.

It is also incredibly difficult to get running in this day and age, requiring both knowledge of what's required for the software to run within an emulated environment, knowledge of the hardware it was meant to run on, and knowledge of specialized early PC emulation software. You can't simply run this accurately on DOSBOX or VMware. It took me considerable effort and research to get this running accurately enough to play the game the way it was intended, and my end goal was to make it so that anyone could easily play it and speedrun it if wanted.

On top of all of this, I marketed it successfully to a marathon, got it accepted, and ran it, clippy and all, live for a whole mess of folks.

That's probably why it has a board. Put in the work first. Then throw shade.

I've known for a while that the early fat PS2s couldn't achieve a lot of the same save glitches and hacking using RPG Maker as their slim counterparts, but I wasn't exactly sure if it came down to just differences in copying the save header or not. Decided to test that in a fun run of Xenogears (JPN) last weekend, and it turns out it is down to differences in the copy functionality on the PS2 PlayStation driver version.

Since I don't have access to Japanese Slim, I used one of my US 79ks to do the copying part, and it worked perfectly! It really is simply a function of the PS driver on the Fat models as I suspected:

Pretty interesting. It kinda looks like it writes the header at a totally different point in the save if you look at it in a hex editor.