Christmas is here! And, it's raining? Go figure.

SBC's Cookie Clockmas is out now, so go watch that if you want.

Anyhow, it's only been a short Christmas so far, like, 4 hours into the day for me, but already I've gotten some nice sweets, some new pajamas, some money, oh! And a new DS lite! Gloss Silver looks AWESOME compared to my old White Lite.

It's great, because it's fresh, the D-pad is a lot more responsive, the touch screen is accurate, it doesn't have a nasty click when I open it, but there's one real issue to be honest, the screens.
A lot of the newer DS Lites have these cheap screens, the Crimson DS that was made for Brain Age 2 had really bad ones, but luckily it seems my only issue is ghosting (black images staying on the screen for too long)
Other than that, this is a nice sexy new DS.

So right now, my mum is cooking a nice Christmas dinner, which me, my mum, her boyfriend and my brother will all be enjoying in a few hours time, a nice turkey crown with gammon, roast potatoes, oh this'll be nice.

Oh right, I shouldn't just talk about what I got, right?
So I got for my mother a Newton Faulkner: Hand Built by Robots music CD, I really have no idea what this is like since I don't pay attention to the music scene, but this is what she wanted. :)
For her boyfriend, I had no idea what to get him, so she got me a book to give to him.
I have no idea what the book is, except that it's an autobiography of someone he likes. XD
For her boyfriend's son, who's going to be very surprised when he unwraps his Wii later today, I'm giving him my old copy of Rayman Raving Rabbids. I didn't care for it much myself, but a lot of people like this game, especially for it's multiplayer.
And for my brother, I got him two things.
First was a SNES to USB adapter, since I was going to buy myself one anyway.
Second was Contra 4 for the DS, I believe he loves this kind of game so I imported it for him from play-asia.com. I actually got very lucky, it was supposed to ship on the 27th, but it shipped on the 10th.

As for what other people got from eachother, well it's still early, but my mum got a FUCKLOAD of things, a book, an iPod nano, a stereo with dock, and a digital photoframe, insane!

There's a lot more left to the day, and then there's our annual family gathering on Boxing day tomorrow, so there's always more presents and more festive surprises.

I hope you have a merry christmas too. :)

Yeah, my clockmas movie, SBC's Cookie Clockmas is 100% finished now, with subtitles, credits, and of course the actual animation.

And thank god for that too, I've been busting my ass off these past few days to get a lot of the animation done, I can hopefully get my sleeping patterns in check now, and then enjoy some gaming tomorrow on Christmas Eve.

I'll be submitting it to here on Newgrounds and on Youtube as well on Christmas day, I hope you enjoy the 2 and a half minute long animation when you watch it, I certainly enjoyed making it.

EDIT: I've successfully finished all of the animation, making for 155 seconds in total.
All that remains is to add the subtitles, and make a credits screen.
At this point, I can pretty much guarantee that this will be released sometime on Christmas day. :)

Well, there's only a few days left until Christmas, and my short movie is two thirds done.
I'm confident that if I bust my ass for the next few days, thankfully with no more college, I can get this done.

Animating it has been tough with distractions like playing games and receiving college awards and visiting dentists and shit, but now I can really get to work on this.

You may've seen in the previous screenshot that StrawberryClock and OrangeClock were together to bake the cookies, but Rupee will play a part as well.

The movie also borrows a few elements from Phoenix Wright, if you're wondering how, you'll just have to wait and see.

I hope you enjoy this when I release it, hopefully on Christmas day, perhaps Boxing day if time constrains me somehow.

Well, Christmas is approaching, and I have been lazy as fuck, it's time I made a clockmas movie, right?

This year I'm only making a short 2-3 minute flash featuring SBC and OrangeClock in the same FBF style I used for my clockday movie, SleepEasy, I'm sure I can get it done in 12 days.

The basic plot is that SBC bakes cookies to raise funds for clockmas, it's more like a single joke to be honest because of the ending I've got in mind, but whatever.

Hopefully the project will go well, and I will have the movie ready for submission on Christmas day, or maybe Christmas Eve, I've not decided yet.

So, I recently bought myself a SNES Retroport, a basic SNES to USB adapter that lets me use my old SNES pad on my PC, it's great.

I think a lot of people would agree in that the SNES pad is actually one of the best designed controllers ever, given it's age, even today the DS uses the exact same button set up (although the start and select buttons are moved, everything else is the same.)

I've been trying it out on a number of different applications, and it's worked great so far.

1: The pad is ideal for DS emulation, because of the identical button setup, no$gba can use it very well, I'm playing Phoenix Wright on my PC, hah.
New Super Mario Bros plays well too, I'll likely take a whole bunch of screenshots too.

2: Naturally, SNES emulation works great with a SNES pad.
...I mean that's a no brainer, Super Mario All stars on my PC with a great display, yes please!

3: GBA emulation is good too, obviously.
I'd mostly just use this for recording gameplay footage these days.

4: VirtualNES.com combined with Joy2Key means I can easily play a large number of NES games at a whim with a good controller, and because of 4 spare buttons (X Y L R) I can assign some extra keys, say like use L and R for better Start and Select buttons, and set some auto-fire buttons as well.

5: Oddly enough, playing Super Smash Bros on an N64 emulators is pretty fun with a SNES pad.
I was never a big fan of analogue sticks, although I'm good with those on Melee, make no mistake.

Yeah, I have a feeling I'm going to love this SNES pad for a long time, no extra software needed either, great stuff.

Sakurai just announced on the Smashbros Dojo website that many past stages from Melee will be re-appearing in the new installment Brawl, just awesome.

Stages themselves are graphical replicas, so they don't look better, but with brilliant layouts like Temple had, I can only hope they choose some more great stages in the future.

What's more is that just like you'd think, given the music collecting feature, in addition to the original track you've also got more music for the stage, great!

Brawl has had some amazing updates in the past few weeks, too think, the game should've been coming out in America on Monday, just a few days from now too.

Remind me not to emulate 12 DS games at once.

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Back at the beginning of the year, when I was still running Windows XP on my old machine before upgrading to Vista, I was using a favourite skin of mine called Luna Element. Luna is XP's default skin, Luna Element is the perfect answer to it with sleek buttons, impressive shiny designs and amazing use of colours and contours, I absolutely loved the skin.

When the time came to upgrade to Vista, I realised I would have to let go, so I did, thankfully the Aero interface was actually very nice, but soon enough I grew tired of it.
Through all the XP skins I had used, through a patched uxtheme.dll or Windows Blinds, they all had a unique, pixelated charm to them to be honest, something Aero could never capture.
So soon enough, I tried good old uxtheme, but there is not one uxtheme skin for Vista that doesn't look like a crappy hack of Aero, seriously.
Then I tried Windows Blinds, it was good for a while, that's for sure, but I still grew tired, as many of the XP skins I loved simply didn't view right.

...Soon enough, WB 6.0 came out, I was entitled to a free upgrade, joy!
It even came with a skin called Classic, which was actually very nice, but lacking...

So getting tired of that old Classic skin, I started looking around.
I was reminded of that lovely XP skin called Luna Element, and remembered I have a laptop in my Psychology lessons for note taking, I decided to install and remembered how much it fucking rocked. I actually started longing for XP again JUST for this skin.

And finally, just about an hour ago, I discovered I could convert that classic fucking skin, for Windows Blinds.

You have no idea how fucking happy this makes me

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Have you ever heard of a DS emulator called no$gba? With some recent developments, DS emulation has become really good.
It still requires a reasonably powerful machine to emulate a DS game well, but actual playability is very much in site now!
Problems still exist naturally, 3d games suffer slowdown (but very little of it with the latest developments) transparency sometimes messes up (it can be a hinderance in Picross) and 3d models don't display properly (shadows just don't work right.) But these are all gradually coming together, why, with the previous update, Megaman ZX would crash and Mario Kart was painfully slow! The biggest problem that exists right now is sound, many games sound fine, but going back to Mario Kart DS sound can be horrible.

Here's a list of games I've tested, keep in mind I've got a lotta ram, a powerful processor and a high-end graphics card on Vista.

New Super Mario Bros:
YES! Game is fully playable, intro has weird transparent sprites, slowdown with multiple 3d models is minimal!

Zoo Keeper:
YES! Infact, it's practically perfect

Brain Age:
WELL, it certainly works perfectly, except the emulator needs an option to rotate the screen sideways. :p

Megaman Starforce Dragon:
NO, 3d models just do not appear in battle...

42 All Time Classics:
NO, it never seems to get past the saving screen, and it still horribly slow and sounds awful.

Mario Kart DS:
YES! The slowdown is minimal and fully playable, but you'll need to put up with some bad sound quality.

Megaman ZX:
YES! Works great, even the videos they included, but there are some minor transparency issues.

Sonic Rush Adventure:
YES! The game plays amazingly well! The intro is a bit slow, the main levels work 100%, the boss battles are a bit slow, the Jet Bike levels work fine but have some bizarre graphical errors, but it's completely playable.

Megaman Battle Network 5 DS:
Maybe? The game works great, minor transparency issues, but I can't seem to save it, I can't be bothered to investigate, probably requires savetype configuration.

Zelda Phantom Hourglass:
YES? Now this is an odd one, during gameplay, it actually runs FASTER than it should.
I think I have an explanation for this too, when looking for action replay codes, it seems that this game has a built in V-sync option, disabling it makes the game go way faster than it should.
There's also a lot of shading issues and slowdown in some circumstances.
So it won't be easy playing with your mouse.

Tetris DS:
YES! It's fully playable and great speed, but one issue is that the background is not translucent, making it hard to see tetris pieces.
I prefer Tetris DX anyway, I hate 20g and infinite spin.

Animal Crossing DS Demo:
NO, the outdoors 3d models just don't appear, at all.

Pokémon Diamond:
YES! It runs at a great speed and such, although some graphic errors like water appearing black occur. Otherwise, fully playable!

So there you have it, these are the games I've tested, you can see, problems to exist but these should not be hard to overcome.
I look forward to what future developments the no$gba team makes, I might even donate if I can make use of it. :)

It's been a while since I've posted a news article, but I can't REALLY think of anything to post.
I mean, I should be working on a flash, but i'm not.

Really, I'm just playing one game after another these days, I'm always in need of a good game, right now it's Megaman ZX Advent, before that it was Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland (you can imagine why), and before that, Zelda Phantom Hourglass of course.

I've GOT to do SOMETHING in flash, I mean fuck, my output has been so low this year because I keep playing games, even just something short like Untitled-1.fla, maybe I should do an Untitled-2.fla or something.
Hell, already ideas are pouring into my head, that in itself could be the idea.

I need to get out of the habit of making movies just because a special occasion is coming up, like clockday or clockmas, I've got to do something about only ever doing things to fulfil deadlines or goals.

And no, I'm not making a Tails and his GBA 4, for fucks sakes.