I wanted to give everyone a heads up on where my time is currently going, and the status of pending site updates. Right now most of my resources are being consumed by the archive work I do relating to preserving game sites and game related material. OC was the catalyst for this, but over the years it has evolved into an incredibly ambitious and time consuming process. I am doing my best to get ahead on this work.

Onlineconsoles has some exciting news pending, especially for the Dreamcast site, as well as sweeping updates, changes, and site improvements across all of OC.

A point to keep in mind is that our online environment for playing games is in many ways, fractured, or broken, with this site and its members having to try and repair or fill the gaps in order to facilitate regular online play. Recently I was detailing a list of issues that are currently plaguing the online environments we try to maintain. Things such as Homeland for GameCube needing a beginners translation guide, the sketchy landscape of the Dreamcast PCDC server, and how the Tribes Master List we developed has had some bugs. (Though hopefully, the recent relaunch of the TAA master list squashes all of the problems people were having when connecting.)

Online gaming is very much about convenience, and I am going to be trying my best to make the process of playing online as simple and easy to get into as possible. Changes will be made on both the game side of things as well as the website in order to improve the playing environment across the board.

Thanks all for being patient!

Ben Pekarek
Director / Founder
www.onlineconsoles.com

I had originally planned to have the Homeland Beginners Guide up last spring. Unfortunatly, some critical projects came up relating to archiving that delayed this considerably. I recently got back on the project, and things are going smoothly. Remember this is just a beginners guide to start playing the game, and will not be a complete translation. But when it is up, it will inform you as to what you need to play Homeland online, how to host or connect, as well as how to 'start' playing the game.

One big milestone that I finally completed was getting the entire printed Homeland Manual, into actual onscreen selectable text. I took all 53 pages from Homeland's manual, passed it through an OCR application, then added this text to coded pages roughly layed out in HTML, and finally was able to pass that through various online translators. This has taken a few solid weeks of work. The next step is reading through the rough translation and extrapolating some sense from it all in order to add it to the beginners guide.

If you have purchased Homeland or have wondered when or if OC's Homeland community will ever get rolling, trust me, it will. These things take time.

Regards,
-Ben Pekarek
Site Director/Founder

My personal site recently went live, which means 2 literary works I have been working on for quite some time have now been published.

A while back we had a thread at the Dreamcast area of OC that was about HD displays. Quite a bit of debate went on back and forth, and the thread was eventually locked down. I could get into an explanation of those who were write vs wrong in the discussion, but my reasoning for closing the thread down and keeping discussions on HD to a minimum was because of this pending article.

Please read:

Video Games in an Era of High-Definition
"An indepth look at the hurdles of playing video games on High-Definition Displays."
by Ben Pekarek

After reading this paper you will have a very firm understanding of how to approaching playing your game console(s). There are numerous links for further reading as well. Regardless of where you are at with comprehending the effects of display lag, this extensive article should bring you up to speed rather quickly. Do pass this link around if you encounter people asking about the effects of lag and degernative image anomalies on other forums.

Since this guide pretty much explains the issue in meticulious detail, and already makes a firm recommendation for how to approach the matter, we will continue to discourage topics for HD troubleshooting on the forums. So a sticky will be posted in the Lounge Forums linking to this article as well for easy access. You are more than welcome to email me to discuss the topic, but I feel we should all focus on talking about the games above all else.

A second article, relates to the nature of online games, as well as restoration. Remember the new section that was supposed to go up at OC in the future? as noted in the rules? Well, this paper brings that section one step closer to reality.

Since I started OC I have been closely watching how a userbase interacts with online games from their release to post mortem.

The Nature of Online Gaming, defines the lifecycle of internet connected player experiences. This is an important read, especially for newer members to the site.

The as yet to be named sub area to OC, will branch off from themes outlined in this article. It will include a history of milestones made in preserving and restoring software relating to the platforms we cover, as well as an FAQ section where you the user can ask questions and have them answered in detail.

Thanks for reading, and see you guys online.

Regards,
-Ben Pekarek
Site Director/Founder

Hello everyone, and welcome back after a 9 day blackout. On the evening of December 7th the RAID Controller on the dedicated web server that OC was hosted on failed. This synchronized data between multiple harddrives, namely backup drives incase of a primary harddrive failure. The failure of this device put the entire server out of commission. Luckily all of OC's data was intact, and nothing was lost.

Though, for the majority of the past week and a half I did not have all of the data needed to fully restore the site. It was not a fun time period for me at all.

OC's primary function is to keep technology alive. Not only as a self serving role to maintain its own community, but to preserve the ability to interact over networked game consoles. Situations like these give us a window into the stability of web based services and how that relates to much of what OnlineConsoles is all about. Maintaining websites with a heavy backend infrastructure for the longterm is the real challenge. Catastrophe is inevitable. It is only a matter of "when and how" it will happen. Not only do site admins have to rise to the challenge of fixing problems, but also maintain the site over time to evolve with the ever-changing landscape of the Internet.

Over the weekend I obtained a complete mirror of OC's data, and after several more days of waiting... and waiting, I simply took the situation into my own hands and got the site repaired and running again on a new host. OC is now back and my email should be functioning normally.

This means we are now in a different server environment. Since 2003 OC was hosted on a dedicated machine, with very few other sites competing for server resources. However now, we are on shared hosting, which means site speed and uptime could be impacted more than it has in the past. We do have a few things in our favor though. I designed OC to be very lean on the front end, and years back implemented various caching methods on the backend to speed up the sites overall functionality. In addition to this the webhost I went with has a solid track record, and is aimed more towards technology minded individuals. They don't overload their servers with too many clients.

I don't expect there to be many problems, but I am prepared to deal with them as they arise. As such, I will be relying on you guys (the OC community) to help spot any errors, bugs, or major site crashes that may or may not unfold now that the site is back up and running.

1.) First post any info regarding this in the "OC Support" forum, under the Support area.
2.) If something is broken preventing you from doing that, contact me via email at ben(at)onlineconsoles.com
3.) If niether the site, nor my email is working (which will be highly unlikely at this point), you can reach me on jabber if you already have my jabber id.

I will be working on the site throughout the evening, and I am asking many of you to start actively posting on the website tonight so we can get some posts up to ensure everything is working smoothly.

Thank you all for being patient! Happy Holidays and Let's play some games!

Regards,
-Ben Pekarek
Director/Founder

I just want to thank everyone who contributed donations to help offset the costs of running OC's game servers. For the year running from June 2008 to June 2009, the OC community contributed over $425. This helped to cover roughly 26% of the yearly server fees.

The Servers Page has been updated to show each contributors donations, and is reflected by an anonymous ID number.

I have also reset the donation graphic for 2009-2010. Which so far... we only have had 1 donation since June of this year. So we are off to a very slow start. Only 12 users have been actively contibuting. If you use our game servers, please pitch in a few dollars to help out.

Thanks so much everyone for your continued support!

For many years we have used a automatic post merging feature to merge your post to your most recent one if you were the last person to reply to a thread. However, for a few important reasons we have decided to remove this feature, and encourage members to edit their posts instead, thus allowing for certain situations where double posting is necessary.

A new entry in our Forum Rules has been added on Bumping (Double Posting), and it reads as follows:

Quote:

If you are the last person to reply in a thread, please try to edit your post with more information if you wish to contribute more comments. If 7 days have passed, and you have something you would like to add to the thread you may add a new reply. Single word bumping of threads is not allowed, so do not use the word "BUMP". Most of the time, members should use the edit feature, but in specific instances where you are trying to generative activity in a discussion, you may create a double post to add more information. Note: Admins/Mods may merge double posts at a later date and time to clean up the message boards.

Our game servers are all back online, and migrated over to the new machine. The Quake 3 and Star Wars Battlefront servers will show up in the Master Lists just like usual. No configuration adjustments will be necessary. For Maximum Pool, you will need to download new save files, which have been updated at the following location:

http://dreamcast.onlineconsoles.com/v/mp/MAX1.VMI

All Phantasy Star Online players need to visit the PSO area for new connection instructions.

We are currently in the process of a server migration. The hosting company that houses OC's server for online games is moving out of Savvis facilities, and because of their restructuring all of OC's hosted game servers need to be re-setup from scratch on a new machine. This process is already underway, and partially completed. I expect to get everything back up and running either today or tomorrow. Please check back for more information as it comes in.