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Now that's an old familiar name! Here's to more years.

Time sure flies... Long live forum systems.

Pure Pure has been moving a bit recently, but VNTS still says 64%. http://tlwiki.org/index.php?title=Pure_Pure_The_Story_of_Ears_and_Tails#Total_Progress All the remaining chapters are at 100%, but Ch.1 is now getting re-translated.

I seems that your save data version doesn't match with the game's version. Did you update the game? Or are you using a savefile from someone else? If so, make sure you got the right version for it.

Games that require that old version of these codecs (I think one of them was Family Project) need the files to be in your system32 folder. Simply replace the existing version you have (make a backup of the original just in case).

Well, those dialogs only show fonts that have proper JP support - meaning it can't find any (even the translators')... Try changing your whole locale to JP instead, and see if it recognizes your JP fonts.

I think I've seen something like this happen in my VM before. Try running as administrator, or copy the font file to the same directory as the game's executable. It might recognize it then. If more than one application is failing to read your fonts, that could mean something's wrong with your settings or font set. I suppose MS Word and other programs work fine, right? Also, the application window menus and config dialog appear correctly, but the window title is full of ?s. Which method did you use to change your locale?

I don't think buying the game would fix the issue. Seems to be a problem with how your system is set up. Instead of clicking the HDD install option in the launcher, try checking the mounted disc's directory and look for some "setup.exe" file or whatever. Try running that directly to install the game. The launcher is just an extension to launch the installer, so it should exist somewhere.

K-Lite tends to break things. Install CCCP and open the ffdshow video decoder menu (should be on your start menu). From there, search the video formats area and find the format that causes you trouble, then select a different rendering type. I don't remember what they are called now since I haven't updated CCCP in the VMs since a long time, but changing that should make it work. Basically, you want ffdshow to avoid managing MPEG videos and let the problematic VN render it by its own. Some VNs tend to screw up when an external codec tries taking control. CCCP's defaults might work out of the box though, so give that a shot beforehand. EDIT: Another tip - if you don't care about videos that are in open formats that you can play with your video player anyway (WMV, AVI, MPEG, whatever) you could try renaming the files to anything else so that the game won't be able to find them. Most games simply skip the video, while a few quit with an unrecoverable error. It's a matter of trying it out. :]

You'll have to try and see for each game. I keep a text list of problematic games with instructions (e.g. how to crack, how to run on VM, etc) so that I can take the necessary action when needed. Using a VM also comes in handy because I can revert to previous snapshots, completely undoing whatever the title in question installed and added to the registry. You can at least burn the "direct run" titles for semi-portability. Examples of games that run directly are Baseson titles (easily recognizable because the install disc has a "WinRoot" folder), the recently released Eroge! and Eushully titles such as Kamidori.

Hardly possible. Most games are hardcoded to read either from %appdata% or the program's own folder. What you could do is make a batch script, residing in your DVD, that will copy the files to the right place, e.g.: Have the "savedata" (or save files, whatever) in the same folder as the batch file. Write in notepad, save as .bat Example for game that writes to game folder, multiple files @echo off copy .\save001.sav %programfiles%\\\save001.sav copy .\save002.sav %programfiles%\\\save002.sav Example for game that writes to appdata folder, single folder that holds all files @echo off copy .\\ %appdata%\\ Some games will need registry entries, or else they refuse to run because they're "not installed". For these, you'll need to install the game, open the relevant entries with regedit, change the paths so that they point to your disc drive, and export the .reg file so you can easily import back the keys when needed. A couple of VNs that I remember having this are Hinatabokko and Kanojo to Ore no Koibito to. Here's a fragment of Kanojo's .reg file entries: REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WILLPLUS] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WILLPLUS\tototo] "InstallType"=hex:02,00,00,00 "InstallDir"="C:\\WILLPLUS\\tototo" "InstallSrc"="E:\\" The InstallDir key is the one that points to the files the game wants. No key, it won't think it's installed. The source key only points to the install media drive, which is E in the case of the VM I used. There are other keys in there, but they pertain to game settings. A few games have a registry key that sets the save directory, but this also defeats portability since it depends on inserting registry entries. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Double clicking these batch files should copy the saves in question. If you're using Vista or 7, you may need to run as admin if writing to Program Files. Likewise, double clicking reg files will do the trick for importing the keys. Anyway, shortly: Short of hacking your way through, you can't make every VN truly portable because of a) hardcoded save locations and/or b) dependency on registry entries. Lastly, many VNs don't give a fuck about registry entries. These should be trivial to work with, as long as you take care of the savefiles either manually, or through batch scripts.

That fast? Any source on that? If so, this isn't looking good...

From what the reports say, the entity SEGA DREAM (temp name) was made to hold what Index was. Considering what Sega does, the main fear is that whatever is made isn't coming out of Japan. Hopefully this won't be the case...

What Ryu said, basically. Reading/writing portuguese is easy, but listening to it is another thing entirely, though. If you know spanish, you know +60% of portuguese. I started learning english pretty early on - the sooner you get to learn a second language, the easier you can become a polyglot. What I was taught in school was pretty much worthless (again, as Ryu said - perhaps not too much for those who never worked with English before, though), and I've used games, music, movies and books as my main material for indirectly learning. Having conversations helps a lot, too. For the record, English is taught pretty much for the whole duration of school. I've had some japanese books around, but they were aimed at basic stuff for traveling and stuff. Still helpful, though. I'm in no way making a serious attempt to learn it (too lazy...) but I started getting the hang of things simply by listening and reading. I don't have any plans on overcoming the kanji wall anytime soon, at the very least. Listening is indeed a great tool in understanding languages. I find it effective to try and "think" with the languages as well. Try mentally applying terms or concepts you learn in order to make it "flow". As for writing, a graphics tablet can help a lot if you want to learn to write japanese.

AAI2 case 1+2 patch is out. Case 1 took way longer than I expected - this seems promising. Music's awesome as always, and I did get kind of surprised finding out that the translators actually dubbed the Objection!/etc clips for the new characters. (if anyone without a DS wants to try it, I've read desmume works better with it).

@Ryu: Crappy rainy weather, huh? (but hey, if you got a laptop and a USB modem you can get a bit of extra internets before running out of battery power!) AAI2 translation? Fuck year, I thought they were lost in the void at this point.

Dat censorship... on a super-deformed CG. Seriously? Anyone trying Danganronpa here? With the anime coming out in the coming season I thought about trying it out - I loved 999 on the DS. @Ryu: Fevertel's merge got everything down the drain, huh? Which ISP are you changing to?

It's just the dev's additional step to "gaijin protection". Easy to fool, at least. You can change back your time format to your local one once you're done playing. Only Favorite games do this, AFAIK. (the patch for Hoshimemo skips the check, though).

CPUs are CPUs are CPUs. (lol) Spec lists usually just list Intel because of laziness or product placement, with an approximate freq number. If you have an AMD processor of comparable power, it shouldn't be an issue. In the end, the architecture is the same (either i686 or x86_64). Also don't trust spec lists when it comes to variable fields such as freq speed or RAM amount. When it comes to specific fields such as "GPU with pixel shader 3.0" or "Sound card with DX9 support", these are usually reliable. In the end you'll just have to try out things: VNs don't need much power unless they're 3D heavy, you'll be fine with a decent Pentium 4 processor... or even a Pentium 3 for not-so-new titles. Lastly, big titles such as the latest generic shooters and co. have all sorts of product placement such as nvidia logos and all that, but they still work with competitor hardware (if they didn't, it'd be a huge loss of money). All that "extra performance with X brand" stuff is just marketing most of the time. The beauty of the PC is that all the kinds of hardware are essentially the same thing, no matter which brand, since they have to conform to a established architecture. The mobile platforms on the other hand are a complete mess.

As expected (hell, KS took down Tentacle Bento, so if this went over it would've been ridiculous). I can't even imagine what went through their heads with the "lol Littlewitch is no more" approach. There's just no way Kickstarter translation projects can be successful unless the "OK" is given by the developers. The way they did this, it was a pretty obvious (public) slap in the face to Littlewitch. If people want to donate to X translator privately through paypal, a steam gift game or something that's one thing. But using a platform like KS to do it is doomed to fail.

"Battery feature"... Ahahaha, now that sounds ridiculous. Every single form of DRM is destined to be circumvented. Especially the stupidly intrusive ones. Next up, they'll be saying that the VN "requires server-side complex calculations to run properly" and fuck up even further. I feel bad for the ones who bought that new SimCity... Fun.

Use a program such as HWinfo to get the motherboard model you have. Then, search for updated drivers for its onboard sound card and install them. You could try having Windows to search for drivers from the device manager, but I doubt it'll be effective.

It says something about an "Audio Stream" - (オーディオストリーム). Does sound work properly on other games/video players/whatnot? EDIT: As Dan said, try getting codecs installed.

Pretty much this. Shirogane, it's pretty much highly unlikely that they could start nagging you for stuff you got earlier. Besides, from what I've seen around the internets, the main targets seem to be highly popular or licensed stuff. In other words, recent movies or TV series, and animu that has been licensed on the region. I seriously doubt they would care about eroge - since their sellers mainly aim at their local market, some even blocking foreign IPs from sites. As for MG/JAST, who knows...

Fuck yeah *high fives* Impossible - to "sue" you for past downloads, they would need a log which does not exist. Keep in mind that these laws don't really help ISPs. They want your money and you want good internet connections. ISPs don't want to keep logs of everything since it's a loss, and I can expect many people to abandon ISPs that get overly idiotic with the whole warning system, causing mass migration to other ISPs.