Please Note: You are either not using a CSS-compatible browser, or you have not loaded our CSS file.
I’ve been using Twitter personally for quite some time, but as we get things moving with the site again it seems right to introduce Twitter support to the website. You can subscribe to us by heading to мебель в болгарииthis link, either signing up or logging in, and clicking “Follow”. The Twitter account will carry links to new news items, articles, reviews and previews as soon as they go live on the site.
E3, or the Electronics Entertainment Expo, is the computer games industry’s biggest event of the year and here on allaboutgames.co.uk we’ll be providing coverage across the week. We’ll be putting up news as and when we can, with images and videos where available.
Some posts may be short on content if they’re just announcements, but we’ll try and bring you as much as we can from the show. All news items for the show will carry an “E3:” tag so you can easily keep track of things on your news reader. We hope you enjoy our coverage, and stick around after the event as the site undergoes redevelopment.
It has probably been a while since you saw some new content up here on allaboutgames.co.uk. That’s because things have been hectic away from the site for most of our main contributors over the last few months. We had a flurry of activity early in the year before disappear again, and now we’re getting on with things. There’s some content that’s been held back which we expect to see filtering through over the next few days and weeks, and hopefully a steady stream of updates will resume.
…but unfortunately we can’t help you with that. We can, however, help you with searching that’s not been commanded of you by a mid-90s pop song with our new search page, which you can see over to your left in the sidebar. Just type what you’re looking for in there, and it’ll do a search within our news, reviews, previews, articles, and cheats. You can even choose what field to sort on. Fancy, eh?
(More astute readers will have noticed that we did have a search page beforehand. Unfortunately this was lost when we lost a lot of our data, including news posts, a while back – we’ve since had a far better backup strategy, so this shouldn’t happen again.)
We’re still a long way off, but we have finally begun to make actual progress towards the implementation of the new look we’ve mentioned before. It doesn’t look like much at the moment, but Dave is working hard to get the layout right before the graphics start to come into play. We had the design created for us some months ago, but it’s only now we’ve got the free time to get things moving, and hopefully you’ll see what we internally dub “aagV6″ implemented some time this summer.
Stay tuned to this blog for the second teaser in the near future.
This post delivers our aim of giving more to the blog in two ways: firstly I’m updating you about site development, and secondly, more regular updates are guaranteed with the new integration.
Firstly, the move to PHP. For years now most of AAG has been powered by PHP with our lovely MySQL database sitting in the background. An exception to this has been the discussion board, powered by a combination of Perl and CGI that Dave has been hacking away at for years. While he’s not a fan of PHP, it makes sense to integrate with the rest of the site, and indeed we’ve wanted to change for a while. But the old tech has been serving its purpose and has also been powering our news and site news sections. Well, we’ve just made a big step away from the 2002 technology with the move of the news section to our main database, and it’s now also in PHP. You will likely not notice the difference – the posts and the index look pretty much the same, aside from a few minor tweaks which are nothing to do with the change of technology. The URL now works in the same way as the rest of the site as a result, too.
Complementing this is the integration of Site News into the Blog. We’ve always intended to post about site developments on here anyway, and so it makes sense to incorporate the announcements here too. As a result of this merge, we’ve freed up space on the front page which is duly taken over by a list of the latest blog entries. This mean you’ll also still see the latest site announcements in the same place. The integration again removes a tie to the old discussion board.
So what does this mean for its future? Well, we’ll discuss that in a future blog entry, but ultimately it will close in its current form, and the last of the old and nasty code from the aagV3 days will finally be gone.
It’s now been a few years since we launched AAGv5, with a slight improvement over the (frankly very bad) colours that it launched with midway through its life. Now, whilst AAGv5 is certainly, in our opinion at least, an improvement over its predecessor in both design and underlying code, it’s still not the most modern looking design in the world. However, we have since enlisted external help, and as such, I’m pleased to reveal the first teaser for how we’ll hopefully look before too long:
…OK, the logo’s not final, and none of this has actually been coded yet – it’s just an image. However, hopefully it gives you an idea of the direction in which we’re going with our new look, and I hope you like it.
Well, I promised more updates to the blog, and then we disappear for a while. Sorry about that, but we really will now get on with giving you more details on here! With the integration of site news into the blog (to be explained in a post later today), I thought I’d re-post the recent site news item explaining our downtime below:
————
If you’ve been following the “AAG Temp Blog” that was up on allaboutgames.co.uk over the past couple of weeks you’ll be aware of why we went away. The main site was down for about two and a half weeks, and was the result of unexpected consequences of a server move, which have left the site out of action. With little notice the server needed to be physically moved, but problems were encountered at its new location, and thus prevented it from being set up again. The uncertainty over what would happen next meant it took a while for us to set up the temporary blog to provide you with some content until the full site was restored.
The new location is – as you can see from the restoration of the site – now fully set up and ready to bring you a full range of coverage once more. Further bad luck delayed this stage too – the server itself was actually damaged in transit, but thankfully the HDDs were intact, and we were able to eventually the restore the site on new hardware.
We apologise for the lengthy downtime, and we hope you will continue to visit allaboutgames.co.uk in the future – a future where we hopefully won’t experience anything like this again!
It’s been nearly 9 months since the last blog entry here on aag, so it’s about time we got back to action. As well as general musings, we’ll be keeping you informed of work on our upcoming redesign, which is likely to see further integration of the blog into the site. We also have other plans, like a forum migration and relaunch, and we hope you will be interested to see where we’re going with this, and provide feedback both on here and on the board.
I can’t speak on behalf of other writers, but I certainly hope to make posts reasonably regularly, so please stay tuned to the allaboutgames.co.uk blog.
First off, neither Matt or myself condone piracy. Not a single commercial DS game has gone anywhere near the microSD that I use with my R4. I’ve even gone to the extent of banning Google ads from advertisers who have advertised such products with phrases such as “Download Nintendo games for free!” (when I’ve been able to determine the domain without clicking on the ad, that is). My R4 and EZ-Flash 3-in-1 are used solely for DS and GBA homebrew (such as the oh-so-addictive tetattds and luminesweeper), but the details of that are deserving of a whole different article.
Now, with that out of the way, on to the core of this post: recovering semi-bricked DSs. If you’ve come to this post from a search engine, then you probably already know what FlashMe is. For those who don’t, it’s a replacement firmware for the DS (or DS Lite) that does a number of things like let you boot DS code directly from the front slot (normally you’d need a slot 1 device such as a PassMe or NoPass, as well as a slot 2 cart), boot unsigned code via the Download and Play option, strip out the health and safety screen, and add a failsafe recovery mode. Obviously installing this completely and utterly voids your warranty.
Flashing a DS is normally a fairly painless process. With DS Lites it’s a bit harder, due to being more compact, but still fairly simple. Unfortunately, if your DS chooses to turn off during the flashing process (like mine did), you can’t boot. Thankfully, FlashMe writes a failsafe bootloader that’s just able to boot DS code from slot 1 or 2 (accessed by holding start and select at poweron), so as long as this was successfully written, you can at least use your DS for more than just a paperweight. Unfortunately, trying to run FlashMe (or, in fact, any .nds files) from an R4DS (or M3 Simply, since they’re the same hardware) when in this recovery mode results in the following:
Oh dear. Not good. Thankfully, chishm, a well-known developer in the DS homebrew community, recently reverse engineered the R4’s encryption system, producing the r4crypt tool. Now, you know the _DS_MENU.DAT files you get in the R4 updates? They’re just encrypted NDS files. Can you see where this is going? Yup, you guessed it, encrypt flashme.nds, and save it as _DS_MENU.DAT in the root of your microSD card.
To make it easier for those who just want the instructions, here’s a step-by-step guide (obviously I accept NO responsibility for anyone damaging their DS further):
You will, of course, have to put the R4/M3 Simply _DS_MENU.DAT back on to be able to use it properly again.
I hope this information will be of use to some people, and I would like to thank chishm so very much for both writing r4crypt, and for telling me how to do this on IRC.
AAG Blog is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
Website design and content (c) 1999-2006 allaboutgames.co.uk.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License, except where otherwise noted.
Some screen captures on the site were made with HyperSnap-DX by Hyperionics.
Smileys taken from Crack's Smilies.
