Recently, I've had to ban most every IP address that originates out of China, Taiwan, Korea, Indonesia, India, etc. (Asia). You can blame China for this mostly; most of the problems of excessive bandwidth consumption, hitting my download counters nonstop for my patches and the Typing Tutor game have been from IP addresses out of that country. I've had snoopers from Korea looking to see if phpMyAdmin is installed on this server, I've had another guy looking to see where the donators-only Felghana patch is located even (that was from Europe, possibly the Netherlands). There is also the case of two individuals that I found to be unapologetic, self-righteous pirating punks that thought they were hard and also mistakenly thought I'd take their bullshit warez propoganda lightly. Another issue is if you're using a download accelerator to get files from this site, I'm going to consider you a spambot. Anyhow, all of that activity has resulted or will result in me banning not merely the singular IP address of the offender, but the CIDR of that network to handle the case of dynamically assigned/changing IPs.
Because the server has finally been able to take a breather since the Asia ban, I have no plans to remove this global ban anytime soon. Seriously. I'm rather enjoying not seeing the server & download logs grow at exponential rates since this ban. Obviously, you're browsing with a proxy if you're reading this (as well as being human, and not a bot) and if that is the case, you could email me about it with your IP and I can add an exception for it such as I did for one individual who was caught up in the ban, apparently in Japan, that wanted to continue to visit this site.
As I really don't expect to find English speakers in such countries, it really doesn't bother me to have done this. It's going to be a very small minority that would be interested in what I have to offer here (normally, and prior to DXWnd, which I'll get to below). Well, such is life. Until such countries do a better job of stopping spammers, bots, until its citizens do a better job of preventing their PCs from being infected with worms, viruses, etc. others will have to pay for it.
Also, I should mention what I believe was the cause of this. I used to host a nice little utility called DXWnd. This was the utility that lets you run fullscreen DirectX applications/games in windowed-mode, when the interface doesn't otherwise support it. That is, the application/game can only run in fullscreen mode, but you need to run it in windowed mode, for whatever reason, debugging or you prefer to play games that way while being able to multi-task. Suffice to say, this utility became very popular and was the number one downloaded item on this site. Specifically, it became very popular in Asian countries and "popular" doesn't always turn out to be a good thing... I was linked to in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. forums all for the express purpose of getting this utility. Unfortunately, it became too popular, and put my site on the map for spambots, hackers, etc. in those countries. This is my suspicion of course. All my troubles seem to have begun by having made the mistake of offering up that utility... Anyway, I have since deleted it in the Downloads section and will never again share it in the future.
I took a little diversion today to work on the Ys Origin Setup Utility for some reason. In a matter of few hours Psycho DeuceBag and I produced a nice little patch for you, so the time spent was quite productive. Check this thread for info and lemme know how it works out for you there.
This pretty much completes most of what I wanted to see happen with the Ys I & II Complete line of patches. They are now both up-to-date. A few script fixes are included, patcher fixes and image edits. Note: I deleted the old hotfix patch in the Ys II Complete section, since with this new patch, it is no longer needed.
So basically, I suddenly got the urge to wrap this project up after johnnybleu finished the last image edits I wanted, namely, to remove the remaining "ETERNAL" references in the game and change them to "COMPLETE". (The image gallery for Ys II Complete shows you which ones.) Anyway, this will be pretty much the last update for the Ys II Complete patcher for a long time. I *might* someday return to the Ys I & II Complete project for one final enhancement, to enable the patchers to install from an original Japanese game disc, thus avoiding the problems of having to boot in Japanese mode, using App Locale, or installing the games manually. Other than that, both games are over with and I'm very happy about that. It's been 4 years...
Also, if you were one of the first 6 people who downloaded it, please download and run it again. You'll notice your title screen will still say ETERNAL if you are one of the 6 with a bad patch.
Well, all my attention is now left towards Felghana. Onward I march. Oh yes, but first, the Ys II separate project page will go up tonight. Look for it here:
Check out how the new title screen will look with the upcoming finalized Ys II Complete patcher. The "ETERNAL" remnants finally get replaced with "COMPLETE!"
Howdy folks. Merry Christmas one and all! Unfortunately... I didn't have a chance to work on the final touches to the Ys Felghana patch which I was hoping to have ready for today... However, I decided to make the mostly completed patch available to all my donators and to those have assisted me with such things as image editing, etc. I haven't really expanded the pool of BETA testers up to this point, so I figure they can serve that purpose somewhat in the meantime. As for when it'll be 100% ready for release to the general public, I would guess some time in January. I have a few text images left related to a 'mural' for a certain point in the game and some boss name description images that need fine tuning. After that, I'll only have the ReadMe to finish and possibly one programmatic change to cache all edited images since there is a slowdown that occurs when the player opens the options menu.
On an unrelated note, I'd like to say RIP on behalf of James Brown [The Godfather of Soul]. He passed away today around 1:45 AM and deserves an honorable mention in my book.
So, I was offline for a few days and much to my surprise, I return to find that Falcom went ahead and unveiled specific details regarding the mystery title they were teasing us with earlier! It has been given a name, "Ys Origin", and all previous speculation came out to be pretty worthless I gather. Anyway, more eye candy! Look at the purty pictures!
Please check this thread for details on helping with the upcoming Felghana English patch. I need mostly image editing and some grunt work involving the images (transcribing text off of 'em, not editing). It's preferable if you're able to work with and know Photoshop CS well. So, if you wanna help speed up the release of the patch, here's your chance to actually help out!
EDIT: OK, I've just released an updated version v0.85. Anyone that downloaded any prior version, you'll now wanna upgrade to this! Everything is in English and the font is fixed! Woohoo!
WHY would @XSEEDGames insult me by calling me "Hitler" when I would NEVER call them "Stalinists?" Oh well, I try so hard to be their friend - and maybe someday that will happen! twitter.com/realDona
Just got blocked by @XSEEDGames on Twitter a second ago.. I just wanted to express glee to the jerks for having kept their divisive, poisonous, criminal hands off of the new Ys VIII title & Gurumin, well, they had no choice, NISA poached everything out from under them! Live by the sword, perish by it... It took another ruthless ugly competitor to bring them to justice by taking the Ys series away, that sweet Falcom partnership, which they NEVER deserved!
Psycho Kirsten "omgfloofy" Miller called me a "f@gg0t" on Reddit by proxy with an animated meme! In a recent exchange, she spammed me with this: https://imgur.com/wA Who is Kirsten ? She did work for X.X.XSEED on Ys Celceta and is credited in the Special Thanks section... Don't they get more embarrassing the more you learn ? In the aftermath of the terrorist attack at the Pulse nightclub where 50 people were executed, does dropping "f@gg0t" still fly in so a nonchalant fashion ? Source Link.
Is XSEED [Lame] "Games" waging a "war on women," specifically "little women" ? Do they pander to animated ped0philia-loving perverts ? Man, these headlines write themselves! Hah! Attaboy Tom, thanks for the lulz at least in the midst of all your criminality!
It's been 11 years since I managed a new PC Engine project, but I have indeed returned to the retro console platform I first started the ole fan translation gig with! Finally took the time to mention it here, >> Emerald Dragon <<.
1) Kinda funny, but Ken Berry, Director of Publishing of XSEED Games, did a Facebook block on me some time back... Heh-heh. Guess I should feel honored! That's in addition to Thomas "WyrdWad" Lipschultz of course after I sent him a PM. 2) OK, REALLY LOLOLOL FUNNY, X.X.XSEED Games is under fire by HuffingtonPuffington for what "may be one of the most despicable video games of all time!!!" HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Lipschultz is on the Comments section defending his two-bit, perv, criminal cheat of a company against the author of the blog article to boot, so is even the X.X.XSEED Cock-Flasher, it's a full-on freakshow! More of my thoughts here! Oh lordy, the delicious irony and glee here, I can't contain expressing it!
