General Arcade & Retro Chat' Special Championship Edition

A community run Boards, ie, how it all started in 1998, will be only way it'll survive over time. Forgive me as these are people's jobs, but it can't sustain/doesn't need a CEO, and it likely can't sustain salaried staff, insurance, an office, rent, overheads, and the likes. It's at its best when it's a small/medium community based forum discussion site, ran by community driven administrators (like it used to be before it needed to be profitable.)

It might be ticking along, after somehow surviving the disastrous Vanilla move that looked like it was causing a complete exodus of users by the day, but it's a sinking ship as long as it needs to generate revenue. The Talk-To section is almost dead now, greatly reduced in scope - nocompanies don't seem to see Boards as a commercial opportunity nowadays like they used to. Users are switching to ad blockers by the day because of how badly ads have been implemented here too.

Speaking of Vanilla, has Boards shat the bed for anyone else today?

On the bright side, the desktop issues almost make the phone version seem competent for once - if it weren’t for the whole random reset craic.

I currently have Sega.ie which I'm looking to do something with, new Sega forum? 😁

Public service announcement — CeX are shower of cowboys, had another big-ticketish item cancelled and am now starting to get paranoid my orders are alerting them to games' real value and they're all like "**** that guy."

It's a combination of almost total ineptitude, with possibly a small cohort of chancer employees gazumping the valuable stuff I'd say.

Pricing is outsourced to a team in India based on supply and demand and current market pricing. It's done done every Monday from what I remember.

If your order was cancelled it's likely when the shop went to pick it they either couldn't find the disc, couldn't find the box (regularly misplaced or stolen from the shelf) or the disc was in bits and the cleaning machine was out of order (cleaning pads, paste or the chip counter are regularly on back order). If it wasn't picked I believe some of the reasons on the system don't adjust stock off automatically, if it has to be adjusted it's investigated and effects their weekly numbers. Anything taken out of their sales reduces their staff hours for the next week as it's a percentage of the previous week sales. Shops want the hours and will do what they can to not get a refund (I don't mean not wanting to refund people, but do their best to fulfill orders, keep stock accurate etc). If a staff member did want to keep it for themselves it would be sold that day at the end of their shift. I know I certainly didn't let stuff sit around for a few days if I wanted it.

It's more noticeable with retro or niche stuff. If a box/disc is damaged for a game with 2+ in stock they'll still have a backup to pick, if the shop can't pick it then it automatically goes to the next shop in the list. If there's only 1 copy in the whole company then it would be cancelled.

If the price went up in the time between ordering and the shop processing it they would need to contact e-commerce central to create a new payment voucher as the original one would no longer be enough but that would be rare and wouldn't be a reason to cancel it.

Long post, just thought I'd explain the pricing aspect of it!

Spotted this on in a CRT group on Facebook.

https://github.com/cjuniorfox/retropie-crt

Basically allows you to connect a raspberry pi to a HDMI to analog video converter at the appropriate resolution to play RetroPie on a CRT.

Telegram is great for news and sales groups and a bit of chat, but it's not the same as a forum.

Forums almost feel like mini wikipedias you can go mining for years old information in. All these modern platforms have a real transient feel to them, you wouldn't be reading anything on them older than a week.

Discord is grand for chit chat crap but useless for anything else.

Forums are brilliant as a searchable source of information, where proper tutorials and information can be shared and (most) people tend to write proper like with full spelling etc rather that txt spk shite. Would be a real shame to lose that..

Just discovered Yakuza: Dead Souls is still up on the PS3 online store for €20. Half-ropey game by all accounts, but a more palatable price compared to what the physical version is commanding these days as the series’ popularity grows and demand grows for the older stuff.

It's on the Zero/Kiwami/5 engine, right? I can't imagine it handling that poorly compared to the ragdolly nature of the Dragon engine. Nice to have it in the back pocket anyways, it's getting expensive.