| There's a bunch of new stuff worth reporting today. First up, over 100 NES games and accessories have been added to the Vault Store and are available for browsing. A change in the shipping API that broke the international shipping calculator has been fixed, and from now on the only payment method accepted will be PayPal. Most people have chosen to use PayPal anyway so hopefully this won't be an inconvenience. There have also been several bug fixes around the site, including finally getting the Genesis Vault's top download stats working. The stats have also been improved to reduce double counting of incomplete or duplicate downloads. In The Manual Project the contributor database has been merged with the Message Board database so there's now one login for the entire site. There's also a new page being developed for submitting new manuals that's much more user-friendly but it's not quite ready yet. And last but certainly not least, for the first time in nearly eight years a new section has been added to the Vault. Introducing, the Nintendo 64 Vault! And of course, some N64 emulators have been added to the Emulation Lair as well. Well, that's enough for now. Enjoy! |
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| The Genesis Vault is complete! A perfect copy of every Genesis game released in the US (according to GoodGen 3.0) is now present in the Genesis Vault. A title screen shot was captured for every game using Gens, though a handful of games would not run so they'll need to be snapped with another emulator. While the correct title of some games is questionable, all games have been named using their GoodGen title for now. Special thanks to gamerX for starting the Genesis Vault roughly seven years ago. Enjoy! | ||
| The first pass through the Genesis Vault is finally complete. All US games now have full stats and screens and a handful of unknowns will be cleaned up in the next pass. All bad links have been fixed and a number of small errors around the site have been cleaned up as well. | ||
| There's a few new items worth noting lately. First up, all the hardware problems seem to be fixed on both the web and mail servers and everything's stable again, with a little more speed to boot. Next, there was an incident on the Message Boards where someone was using a SQL injection attack to mess things up. The vulnerability has been fixed and the logs show that the attacker has given up. Just to be safe, rotating 30 day backups of all databases are now being made nightly. That should've been done all along but there has never really been a need for it. Unfortunately the last backup was over a month old so a fair number of posts and registrations was lost. For many months there have also been bots that create new accounts with spam in their profile which is quite harmless, but they've been blocked as well. To help keep the accounts database clean any account that's over one year old with zero posts will be deleted automatically from now on. The admin tools have also been enhanced a bit to allow board admins to delete any post with the click of a button, and the login has been tweaked so that the "Remember me" option will retain your login for one month and reset the timer each time so that if you visit regularly you never need to log in. By request of a user, a simple API has been made to allow anyone to pull ratings data directly from Vimm's Lair. While not scientific in any way, there have been a fair number of votes collected over the years which some might find useful. This xml api can currently be reached for each system in The Vault at these urls. http://vimm.net/vault/ratings_xml.php?system=nes http://vimm.net/vault/ratings_xml.php?system=snes http://vimm.net/vault/ratings_xml.php?system=genesis |
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| After a couple weeks of downtime Vimm's Lair is back. There was some hardware trouble that was tricky to solve but everything's stable now. To celebrate, the Emulation Lair has been updated with the latest NES emulator summer releases and some minor display issues in IE7 and Firefox 3 have been fixed. | ||
| There's a few items worth reporting today. First up, all emulators for Windows in the Emulation Lair have been updated with Vista compatible self-extracting files for those of you with Vista inflicted upon you. The RockNES and Jnes emulators have also been updated to their latest releases, and FCE Ultra has been removed since it's getting old and clearly won't be updated anymore. The problems some people had downloading files should be fixed now, and the speed limit has been removed from the Vault so all files should download at full speed. | ||
| Sorry about the down-time lately, and thanks for everyone who wrote in about it. A hard drive on the new server is acting up and keeps messing things up. The server will be shut down again tonight for a full disk sweep and hopefully it'll behave itself after that. On the plus side, the database settings have been tweaked and the site is much quicker now. | ||
| Vimm's Lair is up and running on its new server and is now HTML 4.01 compliant. If anything's broken or out of place, please post it on the Message Board. | ||
| It's time to bring this site up to code. HTML code, that is. A lot has changed in the ten years this site has been around and believe it or not, Vimm's Lair was originally designed with Netscape 2 compatibility in mind! HTML has evolved quite a bit since then and the site has never followed a set standard, so it seems like a good learning exercise to make everything HTML 4.01 compliant. This means that any browser that follows the HTML 4.01 standard will display the site correctly. If done right you should notice... nothing at all! Exciting, huh? On a related note, this update is taking place on a new server. While it's not any faster than the old one, it can hold more memory and has much fewer miles on it. The Vimm's Lair server has been chugging away 24/7 for about 8 years now and it's only a matter of time until its hard drive gives out. So, to prevent this a copy of Vimm's Lair has been made on another server and the HTML compliance is being worked on there. Along the way a few minor tweaks are being made, but for the most part everything will look the same. Once it's finished the servers will be swapped and it should be good to go for many years to come. In other news, work on improving the Genesis Vault is proceeding nicely and every game is getting an updated screen shot and stats. Any duplicate or mislabeled games are being corrected, though there does appear to be a few holes. Any missing games will be filled in once the entire Vault has been updated. |
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| There's a couple items worth reporting today. First up, the Emulation Lair has been updated with all of the latest emulator releases. Looks like May was a busy month! A new Genesis emulator has been added too, and with it the Genesis Vault has reopened! Enjoy! | ||
| Well, it turns out Vimm's Lair won't have to close after all. A new way was found to keep Vimm's Lair online for another year and it's twice as fast to boot. While the server was down it got a small hardware upgrade and a fresh coat of software, but unfortunately it broke pdf generation so pdf manuals won't be available for a while. On the bright side the site now has bandwidth to spare and it'll surely be put to good use soon. | ||
| Happy New Year! This year marks the 10th anniversary of Vimm's Lair, though the exact date the site was started is unknown. To start off the year the Emulation Lair has been updated with new releases of Nestopia and ZSNES. In other news the site has been having a bit of trouble staying up lately due to some server errors. It may not be worth fixing the problem though since Vimm just got a new Lair and can't take bring the virtual one along this time. So, unless Vimm's Lair can find a new home it's likely it will close for good near the end of the month. This may not be the best way to celebrate the 10th anniversary but it's been a great 10 years! A big thank you to all the millions of people who have visited over the years to make this site a success! | ||