6. Feature Walk-through, Continued

LAUNCHcast

LAUNCHcast streaming music is a strange addition to the program. Most of the links don't work, and you get a commercial when you sign on. You're allowed to skip songs, but are only allowed to skip five songs an hour unless you pay. There are also many feeds that you simply cannot access without paying. I believe services such as this represent how Yahoo expects to make money.

LAUNCHcast

The irony is that this is the least reliable service in this whole program, and I don't understand why anyone would pay for it if the free stations don't consistently work. On the bright side, they did present a wide variety of music - probably so wide that they can't keep it working. The CD player works just like the DVD player: simply insert the disc and it plays. The music in your music folder can be MP3 or WMA. As usual, there is no M4A or M4P playback here for Itunes people. I thought it strange that there were no visualizations, but that doesn't mean that they cannot be added in later.

Games

I spent a few minutes checking out a games plug-in that was presented by a member of the forum; it enabled users to play most retro game titles from the N64 and Playstation and below. The plug-in still required a BIOS from a Playstation to load Playstation games. You also have to supply your own ROMs. I thought the sound was superior on specialized emulators.

The thing that irked me is that the author was charging $20 for the plug-in, though he was nice enough to offer a 15-day trial; the plug-in is available here. I suggest setting up free emulators available here (though the PS2 and Xbox emulators are still limited, so don't try them). I prefer the free emulators for better fidelity during gameplay, but then again $20 is not much to ask, given how much time I wasted learning what I needed to set these up, and even more enabling them to be launched by remote.

The emulator ePSXe for Playstation has a program called delta that enables games to be played once inserted into the CD-ROM (though you still need a Playstation BIOS and a supply of your own games). With all other emulators, you're still going to have to find some sort of creative interface to pull this off, such as a remote that can launch and control emulators, or a front end such as GBPVR.