Hey, is that alucard from IRC a long time ago?

The Japanese voices are available in .ogg format from http://uqm-mods.sourceforge.net/#/Downloads under miscellaneous, or this more direct link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/uqm-mods/files/Misc/JP-3DO.zip/download

With these I think you can simply overwrite the existing voice files and play the game with Japanese voices.

Well done!

And thank you for outbidding these guys! (wtf?)

This is the first time I've posted here in almost a decade, I can't believe how long ago it was when UQM was first released. I'm glad this forum and project are still kickin. Hey meep-eep!

Wow wow wow wow wow wow wow! ...Is what I literally vocalized when I read the news on Slashdot.

Thanks for dropping by Brad, and at the very least thanks for hopefully keeping the name from sitting around in the dusty basement of one publisher after the other.

Please don't half-ass this.  I'm glad to hear you're a fan of TFB's games, and I hope your favorite is Star Control II. I really hope you can work with Paul in some fashion. If you can blend open exploration with good RPG elements* and fun spaceship action successfully, you'll have a valuable winner on your hands.

*Two games, SC2 and KOTOR come to mind when I think of great RPG storytelling. The conversations are branched, real decisions can be made in dialogue, and consequences manifest from those decisions.  You don't feel like you're on a track, even if ultimately you are.  Not to mention they don't take themselves too seriously.

Also if you can pretend Star Control 3 didn't happen that would be great

The original source and content zips were offerred for download on the sc2-devel mailing list in the beginning of the project, so they still should be out there, somewhere.

I don't know if this copy protection existed in the first game or the second game.  If you want to play Star Control 2, however, I highly suggest downloading The Ur-Quan Masters for Windows. This forum is not for support of the old DOS version, and generally it's my opinion that the new port is superior to prior versions.

It's not really possible to split the voice from the music cleanly, they're both on the same track.  Some type of low frequency sound remover may work, but I don't believe you'd be able to put it back into the weird container format that the videos use.  Instead it would have to be programmed to mute the audio from the video, and play back the external sound file in sync with the video.  In other words, unless you yourself have the capability to do this, nobody else will likely go through all the trouble.

I liked the video's original music, by the way

They are png files in the content zip.

That's bad news about the 3DO videos.  I'm guessing that to get them to work in the future 0.4 release you would just need to drop them in the content directory?

If someone were to take those videos, package and distribute them over a decentralized peer network such as BitTorrent, would a link to the package be allowed on this forum, provided that no copyrighted material is being hosted on any servers related to the project?

Chris Nelson, the same as appears in UQM's Core Team credits, created an early alpha of a game whose goals were very similar to what you describe.  Incidentally, the game was called Star Control Online.  Furthermore, this game caught the attention of Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III (or maybe he just emailed them and they liked it).  They gave him an internship at Toys For Bob, and because of his extra help they were actually able to create The Ur-Quan Masters project.

The game itself was off to a great start, it was buggy as far as performance and stability were concerned, but the physics and the ship designs looked and felt perfect to Star Control 2.  You can download Star Control Online Alpha 0.2 from Chris' SourceForge Project Page.

Some of the best box art ever, in my opinion.  I saw the 3DO box art first, and always assumed they used the same picture for the PC version.  I was pretty shocked when I first saw the PC box art on The Pages of Now and Forever.  If the melee demo hadn't otherwise convinced me to buy Star Control II, then seeing the box art surely would have.

I "made" (more like edited together) the logo you see at the top of the forum.  It looks a little junky up close because I had to change background colors to match the HTML color until Mika just matched the HTML to the image. Yes I am pretty damned stupid when it comes to graphics and web design.

Not a bad idea for an addon/fork to make the game more replayable.  Sort of Wing Commanderish.

Star Control II fact #2.5:  SC2 fact #2 was lost when SourceForge's webserver got hacked and all dynamic content was erased.  This was when the UQM Forum was hosted on sc2.sf.net, and therefore was deleted as well.  Thankfully Mika had a backup of the forum, but it wasn't as up to date as possible so about a week of posts were lost, including Star Control II fact #2.

Perhaps these interesting tidbits about the internal workings of SC2 should be converted to HTML and put up on the main page so that something like that doesn't happen again?

That won't happen, see the mailing list archives for info on this.  Basically TFB does not want to release the content under a unlimited free license because then Pepsi could start using their characters in advertisements or something like that.  They want the content to be used for playing the game, and any derivitives of the game, and nothing else as I understand it.

You can give yourself a better idea of the problem by running the game in a command window.  Type "cmd" without the quotes in the Start Menu -> Run box.  Then type cd\Program Files\The Ur-Quan Masters (assuming you installed it there) and then type uqm.  Any error messages will stay on the screen that way.