My "Dreadnought Killer" configuration is, from front to back:

Crew Pod
Hellbore Cannon
Tracking System
Point Defense
3 Dynamos
8 Shiva Furnaces
Hi-Eff Fuel
And maximum thrusters/turning.

I use this configuration primarily for "mining" Dreadnought hulls in the Kzer-Za only slice of space just beyond Betelgeuse. While the tracking is not perfect, it is good as long as you stay outside of the Dreadnought maximum firing range. And since you have Point Defense, they won't launch fighters. When using the Cannon only, energy regeneration is merely 1 point from matching energy consumption. If you swap out the Point Defense for another Shiva Furnace, you can keep firing your blaster as long as you want and it will never run out!

Known Weaknesses:
Ilwrath: Cloaking renders tracking useless. Your best hope is to angle your ship and hope to hit them that way.
Kohr-Ah: Unlike the Kzer-Za, I tend to take damage against the Kohr-Ah at least every other battle using this configuration. Since they yield the same amount of RU as Ur-Quan, and cause me much more trouble, I avoid them at all costs. If while using this configuration (or something similar) you find an effective tactic to totally agnigilate them, I'd be interested to learn of it.

Known Strengths:
As stated above, this configuration is built to fight Kzer-Za for the sole purpose of destroying them in as short a time as possible. It also works well against almost all of your expected enemies throughout the game.

Warning: If you intend to play as the "Evil Captain" in charge of the "Empire of Zelnick", dedicated to pissing off as many aliens as possible, note that I have not tested this configuration against races you are normally expected to be friendly with. I suspect an Utwig may give this ship some problems. There may be others that I haven't figured on.

How many official Megaman games have been made now? Would 10 be an overstatement?

Ten Megaman games would be a very big understatement. Similarly, the Castlevania series has a fair number of games under its belt. Both are very successful franchises, and have at least two things in common that gives them an advantage over Star Control:

1: Both have had a roughly 5 year head start on Star Control. Any franchise that has managed to be successful for this long is naturally going to have a larger fan base.
2: Their products have had a wider viewing audience, mainly due to what systems they were released on (NES being both franchises' jumping point).

In the case of Star Control, it has had releases on PC (for DOS) and the 3DO. While both systems were technically capable of handling the games TFB produced, at this point in time the PC did not have nearly as big of a gaming audience as the then-extant SNES or Genesis. I suspect that if the enhanced SC2 had made its way to the Playstation (which was just around the corner) in addition to 3DO, it could only have increased the awareness of the game that much more.

With the porting of UQM to modern operating systems, we are effectively doing something to alleviate issue 2. There may be a lot of Megaman and Castlevania homebrew clones out there, but none of them can claim to having the original game logic available at their fingertips. Advantage: us.

With the code available to everyone, it is possible for those with the knowledge to port and modify the game in ways which the Creators had not originally conceived! Net Melee is a prime example of this. Once this is brought to the "stable" 0.6 release, we will have nothing (bandwidth notwithstanding) stopping us from getting our friends in whatever remote corner of the world to try what is quite possibly the simplest, most addictive piece of fun conceived for any gaming platform! This will eventually cause some to wonder what that "New Game" option is all about, which can only end up bringing more converts to our cause.

I remember someone here theorizing that perhaps the reason the UQM source was released in the first place was to get enough attention brought back to it so that TFB would be able to get the green light for making another one. I'm not sure I entirely believe it. Regardless of that, even though I haven't bought a dedicated gaming system since the N64, nor a game for my PC since Diablo 2, I would be compelled (Dnyarri* style) to plunk down whatever price was necessary for some new Star Control goodness.

* /me adds the word "Dnyarri" to Firefox's dictionary.

Just out of curiosity, is anyone even reading these links? I slugged halfway through the first one, and then gave up. I assume the rest is the same sort of stuff, but clicking one open just reveals a wall of ugly text in horrible colours which I can't be bothered to look more clearly at.

The landoverbaptist.org stuff seems to me an obvious parody. Accept Jesus Christ as your Savior and get a Playstation 3 = teh funnay!!

When I first read the stuff on the hottest-host site, I was assaulted with the most idiotic, racist, hateful crap I had ever encountered. However, after reading the article about anime, I'm beginning to think that this might be a parody site as well.

I haven't bothered with the other ones yet.

After Zanthius was mentioned here, I found myself longing to read some of his insanities for a few good laughs. Unfortunately the search function on this board is shot. Also his website seems to be missing much of its content from that time (though the Wayback Machine still has copies). The most I could find post-wise was a scant offering on SCDB.

It's kind of sad, but I almost miss the guy (?) for the comedy he brought here, even if he (probably) didn't intend it.

Edit: Could this be the true face of Zanthius?

I just happen to have a copy of the "UQM savegame editor" here

Razorback: Rather than scold you for bumping threads which had been answered, I will instead suggest that you should have just linked to the threads you wanted to reference. That would have made a lot more sense.

Until the CVS snapshot system is functioning again, I have a copy of uqmdebug.exe that you will need in order to use the netplay functionality. This is taken from the CVS as of a few minutes ago.

Enjoy!

Edit: It appears you will also need an updated version of SDL.dll for this to work.

Edit 2: Links removed now that CVS snapshots are working...

Is an Androsith some sort of artificially replicated practitioner of the Dark Side of the Force?

I know you might find this hard to believe, but the Frequently Asked Questions: Technical Issues thread that's stickied at the top of this board provides a link to the information you seek. More specifically, the answers may be found here.

Unfortunately, it appears that the link to "more detailed instructions" is dead. Thankfully, there is a somewhat complete backup of it available through the Wayback Machine. However, some crucial bits of information seem to be missing. I'll see if I can locate a guide that can be used as a reference for a new entry in the Ultronomicon.

Edit: I've found that none of the specific options from the "detailed instructions" are required in order to rip an ISO of the SC2 disc using CDRWin. So you could ignore that second screenshot it shows you and it should copy without issue.

While I do not have FTP or any of that other fancy stuff, I do have a web based FTP-like setup on my home PC that would allow you to upload the files and have them viewable on the internet. PM me if you're interested.

I'll tell you, but you asked for it.
Delta Crateris
Highlight the line above this to see the answer.

Consider it "watched".

The bleeding edge version at http://seijin.ath.cx/cgi-bin/uqm/ is actually making decent progress at compatibility with Firefox and Opera. So far I've managed to at least display the SVG elements, though the Javascript itself is working only partially in either of these browsers.

I've also figured out a way to output the normally SVG parts as either GIF or PNG (I could do JPEG too, but the quality loss is too horrible to bear). The current version will only do this for the Hyperspace map. I just have to get around to making this for the Quasispace and Interplanetary views. My plan for this is to have a "backup" interface in case someone's browser is unable to render SVG. I have yet to implement this fully, but you can have a look at the hyperspace map at these two links:

PNG: http://seijin.ath.cx/cgi-bin/uqm/?cmd=hyperspace&type=png&zoom=.5&sphere=1&rainbow=1&quasi=1&homeworld=1&quest=1&quasi_map=1
GIF: http://seijin.ath.cx/cgi-bin/uqm/?cmd=hyperspace&type=gif&zoom=.5&sphere=1&rainbow=1&quasi=1&homeworld=1&quest=1&quasi_map=1

The value set by "zoom=" can be adjusted to anything between .5 and 8.

All the parameters set to 1 can technically be set to anything, but removing them will cause the indicated aspect of the map to vanish. Later on I'll be making individually toggled spheres; this is just a temporary solution while I try to tackle more important matters with this script.

Again, there is no interface to make this "easy" to use yet. That is for future upgrades. Right now my highest priority is reorganizing and cleaning up this mess I've made.

Kohr-Ah Death: Sorry for the slow response. I've not checked this forum in some time. The pages that display all the planet views are generated at the time you request the page. The only preset graphics are those that I didn't make myself (basically anything from SC2 itself). I wouldn't even want to contemplate how big these would be if they were in a static JPG or GIF format. But science fiction has taught me that the answer is probably 42.

Since I'm writing a message here anyhow, I thought I'd just mention that I've taken a copy of the current codebase to my personal machine. The "stable" version of the database will remain where it is, but I have a "current" version availible on http://seijin.ath.cx, with updates on an irregular basis.

One thing I'm taking a long hard look at is making this compatible with as many browsers as possible. Unfortunately this will require redoing the vast majority of the JavaScript currently in use. I now understand the wisdom of a sane, logical order and standards compliance when doing any sort of programming, and this entire project has shown me just how much of a pain it is to redo code because of short-sightedness.

I've noticed in the past few weeks some failed attempts to download the mp3s listed in this thread. This is due to the fact that these files are hosted on my machine. I just recently got a new 250 GB hard drive, which is now the home of these mp3s. When I return home from work, I'll update the links on this thread to reflect their new location, so that they may be downloaded again.

EDIT: It is done. The files are now properly linked.

My apologies for the thread necromancy, but I bring good tidings. In my travels through the Wayback Machine, I have located the Magic Box! Most of the files seem to be preserved (if you look at multiple versions of the site, that is).

Sadly, I have not been able to locate the Warlok files in the same manner. Fortunately after some research (and the realization that it's spelled Warlok without a c) I discovered that I have a backup of these very files, in the same state as I had first found them. I now present them to all of you.