This one was a disappointment to me, because it was a test to see if it would be just as good as the original and it wasn’t.

• Pacing: needing to take up twice as much time as the '96 anime means stretching scenes out. Adding back all the scenes from the manga that were cut in the original helps, and so did making up two extra tricks for Chou to show off with that flexible blade, but the tension can’t help but suffer some.

• Music: I didn’t notice this on my first viewing, but after seeing people comment I went back and listened. Using heroic music for Kenshin’s attack with Shakkuu’s last sword instead of tense, ominous music was a major mistake. Sure, Kenshin is here to save the day, but that’s less important than whether Kenshin will save the day by losing his soul.

• Positioning: I really disliked how Kenshin ends up next to Chou after giving him the elbow and how we clearly saw Chou’s body after Kenshin struck it with Shakkuu’s last sword. While Okina was talking, Kenshin should have been able to do something if he were that close to Chou, like disarm him or beat on him some more. The old anime pushes Chou far enough away that Kenshin plausibly couldn’t get over there and do something before Chou recovered. Showing Chou’s body clearly lets us see that he doesn’t have any cuts on him of the sort that would be expected after having been slashed with a very sharp sword.

Sure, 80-90% as good as the original isn’t a disaster, but I’d convinced myself that this remake had climbed up to par with the original and it fell short when it needed to deliver.

In other news, snow is cold and wet.

Rhinoshield lets you customize a case and has cases for a few popular anime series in stock.

American credit unions are not insured by the FDIC and won’t appear there. They are insured by the NCUA.

Today I’d rather play F-Zero because its controls are more responsive, but there’s more to do in Super Mario Kart.

I’m getting worried about the pacing. This was a quieter episode, but it only adapted two chapters like the previous two episodes. I can’t imagine they could finish the whole arc in two cours at this rate. I’m not sure they could finish the whole arc in three cours at this rate. They might take an entire additional season for Kyoto.

The moon waning as Sano trains was some surprising attention to detail. The moon really was waning in the second half of May 1878, with last quarter on May 24.

The first conversation with Anji during training was good filler. The second one, I’m not so sure, but it worked.

There are four acts that make a monk immediately fall from the religious life and make him ineligible to ever become a monk again in this lifetime: sex, murder, grand theft, and false spiritual claims. Anji didn’t fall from desire, so what did he do? (Don’t answer that.)

This is the first episode so far this season that adapts only 2 chapters and adds several original scenes to fill out the runtime.

I liked the new scenes.

The much-expanded Senkaku fight was silly, but he’s never not going to be silly.

It’s been a long time since I thought about Tenchi Muyo.

The Magic of Scheherazade showed us that mixing turn-based and action RPG battles is harder than it sounds, so I’m a little worried about the balance here.

This episode was a noticeable improvement over the previous one, which itself was above the show’s running average. I’m getting my hopes up for the quality of the rest of the season, if not their odds of getting to chapter 128 at their current 3-chapter-per-episode pace.

Why don’t they advertise these things? Can they be bothered to list all the formats they support somewhere?

The even more efficient example was Mega Man 3. The standard rip format for NES music is far more efficient but also far more complex, requiring specialized skills to rip instead of a copy of ZSNES and a fast finger on the F1 button.

Edit: the standard rip format for NES music is NSF, but an expanded version NSFe is better if you can get it because it supports metadata like song names and lengths.

Everything filed under “Chiptune”, excluding the AT3 and MAB files which are effectively general purpose music formats, comes to 1.14 GB for 4211 items totaling 158:50:29. There are a lot of duplicates in there, because for a lot of these items it’s more trouble to hunt down a replacement copy than it is to store a backup.

The catch, of course, is that it’s all retro videogame music from bleep to bloop.

Those are SPC files, and that particular example was one rip of Final Fantasy VI (III)'s soundtrack.

Unfortunately, it only handles music embedded in Super Famicom/Super Nintendo games. To convert your own music to SPC, you’d have to rewrite it for the SNES sound chip.

Chiptune formats for retro videogame music can be very efficient. Just picking two with particularly good music, I have a 21 KB (0.02 MB) file storing 28:30 of music and 4.72 MB of files storing 1:54:48 of music, both at source quality.

The catch is that they are designed exclusively to rip chiptunes from retro videogames as close as the format designers and player coders could manage to the original. So even the oversized ones like the 4.72 MB of files extracted from a 3 MB game are going to be far smaller than a general use format like opus. But you can’t encode your own music in the format without going to massive effort to code it like you would an authentic chiptune, and you’re unlikely to like the results.

Ten chiptune formats, two other videogame music formats (.at3 and .mab), WMA, IT, AAC, MP2, and MIDI.

Because hard drives aren’t getting any bigger lately and I don’t want to multiply the size of my videogame music collection by ten?

The preview for this week’s episode is mostly Aoshi monologuing, but it’s funny rather than insightful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh0ciz8yWDk