Hi gang.

Retroroms has been around for a while. It's served us well, but its time to do a bit of an overhaul.

First task is to decide how we're going to build it. We're currently using xoops as the main framework. I'm happy to rebuild with a newer version of xoops if thats what everyone likes, but another alternative is Joomla. I would start a poll to let you all vote, but the poll module appears to be dead. Instead, just post a comment here against this news article to let us know which you prefer.

Later on, I will ask for expressions of interest to help build the new "skin" for whatever system we choose for the new retroroms. Stay tuned to be part of the rebuild.

Hi Team.

This month, we had someone donate 10 cents. Please remember that donations under $5 will not get any special access. We have had people donate one cent previously (which costs 1 cent in paypal fees). To discourage this behaviour, you can still donate small amounts, but no special access for donations under $5

While on the topic, More maintenance coming soon. We lost a hard drive about 6 months ago. Another one is dead right now (running without backup). So, I have to get a new drive sorted soon.

Which brings me to the next topic. I know times are tough, but $10 (and ten cents) for the first half of the month would not pay for my petrol bill to go install a new hard drive, let alone the cost of the new drive and other usual monthly costs. I'm not going to change our policy and make this a "pay only" site or anything like that, but please remember that it costs to keep this place running.

We've had a crazy time lately with hardware, but the good news is that everything is back to normal.

Some people had special access expiring during the outages, so I think its fair to extend it for now. Thanks and bittorrent access is currently extended to 90 days instead of 60 days from the time of your donation to make up for issues during our outages. (This will be wound back to 60 days around the end of June)

The bittorrent seed is also running again - and seeding like crazy, so have fun everyone!

Cz

The new hardware went in tonight, but it didn't go quietly! I arrived with my new network and video card. But, they would not both fit in the chassi at the same time.

I ended up urgently getting a different type of video card from a mate that would co-exist with the new network card... but even then there was more problems.

The system bios settings got nuked in the process, and we were unable to boot the server! Took a while to find it, but we're back now.

The bittorrent service has also been restarted.

In the next few days, I'll be reviewing those that either had active "thanks" access or who donated during the problems - they will get some bonus time added to compensate for the inconvenience during the outage.

Cz

IMPORTANT: READ THIS POST. Downloads are down until further notice.

OK. So I have replaced the power supply, the motherboard, I have tried two ethernet cards, and today the video card has died.

The system is "working" on the built in ethernet card, but under high packet load, it crashes the server. So, I have to turn off the download area until it is fixed to reduce load. I hope you all understand.

Once it is fixed, I will "extend" the dates for people who are donating to retroroms to allow for this downtime.

Cz