forums.marpirc.net

Quoting today's news:
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"Monday 30th August 1999

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It looks as if the MARP site is going to have to close soon. I'm sorry, but the people hosting the site are no longer willing to allow the CGI scripts to have the memory that they need to run. I'll try to make the scripts smaller, or find an alternative host, but I'm not very hopeful at the moment. I'll post more news here as and when I know what's happening. "

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Men.....that's terrific !!!!!
Personally, I will feel completely lost....anything that could be done to save MARP, or to help him finding a new host, I will do!

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If we will have to give up to some "unnecessary" scipts features, ok....through them away, Zwaxy....we will support them even manually, but pls....don't leave us without MARP !!!

--
cicca@writeme.com

Thats not good news.
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Anyway to make the data more static and do nightly updates of the
scores?

--
info@kaupp.cx

Loose the scripts man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And maybe loose the clones and start fresh!!!!!!!!!
Or how about a site where u vote for 10 games each month, or a new
competition when each new beta is released??????

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WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! Don't go man!!

--
games.guru@cableinet.co.uk

It would sure be a sad day to see MARP go. Maybe it's time to
streamline MARP a bit - does MARP really need to have scores for all
those clones/different country releases (lots of games have 3+ US,
Jap, World, etc) for so many games? Maybe there's a way we could
decide on one "official version" for each game?

--
sjh1@bigfoot.com

Hi....
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I don't think it is a matter of server disc space load, rather than
of memory load, due to the heavy scripts.

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The solution will be to make them as simpler as possible, just 2 or 3
features (serch a game, a player, show the leaderboard and stop!)
For all other features, static pages could be posted somewhere
periodically.

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Ciao
Cicca

--
cicca@writeme.com

I love the heavy duty scripts, but if the choice is no scripts or no MARP I'd vote to ditch the scripts in a heartbeat. If we only get basic uploading & scoring scripts we'll live Zwaxy - the two alternatives are first place only or a black hole of email from which new games never resurface!
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As much as I might like Sniper & Cubeman, MARP is the driving force in this universe...

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Aqua

--
aquatarkus@digicron.com

I am serious when I say this:
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If MARP closes, I might be in a major state of depression. =(

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I quit an internet basketball league just so I could spend more time
here...and MARP is right now the only thing I really can do right
now. No MARP = No Happiness for me. It sounds trite...but I'm
serious...it took me almost 3 hours to swallow the news (in which I
didn't crack a smile, or barely spoke, just made sounds of
hopelessness)...until I was motivated again and then I started my
push for 10,000. =)
You can take out the complex leaderboard features I wanted, just keep
the site up! You don't want to see a depressed Sports Dude. =)
(Yeah, yeah, I know, I sound desperate, but if you knew me well,
you'd know I was quite serious)

--
shyboy820@aol.com

I think not only a few will be depressed if marp closes, so be warned
if it does close there will be people to find a way for it to exist
at a later time somewhere else.

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Zwaxy if you need to dump space before they kick you out, i'll give
you an ftp site to dump to, or me recursivley grab stuff quickly.

--
churritz@cts.com

Zwaxy, e-mail me ASAP, as I can possibly save your scripts and their
resource needing. (I, like most, can't see MARP close, even though I
am a relative newbie, (only 9 months))...

--
cparsley1@hotmail.com

Thanks for the support, guys. I don't want to see MARP close,
either. I'd love for retrogames.com to allow the script to keep
running, but I really don't think they're going to. Their server
keeps crashing, and it's easier for them to blame my scripts that to
find out the real cause of the problem.

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If anyone knows of a site which can offer MARP the >100Mb of disk
spaces needed to host the recordings, and the ~1s of CPU per hit
which the script uses then that would be great. I've talked to Dave
of davesclassics before, but his site is hosted on an NT box, which
doesn't run Python, and he didn't seem very keen to host MARP. Maybe
some other site has the resources needed, but I think that the 2-300
hits per day that MARP generates isn't enough to warrant the resouces
it takes...

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I hope in time that I, or someone else, will be able to re-code the
scripts in a more efficient language, or maybe I'll find the time to
cut down the memory/CPU requirements of the script, but for the
immediate future, I'm not too hopeful.

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There's no way that I would have time to manually update the page for
every recording that's submitted - I used to do that in the early
days when there were maybe 5 or 10 recordings per day, but now it's
just too much. I'm sure that eventually we'll work out some way to
keep MARP alive. If anyone has any suggestions/offers/prayers please
let me know!

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Chris.

--
zwaxy@mail.com

You know what I think you should do? You should go to emulation news
sites and mention that you need a new home. Tell them what you
require, and I bet they'll post this news on the web, because it IS
emulation related(in the bounds of MAME recordings). With any luck,
somebody who's willing to sacrifice the resources will pick off this
news, and they will let you know about hosting your site.

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Am I the only one who thinks this is a good idea?

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Here's another thing... when our tournament started on July 1st, we
were averaging about 200 hits / day. We are just about ready to
start September, and now we're averaging about 300 hits / day. If my
math is correct, that's a 50 % increase... which is HUGE over two
months!

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Therefore, I think anyone who wants to host this site will be making
a good investment, because we've been increasing our visitors by
quite a bit recently.

--
goldengameboy@yahoo.com

I thought of something else - if by any chance you have to close
because your script is too big, I bet you can narrow down the script
to just include the tournament. The script would probably be at
least 10 times less space than your regulation script. True, there
would be only 10 games to play on, but it would be something to
compete on while you're finding a new home.

--
goldengameboy@yahoo.com

I hope not. After all this is the best site in net, a huge database
to see how "classics" are played gathering nowadays some pretty good
players all over the world. Zwaxy and us other players have done so
much for this site, hope these efforts don't get wasted.

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I don't really now much about any scripts but here are some
suggestions anyway. If there is no other solutions, take these away:
every score except top 3,clones,messages telling you that someone has
scored something(simply look uploads),that daily board summary(it's
anyway better to go to board and checkout new messages and new
answers),scoring system could be much simpler (old 10-3-1 or first
place only...), or get rid (I know many don't like this)of the whole
leaderboard system(maybe temporarily)? ,tournament could move to
gameboy totally, only link there?....

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ps. thanks guys for noticing my Tron record

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Tommi

--
tiihoto@hotmail.com

Here follows an e-mail I sent to some 30 major Emu Sites WebMasters:
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"Hi there....

This is not an official mail from the MARP (MAME Action Replay Page)
site Wabmaster (Zwaxy), but a private initiative from a user who
loves retrogaming and hopes that great site stays alive. I sure I'm
also interpretating all Marp users feelings.

MARP is experiencing difficulties with its server, and is looking for
a new home. What it needs is ">100Mb of disk spaces needed to host
the recordings, and the ~1s of CPU per hit which the script uses",
and it has to run an a Unix machine (Phyton scripts).

We and all the retrogaming community will be very greateful if you
can do anything for that, either hosting the site, or addressing him
to a reliable provider, or, at least, posting this news on you
sites.....anything will help.

The guy to be contacted is Zwaxy (zwaxy@bigfoot.com) .


Thanx for your cooperation.
Cicca"

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Hope this will help, and Zwaxy would appreciate.

--
cicca@writeme.com

Hopefully another retro gaming site will come through soon. I'm sure
someone will host Marp.
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I can put Marp on my machine *temporarily*, my provider does not
allow us to run servers, so I could not leave it on there for very
long. Its a P120 with 64Megs and about 8 megs of HD space left.

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PS: I have also never set up Apache, so that could be a problem also.


--
info@kaupp.cx