[2011-04-28]

Greetings friends of tantalus! By easter, us in the team had the opportunity to meet and set some plans for the summer marathon. It's been decided to take place from the 18th of june and hopefully just 8 days continuing. It's a bold statement to do it in such few days but the crew has been working hard on their games and for those of you who was with us the last time, you know it can be done in under 10 days!

For those of you interested in the technical setup, we will be using a 1st generation backwards compatible ps3 to play all the games (but III...) and capture the media with a "Plexgear videograbber". Audio will be brought to a mixer where we will merge the audio with this from the sorroundings microphone array. We will then use the software webcamMax (or perhaps superWebcam) to make a video out channel containing picture in picture with a camera pointed towards the player. This picture in picture channel will also grant us the ability to have interviews in another setting by chaning the smaller window to broadcast different cameras, such as a mobile phone. The resulting media channel will then be encoded with flash media encoder from adobe, to gain the ability to stream in greater quality from ustream.tv, thanks a bunch! Upload speed will set the limits to how high quality we might present this marathon, but we will contact the ISP to try and work out a deal for those weeks only we are keeping this low budget.
Hopefully this marathon will be a pleasure to both viewers and players, and we hope you will help making it a great experience by participating in the chat with both amusement and ideas on gameplay. Don't forget to put this in your calendar, see you on the 18th june!
Johan N

[2011-03-11]

Johan, both Vikmo & Nilsson, made some preparations for the summer FF-marathon 2011.

We've decided to look for some help on making the site more easily edited, we'd like to be able to edit the column to the left on all pages at a time and so on. If you think you can help, you're much welcome to contact us by using the guestbook at Mathew's blog. Furthermore, we more or less decided that this marathon will raise money to the cause of Doctors Without Borders, and our ambition is to make donations more easy this time. This will probably be done by using PayPal along with a widget from ChipIn.

[2011-01-06]

All the videos from the christmas marathon is now uploaded on our youtube account.

We hope you had a lovely new years eve, and that 2011 will be filled with new fun marathons!

/ Emanuel Johansson

[2010-12-28]

Crash Bandicoot and MarioKart were completed with good margin. We're now following ICO from the sofa with only a handful of brave viewers, but the game is amazing and progress is good.

A digital clock with swedish time was embedded into the broadcasts and livestream pages for an easier time keeping up with our Stockholm schedule. A link to the image gallery was added, and work began on uploading the first two games' recordings to youtube for later embed.

Johan N

[2010-12-27]

Welcome to our Christmas Marathon

We will soon start streaming, but wont start to play before 19:00 (gmt +1)

And we hope you will have as much fun during the marathon as we are going to have

[2010-12-20]

Added an image gallery with some photos from the last marathon. New pictures will be added subsequently from the christmas marathon. Cyber detectives will be able to reveal the code to a room containing a motherload (of recycling materials, being that it's the code to Vikmo's garbage room). 

Also, I structured the contents of the server a bit.

Johan Nilsson

[2010-12-19]

Made some changes to the overall layout and changed the library structure a bit. A hall of fame page was created to replace what was earlier found under the "Broadcasts"-page, the latter will only be relevant to the current (or upcoming) marathon.

Made a layout for the christmas marathons players presentation for them to fill in. This included me performing some mad paint-magic to grant them vicious looking santa hats. The team features a couple of new players, while only one of the 2010 FF-marathon players, Rickard, is missing out. Hopefully that means some sweet expertise in their respective games.

Much props goes out to Mattias Nordblom (featured player in this marathon) who made that plain awesome banner above that you've been staring at for some thime now. Happy to see him involved, and by the way. It was the named who performed many of your requests songs on piano during the FF-summer marathon this summer, nudge nudge (I request Song of storms).

Current themes of debate is what system we'll use for donations to unicef. As some of you might agree with, Pay Pal put up with a show last week when they froze the assets and furhter donations to Wikileaks. Regardless of whether this was a good thing or not, there was no clear indictment from the State Department towards what criminal activity had been performed by Wikileaks, therefore I personally think PayPal put their clients in danger (cyber attacks) wrongly. The clients, to whom their responsibility lies if there are no clear accusation grounds from the government.

Still no news about the exact time for this, we hope you have enough spare time during christmas to be flexible to this.

Johan Nilsson, the site's caretaker.

[2010-12-08]

Hello there, friends of Tantalus!

[2010-08-24]

Hello there folks! I've seen that some people still are visiting the site, so I have to write something here.

If everyone has time next summer we will arrange another marathon! There will be some changes then though. During this marathon we only were four gamers which forced us to sacrifice almost all the spare time we had. So next time we'll be at least five players (maybe six) and we will also be recording it. I hope you will watch us then too, because we need your support! Let's hope the next marathon is going to be even more epic than the last one was!

And btw..

If we feel for it, we'll have another marathon during the christmas holidays. Which game series we're gonna play then is future-Tantalus' problem!

[2010-08-03]

After some agonizing, yet exciting 10 days we're closing the broadcast. We'd just like to put out another BIG thanks for watching. As we said before this couldn't have been done without your support, there truly were times where giving up didn't seem that distant. Unfortunately, as most of you know, the FF III was never completed due to some sad circumstances, we don't want to get into how or why as there is no that simple an explanation for it. We hope that you enjoyed the marathon as whole and we wish to meet with you in the facebook group http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/g... Much love, the tantalus4 crew via "the technician" Johan Nilsson

[2010-07-23]

Earlier during the marathon, we've had at least one person complaining about problems with logging onto the chat, and therefore being forced into having the ustream channel's chat in an external window. While searches turned out nothing, we've encountered this problem ourselves. When trying to fix it, it turned out to work in an alternative browser. This proposed a problem with the cache, by emptying the firefox cache and refreshing the window, the problem was solved.

Now we're looking forward to see Joakim take on the latter parts of FF VIII and I'm right now off to Emanuels apartment, to update him about getting ready to play again. We've had a great audience and would really like to thank you for your interest.

[2010-07-23]

Now entering our second day of playing. Just now, Emanuel beat FF V and his seat in the sofa was taken by Joakim, taking on FF VIII. We're having a steady 22 viewers who are keeping themselves busy in the chat. Expect more updates as the night progresses.

[2010-07-15]

Watch as the players respond to your comments or make humiliating compilations of the players unawaringly picking their noses. Tantalus4 now offers picture in picture view! This will definitely make the show more cosy, and moreover it means that we're technically ready to do the show. Currently the players are in practice of their different games, we're expecting to come together in the beginning of next week, setting up the final details. People, with this excited of a team, we're simply demanding of you guys to be just as excited yourselves. "That's right: "

[2010-07-12]

Here's a little update! This is our preliminary status:

Location: Johan's or Joakim's apartment.

Start: July 22, 12.00 Local time (GMT +1)

Game order: 13, 2, 8, 5, 1, 12, 4, 10, 6, 7, 9, 3

The marathon is soon to come! And we feel some pressure on us since no one has completed a Final Fantasy-marathon before. Our preparations could have been better. We all have found it hard to make time to play the games as much as we want. But we still have faith in ourselves and that's the most important part to complete the marathon!

[2010-06-29]

Some people have found it hard to understand how we're going to do the marathon. We'll give you a little explanation:

We're going to play one game at a time and then we'll just take turns. Most likely we'll play all games on a PS3 (if not, we'll play them on PSX, PS2 and PS3) except FFIII, which will be played on a Nintendo DS (this will make the streaming bad, so if anyone has any ideas of how to make this better, mail us). We're not going to play the games in order, because we want to mix them up a little. We have made a provisional list of the order to play the games, but we all have to look it over first (Emanuel and Joakim are abroad at the moment). If you want to see the list, mail us and we'll send it to you. When we have defeated the final boss of the game, we're done with it. We have set a time limit to 10 days, which gives us 20h per game. It will be a challenge, indeed!

The marathon is going to start on July 18 as it seems right now. But we have to talk this over when Joakim and Emanuel come back to Sweden.

If you know anyone who likes Final Fantasy (or nerdy guys for that matter), try to convince them to watch the marathon! We hope it'll be a great show!

[2010-06-22]

Today there was a really nice game between Arsenal and Tottenham (Fifa 10) shown on tantalus4 as we finally got the streaming working properly.

[2010-06-21]

We bought a module to connect the Playstation to a computer. After some work we made progress and we got the game viewed on the computer and the tv at the same time. Unfortunately we found out we had more trouble when we discovered that the streaming was lagging a lot, with the picture turning black every half second.

[2010-06-19]

Playstation to stream was tried, unsuccessfully. We're currently figuring out new ways to solve this problem. Have you got any experience in doing this yourself? - Contact us at tantalus4@live.se

[2010-06-14]

Details, details. A favicon was designed and added, a visitors counter, some minor changes in the livestream's layout, and tabnames were made for the subpages. Tomorrow will likely hold first tests of playstation to stream.

[2010-06-13]

Site is furtherly improved by addition of a broadcastment schedule next to the video player. A youtube channel was linked with the Ustream account, now broadcasts will be made able to be watched, post present.

[2010-06-13]

Site is coming together, stream is now embedded and soon to be tried for the first time. More news on that coming soon.

EDIT: Test of livestream went well and Tantalus4 is now one step further to begin the marathon.

[2010-06-12]

First post!
Hello there! Welcome to our new website, where we're going to prepare everyone for the Final Fantasy-Marathon we're about to do. On this website you'll be able to follow our progress and later on we're going to have polls and stuff like that.