Gear - Blog Posts

My Life in Gaming – retroUSB's AVS NES

The certified video nerds at My Life in Gaming got to review the retroUSB AVS, a new system that plays NES carts and accessories accurately in glorious 720p. I’m still playing my Famicom carts on a Power Joy, so I really want this.

Source: My Life in Gaming via the Backloggery

Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype

Famous retro console modder Benjamin Heckendorn got his hands on the priceless Sony SNES-CD prototype. After examining its components, Ben Heck makes some repairs to get it running better than we’ve ever seen it before.

Source: YouTube via recommended videos for a Beefy Smash Doods video?

Flyboard Air Test 1

Now this is a hoverboard! Zapata Racing makes those water jetpacks for your feet, and now they’re cranking up the power and making a Flyboard that flies through open air. The Flyboard Air can apparently fly for 10 minutes at up to 93 mph and 10,000 feet. If even half of this is real, I want one last year.

Source: Zapata Racing via TwistedSifter “Holy Crap Someone Actually Built Green Goblin’s Hoverboard”

My new Kia Forte5

This is my new ride, a 2016 Kia Forte5 SX. I wanted a new five door hatchback with a backup camera, Bluetooth audio, and a nice interior for road trips. When I walked up to the car with the key and the mirrors folded out, I knew this was the one. When I went to Shumatsucon this weekend, I parked in the craziest parking spot I know and took some pictures.

With this, the hardware upgrades are complete. This car is so good, I feel like I need to improve myself to be worthy of it. More on that later.

It's about time I took my own wide angle picture like this. I had to wait a week for a nice day, and I happened to be at an event near this parking garage. I even got a helicopter in the shot!

I probably won't drive up there again. It's really tight climbing to the 8th floor of Fifth Third Center with a car. It's only good for pictures. I haven't tried panorama before. The car looks kinda warped, but I got all of Columbus Commons. It's too cool not to include.

Source: my phone camera on the 8th floor of Fifth Third Center

Wintergatan – Marble Machine

TwistedSifter just keeps finding awesome stuff I want to share. If you like my posts, you ought to subscribe to TwistedSifter too. How else would I have found out about Swedish electronic folk band Wintergatan and their one-man band contraption? 2000 marbles play a catchy loop on the machine’s built-in vibraphone, bass guitar, and drum set.

Source: Wintergatan and Wintergatan via TwistedSifter

The Game Boy, a hardware autopsy - Part 1: the CPU

The humble Nintendo Game Boy had a low price and long battery life thanks to its cheap low-powered parts. JackTech is breaking down the Game Boy into pieces to show us exactly what each component can do. The Z80’s bare-bones instruction set made it a pain to code even basic tasks in assembly. That’s why I did all my old TI-83 games in BASIC.

Source: JackTech via YouTube related videos for Bafael’s Zangief BnB guide somehow

My New Gaming PC

UPDATE: This PC now has a name: Red Cyclone.

I built a new $900 gaming PC, so I’m showing it off. It’s a Core i5-6500 with a Radeon R9 380 in an Enermax Ostrog GT case. My friends convinced me to get a Samsung 850 Evo which makes Windows 10 super fast. I haven’t found anything that can push this to its limits, but it runs all my games great. I wrote a lot more about this rig over on PCPartPicker.

Here's what my desk looks like. There's a Dualshock 4, a Das Keyboard Ultimate S (with unlabeled keys!), and an old Logitech G5 mouse I should replace soon. The side panel window is tinted, so you can't see inside the computer very well until I remove the side panel. I kept the red/black color scheme inside the machine where I could. The Enermax case made it very easy to fit everything in with tidy wiring.

There's a TV on my dresser, but it's only ever used as a second monitor. You can also see my stack of consoles connected to my video capture rig. The monitors seem far apart, but from where I sit at my desk, it makes sense. Gamepad games work well on the TV, and I run keyboard-and-mouse games on the main desktop monitor.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor: $199.98 @ OutletPC MSI H170A Gaming Pro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard: $129.99 @ SuperBiiz Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory: $84.99 @ Amazon Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5″ Solid State Drive: $84.34 @ Amazon Western Digital BLACK SERIES 1TB 3.5″ 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive: $74.00 @ B&H MSI Radeon R9 380 4GB Video Card: $213.98 @ Newegg Enermax ECA3280A-BR ATX Mid Tower Case: $76.35 @ Amazon SeaSonic X Series 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply: $129.99 @ Newegg LG GH24NSC0B DVD/CD Writer: $12.99 @ Newegg Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts Total (before mail-in rebates): $1,016.61 Mail-in rebates: ($10.00) Total: $1,006.61

Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-01-26 05:10 EST-0500

Source: PCPartPicker and my phone camera

Control Config Menus

I’ve been updating my VOGJAM game Skeleton Hunter with new features like custom button mapping. PC games need this because players might have foreign keyboards, nonstandard gamepads, or disabilites that make the default controls unusable. Mine works like the PC version of Skullgirls where every action has both a keyboard key and a gamepad button, and you can assign them one by one or all at once. Please try it and tell me if the menus work the way you expect them to.

Source: my game Skeleton Hunter v1.02 reusing code from my Control Config Demo

Spruce Creek Fly-In Community

It’s 2015; where are our flying cars? In his search for flying cars, James May visited Spruce Creek, Florida. This village treats airplanes like cars, parked in garages and taxied right down the street to the local runway. If every town was this well adapted to small planes, we’d all be flying from place to place, right?

By the way, my Friday night stream has moved to Hitbox! I’m attacking games like Super Back to the Future II, Panorama Cotton, and Sayonara Umihara Kawase, so stop by and chat!

Source: James May’s Big Ideas episode 1

Kodi

Kodi, or XBMC, is flexible open-source software for streaming media players. It has dozens of add-ons for playing video from lots of places on the Internet, right on your TV. At the fair today, I saw a couple shady vendors selling little Android boxes with Kodi for hundreds of dollars. If you really want to save money, just buy a cheap Amazon Fire TV stick and do it yourself. It’s not that hard.

Finally, XKCD makes an indirect apperance on the House of Hitstun. Randall Munroe also answers lots of hypothetical "What If?" questions online and offline. I've linked to this video in the "Source" section below.

Source: Found on an original Xbox and an Amazon Fire TV, also screenshot of my Amazon Fire TV playing Randall Munroe’s TED Talk

The Twitch Streaming Experience

For April Fools’ Day, I brought my weekly stream back to Twitch and did annoying things popular Twitch streamers do a lot. I played a mainstream game online, I had a webcam which covered up my money and ammo counts, I had a lot of useless crap taking up space on the screen, and I constantly begged for followers and donations. Even Moobot was spamming up my chat, which had the default cuss filter on despite the NSFW language onscreen. This all went horribly right, even with Twitch constantly buffering and crashing and Xbox Live dropping my connection several times.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1bYBc9bROg via Twitch, ideas from Bad Stream Layouts via Ragnorok64

Chocolatey

Chocolatey brings the power of Linux’s package manager to Windows, letting you download and install applications from the command prompt. Either that means nothing to you or you’ve already clicked the link because you couldn’t contain your excitement. I reinstalled Windows yesterday and used this to quickly get my applications back.

If Chocolatey Gallery has an application I want, I open command prompt as administrator (Windows Logo cmd Ctrl+Shift+Enter) and run choco install and the application name. With no further input, Chocolatey downloads and installs the package, avoiding unwanted add-ons. You can add dozens of applications in one choco install command and it installs them all one-by-one. To update everything, just do cup all.

Git is revision control software used mainly for software projects. BakaMo Studios uses a TortoiseSVN and a Subversion repository to do that. Choco doesn't just install TortoiseSVN, but Unity and Tiled too! Seriously, this thing is good.

Source: https://chocolatey.org while finding an alternative to Ninite

Buying Gift Cards for the Discounts

Grocery stores chains like Giant Eagle and Kroger like to give discounts on fuel when you buy gift cards. If they have gift cards for places I’m already going to anyway, I use them as much as possible. I even buy GameStop gift cards that I take to GameStop to buy gift cards for other places, earning points twice. Gift cards have their own problems but save money when you can by buying them for yourself.

The real reason for this post was to show off this wall of Fuelperks discounts I just got. Half of that gift card balance was spent before I even left the Giant Eagle parking lot.

Source: the receipt from my Giant Eagle visit just now, scanned with my printer

Challenger with Commentary

I like Instagib, but it’s a lot more difficult to get good stream highlights onto YouTube from there. This run of the 1985 Japanese-only Famicom game Challenger was so watchable and the chat was so random that I jumped through the technological hoops to get this posted for all.

Challenger is famous for its control scheme which is backwards compared to modern games. On the NES controller, you would press A to shoot and B to jump. I actually played this on a Power Joy by Trump Grand that I bought for $5 at CORGS-Con, but it has the A and B buttons reversed. It makes the Power Joy terrible for most games but perfect for Challenger.

The video features Skype chat from myself, Jdetan, and Kinkaido, so of course it’s NSFW.

Wow, it's been a long time since I've had an actual image on this blog, right? Anyway, the top of the N64-ish controller actually has a pointy bit that functions as the Zapper. The trigger is where the N64's Z button would be. It doesn't work well.

Source: Challenger with Commentary – YouTube, which is edited from an .flv archive of my Instagib stream (Instagib.tv deletes archives after 24 hours), uploaded to YouTube, downloaded from YouTube as an .mp4, and finally edited in Pinnacle Studio 14 like my other videos. I really need to find a better way to do this. Also, the camera on my phone.

Feedly and RSS Feeds

Feedly is where I spend most of my time on the Internet. It’s the window through which I organize and read posts from dozens of other sites in one long page, and you should use it too. If you frequently read a news site or blog by visiting their front page every time, you’re probably doing it wrong. Read the rest of this post for links to some RSS feeds I recommend and links to subscribe to them in Feedly or your favorite RSS reader. You’ll be hooked.

I don’t want to spam up the main feed with a lot of links, so you’ll have to click through to the real post this time.

Here are some RSS feeds to get you started. Click the links open the feeds in Feedly so you can follow the feeds there. For those of you with other RSS readers, click the (RSS) after the feed’s name to get its RSS feed. Here we go:

House of Hitstun (RSS) | stuff from the Internet Bakamo Studios (RSS) | my game company RT (RSS) | world and US news from Russia WBNS 10TV (RSS) | manageable amount of Columbus news ESPN (RSS) | sportsball headlines Consumerist (RSS) | Consumer Reports news, tips, and complaints Shoryuken (RSS) | fighting game community news and videos SlickDeals.net (RSS) | bargains from the Internet Wired Science (RSS) | Wired Space Photo of the Day and more Noirlac Sourced (RSS) | nice old video game backgrounds xkcd (RSS) | snarky stick figure webcomic The Adventures of Dr. McNinja (RSS) | high quality serial webcomic Sinfest (RSS) | open-minded webcomic I posted about Did You Know Gaming (RSS) | video game trivia I posted about Botchamania videos (RSS) | pro wrestling outtakes I posted about Classic Game Room videos (RSS) | retro gamer reviews all video games TASVideos Top Rated Movies (RSS) | best new tool assisted superplays Building Feedly (RSS) | updates to Feedly service

Yes, I really have 1,889 unread articles, some dating back to 26 days ago. The biggest backlogs are RockPaperShotgun (269), my YouTube subscriptions feed (261), UsVsTh3m (208), and DarkSakura's blog It's All Around You (160). They're all not accessible at my work so I can't catch up on them there.

Source: a screenshot of today’s Wired Space Photo of the Day from NASA’s Curiousity Mars rover’s Mastcam on my Feedly home page in Pale Moon

Automatic

Well, this is neat. For years, we’ve seen OBD-II scanners that can read Check Engine light codes from your car at home, but Automatic goes much further by working this into a smartphone app. Automatic constantly monitors your fuel consumption, speed, and trip data while you drive and offers up tips to improve your driving style and use less fuel. If it detects an accident, it can even call the authorities for you.

Source: Automatic – Your Smart Driving Assistant via Wired

Phonebloks

I like a good half-baked design every now and then, and this modular cell phone caught my eye. Each of my past few cell phones have met their end from just one component failing. With a Phonebloks phone, you could simply replace the bad component and be good as new. Motorola’s on board with this now, and I hope the project continues to gain traction. How about blocks for buttons and a D-pad?

Source: Phonebloks – YouTube via WebUrbanist

Today Phonebloks is launched!