Good morning friends. I am still very much not feeling amazing, but I still largely think it is allergies. Ragweed has always been one of my worst issues and we are officially in the season when that starts to give me trouble. I am still taking my temperature daily just to make sure it isn’t something more serious, and I am also distancing myself from folks just in case. Seeing as I don’t have much in the way of burning issues that I feel like I need to discuss with you all, I figured I would spend this morning giving a bit of an update on my Retro Freak console experience.
If you want more information about the whole thing and why I wound up getting one you can check out the original post I made a few weeks back. For reference this is the specific bundle that I ordered from Play Asia as it is a Japanese import. I’ve now lived with the console for a number of weeks and feel like I have a bit better of an understanding of the strong points and the weak points. The strong bits are obviously that you can play a whole bunch of systems on a single console, and also dump those games to an SD Card so you don’t have to have the cartridge handy in order to play it. This also means that you can load up the SD Card with roms from other sources and it will work just fine as well.
One of the biggest issues that I have run into is the fact that not all games are going to play perfectly. The problem that I am encountering for example with Contra III The Alien Wars is at the end of stage 4 when you fight the flying artillery ship “Dodriguez”, at the end of the battle the screen just hard locks. I am not sure if it is a specific issue with the rom image that I am using, so I am exploring that possibility. The other possibility is that the game is just doing something that the emulator the Retro Freak is using cannot support. I know there are some issues with this game specifically on emulators, but most of it was surrounding the fire effects early on in the levels.
Another issue I have run into is that wireless controllers that CAN be used over USB seem to have some issues with the console. For starters the controller that the unit ships with was not amazing, and since then I have been trying to settle on a controller that I liked the most and that would support the most titles. I had ordered this Bluetooth Sega Saturn controller and was having a great time with it for a few days. Then I noticed that the console itself was overheating significantly… to the point of locking up completely.
My working theory is that the power draw of this controller from the console is just too much. I might end up getting a powered hub and try seeing if that helps, since in theory the controller would be drawing power from the hub and not the console itself. The sad part about this is that I really like the layout of a saturn controller, and this one in particular had 10 mappable buttons which came in extremely handy. I have another Sega Saturn USB controller, but I am guessing it is X Input because I cannot get it to work with the console in any fashion.
This has lead me to fall back on the 8BitDo SN30 Pro+ which is in itself a phenomenal controller. The only real negative is the fact that it doesn’t have six face buttons, which means I am not likely going to be playing any fighting games on it. However that said… in truth I was probably not really likely to play many fighting games in the first place since why bother with a console port of Street Fighter 2 when I could just be playing the original Arcade game through Mame. This controller still has some issues, like for some reason the console will not boot with it connected. I am not sure if this is a power draw issue, because it does not cause the same overheating issues but stalls out on the loading screen while it is connected.
All of this said… I have figured out what I can and cannot do with the Retro Freak and am still loving having easy access to all of these games. Sure I could just be running them from Retro Arch, but there is something special about using them with a console that I can’t quantify. The only negative of this experiment is that I find myself wanting to dig out all of my old consoles and get them up and running again. There are a bunch of mods for the Dreamcast and the Neo Geo CD that I am starting to look into that would replace the CD mechanisms with SD Card emulators. I’ve opened up a vault of memories and I am sorta afraid I am going down this weird path now.
At the end of the day… all I know for certain is that I will probably always use Scanlines because it just makes the games feel more like I remember them.
The post Scanlines for Life appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Last night was a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to gaming. I am very listless after having finished Death Stranding last night, and knowing that next Tuesday I will likely be starting Horizon Zero Dawn again on the PC. I also used the weird lull to call my Mom and engaged in some truly bizarre conversations. First up she asked if I wanted the box for their new dryer… because apparently there is some commercial on network television where a little girl makes a castle out of a box. Not watching network television, I really didn’t have a frame of reference and passed… though as a kid I would have made a truly nonsense base out of that box.
Next up they forgot about our Anniversary, which isn’t a big deal given that my brain mostly still thinks it is March. They however thought it was our 20th, when that happened 2 years ago… but again not a big deal. Where things started to get weird is the conversation wound its way around to buying fine dinnerware and purchasing salad plates at $33 a plate for someone that was getting married. I’ve never understood the whole registering for a set of dinnerware thing, because that just seems like an exceptional waste of money. We made it for like 18 years on a set of plates that we got at a Family Dollar for $5 for 4 place settings… and then recently upgraded to some from IKEA. We are not fancy.
It was around this time that she started asking me if I wanted “my” dinnerware. First off I had no clue I had some, but apparently around the time we got married she had purchased a set for us without ANY input. Apparently they have a black band around then and orange flowers, which is nothing that we would have ever purchased for ourselves. Thing is… we have been married 22 years and I am pretty sure this is the first time I have ever heard of this. I told her to please give them to someone that will use them, because it is highly unlikely we will ever have anyone over to “entertain”.
As far as gaming goes, I tried out Fall Guys and it was cute. I can’t exactly see myself playing a lot of it, but it was a good spin on the “battle royale” genre. It is essentially something like Takeshi’s Castle turned into a multiplayer video game. It was fun to play for a few rounds. Essentially you race to the objective and when a certain number of people make it across the finish line the others are eliminated. You can stick around and watch the next rounds or you can just escape out and queue for another match. You seem to earn rewards either way, so you are likely best just bailing and trying again.
Other than Fall Guys I spent some time last night playing World of Warcraft. I’ve been leveling as an Elemental Shaman, and quite honestly it was what was keeping me sane during the earlier phone call. I’ve never really played as elemental, but I am finding it extremely enjoyable. I am starting to doubt however that I will actually manage to level the rest of my horde characters prior to shadowlands. I had a good run, but I am starting to lose steam and keeping up a brisk leveling pace. Shaman is now up to 51 and the Rogue and Priest are around 20.
Lastly the Retro Freak has made me contemplate some truly silly things like trying to bid on this lot of 200 famicom cartridges. Japan doesn’t have Ebay, and instead it is this alternate reality where Yahoo Auctions is what became popular. The problem with this however is that you cannot bid on anything on Yahoo Auctions in Japan without a Japanese address. When I first started watching this auction it was going for around $50 and has now jumped up to just shy of $80. The challenge there is the only way I could make this work is by dealing with a proxy bidding company, that purchases the item on my behalf, gets it mailed to them, and then turns around and ships it to the United States.
So that $80 would get around $20 added onto it for the proxy service, another $10 or so for Japanese shipping, and then a large chunk for EMS shipping from Japan to the United States which would likely add about $50 more onto the price tag. So even if I could secure it for $80 the final bill of sale would be around $160-200 depending on the amount of weight 200 famicom cartridges would actually weigh. I’ve largely talked myself out of it… but one can daydream about getting a large batch of completely nonsense games from Japan to play with. The truth is I could just load a bunch of roms on the Retro Freak, but there is something neat about owning the way cooler looking Japanese carts as compared to the ugly monstrosity that was the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The post Cardboard Forts and Fine Dinnerware appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I have to warn you at the beginning of this post, that I may in fact be going through some sort of a digital midlife crisis. I am not exactly sure how I have ended up here, but over the last few weeks I have found myself missing the “forum age” of the internet. For those who did not cut your teeth in that era, it seemed like every group and community had some sort of forum as their primary internet presence. I am not exactly sure what my first forum was, but I can recall being part of one for every major guild that I was in starting with Everquest. It was often times the core social hub of the group and where all of the plans got made.
The forum that I remember practically living on however was the Argent Dawn US Server forums. So many of the people that I still hang out with to this day came from interactions with this site, and the IRC server that eventually sprung up connected to it. Ynubet my horde side guild leader was a good natured forum troll, and to be honest I probably could have been described in that manner as well. Whatever the case this era is what ultimately lead me to start blogging. I was pretty prolific in posting long winded threads that dissected an issue and tried to sway individuals to my point of view. At some point I realized that effort would probably better spent in a blog post rather than as yet another forum rat.
As new technologies arrived, we tried to adapt that same sort of function to other tools. Slack was the first thing that I can recall trying to make work as a viable forum replacement. For the most part it does, except for the fact that no one actually pays money for their guild slack. That means you are limited to 10,000 comments and as a result you are constantly losing any semblance of history. In my experience this seems to be responsible for the feeling that you are having the same conversation over and over, since there is no consistent thread that you can return to when you want to add fresh thoughts to it.
Discord came along as well, and it has more or less been widely adopted because it is “free” and as a result doesn’t have the issue of constantly losing your history. The challenge with both of these however is there is a sense of immediacy to conversations. Yes you can rattle on about something at length, but it is often times miserable to come in hours or days later and have to perform thread necromancy in order to interject your thoughts into an existing conversation. The organization is also very rough for anything other than random live chat, and the fact that it is so easy to spawn one… means that as I have talked about before we are dealing with a deluge of them available for us to join.
I am as guilty as anyone, in that I kept looking for something better than the forum. I got wrapped up in twitter and google+ and what seems like a myriad of other things all the while not quite understanding what I had lost in the process. There was a specific niche that forums filled, of providing asynchronous communication on topics that could carry out over a number of days rather than a number of minutes or at most hours. During the forum era we used to crave that immediate communication that we have everywhere, but now that we have it… I find myself longing for a slower pace. This is probably just me getting old, but yesterday I followed this madness and created a forum attached to this blog.
It is live and effectively “open for business”. I researched a few options but ended up falling back on the technology that we used to use back in the day for that old school feel. You can reach the forum through a new “Chat” menu, where I have also included the Blaugust and Bel Stream Time discord… even though the later rarely gets used because I don’t really stream much anymore. This might be a horrible idea and it might be the case that no one else feels nostalgic about this era of the internet. The alternative however is one I am willing to take a risk on, that folks miss this sort of interaction and are just needing a place to have it. I spent about two hours last night cobbling this all together, and I am sure there will be changes as we go. However for now I am throwing this project to you my readers to see if you have any interest in it.
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This morning you are getting a random image that I thought was pretty from Death Stranding, because this is going to be one of those depressing real life posts that I don’t end up syndicating very widely. This is the type of post that I am mostly writing for myself. I realize that won’t stop the comments checking up on me, and please know that I deeply appreciate it. I am doing okay, but the definition of what okay means changes on a daily basis. This morning I am struggling a bit because I did not get a good nights sleep. I alternated between anxiety attacks, not being able to get comfortable and not being able to regulate my temperature. As such I was up an awful lot of the night and when you tend to sleep about six hours that sorta adds up.
If you were following along on twitter, yesterday my wife got cut by a neighbors dog. The pupper was just trying to be friendly and jumped up on her, but all we can guess is like its dewclaw sliced a gash on her upper arm. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail because it was gruesome as it essentially tore through both the epidermis and dermis layers exposing the subcutaneous. This is the same dog that sliced open the back of my leg about six months ago, but nothing as severe as this. My wife is fine but required ten stitches and we had to deal with going to an emergency care place while under covid protocols.
A lot of my difficulty sleeping was out of fear of bumping her arm during the night and accidentally opening the stitches. These are the sort of things that I live in terror of. Like when I have been in the hospital I live in constant fear of pulling my IV line out. She ended up arranging the pillows in such a way as to prop her arm up, but trying to figure out a way to comfortably move around this in the bed was a challenge and as such I was up at midnight, one thirty, and three thirty with that last one struggling to get back to sleep at all. Today is one of those days where there is simply not enough caffeine in the world to bring me out of this stupor.
The injury was just the icing on what was a horrible horrible stress cake. I found out that morning that I have been in contact with three individuals that are either covid positive, or live in the same house as someone who is covid positive. In theory I kept at least a six foot distance the entire time around them, and had my mask on, but it is prompting a whole new level of anxiety. I’ve more or less lived like a hermit since this all started other than a few trips into work that I was pressured into. On some level I think I am unique equipped for the time we are living in, because I am pretty content not to leave the house for great periods of time. Five months however… is a bit much and it is starting to wear on me in ways that I don’t fully realize.
I feel like I am having this very slow motion break down as I lose bits of myself in the process. It is like falling down a hill, but at an almost imperceptible speed, with no real way of actually stopping the motions from happening. The thing is… I feel like EVERYONE is going through this same slow motion break down. Nobody is completely okay right now, and as a result it feels real weird to raise your hand and ask for help when everyone is struggling around you as well. Even if I did ask for help I am not even sure what that would look like, or what would make things better. It isn’t so much that there is anything missing in my life, other than the option to actually do something other than live in fear of the outside world.
There are times when I make one of these posts, and it isn’t so much that I am asking for help. I have a pretty solid social network of friends who check in on me on a regular basis. I make these posts when I am struggling because I want others to understand that it is okay to struggle. There are times when I seem like I have my shit together, but these peeling back the layers is to make sure everyone knows it is okay to feel helpless. I think what scares me the most is I am not sure what normal is going to be within the next year or two. I don’t know what society looks like after this. I realize we have struggled with this before, but the “spanish flu” was a three year long ordeal. Mentally I am trying to prepare myself for the fact that this is likely normal for the next few years.
I don’t have much to say that is meaningful. I just find it sometimes helpful to write one of these posts when I reach the point where my drug of chose doesn’t seem to be helping me cope. That drug of choice being gaming, and I use it as a way to help set straight my mind. However right now I have reached levels of stress that it isn’t even really helping. Everything just seems like “a lot” right now, and each week seems to bring something new to add onto the stack. Thanks for putting up with me as I go through whatever this is, and my hope that sharing the struggle occasionally helps someone else too.
The post Slow Collapse appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
