E 74 on my brand new Xbox 360I just spent about 45 minutes cabling up my brand new Xbox 360. What happens at first power-on? E 74.
I powered it down and then back up and it’s now at the intial setup screens, but still…
Fucking Microsoft.
Space Giraffe Playing DeviceI gave in.
(After ensuring I still had a network run to that corner of the basement, and that I was purchasing one with the HDMI port and new heatsink design.)
I figure that I can find the spare $390 (total) for an Xbox 360 and a copy of Space Giraffe, but somehow I didn’t notice that 360 doesn’t have built in wireless networking. Arraugh. Everything else near my TV (Wii, TiVo) has a wireless connection, but the 360 doesn’t without spending an extra $100. Bah.
I’ll have to check to see if I still have the network line run over there (I don’t think I do), and if I can free up a port on the switch (I don’t think I can).
Nintendo DS Browser (Opera for Nintendo DS)Guess what’s out? Yep, Opera for the Nintendo DS. Inside the package is a huge manual, Memory Expansion Pak [sic], and the software cartridge itself.
It seems to work pretty well thus far, although it doesn’t appear to support Flash, as Meatspin just didn’t display. Nor did YouTube content. Poopy. Google Maps seems to work, just very slowly. I haven’t had a chance to try Gmail yet.
UPDATE: Gmail seems to work fine. And I purchased it at Target for $29.99. I had called a GameStop earlier and the person answering the phone quoted a price of $34.99 and insisted that it must be preordered, and that there is no other way to get it on Wednesday.
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NES Internal Screw Removal
After acquiring some replacement NES 72-pin edge connectors to fix NES’ for both replika and I, I decided to take step-by-step photos of the replacement and write up a tutorial on it. So, I give you my NES 72-Pin Edge Connector Replacement Tutorial.
This is actually really easy to do, fixes the blinking-gray-screen problem which plagues almost every front-load NES (you know, the problem which were supposedly resolved by blowing on the connector in the cartridges), and can be done with just a screwdriver and replacement connector. There is no soldering or electrical repair skill needed for this.
Also, please Digg this story.
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The Last Starfighter on Atari 800XL
(No emulation, booting from a >20 year old floppy.)
So, yes. The Atari 1050 floppy drive that I was attempting to fix is… Well… Fixed. I also played some Necromancer too, before turning it off and ceasing working for the evening. The new caps are considerably smaller than the old ones, but the snap in pins were large enough that they had to be ground down to fit. Once all the new electrolytic caps were in place and I’d jumpered around the trace I lifted earlier and tested everything, it was time to put the RF shied on the board and put it back in the enclosure. I was a bit nervous about reconnecting the floppy drive because of the many different connectors, but it worked out.
I then put it all together, hooked it up to the TV, and tried to boot a game disk, which failed. Next I tried a DOS disk and that worked, then finally The Last Starfighter beta and Necromancer. So, it looks like that first failure was just a problem with a single disk. Hopefully I can still read the rest of it.
With any luck the SIO2PC adapter will come pretty soon and then I can image as many of the old floppies as possible. Now, bed.
Well, there’s my dinner; grilled tempeh bugers and two papadoms.
As mentioned earlier, Cooking Mama Cook Off for Nintendo Wii was acquired today. It’s pretty good. My biggest complaint is that some of the actions feel a bit laggy, but I think this is intentional. For example, when cracking an egg one makes a motion, then the egg moves and cracks. Move too hard initially and the egg breaks. Move too little and it doesn’t crack. I think the point of this is to get one to make the motion without the visual feedback so that muscle memory learns how to crack eggs and such.
When moving butter around in the pan (to cover it for sautéing) the tilt controls are wonderfully responsive and things work great, along with shaking various pots and pans, and things like that. That leads me to believe the previous behavior is intentional. Also, when chopping vegetables the arrow indicating where to chop isn’t visible if the cursor is directly over it. This was likely done to make the screen less cluttered while playing. However, if the level begins with the cursor already in the right place, it’s a bit confusing as to where one should begin. This goes away with a bit of practice too.
Other than that, Cooking Mama Cook Off is pretty much just like Cooking Mama for DS, except with (obviously) different actions for things, two player games, better / larger graphics, and… Wii-ness. I’d say if one likes the DS version the Wii version is definitely worth getting.
Yay! Target over in Utica has Nintendo Wiis in stock. The person who rang up the sale informed me that they had around 75 of them in stock this morning. What I saw was a display case still completely full. So, excellent.
I also picked up both of the newest Skinny Puppy and The Streets discs. I’m not sure about the SP yet, and I haven’t listened to The Streets yet. Hopefully they both end up being good to me.
Back in 2000 while still living at my parents house (this is both pre-apartment (photo gallery retired) and pre-condo) I ended up building a MAME Cabinet from scratch. (Yes, just a pile of wood.) While it has been in my basement, used on and off for years, I’d never taken the time to properly photograph it, nor write up anything about it. Well, now I did.
This past weekend I spent a fair amount of time on it, making a number of hardware and software changes, slightly upgrading MAME, moving to Compact Flash for storage, and generally cleaning it up. All in all, it looks like new again. Sure, it plays as it always has (read: excellent) but I feel as if I’ve rediscovered it.
After finishing up the upgrades I wrote up a (hopefully) complete document on my MAME Cabinet. This, along with high-res photos of it completed (photo gallery retired), high-res new photos (photo gallery retired), and the original webcam photos (photo gallery retired) have come together with loads of text to (hopefully) provide a good background on the cabinet, how it was built, and what it contains.
Tonight I still have to acquire the ~16GB of MAME ROMs I downloaded for it and process them so that I can properly pick from as inclusive of a list as possible for play, but this should only take some time. And while it’s downloading I can play some Bubble Bobble. Or Ms. Pac Man. Or Asteroids. Or Capcom Bowling. Or Gal’s Panic. Or Dig Dig. Or…
I cannot figure out what is wrong here. Either the MAME devs seriously broke some things between 0.69 and 0.100, or something I can’t figure out is wrong.
See, I’m trying to run a nice, simple copy of DOS on my MAME cabinet. It should work fine, but… it doesn’t. In some cases. :D
Using MAME 0.69 I have no problems, and everything seems to run rather well. Bump the version up to 0.100 for DOS and everything gets really slow. From, say, 60fps in Bad Dudes down to 17fps.
I thought that maybe the increased size of the binary was being weird with SMARTDRV, or maybe it needed to write back to disk more, and the CF card I’m using is slow, so I copied everything over to a hard disk. Same problem. :\
I’m sort of at a loss for what to do.
