Yesterware

From time to time I like to fire up my disc based systems to keep the grease viscous and make sure everything is in good working order.  Well last night I fired up my Model 2 Sega CD and discovered that all was not well. The disk tried to spin up and this horrible grinding and scraping noise came from the drive.  After several attempts the disk finally loaded, but it was painful and I shut it off immediately to prevent damage.  I managed to do some damage getting the silly thing apart, but everything is back in working order now. Problem: Grinding The grinding noise from a Sega CD Model 2 is evidently a pretty common issue.  There's a laser limit switch which the system uses to tell that the laser assembly has reached the center of the CD spindle.  Over time this switch stops working as desired.  The switch is essentially just two thin strips of copper inside a plastic shell.  When the sled touches the switch, the two strips are supposed to make contac...

Short story long, most 80's and 90's era game consoles used off-the-shelf integrated circuits for video/picture processing, and most of those integrated circuits generated RGB as well as composite video.  As a result, even when the console manufacturers didn't bother to connect the RGB lines, RGB could still be enabled by tapping the RGB lines from the IC directly and connecting an amplifier to drive them.  The best example of this is the Turbo Duo/PC Engine Duo. When it comes to the NES/Famicom, things become a bit more interesting.  Nintendo used a custom "PPU" chip to drive video, and as a result, RGB is not exposed, and can't simply be "tapped and amplified". Enter the NESRGB.  Rather than trying to tap RGB from somewhere on the board, the NESRGB actually hijacks the entire PPU chip. You literally have to desolder the PPU from the board and place a device in between it and the system.  I mean, look at this thing, it's crazy. NES RGB Mod - the...

Is it okay to say you grew up poor if you know there were a lot of people who grew up poorer than you did?  You're right, it is what it is. When the SNES came out, I was obsessed with it.  The financial disposition of my family did nothing to diminish my passion, and I was the king of delayed gratification.  It is an odd coincidence that like my first NES, I received my first SNES while my family was utterly without a TV.  The first time first time I played it, I did so by connecting the audio portion of the multi-out to a stereo I had recycled from somewhere.  I popped in Super Mario World, and listened to the opening sequence.  I hit the start button and mashed random buttons until the game started and I could hear Mario jump.  I started trying to time my jumps by counting the seconds between the stage music starting and the sound of Mario dying.  It was crude, and I have no idea how far I managed to get or what stage I might have been on. ...

In the 00's emulation was the rough draft of a love letter from technology to classic console gaming.  Emulation made it possible to play an entire library of console games with just a PC and a modest amount of know-how.  More than that, it provided a venue for fan localization of titles that were never released in our native tongue. I will never forget the hours I spent trying to get Final Fantasy V to play on my PC, or the hours I sunk into actually playing Seiken Densetsu 3 (Secred of Mana 2).  Console emulation is praiseworthy by the fact of its existence alone.  Be that as it may, emulation has always been an approximation of the original experience.  Even with the fastest and most powerful computers, emulation doesn't seem to be able to re-create the experience with complete fidelity - often it gets close enough to scratch the itch and it's a great deal better than nothing at all, but with input lag, screen tearing glitches and a whole other litany of nitn...

About The Release After finally having the pleasure of watching this film in 3D on blu-ray, I have to say not only does it have the best color and contrast of any version of T2 to date, it's one of the best 3D blu-ray presentations I've ever seen - easily on-par with the recent Star Wars releases.  So many of the scenes were shot with such generous focal length that it's difficult to believe that the film wasn't made for 3D in the first place - where some films will include scenes which are exclusively to show off the 3D effect, T2 does this without any added effort.  This is my new favorite version of the film and I could make an argument that it's the definitive one.  With that in mind it's utterly perplexing to me why Studio Canal made it so difficult for me to watch it.  I know 3D has kind of fizzled, but they seem to be actively trying to kill it off despite people like me who still love the format and are willing to pay a little more and work a little hard...

Nothing can ruin art and inspiration like money can When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, our science textbook at school featured a picture of the Seiko T001. https://museum.syssrc.com/artifact/mobile/900/ I can't recall if that's the first place I laid eyes on one, but I remember becoming almost obsessed with it.  I later saw the watch featured in the movie Dragnet, and much later (though it was a much older film) in the film Octopussy. There are plenty of sites such as the one above that tell the story of the watch much better than I can, so I'm not going to duplicate that effort.  The truth is I didn't really know the history of the watch and it didn't much matter to me either.  The fact of the matter is that in 1982 Seiko made a working television screen the size of a wristwatch face. When I was young, the miniaturization of technology was awe inspiring.  It opened our eyes to what was possible and made an incredible promise out of the future.  ...

http://www.turing-machines.com/pdf/beethoven.htm

The Showdown The Nintendo Switch has been in the hands of players for a couple of months now.  The gaming press has carried stories of shortages and stock flying off the shelves, but when you strip away the hype and marketing, how does it hold up against one of the best handhelds of all time, the Atari Lynx? Don't let the fact that both machines feature horizontal orientation with controls on the sides fool you, these are very different devices.  We'll rank each system according to a series of 6 crucial criteria to see how they really stack up. 1. Size Top: The Atari Lynx featuring ergonomic contouring, and ambidextrous controls. Bottom: The Nintendo Switch featuring a more stylish, but somewhat ergonomically compromised design exclusively for the right-handed.  The Switch takes up a 9.5x4 inch surface area and is .55 inches thick, while the Lynx is 10.75x4.25 inches and 1.5 inches thick.  At first glance they are similar enough in size that it may seem like neithe...

Last week I walked into Best Buy to look for a couple of USB cables because I somehow forgot that Best Buy still likes to charge triple price for cables. $30 for a simple 6-ft USB cable, really? http://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-6-usb-2-0-transfer-cable-black/5813024.p?skuId=5813024 You mean this? https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=5443 But I digress. I followed PSVR since it's initial announcement as "Project Morpheus" and fully intended to buy one on day one, but when I saw the slate of software I was underwhelmed and canceled my pre-order.  Then last week I received a random email about "Farpoint" - which I had never heard of, or at least could not remember ever hearing of.  I couldn't believe it, an advertisement in my inbox that actually informed me about something I found interesting.  After taking a glance, I remember making a mental note to watch out for this one as it might actually be the PSVR's killer app - the thing that finally makes ...