Yesterware

When I was a kid, I desperately wanted a Nelsonic Zelda watch, but my parents were always reluctant to shell out money for toys and even if that had not been a hindrance the only ones I could ever seem to find at the store were the white or blue or pink ones.  Everyone knows the black ones are the only cool ones. Over the years as the memory has cropped up I've occasionally checked Ebay and while there are always watches to be had, they're usually the non-black colors or else priced way too high to seem reasonable.  These things originally retailed for $20.  I kept telling myself eventually I'd find one cheaper somewhere.  Well over the years the price has crept up and not down.  Against my better judgement I decided to go ahead and buy one at the egregious price - I consoled myself with the fact that the images on the listing made the watch and the box look perfect. Well, what I received was definitely not the item pictured in the listing.  The listing sho...

It happens from time to time in the video game industry that publishers become infatuated with chasing some new business model that promises to deliver easier profits and lower investment costs.  Just like with any jinn in a bottle the promise seldom works out the way they think it will and comes with a massive downside. They have to sell their soul to consummate the wish and their greed makes them oblivious to the swath of destruction left in the wake of the chase.  I may have strong opinions about this... If you've been playing video games for any length of time, you have probably experienced at least one of the cycles I'm talking about - churning out endless mediocre clones of successful titles (Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, Final Fantasy, DOOM, Resident Evil, Demons' Souls etc...), forcing games to have multi-player modes where it made no sense in hopes of creating a commercially exploitable competitive space, holding back content to sell it to players later as DLC, p...

In 1994, Capcom released a relatively faithful arcade port of Super Street Fighter II  for the FM Towns personal computer.  Years ago I downloaded a CD image, burned it to a CD-R and tried it out.  It was a huge disappointment.  Not only did the game run at a completely unplayable half speed on my FM-Towns 20F (with 8MB of RAM), my FM-Towns gamepad proved to be totally inadequate for a fast-paced fighting game - it seems to be physically impossible to throw a Hadouken fireball with it. The "stock" FM Towns game pad - it's practically impossible to play Super Street Fighter II with this. Earlier this year someone pointed out to me that the "half-speed" issue can be resolved simply by changing the option "Raster Mode" from "On" to "Off".  This does indeed allow the game to run at full speed and made me feel like a complete idiot for never coming across that little tip before. I'm also a bit baffled as to why this setting would be ...

This chronicles my most recent adventures with the original XBOX console.  The first half describes soft-modding, the second describes hard-modding, and I make some comparison along the way. Softmod - the First Go-Around A little over a year and a half ago, on a lark, I decided that I wanted to softmod an original XBOX and plunk in a big hard drive with "all teh gamez".  As a collector, I don't generally mod the complete-with-box consoles I collect because modding tends to reduce their value, at least I know it would for me so I expect it would for others as well.  So I went to a local game shop and asked if they had any.  Turns out they had one, and knowing nothing about XBOX variations at the time, I bought it. The Softmod+HDD Upgrade Process Performing the soft mod was fun and educational.  After sifting through what felt like a hundred guides ranging all the way back to the mid 2000's I finally settled on JRocky5's softmodding kit as it seems to be the only ...