Category: Gadgetology

So I actually have a day off today. Wow! I was asleep until almost noon (which made for a grand total, with a couple of minor interruptions, of almost 11 hours of sleep, and let me tell you – I needed that), and now I’m getting ready to watch Arkansas knock LSU out of the running for the SEC championship. Good times.
Speaking of championships, the Galaga tournament didn’t happen yesterday as planned – there was a little bit miscommunication as to who was working which shift. Darned if my old PS1 doesn’t look nice on a great big HDTV though.

I can’t think of a better use for the conference room table.

Purty.

The ship is almost as big as my hand. That’s just crazy.
Despite me loading up Super Mario (via IMBNES), Ms. Pac-Man, and much more recent fare, nobody touched this setup at all – kinda like I was tampering in God’s domain by hooking it up in there at all. Who knows, maybe they’re right. I just thought it looked kinda neat.
Been doing some 3-D animation stuff I’ll show off to you soon, though I’ve gotta say it looks better on a real live teevee screen than it does as a Flash-compressed file.
Back after the game. LSU, yer goin’ down.… Read more

Earlier this year, the video portion of my beloved Sony A/V amp apparently decided that showing video was a nasty habit that it wanted nothing more to do with, and I had to pull it out and swap it for another amp that just didn’t quite have the magnificent vast variety of inputs and outputs that I like to have. I was glad to have a replacement for it, but I just didn’t like the replacement enough, and I think that coincided with my PC becoming the center of my entertainment system instead of the A/V setup. Well, my wife located and procured a Sony amp like that one that had gone on the fritz, and this one even had all of its marbles – and a working remote, which the original had lacked. (The remote is unique on this model – it’s like a black egg, and you use it in conjunction with an on-screen point-and-click menu almost like a distant ancestor of the Wii controller.) It’s all hooked back up now, and it’s lovely. Now that I have extra outputs again, I may run audio and video from the amp to a secondary input on the Avid – so, for example, anything PDF related, I could play the games directly into the Avid with no loss of audiovisual quality from putting it on tape. I may also run extra outputs from the Avid back to the amp, so I can show anyone who’s there (never mind that fact that I virtually never have company in that room that doesn’t have four legs and whiskers) what I’m working on, on the BIG SCREEN. (If the 25+ year old 19-inch TV I normally drag to OVGE can still be described in such terms.)
It looks like I’m working Thanksgiving, and that means IT’S ON. Our weekend weather guy, Ted, will be filling in then, and we’ve been talking trash to each other about who among us is the master of Galaga. Get ready, Ted. You’re goin’ down. I’ll be dragging my modded PS1 and all of my retro compilations, and The Joystick, in for this supreme display of retrogaming prowess. Ted, you see those things at the end of your legs? What are those? Oh yeah. DE-FEAT.
In other Ted-related news, Ted Sczypiorski, he who authors insanely great Odyssey2 homebrews, sent me a copy of the manual for his next upcoming masterpiece, Puzzle Piece Panic, to make sure I was okay with the acknowledgement for coming up with the game’s new name (for a while early on, it was called Tedtris). I was kinda flattered to get a name-check – and I like his updated 3-D take on the O2 logo as well (not that you can tell from the standard thumbnail size here – trust me, the full version looks much better). I don’t know anything for sure, but I’d say smart money’s on seeing Packrat Video Games release this baby around Christmas. Want to hear true polyphonic music on an almost NES level coming out of an O2, without using the Voice? This game does that. Ted just keeps rewriting the book on what the O2 is capable of – I keep joking that his next game will be an O2 edition of Dragon’s Lair. I just hope he doesn’t get discouraged by the rather insistent (and very vocal) side of O2 fandom that keeps clamoring for this game, that game and the other game, seemingly blissfully unaware of the time and effort involved. He’s said that he’s working on a sequel to Pick Axe Pete next (!!), and I’m always happy to play whatever he comes up with next, because he has yet to drop a stinker in our laps. He’s got a very good sense of balancing the Really Fun Game side of things with the Cool Technical Achievements That We Didn’t Know That Old Hardware Could Do side of things – and among homebrew authors, to put it charitably, that’s not always the case.… Read more