Category Archives: Entertainment

Look at this time crystal on shopgoodwill. A pristine Antec SX1030 case (or chieftech dragon or one of the other clones), painted metallic green with a window installed. Every commercial or DIY gaming PC in the first few years of … Continue reading

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I had nothing to do with this but I’m super excited. There has been a long-standing bug in the CPU emulation in Basilisk II (a 68K Macintosh emulator) that could be reliably triggered when *inhales* Bruno the shark killed you … Continue reading

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Tunic

I’ve been playing some Tunic the last few days, because the Steam Summer Sale managed to poke me at just the right moment to get an impulse buy. I was interested enough that I paid $20 for a game that came out like a year ago instead of my usual “Wait until I can pick it up for a few dollars and run it on a contemporary potato” gaming strategy.

It’s very to my taste, and I’m enjoying it, but it is, in classic self-indulgent indie game fashion, “Video game tropes: the game.” Not that there’s anything wrong with making things for your own in-group, but it winks so hard you start to wonder about a palsy.

The visual style and gameplay nod to everything. Fez. The whole Zelda franchise. Soulsbornes. Some Monument Valley style geometry illusion/architectural environmental storytelling. Bunches of stereotypical Supergiant details. It’s never met a game trope it didn’t like. They executed and integrated pretty well though, and I am in the market segment that connects to the references. [Ed: Oh look. Some Half Life 2 Citadel and more explicit Chrono Trigger refs late(?) game!]

It’s not …quite… as self-indulgent as Lenna’s Inception (same kind of 2D Zeldalike vein, did it a few summers ago, had slightly more fun than irritation about how hard it was sniffing its own farts), and it’s far more modern and sophisticated than the various Solarus engine games. The visual style is both cuter and more spectacular than either.

It also has the classic indie game feature of being relatively graphically simple, built on a major engine, and still being kind of a resource hog … though I’m playing on Linux via Proton/DXVK, on a workstation-model Polaris12 GPU, so some of the “Barely holding 24fps at 720p on a system that can do way more visually impressive games” is probably my fault [Ed: performance issue suddenly fixed after update and reboot, must have been a driver/system state thing]. I will say, having not played many commercial game for the last few years, the progress with transparent, performant functionality out of the Proton ecosystem is really impressive.

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Anbernic RG351(p) and Powkiddy RGB10 Max2 Button Membranes are Drop-In Compatible

I’ve had an Anbernic RG351P for roughly 2 years now, and it’s an absolutely delightful object.

For those unfamiliar: the RG351 is an example of a class of little gaming emulation handhelds that started back in the mid-to-late 2000s with things like the Dingoo A330. They are, essentially, a tiny ARM (+ usually Linux) machine the size and shape of a handheld gaming device, set up with a built-in controller specifically to run games in emulation. The stock firmware on the RG351 is an ancient EmulationStation/RetroArch/Linux stack, but there are better alternatives – IMO, throwing in a decent SD card loaded with AmberElec is the first thing to do when you get one. It will play essentially everything from the dawn of gaming through the PlayStation and some (but not all) of the Nintendo 64 library, and has limited/marginal support for PSP and DS. It is …straightforward but not the sort of thing I’ll link… to obtain the full ROMsets for these platforms, they are frankly not that large. I paid about $90 for mine, I think they’ve gone up a bit, but there are a whole range of similar options at different price points, build qualities, and platform support.

The build quality, however, isn’t perfect. It’s small-brand China-export hardware. You know you have to be a little careful with it just from handling (I keep mine in a fitted case when throwing it in a bag). I’ve been through a screen (I got red lines in my original after about a year), re-gluing the back rubber pads (original glue melted), and now after two years I wore through the membrane behind the “A” button, and that’s actually what this post is about.

I opened it up, found the worn though button, looked around online, couldn’t any in stock, contacted Anbernic through their AliExpress store front (none available), asked the subreddit (no leads), and couldn’t come up with any exact replacement membranes.

HOWEVER on inspection, the membranes from the similar Powkiddy RBG10 appeared extremely similar, and those are readily available (as a $12ish pack of all the membranes and button caps to refit an RGB10, which includes two of the 4x membranes). I ordered this set via Aliexpress, and ~16 days later when it showed up, can confirm the membranes are slightly different, but drop-in compatible.

As you can see from the photos, the Powkiddy membranes have a bit more flat area, and the bottoms of the mounting holes are filled in rather than fully punched through, but the dimensions are exactly right. The height and force of the domes is even almost identical to the originals, and at effectively $6/membrane it’s a very reasonable repair.

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Toys for my Escape Velocity Itch

Printed and painted Kestrel and Lightning models on a PowerBook 5,4

I had my regularly-scheduled itch to play Escape Velocity or one of its successors and/or clones the other week, and decided to play the real thing this time since I did a lap on Endless Sky not too long ago, and NAEV still doesn’t quite grab me.

I’m now most of the way through a game of EV (under emulation in Basilisk II), and …impulse bought a cheap 2004 15″ Aluminum PowerBook G4 (a 5,4) off the internet after a crash ate a save file. I have good coverage of Apple 1984-1994 in my collection (in the form of bulky desktops with CRTs), and x86 OS X is pretty easy to run in a VM, but I have a hole in the late PPC era. That machine will hopefully eventually also get its own post as I finish fixing it up, it’s not in perfect condition but it auctioned below prevailing when I was looking, and seems to be acceptable.

While I was looking into the player communities (…because it’s become very hard to set up a working install of EV Nova recently, and I can’t find a backup of my registered copy) I discovered that a couple months ago some wonderful person (slurked on thingiverse/quarmus on reddit) made and shared 3D models of the Kestrel and Lightning ships from the original EV.

…So the little Mac-user child of the 90s in me promptly headed down to the basement to print a Kestrel and a pair of Lightnings.

I gave them a quick sand to take the worst print artifacts off and sprayed them down with a couple coats of gray Krylon Fusion, which gave a decent base coat. I needed to do a little (bad) detail painting on the Lightnings, and the acrylics I have around didn’t stick well to the spraypaint, so I dug out my decades-old Testor model enamel set. Eventually they were shaken and stirred enough to get the job done; in another post post, an absurd over-engineered shaker that didn’t really solve the problem.

EV is still one of my favorite games, though I think Endless Sky’s implementation of the formula is actually significantly better for a modern player without the memories, especially now that Ambrosia is defunct and the hacks around registering Nova seem to not be working.

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Stadia: Why?

I got one of the free-with-YouTube-Premium Stadia Premiere kit + Pro trials just out of curiosity (since I’m waiting to cancel until Play Music actually stops working, and why say no to $100 of free toys), and after playing for it for an evening, while I’m very technically impressed … I’m completely baffled as to why anyone would pay for this thing, or especially “buy” individual games on it.

It is fast and surprisingly responsive, and the (insane) distributed “phone or computer + controller + Chomecast all talk to the internet and also to Bluetooth and manage to stay in sync” wizardry is an amazing technical achievement, as is the low-latency, reasonably low-artifact streaming.

…but the subscription/rental library is tiny, expensive, and non-portable. It sucks a massive amount of bandwidth (it seemed to be holding at about 20-25Mbit/s down during my AAA test). The fact that I need a minimum of three independent devices (since you can’t do most of the configuration or library management with the controller + Chromecast) to play on the TV is awkward, and the layers of account management and device syncing are pretty wonky for a single user, I can’t imagine dealing with it in a multi-user household.

I played a little bit of Celeste (as an input lag test; it was not half bad, though playing it on a controller is not my preference), a little bit of Hitman (To see how heavy duty graphical games would do), and a little The Gardens Between (hadn’t played it, in my Pro trial, looked neat) – and they worked, but nothing about the experience was particularly compelling.

The whole free-kit-for-Premium-subscribers thing feels like a desperate attempt to dump their hardware stock to build enough user base to recoup the back-end costs for another doomed Google product that will die as soon as the current back end ages out and the workforce moves on to career-advancing shiny new things – after Buzz, Reader, Plus, Play Music, the steady churn of ever-worse chat tools, and half a dozen other products that were useful enough to take all the air out of a market before being unceremoniously dumped Google has lost all credibility for paid rentals or ecosystem investment.

All the freebie premiere kits are going to be Goodwill gold in a couple years though – the controllers are decent (Not $70 decent, but decent) and seem to work as normal HID devices, and there are two nice USB power bricks with cables in there.

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Why did a Banggood package I ordered on March 26 just appear in Bahrain on July 5, the same day it finally showed “Shipment picked up?” Did it just get packed into a container and loaded on whatever outgoing vessel … Continue reading

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Self-Hosting News Sharing and Discussion

Back in 2013 when google killed Reader I mused about self-hosting my communal news shit-talking.  With the imminent death of G+, which I moved to despite knowing better, I’m looking into it again.  This process might (will) cause some spurious content to appear in the main feed while I try things. I’m still on (and pretty committed to) tt-rss on the news-consumption side, I’m poking around ways of rigging the published feed from that into a comment-able format.  Hopefully with a minimum of work and maintenance overhead on my part, and without hooking myself to yet another platform that won’t monetize well and will thus die.

Success!: The news tab in the nav-bar now takes you to a page that shows the things I publish from my Tiny Tiny RSS instance, complete with a place to yell at me for my hot takes, or share your own thoughts. It’s rigged up with FeedWordPress and a little bit of theme hacking, and can itself be subscribed as an RSS feed. There is a little bit of jank with nested feeds, but at least it’s in house.
A less lazy me would probably do this with a static site generator, a comment system (like isso or something) and some scripts, but I all sorts of don’t have time for that.

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G|Bomb Push|Pump

gbombboardbtm

I finally bought a G|Bomb Push|Pump setup after years of teasing myself about buying a proper hybrid distance deck. I selected it over the only other obvious contender, the Subsonic Century, mostly because as an engineer the G|Bomb design tickles me. Yes, it’s a $300 deck with another ~$100 of parts on it, but based on my first few rides, it’s totally worth it.
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Breaking In to your Own Devices

I gave an informal talk for the IEEE student branch about breaking in to your own devices this evening. I did the low-postable-content notes with live examples and links thing, but at least one person wanted to watch the video links, so here are the notes. There is something delightful about giving talks that require legal disclaimers. I don’t think there is anything in here that will get me in trouble…

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