Home improvement!

Hi!

Geril here, writing about our mundane days in lockdown.

We did quite a lot of home-improvement projects this month, bought some new furniture from IKEA. We also bought two sets of arcade sticks, buttons and two controller boards, so that we could play classic arcade games on our Rasberry Pi. After the assembly of the IKEA furniture, we realized that we had no surface where we could attach the arcade stick parts... but we had quite a few empty IKEA boxes. So, temporarily we assembled the arcade stick into the IKEA boxes. They work fine, and we played several classic games with them.

They look kinda flimsy, but they are just sturdy enough to work. Also, we reassembled the cable management in our media center, now with the surround sound system in mind. By the way, did you know that Star Fox on the SNES could output surround sound? Well, it can. Seriously, and it's pretty impressive. A few SNES games can use "VHS" type surround, and it's a trip to play a classic game with surround sound. It's like a super-secret level that you unlock after decades.

Apart from messing around with our setup, there's really not much to talk about. We're looking forward to the situation improving, so we can go out more.

Pump It Up arcade hardware!

Hi!

Phew, it's a really hot summer this year. We'd rather just lie down in a cold air-conditioned room, face down, and sleep. All day.

But!

Today we're showing you something different than usual.

My (Lussy) probably biggest wish as a kid was to have my own Pump It Up arcade cabinet. For those that don't know, Pump It Up is a Korean rhythm arcade game similar to DDR, but there is one additional panel on the floor and they are arranged differently. I prefer it to DDR because of the different panels, and also because of its soundtrack.

It was really hard for me to research anything about the arcade hardware, but a few days ago I found a main board for an older cabinet type, the MK-3. What little research I was able to do showed that this was the model that my old favorite software ran on, so I ended up buying it. It's a proprietary PC motherboard with some custom chips thrown in for good measure, and a glorious CD-ROM drive to read the software off of.

There are a bunch of parts missing, most notably the power supply, so we weren't able to test it yet. When we do get it running, the biggest challenge will be to find a set of pads for it, and find a place to store them at. We can't even begin to imagine what adventures this little machine will have us go through until we make it complete and get it in working order, but we're looking forward to them.

By the way, we are still working on our own rhythm game project, and the gameplay concept testing phase is coming along nicely, however there's still some work we need to do before we can show it off.