New 3D printer!

 Hey! Geril here.

So, we bought a new 3D printer. We already had one, but it was very high maintenance and fragile, so the new one is more limited in options, but works easier.

It's a Polaroid PlaySmart 3D printer that was only released in Europe. It's not perfect – it can't connect to any of our WiFi apart from Lussy's iPhone hotspot – but it gets the job done.

We're at the point of collecting games where we're just out of space. And it's pretty hard to store SNES, Mega Drive and N64 cartridges, especially when trying to also display them. I mean half the fun of collecting games is to have them on display.

But with cartridge-based games, that's never easy.

So we tried to solve this issue with a custom-made holder. Now, our printer has a meager 12x12x12 centimeter print limit, and an N64 cartridge is 116 mms in width, so we can't make a full encompassing case for those. I ended up modeling a small but tight holder that holds the cartridge by the plastic shielding next to the pins – but never touches the pins.

Other than that part, I also added leaning arms that help hold in the cartridges, and those never touch the front labels. Then I added little nubs and holes to the top and bottom so I can stack these holders.

The final print is pretty solid, but we'll probably have to glue it to a piece of furniture just to be sure.

Also, Lussy made a nice little guitar pick stand, too. We're trying to design objects for ourselves now that we have an easy way of creating them.

Other that the printing, we started messing around with a Raspberry Pi Zero. It's a fun little machine, we already played through TMNT and TMNT:TIT on it with a MAME emulator.

Aside from this, there's only work.

Retro console video signals and the OSSC!

Howdy! Geril here.

We're going to Japan in March and we made it through the hardest part of it: we bought the plane tickets!
Earlier this month, one day we checked the plane tickets, chose which one we wanted to buy and because it was late, we went to sleep. The next day we checked it again and the price has almost doubled! Lussy had to check a whole lot of options until she found a plane that had available seats and was reasonably priced. She's a hero - I was freaking out the whole time.

Also, we bought an Open Source Scan Converter - or OSSC for short.
We have a lot of old consoles, and it's hard to make them look right on an HD flat screen. But that is where the OSSC comes into picture - literally -, because it turns the RGB analogue signal to digital. It also has awesome latency-free upscale options and can add customizable scanlines to the image.

The PS1, Megadrive and the SNES look the best, super sharp (partly thanks to the excellent Packapunch cables), and the scanlines can add a lot to the image, adding a CRT-like feeling to it.
The PS2, Gamecube, XBOX and Wii are alright, but there's no real reason to upscale a 480p image, although if the image is 480i, the OSSC can de-interlace it, which is pretty cool.

The most problematic consoles to connect are the N64 and the NES, because they have no RGB out, so the OSSC is just not compatible with them. For us, the N64 was the priority, because Lussy loves that console and the image quality of that hardware is just not good in general.
So we bought an RGB amp mod chip for the N64, and installed it just yesterday. What that little chip does is, it takes the raw RGB image from the motherboard and adds it to the output. And it helps a lot!
We connected the now RGB N64 output to the OSSC and it worked fine... but that console changes resolutions so frequently and uses such weird pixel amounts that the OSSC just can't keep up, and sometimes it only shows a black image for seconds before it cuts back to the game. So it's not optimal.

But we also have the RadX cable what we have bought for the N64, but now that we have an RGB out, it creates a really crisp and clear image, and it never cuts to black.
So we're trying to achieve video-perfection. Next, we have to do something about the NES.

Most of next month will be spent preparing for and stressing out about our trip. And work.

Project Contrivance overworld thoughts!

This month, we've been thinking and working on Project Contrivance's structure. We decided to base the game on an overworld that houses all the levels - kind of like in the N64 era.

Level progression would be driven by beating levels and gaining resources for opening up more levels. The overworld would contain puzzles of its own, so you wouldn't have to beat every level to proceed, you could gather the remainder of the resources in the overworld, allowing you to bypass levels you don't like.
Each section of the overworld would end with a boss that goes with, and explains the previous levels' theme. Beating the end boss would open up the next section.

Other things we've thought about were giving players the ability to color their characters by finding special items in the overworld, adding competitive elements to multiplayer, and opening up bonus levels.

This system was inspired by the N64 era games like Super Mario 64. We'll show you more once we've progressed enough with development.

In other news, the Nintendo Switch has arrived, and it appears to be successful. We like the console's idea, and enjoy playing on it, so we've decided to keep the Joy-cons in mind when designing the game. We've even managed to make them work on our PCs so we can test the game with them!

Stay fresh!