Bummed.

Hi, Geril here.

This month was a mess.
We were supposed to go to Japan tomorrow. We bought and booked everything: flight tickets, hotel rooms, new backpacks, power banks, and we even won four tickets for the L'Arc concerts we targeted (they do a lottery for the tickets, so we were very lucky). But because of the coronavirus outbreak, they cancelled the concerts and closed a lot of places we wanted to visit. We are quite burnt out, because we worked overtime to get things done before we go, so we're a bit under the weather.
So because all of this, we're not going to Japan.
We lost some money because of it, but we're not gonna risk our health, especially if we can't even go to the concerts.

Both of the hotels were good sports, they understood that we cancelled our reservation because of the outbreak and they gave our money back. But we're probably not gonna get our money back for the plane tickets.





But on to some better news. We got a Gameboy Printer WiFi adapter!

This little pack of circuits acts like a Game Boy printer, so when I connect my good ol' GB Camera to it, it saves the images. It also creates a WiFi signal, and if I connect to it, I can download the saved images.





Here's what they look like:

It's got a bit of a pointillism look, that I like very much.
It can even take panorama images!

The Game Boy Camera was ahead of its time... even with only 4 colors.
Maybe one day we'll use some GB camera images as masks or textures in a game project. Or not. Anyway, it's fun to make images with an old Game Boy.

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.

2020!

Happy Holidays!

It's Geril.
This was a stressful end of the year for us, but at least we had a few days to chill a bit.
Lussy got a shiny new guitar and I got two buckets of bubble tea pearls for Christmas.

We haven't yet talked about it much, but we actually like making music. I play the blues harp – you can hear it as the background, ambient music in our project, Project Contrivance – and Lussy is playing bass and electric guitar in her free time. So when we work on our own pet projects, we're probably going to make our own music for it.

Oh, and we played Mass Effect 3 again. It's still hard to start it up on the Xbox One, but we finally got to the Citadel DLC, and wow, it's awesome!
Like, this is what was missing. Some humor, creative writing, characters and yeah, some fan service. I mean, seriously, this is the final game of the trilogy, they've got a lot of awesome characters, why not use them?
We haven't done the house-party part of the DLC yet, but even now, we're just happy because of this expansion. I mean, it feels like an expansion, rather than a DLC.
Best DLC ever? Maybe.

We're also upgrading most of our old consoles' video cables to Packapunch cables. These cables are awesome. I had no idea that an original SNES can output this sharp of an image.
So we now have scart cables for the GameCube, the SNES, PS1-2 and a RadX for the N64.

For a Non-CRT setup, these kinds of cables are a must and can add a lot to the image quality. We can't recommend them enough.
Now we only need a Framemeister or an OSSC.

And we also had time to assemble the game boxes.
We still want to print out more N64 and SNES boxes, but they are bigger and harder to print efficiently, so it takes a bit more time to create them.

And hey, it's 2020. We started working on this blog in 2013, seven years ago. GTA 5 and The Last of Us were the big titles that year, and we played a lot of Link Between Worlds, the shiny new console was the Wii U, and at the end of that year, the new generation of consoles – the PS4 and Xbox One – got released. So 2020 will have some similarities to 2013.

We have learned a lot, had some hard times, some good times, and overall we are now inside the game development industry.
Not really as Indie developers though.
We'll change that later. For now we'll work hard, and who knows, maybe in 2020 we'll post more about game development, and less about... everything else.

We're looking forward to the new decade.

November has come... and went.

Hi, Geril here.

Another month full of work.
And we didn't have much time for anything else.

At the end of last month, I got my hands on a GPD Win 2, and I'm having a lot of fun with it.
This is more of the same as my old GPD Win, but more powerful - and with better button positioning.
Games run on it OK, but I'd hardly be satisfied with that only. What I want is to work, and to be able to work anywhere. And Unreal Engine 4 is running on it quite well.
Nothing really surprising, but with forward rendering, the little machine can manage itself quite well.
Lussy and I have some ideas for smaller games, but with this much work, we only have free time when we're on a train, bus or in a car. But with this palmtop, we can make things on the go.

And we've also done some home improvement stuff, like printing out old video game boxes for cartridge-based games we have, in miniature, just-fitting form, and we bought some cartridge cases as well.
So we can have a classic game collection that isn't just grey cartridges on top of each other.
But again, for that, we need some time to work on it a bit, cut out the boxes, and print out labels.

But to be honest, we're very tired. We work all day and then we go to sleep, just to wake up to work some more.
We're looking forward to having some time for ourselves.

More Mass Effect woes!

Hi! It's Geril.

We're working hard in our jobs and learning a lot.

Other than that, we started playing Mass Effect 3. And because it's us, it's never easy.

We installed the game onto our Xbox One, bought the DLCs and downloaded them. But when it loads to the main menu, the initialization never ends. Checked it online, and it's a typical issue – what else? – and the solution is that you have to go offline.
But to play the game, since it's backward compatible, the console checks the disc and looks it up online and only then starts it. So we have to start it up while the console is online, then turn it offline just to get through the main menu.
But it plays.
Except when the disc is somehow unreadable. No real reason – it's not scratched or anything – it's just when we turn the Xbox back on, sometimes it doesn't read the disc and we have to restart the whole thing, sometimes more than once.

When I was little, I had pirated most of my video games. A lot of things I learned about workaround methods and basic software trickery comes from that time. Later, in some of my late teenage years, I went to make up for it by buying most of the games that I pirated back then, to zero-out my karma (because how can I ask anybody to pay for something that I made, when I rarely paid for the things I liked myself?). And it was always surprising how easy it was to install an official copy. No cracks or tacky and long workarounds, just put the disc in, type the serial number in, install it and boom, it's done, and works as intended (well, if I met the system requirements).
Console gaming is even easier. Put the original disc onto the tray, close it, and it plays.

But somehow, our experience with playing the Mass Effect series reminded me of those times when I had to check .NFO files and online boards about game cracking and copy protection workarounds. It's as if we have no right to play this game.
It's a bit nostalgic somehow.

The funniest thing about this whole painful experience is that playing Mass Effect 3 right after playing Mass Effect 2 is just disappointing. The second game was the peak of this series, and the third is missing the quality of the writing, and it's just very unpolished.
But we'll finish it, we're just not as enthusiastic about this game as we were about the second one.

Oh, and out "new" Xbox 360 Slim came. It came a bit late, and in retrospect, we should have waited for it before we started playing the 3rd game. Maybe on that console we would have fewer issues.

Other then this, I finally got my GPD Win 2.
It's the same old Win10 palmtop, but stronger than the first one. I like it, and will probably use it to play some games, and even for some of my work.
I may write about my experience with it next month.

Righteous Rage!

Hey, Geril here.
Not much has happened work-wise, except for us still not having much free time.

In our limited free time, we don't really feel like doing anything productive generally, so we started playing the Mass Effect series together.
Lussy has never played it, I only played it a long time ago, and our work is kinda related to it, so it made sense.
But oh boy, it is hard.
Not the game. Everything else.

First, the original Mass Effect game barely works on a modern PC. NPC-s charge around, performance is unbearable and glitches are everywhere. But no problem, we own this game for the good ol' X360.

We have the original Xbox 360, without the HDMI out and with the fans what sound like a vacuum cleaner. But whatever, we have a component cable for it, and we can pump the volume up.
We started playing, but we couldn't even start a new game, the console just told us that the disc was dirty. Of course the issue is actually with the disc drive, but whatever, we copied the game onto the mighty 12GB HDD. It took some time and tries, but it succeeded eventually.

I always played the Mass Effect games on the PC, so I had no idea that the game's Xbox version was this... problematic. Low framerate, and texture streaming issues everywhere.
We played for a while, then got fed up, and installed the game onto our Xbox One. It's even in the Game Pass, so it was an easy install. But the game still ran horribly. Oh well, we slowly finished it. Lussy liked the story, so we looked forward to the next game.

That we own for the X360. It was the German version.
If somebody told me that a high profile game made in 2010 has no language options, I would call them an idiot. But lo and behold, there's no other language on the disk. And what about the Xbox One version, that actually just downloads the game files? Nope, still German only.
I got pissed off, so I just bought the game again. But first, the Microsoft store locked me out for some reason, so I had to contact support.

Mass Effect 2 has some pretty important DLCs. Like whole stories and characters are locked behind them. So I got to buying the DLCs on the store but there was only 2 of them. The Arrival and Kasumi - and also some appearence set. What?

Installed the game on the Xbox One. Main menu, connected to Cerberus network. Tried to download the Kasumi DLC I bought, and it just said that it was going to download. But nothing happened.
Tried to download the other one, still got the same pop up notification. Then nothing.

Got fed up again, checked it online. In our country (and in some other ones around us), we can't download any kind DLCs (besides Arrival and an appearance pack) on Xbox One. No reason, we just can't.

So we tried buying the DLCs on the Xbox 360 so that we could trick the Xbox One into downloading it. We put the glorious German disc inside the crappy disc drive, and it started grinding it. Very loudly. Error message, and the disc drive opens without warning. Disc got some pretty big scratches - not a big loss - but the disc drive now doesn't want to stay closed. Not even when we turn off the damn console.

shame.

We checked it online, it's not a rare issue. But the only viable solution is to send it to Microsoft with warranty. That is not an option for us, especially in 2019.
But the machine itself works, and I'm not the type who gives up if it's about a video game, so I installed the digital version of Mass Effect 2 onto the X360's HDD. It was slow, but it downloaded. Game starts, I enter Cerberus network and then download all of the relevant DLCs.
But the X360 only has a tiny 12GB HDD, so I had to wipe everything else on it. And we still can't download the Overlord DLC.
Well, at least everything else is installed and ready to go.
I moved the console against a furniture so the disc tray couldn't open, and we played the game. And man, it's just as good as I remembered. Lussy and I are having a great time playing.
But the damn machine is loud and sometimes the HDD doesn't start, so we're gonna buy a slim version soon.
Maybe with that we can finally play the game without issues. One can only hope.

Anyways.
It sucks that we can't talk about our work publicly now, but until we get more time to work on our personal projects, there's not much to say.

Grinding!

Hi, Lussy here.

This month has been an absolute grind. We're involved with one more project, and we barely have any free time. As a result, we couldn't spend time on our personal projects.

The FPS game project is progressing well. The plan is to have a playable version of it released by the end of the year, so we're working towards that goal rapidly.

The other project we can't really talk about, but it's also going well, and we're learning a lot thanks to it.

There's not much else to say this time.