Retro portable consoles!

Hey!

We started a company. It was a hard and very long process, but we're finally officially a company. What will this change? Nothing, actually. Just more paperwork.

Other than that, this new year started out pretty hard. A lot of work and bureaucratic shenanigans. Sadly Geril's GPU got a bit fried and Lussy's CPU is acting up because of a leak in our ceiling that took out the power for a few hours, so we have to buy some new hardware - what is not the easiest thing to do at the moment.

Also, Geril's obsession of portable gaming devices got to the point that he bought a Nokia N-Gage. And what is a console without games, right? So he got Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey, Rayman 3, Ashen and Worms World Party. They are all fine games, and they work pretty well on the little Nokia gaming device.

What is really surprising about the machine is its multitasking ability. You can make a phone call while you're playing, or you can go back to the phone's operation system anytime while a game is running. Also, you can take screenshots - even if they are a bit chunky.

So in some ways, this device was ahead of its time. But where the real issue lies is the controls. No one wants to use a num pad to play a game. It just feels uncomfortable and unintuitive. But playing an Elder Scrolls game on this four centimeter portrait screen is weird, in a good way. I can't recommend the device to many people, but if somebody like curiosities, this is certainly one.

Other than the N-Gage, we got an Atari Lynx, which is a very powerful portable console (I'd rather not call it a handheld, because it's really heavy). Geril had the most fun with Blue Lightning and Hydra, but Rampage, Rygar and Crystal Mines are fun, too.

Our biggest disappointment was the Sony Xperia Play. We got an old Sony Ericsson Xperia Play Z1i - the one with the sliding control-panel - thinking that we could play some cool older mobile games with an actual, physical controller. Sadly, that's not possible anymore, because they shut down all of its support last November. Even to jailbreak it, it would need a few applications that are no longer available. Too bad, we wanted to try the Android version of Dead Space and Mass Effect: Infiltrator and a few other old rarities.

Next month we'll try to assemble a working GameGear out of two barely working GameGears. Wish us luck.

Happy Holidays!

 2020 is finally coming to an end. Can you believe that?

At the end of the year, we finally got a little time to ourselves. We expected we'd be doing all sorts of things, working on personal projects, maybe making new models for Sketchfab or learning new things inside Unreal, but we've just been resting and playing games. The last month was especially busy, so we probably need a lot of time to regain our energy.

So now we're spending that time on playing games we've meant to play, or we like playing. We started Persona 5 Royal, but we're disappointed that the localization wasn't improved at all, and we couldn't use the original game's save file for New Game +. It's a good game for chilling at night, has a wonderful atmosphere, but the story bits often have us scratching our heads.

Another game we've been playing is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (because what else would we play on a 4K TV?). It's a pretty special game for us, since we played it together very early on at the time we first met. Geril has only completed the 3DS version, and I only completed the original game on an emulator, so now we're playing it on the Gamecube, as part of The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition. It's not a perfect port, but with the Gamecube controller even Geril can tolerate playing it.

There's not much left of the year, and we doubt we'll suddenly get an ungodly wind of inspiration to create something on the last day, so we're going to end the year with hopes that during the next one, we'll get more time to work on our personal projects.

Happy New Year!

Huge Screen!

Hey, Lussy here.

This month, after a lot of hesitation, we upgraded our 8-year-old-ish 1080p TV to a shiny new enormous 4K OLED TV. It is ridiculously big. Seriously, it is dominating the entire living room.

With this upgrade, we had to mess with our cable management again, but thankfully since this TV has 4 HDMI inputs, as opposed to the previous one that only had two, we could give some devices their own dedicated slot in the TV. Currently, the OSSC and PS4 are plugged directly into the tv - the PS4 didn't like sending HDR data through our cheap HDMI switches, so when the content we watched was HDR, the image kept blinking.

It's crazy how many new problems come with this upgrade, next to fixing many pre existing ones. For example, one of the biggest advantages is that the TV now properly transmits 5.1 audio through its optical out, unlike the previous one, where we had to bypass the TV with our whole audio setup. So this is cool, BUT. It only supports Dolby, not DTS, and it has a pretty significant delay. It's not an issue for movies, but for rhythm games, we find ourselves bypassing the TV still.

We are learning so much about audio and video signals due to this. For example, this TV simply does not support the NES's video output anymore, and the OSSC doesn't support it either. We still have to find a proper solution for that (without using one of those nightmarish little signal converter boxes).

Other than that, there's not much going on. We're working a lot, but that's nothing new.

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.

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.

Sega Saturn!

Hi! Geril here.
So, we bought a Sega Saturn.

We have quite a lot of game consoles now, and the Saturn is such a weird and interesting one that we just had to buy one. I mean it uses quads (more like sprites with custom corner positions) and has a cartridge slot and an optical drive (but the cart is mostly for memory expansions and save games), and is in general just very weird.

We have a few classics for it: Sega Rally, Virtua Fighter 2 and Vampire Savior and also a few strange ones like the DOS classic Magic Carpet and a kinda Smash Bros. like Fighters Megamix.

The machine is fascinating. We got it refurbished, with a new lens for the drive in it, and it's kinda hilarious. We bought Virtua Fighter 2 and when we received it, we noticed that the disc had a little hole in it. Like, we can see through it.

But the Saturn still plays it. A few music skips, and the loading is probably a bit longer, but the game is working at a silky smooth 60fps.

Also we got The House of the Dead, and it's just as good as we expected. Lussy loves the House of the Dead series, but never played the first one. It's not as good as the second one, but still fun to play even without a lightgun.

By the way, we also got a "3D" controller for the Saturn, what is more or less the same as the Dreamcast Controller. Sadly only a few games work with it, but The House of the Dead is one and it makes the aiming much easier.

If you know about House of the Dead, then you know that it only got released on the Saturn in Japan. And maybe you also know that the Saturn has a region lock.

And if you know both of these then you probably know how we solved this issue. Yeah, with an Action Replay cartridge.

Good stuff, can't recommend it enough. Saturn games from Japan are cheap, and they got many more games released for the system than us.

Also, they have better disc cases than us. Saturn games' disc cases are the worst. I thought the PAL Dreamcast games had the worst disc cases, but at least those are only destroying themselves; the Saturn cases break easily and scuff up the discs inside.

We only remade Snes and N64 boxes so far, but we maybe should make custom Saturn game cases too, just to be sure.

One day we'll return to posting about our works, but we can't do that now. But we're making friends and learning a lot about Unreal 4 and just in general... we're just very tired. Like, so very tired.

Another month, another set of new stuff!

Hi! Geril here.

Our lack of free time made us concentrate more on buying stuff we always wanted to get, but never got to buy.

Lussy bought a Wacom MobileStudio Pro tablet. So far she's used it for making models, and tested Substance Painter on it. It's pretty powerful, but gets hot very quickly. Oh, and we got an Intuos Pro M drawing tablet with it as a gift. That's pretty cool too - I use it for making textures.

Did you know that you can order custom-made keyboards from Varmilo? Lussy wanted to have a full-scale keyboard with Cherry MX brown switches and a Hungarian key layout. That in itself is hard to get, but because it's a custom order, she even got to change the keys' colors one by one.

It feels high quality, nice and heavy. The only drawback is the backlight. Some of the keys are more see-through than others, and it looks weird.

Also, we put together a microphone setup with sound shielding, an audio interface, a pop filter and a nice sE studio microphone on a stand. Nothing too serious, but it's good enough for us for now.

Other than these, we've finally rearranged our living room, so we had the opportunity to change our console video connections to an OSSC-centered, mostly scart-based setup that goes through our capture card, too.

It was a pretty hard thing to setup, but in the end, it's working fine.

The main reason to rearrange the cable setup was the Hydra Scart switcher (made by Lotharek) that we recently bought. It's an excellent automatic scart switcher. It has 8 scart inputs, so now we want to connect every old console to it - except the Dreamcast ofc, because VGA quality is just the best.

And because both the OSSC and the Hydra have to work together, and there's no easy way to turn them on or off from a distance, we connected them to a smart plug. With this setup, we can quickly turn on both the OSSC and the Hydra, so we can use our old systems without fighting with their cables.

So yeah, we're updating our tools and making things more streamlined. Other than that, we're working, until we drop.