I've been clearing out the basement by selling or giving away stuff which hasn't been used in a decade or more.
One of the items which I plan on getting rid of is an old IBM Thinkpad 765L. Amazingly it still works (although the battery doesn't hold a charge, which isn't surprising) and it even has a clean copy of Windows 98 installed. It also seems to have what appears to be files restored from old backups. Files which I aren't on my external backup drive. So before I put it up
The Corsair XD5 reservoir + pump includes a temperature sensor which screws into one of the inlet ports. As my motherboard doesn't have a header I could plug it into and I wasn't interested in spending ~$100 on a Corsair Commander. So I just left it (along with the RGB connector) disconnected.
However, there are advantages to measuring the temperature of the water rather than components. One of the benefits of water cooling is the water has a very high thermal mass. This means the
It's done!
https://youtu.be/2AIxvOHdLRQ
Fortunately the leaks were all due to the fittings not being tightly seated. Unfortunately, to fix this I had to undo & redo the compression fittings on each connection. I also learned that draining the system isn't simply a matter of breaking the loop at the lowest point - water doesn't siphon out of the whole loop. So every time I disconnected a tube I'd get (distilled) water flowing out. If / when I want / need to drain the loop
What was I thinking? I just hope the end result justifies the money, time & effort I'm spending.
Last week the first order of parts arrived with the radiators and fittings. As suggested on /r/Watercooling, I bought a cheap (C$20) fountain pump and used it to run distilled water through the radiators and a coffee filter. The idea is to flush any particles or other manufacturing residue out so it doesn't clog the water blocks and pump. I don't know where other people are buying
My EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 XC3 Hydro Copper 12GB arrived yesterday - and it looks perfect. (It's also heavy.) But unlike a normal air cooled graphics card I can't just drop it into my system. I need to order a whole bunch of parts first. Any water cooling loop will have the following:
Blocks which attach to the CPU or GPU and transfer heat from the CPU or GPU to the coolant. This is built into the graphics card, but I might as well get one for the CPU too (in for a penny...).
Rad
For the most part I've been very happy with the PC I bought two years ago. From a performance perspective it's handled everything I've used it for and it's definitely faster than the iMac which I was using previously. Sure, I could have spent more and made it even faster, but my plan was bang for the buck. I am also very glad I bought it when I did - if I'd waited much longer the epidemic & ethereum related supply difficulties would have made it more difficult and expensive.
H
I've been playing Escape From Tarkov for the last month. It's an interesting twist on the online PvP FPS with a money based risk / reward system. If your main character is killed then any equipment you were using (with a few exceptions) is lost and you must spend in-game money to replace it before playing again. Or you can play as a "Scav" which spawns later in the raid with random equipment. In raid you can also find randomized loot in various locations or take equipment & loot from dea
In my life I've undertaken many personal projects and there are a few I would qualify as failures. After working on my latest MAME cabinet project I realized I had learned some important lessons from those projects. In the hope that maybe others can learn from my mistakes...
Decades ago I had an idea for a circuit which would remove Macrovision copy protection from an analog video signal. IIRC it was based around a sync separator and I was positive it would work. So I ordered the
I watched Babylon 5 when it was first on TV and I have every episode recorded on VHS. One of these days I'll digitize them so I can enjoy them rather than the "widescreen" versions. Babylon 5 was great TV - each episode and season told a story which was then part of the story told by the entire series.
But a reboot doesn't compute IMHO. Part of the reason B5 was great TV was JMS. He had the vision for the entire series, the backstory, and the ability to change plans when required
An arsTechnica staffer apparently overheard someone saying, "I'm working on the thing after the Switch." and wrote a whole article about it (which I read, although it's a lot of empty musings). Of course, it's no surprise that Nintendo would be working on a successor to the Switch. For home consoles they have a pretty regular 5-6 year cycle. The Switch was released back in 2017 (how time flies) so I'd expect a successor in the next 18 months.!?
But it got me to thinking - if I wer
After 135 hours of playing Breath of the Wild I have defeated Ganon and finished (but not completed*) the game. It was a lot of fun, but I'm not planning on replaying it in the near future and I certainly have no desire to buy the DLC and play through a modified version of the game.
One of the parts of BOTW I loved is Zelda's story revealed through the memories and her and her Father's diaries. Unlike the Champions who chose to be warriors and then accepted the role of Champion,
Earlier this summer I heard an orchestral medley of Zelda themes and it reminded me that I hadn't bought Breath of the Wild. When it first came out I didn't have a Switch and couldn't justify buying one just to play Zelda. However, my son got one a few years back for Christmas so now I just needed to spend the $$ to get the game. So I picked it up and I've been playing it since July 1st. I haven't finished it yet, I still need to grind a while to get Ancient Armor and upgrade it before takin
A few weeks ago a YouTube video about the G-Boy kit caught my interest. This isn't a portable cobbled together from old smartphone components, but an actual Wii PCB, cut down to remove unnecessary components & to make in smaller, then wired up to custom PCB to provide battery power, controls, LCD interface and replace the DVD drive with an SD card, and finally put in a custom case with the LCD etc. Of course, many Wii titles would be problematic without the Wii remote, but the Wii can play
The base software install and configuration has been completed! Now I just need to build the final cabinet (current roadblock is persuading my son to work on the control panel artwork). For those who might be interested, here is the "top 40 classic vertical arcade games" which are playable:
I'm hoping I will be able to track the number of plays for each game. I suspect there will be few which get played a lot and a few which aren't played.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/exclusive-valve-is-making-a-switch-like-portable-gaming-pc/
Not to be a wet blanket, but I predict failure (based upon the info in the article).
IMHO the main problem going to be processing power. A decent gaming PC has a CPU & GPU far more powerful than the Switch and if Valve tried to squeeze that into a portable system the battery life would be very short. But downgrading the CPU & GPU to a level where battery life if re
I got the Raspberry Pi 3A+ last week and the HDMI to DVI adapter finally showed up on Friday. So I immediately hooked everything up and started to redo the setup (fortunately I'd tried to keep notes for most of the config changes). I had powered the Zero off the USB hub built into the monitor which meant I could turn both on and off with the monitor's power button. At first I did the same with the 3A+, but I got occasional "under voltage detected" errors. At first I ignored it as it didn't s
The other day I learned lr-mame2000 doesn't save high scores. Part of me thinks I should just accept it. But the more I play the more I want to have the high scores saved over time. Being on or first on the high score table is part of the arcade experience. (Ideally I'd love it if Libretro saved the entire system state on exit so it wouldn't have to go through the initialization sequence.) And while lr-mame2003 does support high scores, it needs more CPU. So either I'd end up cutting my li
Focusing on the "best of the best" games was a very good idea. It meant I only had to do marquees, attract videos and control panel diagrams for 19 games rather than over 100.
This is a screenshot of my Attract Mode theme. The marquees are instead of the more typical text game list. And when the game is selected it shows a video of the game's attract mode. The bottom is a basic diagram of the cabinet control panel to show which controls are used for what in the game.
The first pass through the vertical games has been completed! I've marked a little over 100 games as "perfect - include". So now I'm doing a second pass. My original thought was to have a second look at the "perfect - maybe" and "playable, 50 fps" (where MAME was skipping some frames) games, but now I'm thinking maybe I might want to whittle down even the main list. Is it better to have more games to chose from or to try to only include those game which will probably get played?
I've been playing through the games and I'm up to R so the end is in sight! 77 games on the "perfect - include" list so far. So now I need to start thinking about what comes next.
Double check the games which didn't quite make the cut, in particular any "top 100" entries.
For each of the games to be included, check to see if there's a child rom which should be used instead.
Create merged sets for the child roms.
Remove all of the roms, config files, etc for ga
Unfortunately the cardboard box didn't really have the strength to hold he monitor in place. But I wasn't ready to build the final cabinet (i.e. spend $$ on materials). Fortunately I was able to build a replacement using a 12x24 shelf cut along the diagonal and some Ikea scraps which were the perfect length. I used some "hockey tape" to decorate the cut edge. (Not sure what I'm going to do on the final version as I don't feel like spending the $$ to buy the slot cutter to use T moulding.)
So I've started playing the vertical games which MAME 0.37b5 supports and I've learned a few things.
First, while the Raspberry Pi Zero is incredibly powerful compared to the CPU of the arcade games, it is also having to emulate the graphics and audio processors as well. So while the majority of the games are playable, the game isn't displaying all of the frames and the sound is choppy or worse. The lower fps actually turns out to not be a big deal, but it's difficult to listen to
In the words of Sinstar, "Beware, I live"
As I mentioned in the previous post, I started over with lr-mame2000 (MAME 0.37b5 as a Libretro core) on RetroPie 4.7.1 (current). While mame4all-pi is supposed to be faster, it doesn't do me any good if it doesn't support rotation. It also became obvious that mame4all-pi is basically an unsupported hack.
Once I started over I tried the recommended solution of disabling the internal "soundcard" without success, like
While researching for whether anyone else had found a solution for my audio issues, I discovered that mame4all doesn't support screen rotation. Bogus!
So now I'm going to try to use lr-mame2000 (the same version the MAME core code, but built on top of the Libretro platform) on the current release of RetroPie (4.7.1) - hopefully I won't have as many issues (or it won't be such a headache to resolve them).
My current challenges are with getting the audio working - not something I expected, so it's fortunate I realized I could use the USB headset. I've been working with RetroPie 4.5 as RecalBox is locked down by using a read-only partition. (So I can't rotate Emulation Station.)
Audio on Linux is handled by ALSA. It provides a lot of flexibility in order to handle the breadth of soundcards - which means a lot of complexity. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good, authoritative, cu
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord