RARusk

I just put my pictures from the event on FaceBook but I need to put them on my account at imgur before posting them here. In the meantime, a local film crew did work for the event and released their film today. You can catch fleeting glimpses of me but I'm in there.

Just be careful not to get eaten by a Grue.....

Got word from PAX South tonight. Finally, after three tries, the Godzilla in gaming panel is on! It will be on January 13th at 4:00 PM at the Bobcat Theater. Now things get interesting.

Amiga CD32.

The event went pretty well and I got a couple of pictures of myself with Nolan. He also came in with the express purpose of shoeshaming everybody - he wore bright red shoes with LED lighted soles. Everybody also liked the consoles and setups - winners of the contests got a flat screen TV. After everything was said and done I was invited to dinner at a restaurant near Trinity University which I happily accepted. Glad I went. Not only was the food taken care of, meaning free dinner, I also got to sit just a few feet away from two of the three founders of RackSpace, Nolan Bushnell, and the Mayor of San Antonio. All in all, a pretty good night. I have plenty of pictures but I will need to go through them first.

As I mentioned there is going to be gaming contests held before the main program. Each of the four consoles will use one game for them with volunteers keeping track of the scores. And the games are: On the Atari 2600 it will be Space Invaders. On the Atari 5200 it will be Pac-Man. The console itself has been modified to get rid of needing to use the special switchbox. The controller used will be an arcade stick (built into an old ColecoVision case) with a Wico Command Center keypad module and all attached to a Redemption 5200 adapter. On the Atari 7800 it will be Asteroids. The controller used will be the Mini 7800 controller used for the early Atari Flashback consoles but re-wired so it can be used on the 7800 itself. On the Jaguar it will be Tempest 2000. The controller used will be a rotary controller I built years ago and with a second joypad for bonus stages and high-score entry.

On November 9 there will be a rally by a local group called Tech Bloc that will be held at RackSpace here in San Antonio featuring Atari founder Nolan Bushnell (this page goes into more detail about the event and how much to attend). If you're local this would be where the old Windsor Park Mall used to be (I-35 and Walzem). Prior to the main program there will be the pre-party with gaming contests and cosplay. The contests will be done using the four main Atari consoles: 2600, 5200, 7800, and Jaguar. All consoles, controllers (including homebrew), games, and other stuff that have been accumulated over the years (including the Lynx) are being provided by me for the event. I'm hoping that some of the local AA'ers will come by and partake in the festivities. Feel free to ask me questions if you're interested.

Yeah, you're going to need to do a FMCB card with OPS2L before you can use hard drives. Apparently there is a way to install FMCB onto the hard drive and use in in conjunction with the HDD OS that came with Final Fantasy XI. However, that OS was only designed to use 40GB drives. But, at last check, it was patched to use up to 128GB drives which is good enough for a small collection. When they finally manage to patch it to use 2TB drives then I will play with it and eliminate the need for a card.

Have you made up a Free McBoot card with Open PS2 Loader installed? You'll need that first before you can do hard driving on the PS2. Also, how big is your HDD?

Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality.

San Japan X is now complete. As for my panel I only had one person show up, similar to what happened to me at RTX. But he stayed the whole way through, asked good questions, and talked outside afterwards. But, you know what? That's okay. That was better than having no one show up or have a room full of disinterested people. So, no complaints there. Besides, I can now say that I have done panels at three major cons in the South Texas region. As for the con itself, there was a very good turnout despite the recent hurricane and gas shortage crisis. Being that this is a major anime con (in addition to gaming) there is a whole lot more cosplay - about three quarters of everybody I saw were doing some form of it.

Day one of San Japan is done and I got my panelist ribbon and instructions on what to do tomorrow since I will need to set up before the con opens.

There's also the new and much larger convention space too and I hope they open up more of the new rooms this go round.

I will be doing another FAQ Writing panel at San Japan (anime/gaming convention) this weekend. It will be held in Room 210 at the Convention Center on Saturday at 10 AM when the con opens. Unfortunately, I was not able to submit the Godzilla in gaming panel because Matt is doing another con in another state the same weekend. I will do another round of PAX South submissions when the window opens later in the year.

I believe it was custom. If it was some kind of standard then it would be easy to create third party digital-to-component video (or RGB and HDMI) cables and not bother with Nintendo's over priced first party brand.

Or, at the bare minimum, glue a couple of pieces of plastic to the sides to ensure that it can't move sideways when plugged in. If I had the device myself that would be the first thing I would do after I make sure that it worked.

The late Radio Shack had a device that you could hook to the back of the TV that could convert HDMI into Component. Don't know of anybody else that made a similar device.

You don't need an adapter - if you have the security screw bit then open up the N64 and remove the tabs inside the cartridge slot in the top of the case with a knife or Dremel.

Where to begin..... The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena are well done games if just a little easy. The fact that Vin Diesel and multiple name actors lend their voices to them make this even better. Although I haven't read the comic books I also liked The Darkness. BTW, all three of these games were made by the same studio, Starbreeze Studios, and I liked these games enough to write text guides on them for GameFAQs. Turok 2: Seeds of Evil I felt was not only the single best looking game on the N64 I also thought it was one of the best. Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion was also pretty good. And let's not forget Star Wars: Rogue Squadron. A little surprised that Goldeneye didn't get a mention but maybe you wanted to focus on games other than that since GE is probably the most famous of the licensed titles. Going further back there is also Red Storm Rising, based on the late Tom Clancy's book, for the Commodore 64. MicroProse kicked some serious ass back in the day and that is probably their best work. BTW, they held a contest called the Red Storm Rising Ultimate Challenge back in 1988 and I finished eighth overall. My copies of the battle disks are hosted here on AtariAge somewhere. And this old blog post goes into detail into several licensed games I felt were good.

Game Over Videogames is probably your best bet. There are three locations down here.

Regarding the end of the video where MJ talks about having a similar device for the Xbox: The reason the GC device works so well is because it uses the digital port and the signal remains digital all throughout the process to HDMI. However, the Xbox does not have a similar port, it only has the analog video port. A plug-and-play device would have to convert the analog Component Video into HDMI and there are many devices that do this but they are not to the level that the new GC device is. To do digital to digital you would have to install a board that would tap into the raw digital signals off of the motherboard and install an HDMI port in the back. Thankfully there is plenty of room inside an Xbox if such a device could be made. And, while we're on the topic of "Xbox device wish lists" I would like a device that would allow me to use the Xbox One controller on both the original Xbox and the X360 (and one to use my PS4 controller on the PS1, 2, and 3).

The fact that it is also Twin Peaks in vidgame form adds to its appeal. It also has a very fascinating development history and worth checking out. I have played through the X360 version, the PS3 Director's Cut version, and the PS3 import version (Red Seeds Profile).

Here's an interesting question. Many of these utility discs offer game save compression and decompression. FMCB and related folder cannot be seen by the cheat discs so you can't just copy them over which is why we have all these different methods to create these special MCs. Is it possible to compress FMCB and folder into something that these programs, like GameShark, will recognize? Basically the idea goes like this: --Compress FMCB and folder on PC side. --Transfer programs to USB drive. --Run GameShark on PS2 side. --Put in USB drive. --Find compressed files and transfer them over to Memory Card. --Uncompress files on MC which should cause compressed files to disappear and leave you with a "blank" card (the programs should be there but GameShark can't see them). --Remove disc and reboot PS2 which should cause FMCB to come up. Of course, the biggest question is what kind of algorithm did these companies use to compress game saves. If this question can be answered and a small program can be made to use this information to make "crushed" PS2 game save files that GameShark can recognize and "uncrush" then it would greatly simplify being able to make FMCB cards.