Repair Log: I fixed my broken Sega CD!

Review: Pastime Legends Game Store

Lionel Coin Operated Train Set

I took the kids to see a Train Robbery on the Charlotte Valley Railroad today, and while there they got the chance to play with this:

Man it is sweet!

• Leatherstocking Railway

Swapping the B and C Buttons on a Neo Geo MVS

If you have ever played any of the King of Fighters series of fighting games on a Neo Geo MVS arcade machine you will have noticed the odd button configuration compared to fighting games made by Capcom. The button are configured in this order light punch, light kick, strong punch, strong kick. This is uncomfortable for me, so I made this cable so I could easily swap the B and C buttons.

It is a very simple cable that uses a double pole, double throw toggle switch. to make it work, I soldered a X crossover wires on the outside poles.

Above: how to wire the switch

The switch plugged into the Neo Geo, this can easily be removed with no damage to the game.

Double Rainbow guy Watching Rambo

By now almost everyone has seen the famous "Double Rainbow" video on YouTube. When I watched it I couldn't help but hear "Rambo" everywhere he said "Rainbow". So I took the audio from that video and combined it with video I shot of Rambo playing on two TVs side-by-side. It cracks me up watching the two combined.

• Direct Link to video
• Original Double Rainbow Video

Review: Arcade Joysticks

I review the following arcade joysticks:

• HAPP Super Joystick
• HAPP Ultimate Joystick
• HAPP Competition Joystick
• iL 8-Way Eurojoystick
• Perfect 360 Mated to a Wico Leaf Spring Joystick

Update: My Basement Arcade - July 2010

Propcycle Repair Log - Fan Fixed

Thanks to my dad got making the replacement part!

Local Game Store: Games A Plunder Cobleskill, NY

This will be the first in a series blog posts about local used games stores in Capital Region of New York State.

Games A Plunder is a new game store that opened this January by its owner Michael Willman. I only just found out about this store last weekend even though it is only 4.3 miles from my house! I was actually at another games store (Pastime Legends in Scotia, NY) and the owner of that store told me about it!

The reason I missed it is because of Cobleskill's retarded despotic historical society that prohibited him for putting up a sign until they approved of it. Can you beleive that almost 6 months‽‽ Many businesses would fail if they went that long without a sign! I don't know why there is even a historical society in Cobleskill, every building is old ugly and run down. It would improve the village a thousand times if they just knocked all of those buildings down!

Well Back to the store. My first impression when I went in was I thought he didn't have much in the way of stock, that was until I saw the two additional rooms. He has a really nice collection of 70's - 80's game systems and games in great condition many in original packaging! You will never see this kind of stuff in a game stop!

I would say that the pricing seems almost random, I saw great collectable stuff complete in box for really cheap, and then I saw other items, like a ColecoVision in fair condition with no packing for $200, which is high. He could easily post some of the CIB stuff on nintendoage.com, and atariage.com and make much better money on those items than he is asking for them. I just hope that some of the more collectible stuff isn't sold to people who don't understand the value of a complete in box games. That about covers Games A Plunder, next time I post in this series will be about Pastime Legends.

Links:

• gamesaplunder.com
• Games A Plunder (Facbook)

Howto: High Quality Fullscreen Video on the T-Mobile Sidekick 2008

If you have a sidekick 08 and want to watch high quality video on it you will want this bash script.

When I looked online at the tutorials for converting video to the 3gp format that the sidekick supports all the output looked really bad. The resolution and bitrate was so low it wasn't worth watching. So I looked of the 3GP format standard and found that it supports other higher resolutions, but none of them fit the sidekick screen perfectly.

The solution was to convert the video to one of the higher resolution versions and pad the video with black bars in the non-displayed off screen portions.

Here is the script, you will need ffmpeg and mplayer installed, as well as the windows binary version of ffmpeg that supports encoding the 3GP format.

Please note: This script is written in Bash, meaning that it is primarily for Linux users. This could easily be converted for windows users as well. I may do that in the future if I get enough requests. If you want a windows version, send me a tweet

#!/bin/bash # # Script: # Convert video to high quality 3GP format - http://www.tighelory.com # filename: sidekick_video.sh # 2010 Tighe Lory # # Requirements: # # You need to make the following directories: # ~/Video/Convert # ~/Video/Original # ~/Video/3gp # # You will also need ffmpeg and mencoder installed # # You will also need the binary windows version of ffmpeg that supports the 3gp format and wine installed. # Save the windows binary version to ~/.wine/drive_c/ffmpeg/ # # Place the videos you want to convert in the ~/Video/Convert directory cd ~/Video/Convert #Begin Section 1: convert AVI format files to 3GP format. for k in *.avi; do out=$(ls "$k" | sed -e 's/.avi//g') #First convert avi file 352x240 resolution ffmpeg -i "$k" -s 352x240 -r 29.97 -qscale 2 -ac 1 -ar 44100 -ab 128 -vcodec mpeg4 -f avi -vtag xvid -acodec mp3 ~/Video/Convert/"$out"_temp.avi #Now convert the converted file to 3gp format and add 24px black bars to the top and bottom of the video to make the final resolution 352x288 #the black bars will not be displayed on the sidekick, as the vertial resolution is 240px this is a trick to have almost full screen video. #This step uses the windows version of ffmpeg in wine, this is because the version of ffmpeg that I have does not support 3gp format. #If your version does you will not need to use this windows version. wine ~/.wine/drive_c/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.exe -i ~/Video/Convert/"$out"_temp.avi -padtop 24 -padbottom 24 -vcodec h263 -acodec aac -ac 1 -ar 44100 -b 700K -r 15 -ab 128 -y ~/Video/3gp/"$out".3gp #clean up when done. if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then echo "~/Video/Convert/$out.3gp created" mv "$k" ../Original/ rm -v ~/Video/Convert/"$out"_temp.avi else echo "Error encoding" fi done #Begin Section 2: convert MKV format files to 3GP format. for k in *.mkv; do out=$(ls "$k" | sed -e 's/.mkv//g') #First convert the MKV file to AVI and turn softsubs to hardsubs mencoder "$k" -fontconfig -subfont-text-scale 3 -subfont-autoscale 3 -alang 0 -oac mp3lame -sid 0 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -o ~/Video/Convert/"$out"_temp1.avi #Now scale the avi file 352x240 resolution ffmpeg -i ~/Video/Convert/"$out"_temp1.avi -s 352x240 -r 29.97 -qscale 2 -ac 1 -ar 44100 -ab 128 -vcodec mpeg4 -f avi -vtag xvid -acodec mp3 ~/Video/Convert/"$out"_temp2.avi #Now convert the converted file to 3gp format and add 24px black bars to the top and bottom of the video to make the final resolution 352x288 wine ~/.wine/drive_c/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.exe -i ~/Video/Convert/"$out"_temp2.avi -padtop 24 -padbottom 24 -vcodec h263 -acodec aac -ac 1 -ar 44100 -b 700K -r 15 -ab 128 -y ~/Video/3gp/"$out".3gp #clean up when done. if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then echo "~/Video/3gp/$out.3gp created" mv "$k" ../Original/ rm -v ~/Video/Convert/"$out"_temp1.avi rm -v ~/Video/Convert/"$out"_temp2.avi else echo "Error encoding" fi done

• Download Windows version of FFMPEG
• Download sidekick_video.sh

Choosing a Neo-Geo MVS Multi Cart

Please note, I have made major edits to the lists and improved them as of 01/28/2010.

If you are a follower of my Blog, you know that back in June I got a Neo Geo MVS arcade game. It is a unique arcade game system becasue the games are stored on cartridges like home game systems. This made updating a lot easier for Arcade operators.

My Neo Geo is a 4 slot, meaning that it can hold 4 games at a time and the player can select which game they wish to play. I have 3 games in my Neo Geo, but wouldn't it be great to have even more? That is where the Crazy Chinese manufactures come in. Leave it to them to take a dead system that is no longer in arcades and produce a multi cart for it!

Now there isn't just one multi cart, but 9 different versions each with different amount of games in them:

1. 18-in-1
2. 32-in-1
3. 45-in-1
4. 48-in-1
5. 100-in-1
6. 108-in-1
7. 111-in-1
8. 120-in-1
9. 138-in-1

Please note that while I am linking to excellentcom.net for the cartridges above, I am not endorsing them, in fact I am buying mine from a different seller.

This becomes a very difficult decision because the game lists for these cartridges are a mess, spelling errors, different order, Japanese/English titles. To help me decide which to get I made a chart that give a visual comparison of the games that are and are not in each cartridge.

Download this List

You may notice that in this list there are games like "Double Dragon" and "Double Dragon +" I am not sure what the difference is, but if it is anything like the NES multicarts, they are the same game, but the '+' version has a slight modification like easier play, jump higher, etc. I am going to make another list that ignores these slight differences to show exactly what games you are getting in these carts. For now this list is much more useful for selecting a Multicart.

Update January 28, 2010:

Below are two new documents a of 01/28/2010 that use the list of official Neo Geo games, it is much more useful for filtering out the ROM hacks:

Here it is sorted by rarity of game in the Multi Carts, the more carts it is in the higher it is in the list:

Download this List

Here it is sorted by game title:

Download this List

My 3do score!

I was at Richie Rich's Place today and the owner tells me that he has been saving something for me, I glance over the counter and see a 3do! Now, when these things came out in 1993 i didn't have the $699.95 to buy one, but my friend Patrick did.

I remember all the fun we had playing Road Rash, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and most importantly Star Control 2! Star Control 2 is still on of the most awesome games I have ever played. I had the Genesis version (Star Control 1) and the PC version. But the 3do version was the best because of the voice acting that was added. The source code for the 3do version has been released to open source and is called "The Ur-Quan Masters" due to the name being still owned by Atari. It was the most fun on the 3do.

I also scored a Panasonic 19" 15khz color monitor! It will be great for retro game systems!

I wonder this this monitor compares to the Commodore 1702 monitor.

Make your own McRib

Earlier this week I tweeted that I was making my own home-made McRibs and Jerry P. asked me how I did. Check out the video for details.

Fluxbox Theme: LintherBrushed

So way back I made this fluxbox theme that resembles Panther's brushed metal theme. I posted it on freshmeat and forgot about it because I fell in love with the fluxbox theme titled "Alien".

Anyway, looks like freshmeat dropped all fluxbox themes and people were looking for it, so here it is for your downloading pleasure.

• LintherBrushed-default-1-3.tar.gz

This the Alien theme that I currently use and love: