My wife decided it was time to put our family room to use and put a TV in it again. The last one found itself on the wrong end of a Wii controller errant toss from my son. So the TV she found was a pretty decent one of some brand I've never heard of but it had a built-in Roku so what the heck. Much better than I expected from a 40inch/1080p for 250 bucks. We aren't hooking this up to cable. It'll be purely an internet device.
Hooking it up and staring at all these inputs, followed by a coincidental cleaning of my garage, inspired me to get out almost all of my old game systems and fire them up. I started by hooking up the NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube all through a Pelican system selector. I laid down the ground rules to the littles and went over safety mumbo jumbo and the fine art of cartridge blowing. Within an hour the kids were really into these older games. I couldn't help but feel a little pride as my twins were engaged in epic Super Smash Bros. battles and NBA Jam rubber matches. It also turns out that I either suck at Soul Caliber 2 or my son is some sort of prodigy. Likewise can be said about both my son and daughter when it comes to Smash Bros. I simply suck and they remind me with each celebratory trash talk. I do not know where they got that.
After a couple weeks of nostalgia I thought it was time to start getting serious. Enter my favorite game system of all time: Dreamcast. I cannot put my finger on why I've always been so fond of this tiny beast of a machine. Ultimately, I think it's just a combination of so many things that it has. Direct arcade ports of arcade games I never played at the arcade, crazy ass peripherals, the weirdest memory card you'll ever see, the first system I ever modchipped, the first system I ever played burned games on (hey, I own them too). The Dreamcast is still hacked to this day and I even purchased a new release Shmup for it only a year ago. At almost 20 years old this thing is just friggin' incredible, even with it's noisy-ass optical drive. So now the cat is really outta the bag and I'm thinking of modding it with the latest and greatest the world is now offering. Hard drives and direct booting of ISOs? Check and check. I'm even gonna mod the old Agetec joystick with genuine arcade stick parts. I'm simply out of control. I only have one creation under my belt and it's just the stinkin' Fume-0 and that was 5 years ago! Now this!?
Even the GBA is again in my back pocket. LSDJ chip tunes? Oh hells yeah. Too much stuff in my head... Need to concentrate and just start with getting out one thing at a time. Leaning joystick, mostly because of part availability. Chip tunes is just something to do for fun. This will be my downtime and besides, it's portable!
Alright no more writing until I get something going. bye.