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to say that this week was uneventful would be an understatement

July 18, 2020, 9:42 AM

to say that this week was uneventful would be an understatement

I'm beginning to question the utility of a "week in review" - if for no other reason than that this week has been so blissfully uninteresting and uneventful that it doesn't even warrant a review. Scratch that - there's nothing to review.

I flipped through Google Photos, and I noticed that I haven't taken a single picture since July 8th. It is now the 18th. So basically, I have a 10-day gap of time which I can't account for.

Huh.

As I look at the last week of my Five-Minute Journal entries, I get the sense that I've heard all of these things before. Nonetheless, I should mention them, if for nothing else than posterity's sake.

  • getting rid of stuff. I purged a lot of items, and I have a scant few things remaining that I want to get rid of. But, alas, there they are, in an extremely neatly piled set of brown cardboard boxes. I am smelling a photo opportunity here:

my pile of boxes

  • work and stuff. Work is work. Oddly enough, I don't have a lot of complaints about it right now. I'm the only standing engineer at my current workplace. Is that something to be proud of? Or something that has merit? I've always thought about if I'm good at my job or not. That's something I'll have to think about.
  • health. Nothing to report here. Sleep cycle still feels kind of messed up, and I seem to have landed on a 9-10 pm-ish bedtime, and a 6 am wake up time. Could be closer to 9 pm to 5 am, but it is what it is.

Well. Now that that bit of life-administrivia is out of the way, let's write about something more interesting: I've been making slow and steady progress with my retro gaming setups as of late. What's funny is that I have never made a record of any of my retro-gaming related activities.

I have a few setups that I've been working on, but the ones I want to mention are...

the 480p retro gaming setup

480p retro gaming setup with sony pvm 20l5

The equipment:

  • Mac Mini 2009, running an older version of OpenEmu. I bought this thing waaaaaaay back in the day, and it's been sitting in storage for years. I thought it'd be a waste to toss it, and it's not worth much, so I repurposed it for running software emulation. It's not great, but if I might echo the motto of my life: it's good enough.
  • Extron VSC 500. I was looking for a sync combiner with size adjustments. I thought it could do higher resolutions but guess not. I wanted an Extron RXI 203, but those things are getting ridiculously hard to find and expensive.
  • Extron MVX 8x8 VGA switch. I don't think I'll be taking up all those connections, but always nice to have extras.
  • Sony PVM 20L5. I got this for free from a local TV station.

Sadly, the "P" progressive scan part of this whole setup is something I'm still trying to figure out. For now, the video is running through an Extron VSC 500, which only outputs 480i.

And 480i on this particular monitor looks like pure ass. Seems to have too many lines of resolution. The scan lines are not very pronounced and look pretty awful when looking at solid colors. But you know what? It looks find when playing games, or anything in motion.

I did get a pretty cool looking arcade stick to go along with this setup:

arcade joystick unbranded

It's got a second side for the second player as well. I had been looking at arcade sticks for a while (mostly the HORI branded stuff), or even getting some adapters for my Sega Saturn or Playstation One sticks. I saw this on Amazon and purchased it on a whim. Turns out it's pretty good, but the Amazon box it arrived it was messed up:

IMG_20200708_124635 (1).jpg

Luckily, the contents where fine.

Next, I have...

the TATE-mode gaming setup

TATE mode gaming setup sony pvm 20M2u and 20m2mdu

I am aware of the slight irony of playing a non-TATE mode game in a TATE-mode setup. Oh well. I love Cotton 2.

The equipment:

  • Sony PVM 20M2MDU and Sony PVM 20M2U. I got both of these off eBay, way back in 2014. The 20M2U has geometry issues, unfortunately, but still mostly works and not too noticeable while playing.
  • Roland MA-8 speakers. These are good. Not great. But definitely magnetically shielded, and doesn't need an external amplifier, so they're simple and safe to use.

There's a bunch of other stuff hiding the cabinet, which I'm forgetting about. I'm still not quite happy with the way this thing looks, but it's forever a work in progress. Needs a little cleaning up, as I've got erroneous video equipment lying all over the place, and the remnants of my storage unit are still strewn all about. Something I really need to deal with.


Well, that's all I got. I am never sure how to gracefully end these blog posts