Other What currently makes your life awesome?

My Mrs has taken the kids to Bristol Zoo, along with her sister. I get some quite time and for the first time in months I get to actually use my PC and play some music through my amp

 

Finished the bike, went for a ride, wow electronic shifting is amazing.

 

Dug my original PlayStation out of my mother's loft earlier. Sadly the drive is knackered and it doesn't spin discs any more, but I also dug out my brother's PSone and that works just fine.

I've said it before and I'm going to keep saying it: there is no substitute for the original hardware.



(Obviously Final Fantasy VII is not running on that Atari STe! )

Really need to fix the bad geometry on this TV though, I'm hoping there's some options in the service menu that can compensate. I have to pop the back case off to install a momentary switch across the service menu pins, so I might as well check for worn caps at the same time. If that doesn't sort it I'll have to see if anyone is still servicing these old CRT beasts (though tbh if there's hardware issues it's likely to be bad caps). These BeoVision TVs are not cheap.

 

Is it the original fat PS1?

If so, did you try turning it upside down while it's running?

 

... Think I may have to get my slim PS1, PS2 and PS3 setup in my new place next year.

May relive some FFVII on the PS1.

 

That it is, model SCPH-5552:



I've never heard of the trick of turning it upside down - I'll give that a try tomorrow, cheers . Replacement CD units are only about £13, so if that doesn't work it won't break the bank to fix it.

There are other issues with this unit though. Many years ago I disassembled the whole thing to yank out the controller ports, the intention was to mod the ports so that I could connect them to PC's parallel port and use PlayStation controllers on the PC. Unfortunately however, genius here never put the screws back into the case. The top cover and the port assembly aren't screwed down and the original screws are long gone... Again though a fix should be cheap: I'll just pick up a similar but knackered model on ebay and swap the screws over to mine. Sure it's easier just to replace the thing outright but this PlayStation is my PlayStation from 1996/1997, and having my console from ~21 years ago has a lot of nostalgic value .

Just be warned that modern LCD TVs are... not kind to the original PlayStation . You'll definitely want an RGB SCART cable and make sure to set your TV to 4:3! The PS2 however supports component video output and cables aren't exactly expensive.

 

I'll keep that in mind thanks. Hadn't even thought about that.

 

It's actually really difficult to get good quality video out of old consoles these days. Modern TVs don't do well with 240p RGB content; the deinterlacing and upscaling is usually pretty poor quality and introduces an awful lot of lag. Having a CRT TV dedicated to old-school consoles is a bit of an extravagance for most people, and finding one that can actually display true RGB 240p can be difficult. I got really lucky with my BeoVision MX6000, even if it does need some TLC.

My next challenge will be figuring out how to split the video signal so I can simultaneously output to both the TV and some sort of capture solution!

 

Lukas Graham 3 (purple album).

Been waiting soooo long to get this.

 

After getting the "lightning dodger" achievement in FFX HD last week, I just successfully completed the chocobo trainer race with a perfect score to get the "chocobo rider" one... now it's just the butterflies and cactuars to tick off the "intentionally annoying minigames" list to get my collection of celestial weapons going.

But no, I'm still not playing Blitzball.

 

Playing with overclocks. 8700k stable at 5.1ghz. So much better than my Core i5 750 at 3.8ghz

 

For someone with that username and that icon, this strikes me as incongruous.

 

I know, right?!

Blitzball isn't that bad, once you start to get some decent players (or level up the Aurochs if you have the patience) then it gets real easy real fast.

 

I approve of the CRT. I was playing Time Crisis on my original PlayStation, on a CRT, at the weekend. I managed to get to the half-way point on one 'credit'.

 

I never had the patience for blitzball - it drove me spare the time you're forced to play it and I never wanted to go near it again. Which, given I spent tens of hours in the omega ruins grinding, seems a little ridiculous to me too.

 

I'll grant you, that first game is an utter arse, and the first time you can freely play Blitzball it's not much better. Once you get going though...

 

You kids and your perseverance!

That'll never catch on!

 

NVME - bugger me it's fast.

The sound of a pump when you first fill a rig with coolant.

Hose that arrives and is actually the OD and ID advertised. Not 9.5mm instead of 11.

 

Merry Christmas

 

My new festive avatar