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An actual news item: Josh and Shauna have posted a pretty cool pictorial. I like the styles, black and whites, side shots.

Popsy Pointless

IF you have any desire to play a NERD simulator (be the fastest one to click all your pencil leads out), or maybe fly a penguin to shoot the aliens? Paper rock scissors? Emulation is the key. The MAME project is very near completion! Yay! The monitor is mounted and sticks out the back so far that I cannot get the rear cover on. Sigh. I measured without calculating how far the screen is recessed in there. Here is the input controller fully wired:

So many times I shout “check this out” and “oh yeah! I remember this game”. The family is weary from it. How did I ever encounter so many of these arcades growing up?

I ended up using most of the Jamma connectors so that it will be easy to quick-disconnect the control panel. I kept reading about cherry switches, turns out the brand of switch is cherry. It is printed right on the side. These Happ buttons are indestructible! I can leave the rugrats and not worry one iota.

A large problem arises when installing the emulation software. It turns out that of the 6000 or so games, one percent of them are adult content! Yikes. It took nearly four days of solid filtering and favorite making to go through them. Never thought I would be sick of playing arcade games.

Another astonishing discovery is the amount of scrolling shooters. I think about 100 or so that I really enjoy. Many are period Japanese with textures and Kanji scrolls. Radiant Silvergun is as beautiful as I had suspected.

Daphne (emulator) is not much help for me. I had a secret longing to play Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace enough times to be able to eventually beat them. They are harder than I remember!

Popsy Gaming

Photo below = proof on my desk, Information Society’s new CD is out! (At least if you bought it in advance.) Familiar sounds and echoes throughout. All of the pieces fall together well. I want to hug everyone who made this possible, and A Different Drum for distributing! I had to grate my teeth a few times on the new lead male’s notes. Proof that Kurt and James vocals cannot be replaced. Scooping into the notes and a few tone problems seem to clear up as the recording continues to count tracks away from the first few. (I literally cringed at the word “body” pronounced “botty”). The females and chorus parts are really fine! “Run Away” is very Sarina Paris, but in a better way. What a welcome!

Track one opened a little weak for me, as it was Nick Beat’s “Technodisco” nearly beat for beat for a while. The lyrics are not as story oriented as Insoc used to be. Trip-Hop has made a mark. The Hack/Political Edge is missing from the composition also. The thrill-seekers sample is about it. (and probably public domain by now.) Track 10 starts Goldfrapp – “Strict Machine” exactly. There are tons of moments that are just brilliant. The last three tracks captivated me for every delicious note. Kurt’s Voice on the “Seeds Of Pain” final track is such a welcome addition! This track has some of the same samples used in Hakatak – Googleplectic. This skeptic must admit: Information Society is back! Please purchase what they do so there will be more bargaining power to bring Kurt back in force!

Popsy Synthpop Music

The 6000 games are finally played, and sorted into categories. This is the start of a list of what I consider gems that must be played. It will grow as I have time.

1000 Miglia	There is something really fun about racing those old cars. Drifting olde school.
Action Hollywood	Simple but well done tile flipper. Choose the movie scene.
Asterix	Side Scroll and Viking smosh.
B.C. Story	Mini Caveman games. Blow up the dino like a balloon!
Biomechanical Toy	Cute platformer. Toys all gone wrong. Simple and smooth controls.
Black Tiger	RPG hack and slash platformer, a little hard, but the weapons are sweet for its time.
Blasteroids	Balance your ship between armor, speed, and firepower. Try to play this at least to a boss.
Boogie Wings	Old-time planes that can hook and carry stuff! This one is really fun. Carry around a Santa or an Elephant.
Brave Blade	Top-down shooter with plenty of style. I like the change from jet to mech.
Cotton	Side scrolling shooters. Very well drawn! Ride your broom, make a ball and capture baddies.
Crayon Shinchan	Minigames. I really like the cartoon style and the goofy voices of the mom and kid.
Cyvern	Top down shooter. Any dragon simulator is a good game in my book.
Dimahoo	Nice Top-down mixture of fantasy and technology. Dragons with guns!
Dragon Blaze	Top Down dragon flyer. Destroy those dragon bugs.
ESP Ra.De.	Top Down shooter, ESP gone right, or wrong? Not sure.
Exvania	Castle Bomberman spinoff! Dragon bosses and treasures.
Go Go Mile Smile	Simply the best anteater sim. Cute.
Grand Cross	A pinball top-down shooter? Try it. See how high you can get.
Gunbarich	The best pinball/break-out Arkanoidish game of all time!
Guwange	A new favorite topdown. This one is classic Japanese scrolling style. Wow.
Hyper Pacman	Pac-Man really needed armor and lasers and X-ray vision. Now he’s got it.
I’m Sorry	I’m sorry for putting this in. Just look at the Jackson and Executives in leather.
Jumping Pop	For the anime Backgrounds, not the game.
Maru Chan De Goo	Flatten the dough, might be neat if I could beat the first challenge.
Mosaic	Pictures (nice) change and you must order them properly.
Outfoxies	Two Players attack in the same level. Whatever it takes to bring the other down.
Pacmania	Pac-Man with Nike Jumping shoes and 3d!
Prehistoric Isle 2	Side scroll dino shooter. I enjoy getting the people to hang below the copter!
Photo Y2K	Find the differences. Mosaic is prettier.
Princess Clara Daisakusen	Cute diagonal platformer.
PuLiRuLa	Um, cartoon RPG? What happened to the world. No clue.
Radiant Silvergun	Ikaruga’s beautiful 3d little bro. Which of the tons of weapon styles to choose?
Ray Storm	3d Scrolling shooter. Nice future lock-on.
Ribbit	Frogger done exactly right! Still die in the water though.
Scud Hammer	Paper rock smash the over-animated people? Over-everything!
Search Eye	These picturehunts have neat artwork. Never quite matches the shape.
Sel Feena	Bombermanish, catch baddies in the box and bash them open.
Super Bishi Bashi	This is the perfect nerd simulator! Empty the click pencil.
Shippu Mahou Daisakusen	Top scrolling racing fighter? Grab your monkey or fairy and love it.
Sokonuke Taisen	Minigames. Lots of neat button pounding to balance stuff.
Sotsugyo Shousho	Minigames. Bouncing fun, watch for the Kanji ones though.
Space Invaders 95	Exactly what you would expect the Japanese to do to Space Invaders.
Tetris Plus 2	These are so cute! Tetris with a nice plot and cute upgrade.
Tondemo Crisis	Loser simulator. Can you stay alive through each calamity?
Trog	Flatformer. Really cute caveman humor in this one.
Vasara	Both of these are really well drawn top downs. I love the scrolls and faces of the stronger baddies.
Wild West COW Boys	Side Scroller with a western twist. Nice humor and cute.

This list will grow. ^__^

Popsy Gaming

Finally back from Josh and Shauna’s wedding. What a long red-eye! After going through two states of Gimmick public roads, it was really refreshing to cross into Arizona again.

New Mexico allowing double trailers is a strange sight. I guess trucks don’t need to back up anymore? Weaving and wandering is close to using the lane. Also New Mexico has these beautiful long straight sections of Interstate. No curves, no bumps… perfect for bumping the speed up a bit, right? Wrong! You get a gimmick lane called “safety corridor” where lights have to be on in the daytime and oh yeah.. Cops get double donut bucks from you for speeding. Nice black angry DPS cars with V2 or better radars abound.

Texas has this stigma about night travel. 65mph on the interstates at night. I guess they want everyone in bed by sundown? Maybe it is to protect the Armadillos? Who knows.. The black troopers in aggressively marked cars are in full force to make sure everyone gets on their hands and knees and crawls at night.

I am so glad to be home! The AZ DPS have nice white helpful looking cars even. Hang on, this one wants me to sign another pink paper. (jk)

Popsy Pointless

If you have not seen a nice hi-res version of Muse – Sing for Absolution, you need to. This sample is 120 megish, so I may delete it after a bit.

While Muse has been one of my faves for a while, upon revisiting this vid I was more impressed. Here are some points to look for: The first few notes match the missile explosions. Effective use of black/silence. Particle generators and the disruption thereof. Situation matching or contrasting emotions and facial expressions. This combination of heart-wrenching meaning and video wizardry made me very emotional. Beautiful!

Popsy Synthpop Music

I have completely lost count of how many of these things I have been through. This is slimline number two. It needed power connector repair. After opening the belly of this cutie, I expected to find such tiny little workings that I would be unable to effect repairs.

While many of the workings are tiny, the power connector (at the purple arrow) is wonderfully open acres! There was already an eighth of an inch of solder, and clearly cracked from all of the drops to the floor.

This is a masterpiece of simplicity and layout on the little guy. Nice heat sinks. Six main screws hold the cover, and one holds the mainboard together around the controllers. A quick upgrade to a nice bald mound of silver solder and the connection is made! ^__^ Now back to testing DDR.

Popsy Gaming

Moenia’s latest offering of digital dreaminess is awesome. The sound is primarily deconstructed, not as dark, and has a mild case of blippy beat syndrome. The drums and bass lines move at a very steady pace. Hearing female vocals on “Me Equivoque” was a fascinating change.

At one brilliant point Juan bursts into perfect English! “Siempre Igual” is not quite the same meaning as “You can’t expect us to be one.” Oh well, they are the artists words after all. A couple of the layers seem to not have the same time; rhythm is a bit fuzzy in a couple places (like all of “Un Rato”). Now the question is: will they release a US version or will it have evil copycontrol damage so I cannot play it in my car like Stereohits had. Overall this is a fine work. I can’t wait for them to put out something completely in English.

Popsy Synthpop Music

I had this crazy notion to attempt to build an arcade emulation machine. Ebay here we come, after much shop-happy searching and lots of unrelated purchasing, I found an arcade shell in horrible shape.

The guts of the thing need to be completely replaced. I used my power-washer to strip off the layers of black Krylon and found this amazing bit of information:
The machine was originally Spiderman!

After much debate over what kind of computer and display system to go with, I am settling on a newegg combo special ASUS A8N mainboard, 2400 AMD, 1 gig low latency memory, and a thermaltake Golden Orb to keep everything quiet. I have a sweet used 21 inch monitor that fits nice and snug. So far the total cost is around 350 smackers. I can’t factor in the cost SATA raid with two 150gig WD RaptorX drives. That would set me back some dough units. Maybe I can justify them by saying they are used by all the computers in the house for storage? (well, not Erica’s computer of course. Hers is the best of the best – with honors) Is this doomed to be one of those uncompleted more expensive than anticipated projects? Time will tell.

p.s. Building a SATA raid makes an astonishing performance improvement in a computer. Must be the page file speed. Wow. Note to self: The clear windows on the hard drives is less than a good idea. It sounded killer at the time, but the drives are caved away in the dark. The plastic window parts look flimsy, and the heads move so fast the naked eye cannot see the action.

Popsy Gaming

I have been trying like mad to find this show on DVD. Anyhow, before they disappear there are some really good ones on youtube and tvinjapan right now.

Another search term besides ‘Kasou’ or ‘Taishou’ which yields results on you tube is ‘Japanese Talent’
Be sure to watch this karate board breaking one. I had passed it up because it is slow starting, but the ending pays off.

On a side note, this video makes more sense now that I understand: They are making mochi!

There is also a part of Okami where someone is hitting rice in a block with a mallet. These are easier to spot now that I know what this strange mochi type advancing about behavior is.

Popsy Pointless