Interesting article on NYT, Remember When You Wanted Your Own Ms. Pac-man? on the growing popularity of owning your own arcade games. I’d still love to have a decent condition 80’s style game, but with both space and funds lacking at the moment, plans are on hold for now. MAME, gives you some of the flavor of the original games, but they’re just not the same without the standup cabinet and trusty mushroom joystick.
This crafty fellow put together his own Sony Playstation 2 portable using the guts of a one of the new low profile PS2 consoles, a PSONE LCD screen, and portable DVD player battery. It also has one major perk over the real Playstation Portable (coming soon from Sony), in that it plays PS2 software; the PSP will have its own new software. I could imagine all the extra Ratchet & Clank playtime I’d log if I had one of these. Very slick. I only wish I had the time to mess around with kind of stuff.
For all you Super Mario Brothers fans out there, here’s a step by step guide for carving your own 1up mushroom on a pumpkin:
http://infinitesnake.com/1upkin.php
Where do these people find the time?
Of course, I finally get a ps2, and they come out with a new version…
A LOT smaller, and built in ethernet. sweet.
Funny, but I found out about this from today’s Foxtrot cartoon.
Oh well, back to some more Ratchet & Clank… hehe.
After trying Doom 3 on my new Dell, with an almost twice as fast CPU (2.8Ghz), 25% more memory (1Gb), and a fresh Windows XP install, I was pretty disappointed with the performance. It was playable, unlike my old PC, 1.5Ghz and 768Mb of RAM, but still very choppy at the lowest resolution and graphics quality settings.
So, I messed around a bit. First, I updated the drivers for the video card (NVidia FX 5200 128Mb). Next I updated to MS DirectX 9.0c. A few reboots later I was back at the desktop and ready to double click the the Doom 3 Pentagram icon…
Wow, what a difference! Low quality now flies (kinda like playing the original Wolfenstein on a Pentium PC, after all those years on a 486). So, I upped the ante and bumped things up to the next resolution and quality level and surprisingly, it still flies. Kind of a drag that you have to quit of Doom to change these the qualities settings, but I guess after you find you like, you don’t change very often. Anywho, graphics are very detailed and smooth.
Unfortunately, I was so excited to actually be able to play the game at this point, that I didn’t get around to testing the next graphics level. I’ll try that next time. Back to blasting those damn imps.
