Walthamstow Junk tour.

Thank fuck Sport relief is over, because it was becoming nigh on impossible to avoid all the ballyhoo and indeed constant hard sell, of the Beebs ad machine in full on war mode.  Something that is handled with all the subtlety of a full on marching band. To avoid the horror I decided we needed to escape and what better way than a junk tour. 

By the way before I ruin it by banging on about the Beeb, this is the first junk tour of the new year.  A trip out to east London, not quite the east end, but close, you won't find any cockneys here but every other nation is well represented.  Walthamstow is pretty decent actually, known for its massive street market (and dog track Greyhound Enthusiasts, we had Catford on our side of the river until it closed in the early 2000's) and quite a few charity shops (thrift stores to the Americans.)  This will be the basis of today's tour. 

Exiting through the bus station you come to a small park, that is seemingly the home to the Socialist Wanker party, perennial miseryguts, who, even when labour are in power, remain humourless Marxists, possibly the worst kind of human being ever.  There were the local christians out in force handing out leaflets and an african  handing out cards advertising the services of a Marabout.

The market itself is about a mile long strip of stalls selling everything from Islamic CDs (my favourite We remember Allah) to your more regular fruit and veg.  There are a few items of interest there including a few stalls selling Ashens worthy toys, a particularly horrendous doll (luminous doll if I recall right) and an Islamic version of those educational Vtech rip offs.  Onto the shops itself.

Scope.  Previously the Spastics Society before everyone got sniffy over the name Spastic.  Scope are big players in the charity shop buisness.  Every town seems to have a Scope, no matter how large or small.  Walthamstows Scope is situated right at the top of the market making it the first stop on the list. 

We got a Terranova CD there, their not bad DJ Kicks mix album: a mix of breaks, rap and electro along with a few techno classics (largely Carl Craig stuff) made this an must purchase.

A small pit stop to visit the excellent indie game store (almost hidden behind of all things a butchers stall) just down from the 99p store.  We picked up Star Ocean Second Evolution for PSP (a rework of the PSOne classic) before moving down to Age UK.

Age UK.  Previously known as Age Concern, before they were amalgamated with Help The aged a few years ago.  They are another mainstay of the Charity shop system. They didn't seem to be selling much but we did pick up a classic Geogaddi by Boards of Canada. The Sandersons homespun IDM, straight from the wilds of scotland. We've never actually owned a BOC album, just odd tracks on selected compilations, so far we like what we hear.

Moving further down and the market eventually peters out into a mass of Polski Skleps and Pardotuves supplying the Eastern Europeans in the area.  Our destination is Oxfam a massive store on the corner of the street, and its here we hit paydirt. They sell a lot of books and stuff often at a horrendous price, we didn't get anything here but there were one or two things of interest.  They had an Abicah Soul Project ep for sale, for fans of deep house, and in the childrens book rack a signed Michael Rosen Poetry anthology.

I really regret not buying this, theres bits I remember from YTPs including Harrybo (who we learned died age 17) and various bits that sound familiar including Abdul and I think Melanie, oh one of them was titled conversations with a six year old.  No poems on "plams", no poems on the school inspector and no none on no-o-o-o breathing which is a shame, as it seemed  -click-          

NICE.  

Our final shop was Crest a local charity and proper dingy as well.  There was a rich vein of old commercial dance including LFO, a Guy Called Gerald Voodoo Ray and what I grabbed House fly by Tricky Disco.
Old Warp tracks are what I grew up with and its a nice to finally end the day as we started it.

Archive.

A brief update to certain posts, not that anyone reads them.  Coda For Sara had its explanation of Huckleberry friends mysteriously omitted, and our synopsis on the Neo Geo handheld has had more information added thanks to Andriasang printing up more info.

Archive.
I am an inveterate packrat, and am currently digitising select bits of Edge hoarded from the Mid 2000's, normally looking for obscure and niche stuff, oh and trying to collate together all the Biffoworld columns, the corpulent output from Digi's Mr Biffo.  Its not easy when the magazine does not fit into the scanner meaning you'll grab about 95% of the page you want and hope and pray that there is nothing on the remaining 5% that is of any use.
 We also used to have some archives up on Mediafire not so long ago of promo tat from American magazines, (Shining force and some Xfile scans now removed due to SOPA panic) that I'm pretty sure do not exist anywhere. 

What we are desperately trying to say is this, archival, even casually its time consuming work.  It was brought home to me on Monday at our cactus club meeting, they had a display table that our speaker had brought and displayed on it, a massive array of cactus magazines (it was a talk on Haworthia but covered other species too), leafing through this vast amount of technical journals it remained clear, few if any, have any sort of archival back up.  Only Asklepios the International Asclepiad Society had any sort of scan in service (a CD ROM of old issues being advertised) the others had nothing.  

What happens to gaming mags can also represent what happens to other niche magazines too. In other words, preservation is required unless valuable information is lost.  Thanks to project Gutenberg I can read Curtis botanical magazine from the late 1700's, I don't see gaming media reaching the same levels of archival yet.

Its not all bad though, there are places where you can read reviews of games, bits from old Amiga Format, Crash and Zzap 64 magazines.  Maybe the future isn't so bad!.

Cameraphone 2004 style.

Our scan of the week returns with an ad for Sony Ericsson's S700i cameraphone.  Unlike our other scans of the week this isn't humourous or weird, its just something that doesn't really exist now.  Every phone now has a camera but this was both a dedicated phone and a dedicated camera, a sort of chimera between the two.  I kinda miss those days, maybe some of the camera companies could get together with Android say and revive this feature.

Coda for Sara

Sad to say this but we lost my cousin Sara a few weeks back, due to complications with diabetes (essentially a hypo).  She was a real sweet girl and slightly older than me (37), though had myriad problems in her life.  She left behind four kids and a partner.  Her funeral was friday (the day after we put up PS Pops for yo chops) down at Hanworth in West London.

I wore a suit and tie, for the first time in ages, and it was quite a nice send off.  Her kids arranged a song each, (ranging from Smiley Virus, to Michael Baal covering Celine Dion) there was a poem followed by a review of her life.  I abstained from the prayers and general god bits as I'm an atheist but sang along to Adeles Someone like you as it was the least I could do.

To be honest, I hadn't seen her for about 10 years, and sad to say my memories of her had faded to a few selected instances.   There were a few more Huckleberry friends* from the drop in she attended along with some old dude on an electric wheelchair.  My favourite memories was playing Gears of war and Assassins creed with her sons.  There was some nice food too, including some excellent cake.  All in all it was a pretty sad time for us.

*Huckleberry friend is of course from Moon River and is our way of describing anyone who is a bit 'special' or  subnormal, kinda like Timmy for South Park followers.

PS Pops for yo chops.

You're getting a special thursday edition of King Tibbet, as we not only mourn the death of Snesorama, but give you another red hot guide.  But first the news.

Snesorama.

Though we were never a member, this along with Megaupload was the premier place for non torrent archives.
We would occasionally browse the list of old PS1 / PS2 / Saturn stuff to see if there was anything worth a download, but mainly it was to leaf through the Emulation news at least once a week.  I'm not sure if the playstation museum is still going, they were hosted by Snesorama but contained a wealth of PS1 specific data such as screen shots, PEC code lists for cheating, and cover and iso information (snesorama of course having links to the actual ISOs).  The Playstation Datacenter has a facebook page for those antisocial networkers among you. 

We are not sure what happened to kill off Snesorama, posts up on the PSXdatacenter facebook tell of an hack attack, and they shifted their forums to another host a few weeks back.  Now whenever you visit it says their site is dead and won't be coming back.

Popsloader guide.

We did offer you a guide the other week for an easy way to add ISO support to your hacked PSP, now we'll go one further and add PS1 support for your hacked PSP.

PSN are offering suckers, PS1 classics for your PSP to rebuy and download to your PSP.  This is especially dumb if you have the original games lying around at home going unused.  I warn you it involves more stuff than enabling ISO / CSO support, but adding it its no less difficult than before.

As before here is our recipe list.

A PSP with custom Firmware. (incidentally the modern PRO B firmware adds PS1 support natively so this is for non PRO B firmware.)  We use Godman Firmware which is a hack of PRO B and is rather nice.
POPS loader.   Your PS1 emulation software.
A ProDUO card.
ISO creation software
A PS to PSP iso converter.
Some PS1 games.

Step 1.
First of all you'll need to make an ISO image from the discs you own (If you have PS1 ISO files already on your system, you can skip this bit and go to Step 2).  Insert your discs into your PC and run whatever ISO creation software you have, locate the option to create ISO files from disc and select start.  We favour the excellent Imgburn (and you'll want the option, make ISO from disc if you are using it) for all our CD making needs, its free, and has never failed us.   

Step 2.
You can download both POPSloader and  PSX2PSP at this point as we will need them to continue, you can also connect your PSP via USB (or ProDUO card if you have a card reader) at this point as its also required to continue.  

Step 3. Adding POPSloader.

This is your root directory.

With popsloader downloaded, simply drag the popsloader file that corresponds to your firmware into the root directory of your PSP Memory stick.   I.E if your custom firmware is 6.20 drag the popsloader file that says 6.20 to your root directory.

Stage 4. Converting files.

Extract and run PSX2PSP.  You'll want to click on the top box (ISO PBP file) and search for where you have your PS1 ISO files.  (IMGburn puts them in Documents by default)
Select the second box down and create an output folder to store your converted ISO and if you want add a picture image. (you don't have to it'll just look nicer.)  When you are done click on Convert and it'll convert it.  Check the destination file and it'll show you a folder with your newly converted ISO.

Stage 5. The final stage.

Do not rename the newly created folder, or put it in another folder, but drag it into your game folder in you  PSP memory card.  It'll show up as a file that you can click on to play your game.  We've played both PAL and NTSC games (both SaGa Frontiers) and  can attest that it will work.  Oh and a final notice you'll want to press the home button to bring up POPSloaders option menu, (put it to fullscreen otherwise it'll look windowed), it will also let you quit out here too. Enjoy.

PSP ponce edition.

Here is a small but informative update.  Its an original, clearly written guide that lets you add ISO support to your hacked PSP.  We'll also link to a review of International Snooker that we did, clue its a bit meh.

There are a few guides around that are either not written well, that the original author's English isn't that great or are a bit technical.  Also you could be really unlucky and have an ISO image split into about a billion files which I'm still not sure on how you add to get it to run (sorry about that).  Also a great help was this image of the PSP folder structure, (previously we'd stuck it in the game folder and like a dunce wondered why it didn't run... Doh and double Doh).
 
Enough waffle, this is the list of stuff you'll need to get ISO support on your PSP.

First of all some obvious stuff.

A PSP WITH CUSTOM FIRMWARE. (this is important)
A Memory stick Duo pro (the bigger the better, unless you only want to add a few games)
An ISO or CSO image of any game you legally own.  (theres a few programs to back up you UMDs now though we've never used them).

Step 1.
First of all you'll want to either link your PSP to your PC in USB mode, or if you run it from the mains like I do and have a card reader, take out your Memory Duo card and put it into the correct slot (mine says MS/PRO/ PRO DUO).  A box should appear on your screen with your folder, open it up and go to step 2.

Foreground your folder, Background IFM W00t.

Step 2.
See that picture above, your card should look like this (minus the ISO folder), now right click and add a folder and name it in ALL CAPS as ISO.  

Don't open any of the folders and add it there, IT WILL FAIL.  It needs to be added to the main folder of your memory card.

Step 3.
With the ISO folder created, open it and add a folder called VIDEO (all caps again) this is where you'll add all of your UMD movies (I think, I've never done this myself and yes its entirely pointless watching films on your PSP).

Step 4.
Still in your ISO folder, search on your PC, for the folder where you store the ISO / CSO files,  open that folder and drag across a game to your ISO folder.  It should take awhile to copy across unless its a mini title, where it should take a few seconds.

Step 5.

Uncable your PSP (or take out your memory card and put it back in your PSP) and go to Games, Memory card in the menu.   If all goes well your ISO should show up in your games folder, click on it to play.