New 3DS.

We've finally gone and done it and updated from our much beloved  DS Lite to a brand New 3DS.  It was going cheap in Cash Generator (£90) and as an early birthday present decided to snap it up at that price.

Was still shivery for a good hour later as its a lot for me to just buy stuff like that as its way out of my comfort zone, but it feels good to finally be part of this generation now.  First of all we have a generic charger bundled with it that does DS / PSP and DSi onwards.  What I didn't know was that they redesigned the charger port for DSi onwards so those with lite or the old fat DS's are out of luck when it comes to charging.

Secondly we decided to give it a test out of my old DS games, starting with Castelvania Portrait Of Ruin and working through various imports up until we tried our R4 to see if it would play Etrian Odyssey 3 or Pokemon Silver from the flash card and we got nowhere, which to be honest is to be expected.

Firmware is quite nice with a PSP style home button and 3d which gives me no problems but is switched off due to battery consumption.  I even went as far as making a Mii version of myself although I can't see myself adding it to anything.  Face raiders is horrifying as it ignored my mouth and proceeded to put another one in my chin, so I effectively shot at 2 mouthed freaks.

Finally we have Bravely Default 2 today which is really nice and feels like something that should be on a major console like a PS3 or 4.  You can use the analogue sticks to move in and the d pad to navigate the main menus.  Cart itself is white with an extra tab to prevent confusion with old DS games but so far, yeah this is nice, could do with the region locking being disabled which is still disgraceful for a handheld console but it gets my thumbs up so far.

Update time is here again.

A few updates on old stories and things, including a few things to read before you die. First of all a round up.

PS Vita Piracy is a thing now?

Read this on Wololo last week but as I was writing about the Chinese New Year then I plumb forgot about it.  Apparently there is a pirate version of  Uncharted for Vita that has been released now.  There are no flash cards or Emulators available at present to take advantage of this but its a start (). Maybe in 2020 they'll be a working Vita Emulator complete with romhacking scene to take advantage of all the pirates work and that but at present its a nice thing to have. Maybe there will be a game exploit like Locoroco was for PSP that will give an exploit for full access, or a way to back up games that you own to prevent them getting lost and that. 

Super Famicom.

They have in one of those Mobile Phone / game shops a Super Famicom for sale and its not cheap.  They want £220 for it and it comes with a bizarre selection of carts with it.  There is Game of Life, a few horse racing games including Derby Stallion 96 complete with bizarre cart that is Satellaview compatible and Dragon Quest V. They also have D Force a sub par shmup from Asmik Ace which at least requires minimal Japanese knowledge to enjoy unlike the others for sale.

Windows 7.

I finally got something working on the old Sony TVPC. Was going to go with linux but in the end as it came out garbled to fuck, decided to upgrade to windows 7 via an iso. file on an old Hard Drive.  It has a pirate key on it and to be honest its not going on line ever but its coping well so far.  We added tweaking hardware which I've found invaluable for sorting out old drivers to installed hardware, and Service Pack 1 via usb key.  Its at its max of 1GB of ram and still looks like hell though but at least its current now.

Finally you'll have a few things that I've found interesting over the past week or so.

Want to read up on the original version of Star wars and how a group of fans are remastering it from original 35mm prints, then click here.

EPSXE have a new version of their PS1 Emulator out, I spent a good hour dicking about with all the settings trying to get Magical Drop 3 to work before I learned I was trying to run an iso. file as a CD doh.  On better news they fixed the annoying cursor control issue for Pro Pinball the Fantastic Voyage which is a minor miracle, anyway that link is here.

Oh and finally PPSSPP the nice PSP emulator has also been updated as well.  You can bag that here.

Chinese New Year.

Celebrate Chinese New Year Monkey, Newyear Felicitations, beneficial.  We could say it is Monkey Year or Iron Monkey God Celeb ration, for much prosper in the way we into the Auspicious much in the ways. 

Sinister Cupping Machine Chinglish

Hello readers, I hope you liked that intro, that was of course written in the traditional language of China "Chinglish" I have taken the liberty to add another example from the collection above to show you what I'm getting at.  I bloody love Chinglish, no disrespect of course but those who don't know English or have a tenuous grip on it can twist it in may's wost beautiful.

If you didn't know, today is the official new year celebrations up town involving fireworks and all the stuff I don't much like,  so with leave banking up, we decided to venture out on the Friday seeing as Saturday would be rainy and see what was occurring.  The answer of course is nothing much as it was cold out, so while I didn't see any Lion Dancers or Monkey Gods on the loose, I did get quite a good view of all the new year decorations up at China Town. 

Sun Wukong badass.

Streams of red lanterns hung everywhere and there were people out with camera's taking shots of it all.  Down by the fire station there was a series of displays detailing the Journey West aka Monkey! for those old enough to know the old show.  It displayed a potted synopsis of his greatest hits along with Pigsy, Sandy, Tripitaka and his horse in their quest to retrieve the sacred scriptures from India. I always thought the end tune said in "Condora" as a little kid but its actually Gandhara.  Pretty sure it was rerun on Sky One in the Mid 90's too.

This is a pretty good representation of it all.

Anyway I didn't see any Lion Dancers this time or Martial Arts as I have previous years but what I did see was pretty cool. I'll leave you with a photo of the big gate leading down to Leicester Square and of course to wish you Gong Xi Fa Cai.

Lovely.

Hypothetical Products:1 The PCTV.

 Children's Channel Watch.
Before we begin I'll just redirect you to some more located trailers and gubbins that I've found on Youtube, its some old continuity from the excellent Sid N's Youtube channel, who does a lot of that sort of thing.  In fact check it now, they have bits from Lifestyle TV including the Jokers Wild.

We will now begin with our feature presentation.

This idea all stems from an old Sony Vaio PC and TV combo that I've blogged about before.  Its a weird hybrid of early flat screen TV and desktop computer, shackled to a massively restrictive design that is a bastard to get into and no chance of adding any other OS apart from windows.  Its still a nightmare, the DVD drive takes nothing but CD's and the MS Pro port (for PSP cards) doesn't work.  Its not the oldest of these as Apple did a similar thing for an astronomical sum back in the 90's, grafted to a Sony TV of all things.

Indeed looking in the Argos catalogue today, I noticed that they still make them including this model from Lenovo complete with a strange amount of RAM.


How would I do it, something like this.

Numbers outlined Below.

I'm not going to lie to you, it will look an awful lot like an old CRT TV, that's been grafted to a Desktop PC.

Its not going to win any design awards but will be functional and unlike many of these beasts upgradeable.

Front display is a standard flatscreen monitor complete with on button 1.

Side display holds a Bluray/ DVD/CD combo (2) for all your media needs and there is a multi card reader and USB 3 slots x2 for all your data interface requirements.  

The Top Display holds a sliding panel (4) with effort allows the top and other side to slide off allowing you access to your internals for adding extra ram or bigger HD / Graphics cards and that.

The back display panel holds the important bits such as all of your networking and audio ports (5) more USB slots and some legacy slots (6) a PS2 slot for keyboards and old mice would be nice.  Finally the all important fan and PSU parts (7).

I haven't decided on what PC architecture the motherboard would house yet (them Skylakes look nice) or even decided on an OS (probably Win 10, but scalable back to Win7 or any flavour of Linux you like).  I'm sure it would be an accessible system that could do for years to come.  I do know it should have a decent sound card and WiFi networking alongside the customary Ethernet ports and regular outputs.