Hardware upgrades & getting kinda started again! (blog) (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

Still no new videos yet but I'm hoping that won't be the case for too much longer!
Though I do feel I need to get Christmas out of the way first as I'm still at work during the day a lot at the moment.

That said, while I've mentioned it a little on Twitter...

I finally have another new PC!

As of typing this out I've only had it 4 days but so far it seems pretty good!
The main problem I was having with the old PC is just knowing how slow it was after already sorting out the previous new one and then going back to the old one after that one didn't work out.

Boot up times were around 3-4 minutes, and running Sony Vegas on it last week was dreadful. I'm talking literally 8 frames per second in the preview window, despite only having one layer of gameplay on show...

But that's all taken care of now! :D

I'll list the specs below for anyone that's interested... but the main things I looked out for were RAM, the processor and and the graphics card all being relatively high/new enough to run modern-ish games, as well as my editing and drawing software, which took priority over games anyway... (I still like consoles for games!)

As and when the time comes to upgrade this PC in several years time... I'll likely aim to do just that and upgrade whatever needs fixing rather than spend this much on another machine. I'm sure I have several friends who could lend a hand and some advice.

But yeah, here's the specs should anyone be interested in them:

But that's not all!

While the PC was what I'd consider to be a necessary investment, as either which way I needed to get a new one at this point... I did snag myself a deal over the black Friday weekend for something I'd considered getting before now...

I suppose given my line of interests this could be a long term investment too as the previous card lasted me nearly 6 years... but yeah... new capture card too!

This comes from a combination of doing more hours at work and also the damn thing was 45% off during the Black Friday weekend. I almost missed out on this from Amazon, and kicked myself for not going for it when I saw it was out of stock when I got home from work... but PC world had the exact same price so I went for it!

As of typing all of this I'm still waiting for it to arrive, which I believe should be tomorrow!

While it's by no means a "NEW" new capture card, this is the Elgato HD60S which I'm hoping will serve as the long term replacement for my AverMedia Live Gamer Portable, which in itself has gradually started playing up over the course of this year too...

The main benefits I found from looking up what the HD60S can do versus my current card is that I won't have to pick between 1080p and 60fps any more, which I have had to do on two occasions now. I mainly talk about games from the 5-8th generation of consoles and don't actually own a 4K screen whatsoever so 1080p will look nice enough for me and the games I talk about!

And secondly, is that the HD60S seems to be a more "out of the box" as a USB device, working with things like OBS and Windows 10 in general a lot better than the Avermedia LGP.

Don't get me wrong I've loved using the AverMedia LGP as it's let me make all of my videos, and without it I doubt I'd have started making them when I did...

But outside of using it's own proprietary software to record gameplay footage (which like I say, has been temperamental lately anyway), the AverMedia LGP has actually been a bit of a pain in the ass to get working for streams, even more so for things like the PS2...

It's hard to explain how while typing, but you basically had to have a second program running alongside OBS that would trick it into thinking the LGP was some sort of video camera source or something... and it often didn't work!

Which is where Twitch will come into play!

Yes, so I'm going to make more tweets and mentions of this elsewhere closer to the time but for the sake of giving both the new capture card and PC a thorough testing I'm going to try my hand at livestreaming again soon with Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, and a few other games.

The PC in particular I'm sort of throwing everything I have at it... as I need to see if it's going to have any of the problems I faced last time but... thus far... nothing (fingers crossed it stays that way!)

Trying out Xbox Game Pass

So while I'm in the mood to stream and just generally put this PC through it's paces I figured I'd sign up to Xbox Game Pass for 3 months under the trial price of £1. There's like... no way that could be considered a bad deal. Even if it only offered 1 game, let alone it offers over a hundred!

So yeah, that might be useful for just playing games in my downtime during the run up to Christmas but also seeing how I could stream/record some of them. (New Super Lucky's Tale totally looks like something I'd want footage of...)

As for Crash 4...

I've already played through the game once when it launched in October, but before I make a video on it I'd like to re-experience the story and levels in their original format as well as perhaps flesh out the notes I've already made on the game from the first time so... it's a sort of double-whammy on my end really...!

So provided I'm in the mood to, I'd like to test out both console and PC streaming/recording soon!

Upcoming videos:

Now, while actual editing and writing came to a standstill a while back I have been chipping away at scripts and generally playing/recording a few games I'd like to talk about.

One of them is Crash Bandicoot 4, but there's a small selection of other games I'd like to make videos on first which will allow me to be a little more thorough on what I have to say about Crash 4.

One of those games actually has a rudimentary version of it's video semi-made thanks to me altering an older script I already had for it, and recording voiceover for it... (which I believe I mentioned last time)

But I've since gone ahead and written the next video that would come after it and feel like there's a noticeable shift in my writing, given this one is a fully new script versus one I merely tweaked from a year ago... and may re-write the first one when I have the time.

At the moment I'm just sort of wanting to focus more on talking about the games and the small details I like/dislike about them, rather than focus too much on building up to the review with overly complicated camera segements etc...

I think this has largely stemmed from the fact I've literally been unable to make the videos themselves anyway, but also I'd just like to crack on and stop slowing myself down so often.

I'll still make the odd joke here as I generally go when playing them anyway, and I still plan on writing/speaking the way I normally do but... I just feel like I'm starting to outgrow the whole "live action cartoon" visual style I've had in my camera segments thus far tbh.

It'll make those bits funnier when  do sparingly do them though!

But yeah, at the moment this series of videos (including Crash 4) is looking like a set of four, that ideally I'd like to fully make all 4 ( or a t least 3 of them) of them in advance so I can surprise people with a new batch of videos!

(Note to self: A set of four videos leading up to Crash 4 could be a fun way to market me suddenly appearing out of hiatus)

Come the new year my hours at work will likely decrease (which I'm ok with tbh... it's been very busy lately) so I can think about those videos a little more.

I've also been thinking of perhaps trying my hand at freelance work now that I have a PC that'd let me get on with that sort of work but... I'd need to figure out how feasible that is.

Anyway, that's all for now. Thanks for reading if you did!

Stay safe,
- Pete