September 2023 Report (Patreon)

Well this new Patreon logo stinks.

Anyway, time for another status update! Once again, this has been a month mixed with working on scripts, real-life work, tinkering with new hardware and yes, enjoying games. It's all still a wacky balancing act I'm trying to get right. And you know, the whole Nintendo Direct thing happened.

On an unrelated note, this month I completed Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast and the recently released fan translation of the first Legendary Starfy game on the GBA! You'll hear more about my thoughts on them in my end-of-year game review video. Oh yeah, I'm gonna have to work on that in like 2 months. Ohhhh boy.

New videos

On the main channel, a new Short about the TurboRAM N64 Expansion Pak was released! It is definitely one of those topics that I think fits the 60-second formula perfectly as something that's mildly interesting. I actually had a video idea where I just go through a whole bunch of things in my collection that aren't worth a full video, and this Expansion Pak was actually among the subjects! That idea still sounds neat though, so it's still sitting in my long ideas document lol

And on the Plus channel, I unboxed a complete in box copy of the original GBA Play-Yan! Most of the differences between the original Play-Yan model and the revised Micro version are basically just the UI and the additional minigames, so I figured a Plus channel video would serve as a suitable follow-up video to the 2018 core video.

As a bonus tidbit, I ended up going on a hunt for an additional SD card that works with the Play-Yan. I picked up a 2GB SD Card at a flea market a while back (it turns out flea market stalls selling old digital cameras are starting to be popular with young folks and people from mainland China because of the a e s t h e t i c s), but that didn't work either, but a second purchase with a 1GB SanDisk card finally worked, and looking at the list of supported SD cards on the official Nintendo website, I'm suspecting that anything above 1GB doesn't play nice with it at all. So uhhh...if anyone is looking to buy a Play-Yan out there, now you know!

And finally, I posted some high quality footage of the Play-Yan software in action on YouTube for archival purposes! There actually isn't a lot of those on the site, most of it is either blurry capture footage or camera footage of it running of a Game Boy Player. I'm able to record the footage using a...actually we'll get to that in a bit!

The Joy of Nintendo DSi/3DS Camera & Sound

Writing continues on this video as I start to realize this may have the same depth as the AR Games core video and not just a silly small topic once again! Reading through all those Iwata Asks interviews about the 3DS has given me quite a bit of insight on the software development for these system apps, so I think some of these will end up as interesting tidbits throughout the video. But to give you a general overview, I've finished the parts about the DSi apps and am currently writing about the 3DS Camera, so I'm 3/4 of the way there, and the script is like 9 pages at this point. Hooh.

In addition, as of this post, I'm currently attempting to get an upgraded 3DS capture card setup! My 2DS Katsukity capture card has served me well for the past 5 years, but once I heard that Loopy is back in the business of capture card installing for New 3DS XLs, I immediately had to go find an extra unit lol (and thankfully for a really good price because MAN 3DS prices have been going up lately)

I'm hoping this upgrade will solve some minor issues I've been having with my current capture card on my PC such as audio stuttering, and the ability to capture footage related to the 3D functionality (in 2D obviously) would be a plus for something like talking about the 3DS cameras themselves! The whole process will take a few weeks, but I imagine I'll still be working on writing or recording the script then.

Writing is always the part of production that takes the longest for me, so in the meantime, I do have another small filler video in mind...

The SNES Mouse and Famicom Keyboard on...wait we've done this before

Yes, back in 2021, I made a video where I tried using both the SNES Mouse and Famicom keyboard on a computer via the Retrode 2 and Raphnet Famicom to USB adapters. The thing is, I was using it on my MacBook Pro at the time, which introduced some minor issues on the Mac side, and while I was able to run a Windows VM on it, I couldn't demonstrate it in a lot of games because...y'know, I was on a VM.

So now, one PC upgrade later, I figured it would be a neat opportunity to revisit this setup, and for the occasion, I've picked up a SNES to USB adapter from Raphnet as well! (Totally not because I've sold the Retrode 2 since then)

I now have plenty of games in my Steam library to test this setup out with, as well as a few wacky outliers (including the much-requested Mario Teaches Typing), so if there's any particular game you'd like to see me do with this setup, let me know in the comments or the Discord server!

Some other miscellaneous upcoming things

Aside from the core video still being worked on plus that small idea up above, there are a few upcoming...things that may be of interest! First of, I've been working with...some YouTube mutuals to perhaps...make some other appearances outside my channel! This is probably the vaguest I can make this sound, and since you'll probably not be seeing the results of this work until a few months later, uhhh idk either wait in suspense for a long time or forget about it and get jumpscared by me eventually.

And here's a surprise...Nintendo Live is apparently coming to Hong Kong! It'll run for two days from November 25 to 26. It's still a little bit away, but I will definitely be attending and documenting the experience like I did with the Kirby Pop-Up Store a while back. There will apparently be official livestreams of the event, though I imagine that's more so for the competition events. Either way, I'll let you guys know once more details emerge!

Recent pickups

As for recent pickups, if you recall the Dreamcast from last month's report, after a whole bunch of parts swapping and upgrading later, I now have a Dreamcast modded with a GDEMU ODE (optical drive emulator), which is how I was able to complete Sonic Adventure!

As for the major pickup of the month...

Here's an Analogue Pocket! Now, I know there's a LOT that can be said about these things and that would be a super deep dive. First of all, I know how hard these things are to buy -- Analogue's store has them selling out of stock constantly and that's its own problem -- but in my case, I was able to get one from a local trade, which is lucky since I would've had a hard time getting one even if I wanted to otherwise. I even managed to pick up a Dock well below MSRP from a Suruga-ya website find!

Secondly, there's quite a bit of confusion regarding this thing when you look at it from a layman's perspective, since while the concept of emulation is pretty well-understood at this point, FPGAs are...not quite at that level yet. It is technically easily explainable (reprogramming chips to behave like original hardware on a transistor level), but the advantages this offers over emulation isn't really applicable to most casual gamers who will scoff at it and go "220 USD for this is too expensive!!". I will say, I'm really loving the idea of having a portable device with an overkill 1440p screen that can accurately play all these retro platforms on the go, but as for whether or not I will get a lot of mileage out of this thing...that's a question for the future!

So far, I played through the Densetsu no Stafy GBA fan translation on this thing, and it's holding up very well. Perhaps in the future, once I dive deep enough into this thing's functionality, I can make a video talking about it sometime, who knows!

And finally...a PS3 joins the family.

This is gonna be weird.

That's it for this report! I'll see you all next month!