VCR-related

I just published the last entry a few minutes ago even though I wrote it several days ago. But now I'm writing a new entry because I feel like it.

When I was at work more or less selling soil on Sunday I was rather board (no customers) so I was brainstorming how I want to "Super VCR Mod" to work and go. It's going to have the hardware part, the customized Windows 98 OS running it part and a custom software front-end part. Why do I get the feeling I already wrote about this? Hmmmph.

I can work on parts one and two at the same time. Part three I can plan and theorize but can't really test out until I get the thing up and running with TV tuner and video card with TV-out. On another minor level I should figure out what I want to call the thing. Maybe Something like HTPC-VR 98. What am I, a marketing department? If I ever get it up and running it'll be pretty cool though.

I did take one small incremental step a few days ago: I purchased an "ATX power button" complete with wires leading off to a motherboard. It was only $3 at Fry's. Yes, I'm $3 closer to completing it. I have also completely dismantled an old AT PC case. I'm going to use the HDD and power LEDs from it and if I can salvage it the reset functionality. I may have to use another PC case for the reset button. I need more practice with the Dremel apparently.

Then I have to decide the EXACT features I want to add to the thing. I was for some reason contemplating putting in a small LCD monitor that would some how attach and could be used when no other monitor was available. Through one method or another I found a source of LCD screens at Parts Express. If I could some how attach a screen like that I think this would about the coolest mod ever. Of course the screens are limited to only 640x480 resolution but I don't know what I would use the screens for anyway. Watching movies maybe?

The things I have to figure out are how to mount the motherboard, how and which button on the VCR to assign to the power button, how and where to attach the LEDs for the HDD and power, and of course how and where to put in the CD-ROM. That would seem to be the hardest part. There's really no useful gaps any where on the thing to enlarge enough I could allow for a space for the CD-ROM tray to come out. Except maybe the connector panel located on the front.

That's actually a good idea. My original plan was to actually make those work via "couplers" but those connectors would be more useful on the traditional back of the unit. So I can conceal the CD-ROM behind this panel but attaching the panel to the tray of the CD-ROM. When the tray is retracted you can't tell it's there, when ejected the thing comes out with the panel attached. Hopefully there is room in that part of the case I can fit a CD-ROM.

I also need a place to attach a HDD and a power supply. The HDD may not be that hard as I have a HDD "mounting kit" designed for puting HDDs in 5 1/4" drive bays. With that I would need some where to attach that, like to plexi-glass or wood or whatever. As for the power supply I would need something both quite compact and really quiet as I am planning on having this PC in the living room and left on for large amounts of time.

Speaking the noise level I will also be buying some sound absorbing matting since I obviously won't be installing a window and one of those super-silent heat sinks for the processor.

On the note of plexi-glass I think this is what I was going to use for the shelf that will hold the motherboard. I have done more hours of google searching for information on screw-hole distances than I care to admit however today I finally found the information I was looking for (PDF). Maybe I can convince fry's to sell me a peice of plex-glass with the holes already in it that I saw there in a demonstration product a few days ago, but I doubt it.

Upon some further inspections of the gutted VCR I still have in the garage I disovered contrary to the last entry, no I can't fit a normal-sized CD-ROM on the bottom so I can attach the input/out panel to the disk tray and conceal it in a neat way. However I can go crazy with a dremel and try to work it out that way. In fact it has become quite evident I didn't gut the VCR nearly as much as I could have so I did some further gutting. Now I need to get creative with the dremel take out some shelving I don't really need.

Well I suppose to could go on longer but instead I'm going to bed. I hope this was a good entry.

_____


  ¶ 12:08 PM 0 Comments

 

atari?

I've decided if my life were ever exciting enough to warrant an auto-biography it would be called I need a creative outlet: stop looking at me like that. This is based on the looks I have received after telling people I like writing because I need a creative outlet. The look is either "man, you're fucking weird" or "shit, you're smarter than you look". Or maybe it's something else, I don't know. Of course even in the unlikely event my exciting life warranted a biography I would hardly be egotistical enough to actually write a book on it. And no, I wouldn't consider this blog the same thing.

Don't know why I started this entry off with that. For some reason I just thought of that title the other day. If that doesn't sum up the first 25 years of my life I don't know what would. Insert several clichéd paragraphs whining about how no one has understood me my whole life here...

For the actual entry today was my last day for my part time weekend job. If I never see another bag of soil the rest of my life it will be too soon. Unless I take up the same job again in August. Pffff. Probably won't.

After work I went to the famous flea market which happens to be down the road from where I worked. There I found a few more Atari 2600 games. I over-payed by a bit per the usual but I only bought the 4 out of 10 rarity rated games. I may or may not have paid too much and if I did it surely wasn't by much. The funny thing is I was about to leave because I had seen everything in what is obviously the flea market section but decided to explore slightly more any way. I was walking through the other section that makes a rather large chunk of the premises and happened across a vendor seemingly selling nothing but shoes and a few other assorted items but there for some odd reason was an Atari 2600. So I ventured a bit further in and...damn what must have been 50+ Atari 2600 games and probably 150+ NES games. I was shocked to find a rather large cache of video games in a place I would least expect it. I had my rarity booklet with me so I checked a few of the games I didn't recognize (I've read that list enough times now I'm starting to almost know what to look for).

It was at this time that the vendor owners started talking to me and mentioned a lot of people had come by with with books similar to mine (actually I printed out the rarity guide and put it in a binder, book is close enough) and wanted to know why and what the deal was. So I explained it was a rarity guide and that I wanted to find the good ones. I even let him look at the binder I had for a bit. He didn't (I think fortunately) seem too interested in it. I asked why he wouldn't be and he said he though he was better off saving his sanity and just selling the games as he was as opposed to obsessively keeping track of rarities. I can respect such a philosophy, sure.

The strategy I think I have developed, ya see, is to get as many as the commons as possible via eBay buying in some-what large lots. That I get the carts pretty cheap a piece. Eventually I'll have all or almost all the commons that way and I can pick-and-choose a few at a time at the flea market to fill in the proverbial gaps. In theory. I did just look up on ebay one of the games I got today at the flea market and the sold price was $5.71 with shipping, which is more than I paid (for once). The other two games I got today were a lot less than that however. I should really remind myself the rarity guide at Atari Age is merely an approximate guide and not the proverbial gospel. By the way there's a list of my games at right should such a thing interest you.

In other news I'm still working on the long article about with Windows 98 project but I haven't nearly as much because I was asked by a family friend to work on a malfunctioning PC. It's been about 3 days now and I can honestly say Maxtor MaxBlast/overlay software is really annoying and I wish it never existed. But after three days I can safely assume that's the reason the damn second drive won't successfully get recognized.

Ya see he's using a some-what old AMD K6-III so the BIOS doesn't really recognize 80 gigabyte HDDs. So Maxtor had him install special software so Windows would recongize the whole size but DOS would not. This also screwed up the whole process of adding his old 12 gig HDD as a secondary for access to old files and some external storage. In so far as it don't work. And I can't remove it without formatting one or both drives as far as I know. So it's very frustrating. Of course simply creative two partitions, one 30 and one 40 for instance, would also have solved this problem. Minor detail and it's too late now.


  ¶ 8:34 PM 0 Comments

 

"Rubberband's on the other claw, now"

In the news this time I'm (still) writing an all-encompassing article on how to make a "diskless" Win98 system. I'm (estimated) less than 1/2 way through but have written 6 (5 1/2 actually, who's counting?) pages, single spaced. I do have a lot of spaced bulleted lists though. Don't forget that part. I'm going to put a lot of it on separate pages as "for further details" pages. And also span the article over several parts.

There's also the Atari game collection I'm going through at the moment. Right now I have about 51 carts. I've added a link to the list at left. That's 51 more than I had a month ago. Now I just have to get rid of the duplicates I've accumulated via the two auctions I won via eBay. I should really learn to put a watch on an auction before setting an upper limit bid on four different auctions at once. I won two out of the four. I'm just glad I didn't win all four. The link at left uses an HTML feature called an ordered list. It's extremely easy to do, and you don't even have to know how to count. So why can't anyone on eBay figure this out?! It's really not hard people. And it would make your auctions so much easier to read.

Another thing: my last entry was actually written last Friday before what I thought would be work. However upon arriving at the site I learned the job had been canceled for that night. So that's 4 weeks in a row with at least one day canceled. So I went back to the relatives' house, made some phone calls and contemplated going back Friday night versus Saturday as planned. And that's what I did. This freed me up to go on a bike ride with a friend on Saturday, which was a lot of fun if not completely exhausting. I rode about 10 miles total. That's a lot for me bicycle or not. Sunday I worked selling soil once more. Monday one of my parents purchased a cell phone for me so I wouldn't have to borrow one for work purposes. That turned out to be for not because in addition to the job for Monday getting canceled, I later found everything entirely for this particular project had been canceled. So although still enrolled in the original company that hooked me up with this project, I am now out of a job. I'm starting to think the other job I had to turn down would have been better to take. I'm hoping I'll have something else within a week or two (I'll find out, won't I?).

In other news I decided to buy another copy of GameDrive, a CD emulator that mounts virtual "images" of copy-protected games. I went down to Fry's Electronics (a cult favorite on the West Coast) and say they had two versions of the software: a "version 8" and a "Pro version". The pro looked to have more features yet it was $20 versus $30 for the version 8. Being the logical person I am I purchased the extra-feature ridden version for the $20. The reason I buy another copy, ya see, is that you're actually buy a year-long subscription to the publisher's "auto-update" service. As new games are released with new copy protection methods new updates are released to get around them. You only get a year's worth of updates at which point you have to buy a new subscription. I tried installing my new GameDrive Pro but it didn't work with the auto-update. So I sent an email explaining how I just bought it but it didn't work. So the company sent me a link to they're version with even more features, VirtualDrive along with a working serial number for the updates. So for $20 and an email I got a $40 piece of software. I just hope no one at the company sees this and tries to take it back. Odds are against that happening. And now you know why Fry's has the cult status it does :). The main advantage of VirtualDrive over GameDrive is the ability to convert from Virtual/GameDrive's proprietary CD image format to regular ISO image format for easy burning to blank CDs of course. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds sweet.

Well that's all I can think of for now, so I'm going to bed.

  ¶ 5:00 AM 0 Comments

 

"It's a big one...and it's made of chocolate!"

I haven't posted in more than a week, but I have an excuse this time: I've been working. Well not so much last week but this week has been and will be non-stop.

Technically it's not really 40 hours, closer to 35. It's certainly better than between 7 and 14 though, as in the last few weeks. And better than nothing.

Today and yesterday I was replacing hard drives in a really large number of Dell computers at a famous name-brand hospital branch. Seems they recently made a sizable (every hospital location in CA, a lot) purchase of Dell computers with Maxtor HDDs, which turned out to be defective. Or the case was improperly designed so the HDDs were too hot and failed. Either way all Maxtor drives are being replaced with another brand. So I record information about both drives, hook up the new on tandem with the old, boot from a floppy to copy the information from the old to the new and reboot the machine. Basically. There's actually more to it than that but lets not get into details. It now takes me about 20 minutes to do one computer. Which I guess is pretty good.

Didn't, as far as I know, make any screw-ups yesterday but I only apparently did about 5 computers. Others were doing multiple computers at once, which should be easy enough when I'm writing down all the necessary information so I can't get anything mixed up. But I continued with one at a time. Today most-likely I'll try doing more than one at once.

Now I'm trying to figure out if this sort of semi-exciting driving from location to location stuff is actually what I want to be doing as opposed to driving to the same location every day, blah-blah-blah. Who knows? I mean inside these hospitals the floor plans seem almost identical so it doesn't much matter it took me 90 minutes to get to that location because it looks like the one 20 minutes from where I live on the inside. I do get to work with more-or-less different people every week though. I suppose I'll eventually meet them all and know them all well. This strikes me as a high turn over sort of position to I'll probably be meeting different people all the time anyway if I stay with this job.

I mean I would like to stay with this company a while anyway otherwise I won't have much reason to put this on my resume. At most I think it will take maybe another 2 or 3 weeks. That's only 5 or 6 weeks. I have learned an awful lot but it just doesn’t seem to be enough time to brag about really.

So I'm staying down near Walnut Creek, at a relative's house. Which was nice of them to do really. I didn't really want to commute this every day this week. I haven't been doing too much. Yesterday I just went to my sister's place, which is also nearby, to get some stuff I left over there on Monday. Ok so I brought my computer with me for some reason. But hey I could have needed it, who knows? I haven't needed it much yet. I though if I wanted to watch a movie or play a game I could just hook it up. But today so far I've just checked email and made this blog entry on my relative's computer and that's it. Nice to have the option though. I just realized everything I typed up to now has been pointless.

I would like to mention the long-waited season finale of The Shield I watched last night. As you may expect the main lead star of the show did the whole "pining-for-Emmy" moment or moments. But it wasn't some sell-out over-the-top symbolist dream sequence crap. I thought it was real and authentic and a natural progression of the season. I only missed one episode this season but the finale still made sense I think. This third season is, in my opinion, the best of the three seasons.

Expanding on the above has anyone else ever noticed how shows really going for a "gimme an Emmy" approach always have dream and/or musical sequences? There's Third Rock From the Sun, musical dream sequence won an Emmy, symbolism-ridden dream sequence episode of MASH, not sure it won but I know that episode was nominated, this season's Sopranos, long boring symbolism-ridden dream sequence, obviously pining for a nomination for Gandalphini and the show as a whole. But the The Shield didn't sell out like that. It did have an extremely amazing performance from the main star, but no dream sequences! Or I'm the only one who notices lame dream sequences with no point but to get an Emmy nomination.

There's also HBO's Deadwood, a western with extremely good writing. A seeming tribute to the ability to use the "7 worst words" the other commercial networks can't ever use, especially in these days of arguably over-zealous decency enforcement from our friends at the FCC. And forget about what effect such material has on little kids, this show is starting to have an effect on my 52 year old father. That show and The Shield deserve some sort of award or other recognition, but as is expected The Sopranos will most likely win.

I should mention I wrote this entry over three or four days.

So Wednesday night was a very bad night on account of the psychotic poalish guy I have to work with. Hopefully I won't ever work with him again, it's entirely too stressful. Last night (Thursday) wasn't that bad on the other hand. I just swap hard drive after hard drive. I'm starting to get some what better at it, I guess. We're doing nothing but NT4 machines. I guess those have more data because they take 5 minutes to ghost versus a minute and a half for the Win2k machines. I think I did four or five machines last night, I lost count. Takes about 25 to 30 minutes a machine. How that worked out to 7 hours I'm not sure. At least I got out on time last night.

In other news I got into the "gmail" beta via this nice blogger thing here. The service is still in beta but seems to be very common so account invites aren't worth $30 as they were about a month ago. On eBay gmail accounts are worth about a penny, as I saw when I researched the proposition. It is worth noting Yahoo! mail now allocates 100 megs of space, as opposed the 4MB allowed last week. Perhaps that sent the market price for Google's email service down a bit. I did get an extremely good account name for my gmail account so I will have it if I need it. Took about 10 minutes (using Google) but I found a Gmail checking utility, it is called GTray.

I suppose that's all I have to say for now. I brought my PC down with me in case the mood struck but it's now almost 2:00pm on Friday and I didn't use it. So there wasn't much point in bringing it. I didn't work on the win98 project or play any games. Didn't have time really. I have to get ready to go around 2pm as it stands if I want to leave at a decent time and not hit bad traffic. The place I am currently working for is only about 10 minutes down the freeway when there's no traffic.

Ok maybe I'll explain the title: it's from Whose Line (as usual). Two cast members were doing the "selling a compilation CD" bit. One says something like "2000 songs on one CD" then adds "it's a big one...and it's made of chocolate!". I thought that was a pretty good line. But as you know I have a weird sense of humor.

  ¶ 12:19 AM 0 Comments

 

"26'd"

This happened more than a week ago but I forgot to mention it for two entries. Just that I saw Shrek 2 with a friend of mine and I liked it a lot. It was again pretty "edgey" for a PG kid's flick. That's the reason there were so many adults who see that with no kids with them. And at the end after a couple minutes of credits is a second little clip to add something to it. A minor plot thing I predicted at the start. Puss in boots has be one of the best characters ever. And the subtle references to things only the 25+ crowd could possibly appreciate (as in the first).

For anything else nothing has happened. I did price some 2600 carts at the flea market than price them on ebay with shipping included for comparision. The best price on the carts at the flea market, that I could find, was 3 for $5 or $1.66/cartridge. On ebay with shipping included it's more like ~$1.20 a cartridge. Still trying to figure out if it's worth it to pay the 3/$5 or deal with the shipping and the waiting and the headache of waiting for the mail. Or I could just be patient and wait to find cheaper carts at the flea market, garage sales or whatever. There were other people selling 2600 carts at the flea market, but those were all either $2 or $3 a piece (which really makes no sense).

Have done a little updating to the Super VCR Mod page, but really I need to figure out what I'm going to do with that thing before I can do any real serious work.

I did finally test old "Scully", the server, HDD and it's officially dead. The old bitch finally keeled over. I suppose this is fine, I'll just use it for my new theoretical Win98 boot project I'm working on. The one involving a CD and a USB thumb drive.

I did get another email about a job today. Of course it's in an office that would be a 90 minute commute each way for me. And I don't know how much it would pay or how many hours I would work. So I'll give them a call and see what happens.

Well that's it for tonight.

  ¶ 9:45 PM 0 Comments

 

""

Since my last post I did, in fact, show up at a local location for the next part of the job. This time we (myself and several other technicians) setup a few dozen computers in a new building that was just about completed. Tuesday was a learning day for me, Wednesday I must have had one too many caffinated mints because I did my assigned computers way faster than the other two guys. I was more than a little tired at the end of the day but I thought it was worth it.

On Wednesday I ended up odd man out (didn't speak up fast enough) and two of my co-workers went home while I and a few others helped load a bunch of stirophome from several hundred LCD monitors from an upstairs office to a truck outside. I definately wasn't dressed for such an occassion or expecting this. I was really hot and I had the wrong shoes so my feat really hurt. But I'm not whining. After all, I'd rather have the extra time and build up the proverbial karma then leave early or not be there at all but at home playing a computer game or making blog entry....oh.

Anyway I was supposed to do more HDD replacements Thursday and Friday, but after showing up to the location I learned "local IT" didn't know we were coming so the job was cancelled for both days. And again I say "employment feels a lot like unemployment". I got a call offering a job (with no interview ;) on thursday too, before I found out it was cancelled. The job offer was from a staffing firm who said "I need a yes/no right now, you start tomorrow or Monday at the latest". So I had to turn it down. Now I'm not sure I did the right thing.

I was originally told this was only a 4 week long thing. I'm two weeks into it and I've worked a grand total of three days. What the hell good does $15/hour do me if I work three days in two weeks?! Bah! Maybe it's "temp-to-hire" and I will be offered at the end or something. I don't even know what will happen at the end. Will the original company call me? Will I just keep getting more schedules as if I work there? Who knows. I should probably ask.

In other news my latest irrational interest is still going (collecting Atari 2600 games). I bought 7 more games just yesterday (Friday, when I would have been working likely). I paid $16 for 7 games, which comes to ~$2.30 a peice. Yeah, it's a bad price. I realize this. At least my collection is that much larger, right? I now have a staggering 14 games. Only about 986 left to go ;-). Or if the list on Atari Age is any indicator there's approximately 850 games out there, which means I have about 836 left to collect. May as well be a thousand, I mean jeaze. I'm certainly not going to be paying more than a $1 per cart from now on though. I'd like to collect but not that badly...

In other related news (eh?) I spent a large portion of yesterday, while not working, looking at The Atari 2600 Portables Site. As the name implies this guy has transformed real circulating 2600s into work portable systems. He even has several different versions. The latest edition he has is way better than the first and he's even improved battery life significantly.

But wait, that's not all. He's also worked on making a bunch of ther consoles portable. Besides the several revisions of the 2600 portable, so far there's the SNES and PS1 portable editions. The PS1 actually doesn't have any cover over the CD, it just sits there and spins. Works too.

He's seems to currently be working on a portable NES which he admits will much harder due to the sheer size of the carts. So instead of using an actual NES and gutting it he found these pirated "NES on a chip" type toys. Kind of like the joysticks with Atari games built in you just hook to a TV (found at Radio Shack etc.). But these actually pirate/bootleg stuff presumably off the boat from some Pacific Rim location.

He decided to use these things as his base for the portable NES. He figured out it actually had a pin alignment in line with that of the Japanes version of the NES, called the Famicon. The only difference between the NES and Famicon is some sort of lockout on the NES and the number of pins involved. He also found out some how that the very early games (Gyromite, Duck Hunt etc.) actually had the connectors for the Famicon inside the cart followed by some sort of attachment to make it work with the American NES. So he smashed up Gyromite and made his own converter. Of course there's soldering involved and any number of other complicated things that are easy to screw up.

Now I actually did a google on these pirate NES game things and found out it's all kinda shady, way too expensive and something like 50/50 chance it won't work or will have something wrong with it (or will blow up in your face). Also I actually found a vendor selling these in the open and without shame at the flea market I like to frequent. I didn't ask how much however. So why do these people get away with such a thing but the DMCA likes to sue 12 year olds and low-income grandmothers? Wow, I hate how that sounded.

But I digress. I likely won't ever build a portable NES, out of pirate NES-on-a-chip toys or anything else.

The only thing that would be really cool is the portable 2600. Then if nothing else I could take it with me to the flea market and test games before I buy them. Then say "give me this one cheap: it doesn't work! (see)". Just don't want to get mugged and have some one steal it is all. The other thing I would do is make a "home brew sega nomad".

The Sega Nomad, in case you don't know, is something Sega released a few years ago that was something like a Game Gear/GameBoy but took and played Gensis games. However anyone who has asked about making a Genesis into a portable on the "2600 Portables" site forums will get "you know about Nomad, right?" in response. Well ok I want a home brew nomad then. The flea market has about 3 Genesis at every other vendor apparently. So I could use one of those as practice instead of ruining my one perfectly good 2600. Did all that make sense? Doubt it.

Also on that subject my 2600 does in fact work. Turns out the AC adapter was hosed so I went to Radio Shack and bought a new adapter. For $20. That was way too much but I did learn the 2600 works. I also learned I already had a perfectly good AC adpater with the same voltage and polarity as the original 2600 AC adapter but with the wrong power connector (the original AC adapter has a connector that looks like a mini headphone stereo jack). So I took the expensive replacement AC adapter back and with the help of my Dad soldered the Atari connector onto the other AC adapter. Wow, what a hacker.

Now all my games work of course. That'd be too much to ask :)

I remember I did buy an Atari 7800 a few years ago. I didn't realize at the time it would compatible with 2600 games (which I know now). So I can still test 2600 games if I break my 2600 system or whatever.

I think a portable SNES would be cool also. Although I let someone borrow my SNES with all the games and it got "stolen" (which I may or may not believe) so I would have to start from scratch to even use or test it. And those games still aren't too cheap either.

And, of course, I was saddened by the death of beloved President Reagan. I was too young to really appreciate him at the time but I know he did do a lot for this country and the world. He will be sorely missed.
  ¶ 7:47 PM 0 Comments