hardware

Back in 2004 or so, I visited a friend out of state, and during the visit he gave me a Beeshu Zinger joystick. Yesterday, I finally tried to use it. (I've been busy, okay?)

The Zinger is weird.

It's time for me to try out another converter. This time it's the KanexPro Composite/S-Video to 4K HDMI Converter. I also chose to use the NES Star Trek game as my test game for this one, which might have been an error. You can check out the video below, but the audio is a little low. I'd like to say that this was on purpose to protect your ears from the eardrum rending tones of the worst rendition of the Star Trek theme I've ever heard, but the truth is that PulseAudio is ridiculous to try and configure, so I (surprisingly!) didn't get it set correctly.

My ongoing quest to find a replacement for my old capture card has led me to the Hauppauge 610 USB-Live 2. It's a mouthful, but it promises to do what I want. Kind of.

I was walking through my local Five Below (and if you don't have a Five Below in your area, it's basically like a Dollar Tree, except that things cost less than five dollars (if you don't have a Dollar Tree, it's like a thrift store, but they sell lower quality stuff, and everything costs a dollar or less)), and a little electronic gadget caught my eye. It was a little device with a keychain on it that promised that you got 100 games for $3. That's a pretty good game to dollar ratio, so I bought it. I mean, just look at this thing!

In my ongoing quest to find a decent USB capture device for my old consoles that doesn't cost a fortune (although, once I've tested a bunch of these, I might end up spending as much as I would have on one of the expensive ones, so I have that going for me), I decided to try the AverMedia ET111. I figured that since I was already using an AverMedia product that they should work together in harmony and everything would be wonderful.

I was almost right.

You know how computer upgrades go: the new gaming machine displaces the old gaming machine, the old gaming machine becomes the new capture machine, and the old capture machine gets parted out and sold piecemeal to finance the initial purchase. It's a story as old as time.

I was in my local Staples, looking for office supplies for totally business reasons, when I decided to check out the Clearance section. They had the usual stuff: day planners for last year, expired coffee, a notepad that fell underneath a cart and got the cover crinkled up, and so on. But they also had a portable video game player in among the Martha Stewart report covers and the fancy-pants ballpoint pens.