Editorial and Articles

My Gaming Journey – Part 1 – 8-Bit Era

Last year when I did Blaugust over on [BI], I dis a series of posts about my history of computer use. I wasn’t really going to try to go all “hardcore” at posting this year, but I decided it might be fun to try to parallel that series a bit with a history of my Video Game memories.

Also, I have no idea if these are all 8-bit systems, it’s just an easy way to segment things, don’t @ me.

Like my computer use, I’ve played video games, essentially my entire life. I’ve played a lot of games. My god it’s a lot. I covered some of the PC based gaming in the other series, so I’m going to stick more to consoles for this series, at least for a while. also the break points are a bit fuzzy because I generally just, keep playing games on every system. I have the same SNES and Genesis hooked up to my TV today that I had when I was a kid. I still own my original NES. I have all of the same carts too.

My gaming journey started earlier than that a bit, with the Commodore 64 and the Atari 2600/7800. I don’t recall my family ever owning an Atari, my friend had a 7800, I think my grandparents had a 2600. I never really understood the difference, I just knew that, for the most part, the games for one worked on another. My favorite games on the Atari included River Raid, Chopper Command, and the Olympic Winter Games. River Raid was my favorite, it is essentially an early top town shooter, you control a little jet flying through a ravine avoiding the walls and enemy boats. There was also a fuel gimmick where you had to pass over fuel cells to refuel. It helped a lot to hold down and slow down.

The Commodore 64 made up a lot of my early gaming as well. We played a lot of Park Patrol and Ghostbusters, even though I never understood how to actually accomplish anything in Ghostbusters. It was still cool because Ghostbusters! Park Patrol was just silly. You were a park ranger who had to wander around rescuing drowning swimmers and avoiding turtles and snakes.

The real gaming adventure started when my grandparents bought my brother and I a NES for Christmas one year. I’m not sure the NES was technically better than the other options, but it certainly FELT better. And it only got better over time. This is the system that basically created my real love for games, starting with that classic Super Mario Brothers. My friends all had a NES as well, and we often traded titles. And between the three of us, we had and played a lot of games, both single and multiplayer.

Notable titles, off the top of my head.

Super Mario Brothers 1,2, and 3
River City Ransom
Final Fantasy
Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road
The Legend of Zelda
RBI Baseball
Willow
Contra
Life Force
Dragon Warrior
Mega Man 3
Tecmo Super Bowl
Chip N Dale’s Rescue Rangers

I also had an NES Advantage controller as well. I absolutely loved that controller. For those unfamiliar, the NES Advantage was a large flat arcade sticks style controller, that included optional turbo button toggles. These turbo buttons were an absolute blast in Super Off Road. We would play for a while building up Nitro Boosts until reaching 99, the max you could carry. Then turn ont he turbo and jet around the track super fast. It was amazing.

Probably the game I most obsessed over was Final Fantasy. I never did beat it when I was younger, but my friends and I absolutely loved this game and we played it all the time. I also had a strategy guide from Nintendo Power that I obsessed over and probably memorized. It’s an obsession that would last for a very long time as well, Final Fantasy will definitely come up again in future installments of this series.

Speaking of Nintendo Power, that was another long term love developed from this era. I started on Issue 20, with the Mega Man 3 issue, the first to feature a square binding instead of a round binding. I would eagerly anticipate the arrival of every issue. Before the internet, this was how you got news about new games coming out. And the only way to get tips and maps and guides for games. Today you can just search and get it all, but when I was a kid, you had to really hope they would cover the game you were playing at some point. And sometimes, it wasn’t the featured game, it would just get maybe half a page of hints, without any maps.

I just want to close out this era with a nod towards the Sega Master System. One of my friends has a Master System, we never played it much, and I don’t remember anything about it other than if you turned it on without inserting a game, it would load a Snail Maze game. Which was kind of neat.

Some Neat Final Fantasy Swag

Jul 5th, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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I’m a bit late on posting these, but they are still pretty cool. A few months ago, I went to the newly added “Side Quest Decatur” for the Midwest Toy and Comic Fest. It was the first year for the secondary even in Decatur, normally it’s held in Bloomington, about an hour north. It wasn’t anything super fancy, mostly just a big vendor room. I didn’t end up buying much, but I did pick up these neat custom Final Fantasy items from Rusted Icon Designs.

One is this slate coaster, with a fun reference to the Spony Bard line from Final Fantasy IV.

The second is the really nice-looking etched Shinra logo glass. Shinra being the evil corporation from Final Fantasy VII. I use this glass almost daily. It holds basically exactly one 12oz can of soda+ice, though that will put the liquid right at the brim. The etched design is very crisp and I really love the dark red color.

HDMI Cables for Retro Consoles

Jul 3rd, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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I’ve slowly been working on doing a bunch of upgrades to my console video game space. In some cases it involves elaborate changes to how things work with a particular system. I upgraded my PS2 to run from a hard drive, for example. I’ve modified my PS Mini to run more than just the base set of ROMS. I have an extra Wii I plan to try to jailbreak as well. I’ve looked into getting an Everdrive style cartridge for my N64, though those are kind of weirdly expensive.

Not everything is about playing more games though, sometimes it’s just a quality-of-life upgrade.

Like running everything over HDMI. This was somewhat born from necessity. Maybe a year or less ago, I upgraded the TV in the basement. I had been using a decent but somewhat aging RCA TV for a while. We go to a lot of Estate Sales in the area, and at one, I picked up a really nice Sony for pretty cheap. It’s slightly larger than the RCA, has a nice picture, and has more inputs. Except a lot of those inputs are HDMI. I don’t think it has any Component hookups at all, though I do think it has Composite. Over the last few months, I’ve been buying all of these cables, along with a small HDMI switch, because, I ran out of ports.

As the set up is now, I have:

A standard X-Box 360.
A modded PS2.
A modded PS Mini
A normal Dreamcast, I may or may not look into modding this
A normal N64, which I may get an Everdrive cart for
A normal SNES, which I still need to get an HDMI cable for
A normal Wii, my original Wii, the CD drive doesn’t work in it though.

I’m tempted to get a second HDMI switch, but if the Wii hacking works out I won’t need it. I can skip the SNES cable. I’ve got a Sega Genesis I wouldn’t mind connecting though. Also, with more hookups I could bring the PS3 down from the upstairs TV if I wanted to. I’m also considering getting one of those updated Atari consoles that run the old carts as well as ROMs, though I have plenty of Atari carts already.

I’m not finished getting things updated, but as far as cables go, I’m pretty close,

Adding a Hard Drive to My PS2

Mar 8th, 2024

by Ramen Junkie.

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I always kind of debate on whether project posts like this should go here or on Blogging Intensifies. On one hand, it’s a Video Game related post and project. On the other hand, It’s also kind of an electronics and technology-based project. This one, ended up here.

One of my “on the list” projects has been to upgrade some of my old consoles. Two specifically, at least initially, are the PS2, and the Wii. The Playstation 2 was always a favorite of mine, though considering how much it sold it was probably a lot of people’s favorite. I played mine the most during my time at college. I always liked to joke about how I had put 100+ hours each mastering Grand Theft Auto 3, Final Fantasy X, and Metal Gear Solid 2, then upgraded all of those for another 100+ hours each mastering GTA Vice City, Final Fantasy X-2, and Metal Gear Solid 3.

I have, somehow, ended up with several Wiis. Though my original Wii had the CD drive go out on it. Funny enough, I also have several fat PS2s, though I have only have ever really used my original one. Having spares means screw-ups are more acceptable.

Anyway, the first of these upgrade projects I have decided to do is my PS2. The plan for the PS2 was to add a Hard Drive to it and load games that way. A hard drive has the benefit of, being less prone to failure (see also, the Wii’s CD drive) and being faster for loading games. I did some research on this and came across this video:

Which I decided to go with. A friend of mine suggested a slightly altered route, modding an official PS2 drive adapter to take a SATA drive, but I decided to just go with a 3rd party one built for a SATA drive. The main difference is the 3rd party ones, don’t have a network adapter. I really have, no real interest in putting my PS2 online. If I change my mind, I can always swap it out later. These devices are pretty cheap. I expected to pay a lot because the only comparable I have is when I have priced out Dreamcast network adaptors, which are super hard to find and and always go for a LOT.

Too bad there isn’t a cheap 3rd party option there.

There are some drive compatibility lists, but I have a bunch of old smaller drives floating around, so I decided to just wing it and hope for the best on that front. So the upfront cost was just the 3rd party SATA hook-up and the memory card with the loader on it.

I will probably also eventually pick up another larger memory card later, for save games.

Buying the stuff was the easy part.

Getting it working was a bit trickier. There aren’t really any instructions for any of this included, so a lot of it comes down to looking for guides online, which are often inconsistent with each other, sometimes old and outdated, sometimes referencing different overall techniques, which are not always cross-compatible. The first step was making sure the drive would work. I decided to use one of the spare PS2s and not my original, for a few reasons. One, my original is model 30001, and both of the others are model 50001. The Amazon page for the drive adaptor I used, implied the included memory card loader would not work for a 30001 model (it was wrong, more later). I also figure if I break something, it may as well be one of the spares.

Now, a little history on these spares. A while back, I tried to set up a way to play PS2 games on a PS2 and maybe do some streaming. I didn’t manage to accomplish this because each of the three gave me different trouble, though I forget exactly what that trouble was. One I believe doesn’t power on at all, I want to say one didn’t output video. The PS2 I chose to do my testing, it turns out, the front panel doesn’t work. It didn’t recognize the memory card or the controller. So that PS2 was not going to work for this.

These two spare PS2s, I bought them something like 15 years ago from a garage sale, I want to say $10 for the pair. I remember the seller said her son had had them when he was deployed over in Iraq or Afghanistan or something. One of them, on the top, has “Don’t touch or die” written on it. I could always paint this up or get a decal or something, but for now, I didn’t want to use that one, so I just used my OG 30001 model PS2.

Also, the other spare is still slightly buried in a tote, and I didn’t want to dig it out.

Fortunately, the Amazon listing was wrong, the loader worked fine. I poked around in the menu and managed to format the drive.

Now it was time to load some games.

Which ended up being the hard part.

There are several options for loading games, I don’t entirely get the difference beyond, “PS2 uses a screwy Hard Drive Format.”. I decided to start with Winhiip, which was the first one I came across as a suggestion, even though it is apparently considered “out of date”. All of these processes are basically “out of date”, and presumably worked at some point for someone. My thoughts were, this is a 20-year-old console, how out of date could it be, and this one lets me bulk load ISOs. I loaded a subset, of games, then hooked everything up to make sure it was working. A few short minutes later, I was in a game, running off the hard drive, everything was working fine.

I pulled the drive back out to finish loading everything else. The loading was a little slow because I was loading the ISO files from one PC, off of a network share on another PC.

With everything loaded, I went through the process of getting artwork for everything and loading it to a USB drive, then hooked everything back up.

Except, now it was not working. The drive did not even show up at all. I returned it to my PC and it didn’t show up there at all either. A lot of these drives I have lying around are old and second-hand, and generally too small to be really useful. They are slightly prone to failure. After some frustration, I gave up and started over with a fresh drive. This time I used HDL Dump instead of Winhiip, because it’s supposed to be more reliable. I noticed it adds a bit more data to each entry as well. The downside is, It only works, one ISO at a time. I found a bulk loader someone had made, but for some reason, the drive doesn’t show in the bulk loader scan.

I also connected my USB SATA adapter to the remote PC directly to avoid the slowness added by the network transfer. It also had a lot more free hard drive space to dump a pile of ISO files into. After several days of running one game at a time, I finally had everything loaded… Again…

This time, it loads up just fine in the PS2, except for one oversight on my part. HDL Dump had this box where you could fill in a name. Sometimes it automatically filled in, others it did not. I mostly just, ignored it. Which means many of the games have meaningless names now on the PS2. There is a mechanism to edit and update it natively, thankfully, but I don’t know which game is what without actually loading it up. Which means loading the game, waiting through several opening bumpers, making a note, resetting the PS2, then entering the name with a tedious on-screen keyboard. I strongly recommend filling int he name box on the PC as the games are loaded.

Very strongly.

I also have all these art assets downloaded to add but it’s not clear where they go because the system seems to have several different launchers and I can’t decipher which one uses them. Frankly, a list of names works just fine for now, I’m not even sure just how much I’m going to use this whole set up in the long term. I do want to explore options again for doing video capture again, I think part of my issue before is that I was using some really old capture devices and composite video. I really need to just invest in something that takes Component and/or HDMI input.

Benn Venn Game Boy Cart Dumper

Apr 26th, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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Another device I’ve been wanting to get for a while was a Game Boy Card ripper. There are a few varieties of these, but I went with the Benn Venn Joey Jr. The key feature here, is the ability to copy off Saved files. I can get ROMs anywhere, what I really want is to preserve my old Save Files. This device does Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advanced titles.

The most important title worked right off the bat. My original Pokemon Blue is not preserved forever with my original Charizard. There are ways to get these OG Gen 1 Pokemon into modern games I really want to look into next.

Despite that so far I have had hit and miss luck getting things to work, I already wish I had one for the SNES, though those seem to be considerably more expensive. N64 would be nice as well, I’m less worried about my NES carts, most of them don’t really use battery based saves, and I can beat Zelda 1 again in a few hours.

The Benn Venn device is pretty slick. You insert the cartridge, then plug it into a USB Port, and it just shows up like it’s a flash drive. The results have been weirdly hit and miss. Maybe half of my games copied off and the save files loaded no problems. The other half either didn’t get a working save or didn’t even get a working ROM. Two I really care about that did not work that I want to troubleshoot through are Final Fantasy Legend 1, and Zelda Oracle of Ages. The weird thing is, Oracle of Seasons worked just fine.

I even tried some other ROMs of the same game with the save files and no luck yet.

Once the copies are done though, the device still has some fun uses. For one, it lets me dump photos off of my Game Boy Camera. I always have been looking a bit into ways to “hack” the GB Camera with lenses and such, but getting the files off is one important key need. I also want to see if I can write a program that will upscale the files cleanly as they are very tiny images.

I also want to try out what happens when I try to copy TO a cart. It may go immediately nowhere. I don’t have a blank ROM cart, which I will probably get eventually, but I want to try copying to a cart. I have two carts to test. One, I own an extra Pokemon Blue. Maybe I can hack a full Pokedex into the cart. I also have a bootleg Pokemon Emerald, which feels maybe more likely to work.

Either way, something I want to look into is hacking these save files a bit. I want to get my Charizard into my copy of Ultra Moon. I want to add in all the missing Pokemon from Blue. Though maybe not straight add them, try to transplant from a Red save to a Blue save maybe. Maybe these ideas will go nowhere but trying to make it work is like half the fun.