Braglio.com

I imported the last of the old Blogger posts today. I need to clean up a few of the old links pointing to blogger permalinks. I also need to reformat the three photo journals. Strange looking back over all of those posts. One thing I notice is it takes me a lot longer to implement changes than I initially estimate.

I have been contemplating a move from the Blogger weblog service to the land of Movable Type for a while now. I searched extensively and finally found a host with the right pricing ($5 month for 333MB of space and 5gig data transfer a month) and it’s listed as a host that is Movable Type (MT from now on) friendly to boot! I’ve already tested their response time to trouble tickets. My first ticket was answered in under 20 minutes. Not sure how they manage offer this level of service for so little money.

On top of all this good news they will also register a domain name for you for $5! That’s right $5.00. No $35.00 like you are used to.

So, I registered braglio.com as well. It won’t go live for a while but once it does I will probably park the old .org domain at my host so that either address will take you there. I wanted .com 3 years ago but some Italian publishing company owned it. Their ownership expired over a year ago but I couldn’t push myself to register it when it was $35.00 to do so. But for $5? What the heck.

I’ve downloaded the MT software and installed it onto my server. Now I have to configure my weblog. I also plan to convert all of these posts over to MT. That doesn’t look too hard. Every thing I’ve read so far made it sound as if the installation is the hard part. In fact the good people over at MT offer a service to set up the program for those that can’t figure it out for themselves. They ask $40 for the first hour and $10 for every hour after that. I set it up correctly for the first time in about 2.5 hours. My main stumbling block occurred when I tried to check my installation. After submitting a trouble ticket to my hosting provider, I was up in running 10 minutes after the responded to me.

I printed out the entire MT manual and plan to read through it once or twice prior to setting up my new weblog. I’ve spent a little bit of time scanning through some of the free templates and I already have a few in mind. The MT templates are so much cleaner and professional looking than Bloggers. Two of the immediate improvements will be a calendar style archive and posts with categories. There is more than one person reading this blog that suffers from blurry vision when I go into the tech heavy posts. This way they can weed those out.

A major improvement (but a little further off in the horizon) is the ability to post photo albums. Now I won’t have to fire up the old notepad in order to wrestle html for hours to get a three or four page photo album. This will be great when it is online.

I plan to continue posting to this blog right up to the day I move over to the new host.

After four days of the new DSL modem it is clear that I need to set up my blog with a hosting service. I hate it when a hobby goes from relatively free to costing me money. The only upside to this is switching to the new DSL modem dropped my month rate by $12.00. I’m looking for a host now and will switch over in the next week or so. I will also switch to movabletype at the same time. I’m going to try exporting all of my Blogger entries into Movabletype. On paper it looks easy. We’ll see.

I now have the major pieces of the puzzle that is my MAME project. Right now I have:

An Arcade Cabinet that is currently fully functional. It was fun turning it on and playing with it when Jason lived in the area. Now that he is gone and the Man Room has no carpet it sits collecting dust.

A spare PC. My old PIII 933 is sitting in the garage waiting to be moved downstairs. I plan on cutting an access hole behind the arcade cabinet to run the control wires from the PC to the CP (control panel) and monitor. I have an extra mouse and keyboard that I plan on tucking behind the cabinet for manipulating the operating system (I’m tempted to try a version of Linux and it’s associated version of MAME).

After that my plans get a little vague. There are two major points to be resolved:

Number 1 – How to connect the PC to the arcade monitor. I have a couple of options here. The easiest choice is to purchase two parts from Ultimarc. The first part I would purchase is a J-Pac.

My arcade cabinet is a JAMMA+ cabinet. What this means is that any PCB (printed circuit board) that is based around the JAMMA standard can be quickly connected to this cabinet via an easy to use harness. So if I wanted to, I could purchase some other games via their PCBs and just swap them to play them. The JAMMA standard was pretty standard fare in the 80′s so a lot of games use it.

You will notice that the J-Pac also has a video port. This is where part #2 comes in.

In the past it was a very complicated process to run MAME through an actual arcade monitor. Because arcade monitors run at different frequencies than standard computer monitors it was entirely possible to instantly fry an arcade monitor when attempting to configure MAME correctly.

The Arcade VGA card eliminates this danger. Best of all it is based upon the ATI Radeon 7000 chipset which is nothing to sneeze at.

With these two items I could have my MAME cabinet up and running in as little as a week. Together they would cost under $200.00.

However, there is issue number two, my control panel (CP). One of the advantages of MAME is the sheer number of games it emulates. In order to play all of my favorite old time games correctly I will need to do something with my CP. The CP is the original supplied with Mortal Kombat II. Great for fighting games but no trackball for games like Centipede, no twister for games like Tempest.

The solution? Like life, there is a hard way and an easy way to gain all of the controls I need. The hard way is to design my own CP, order the individual parts and wire it up to interface with my PC. Some people have made an art form of this:

This guy has even designed a rotating CP. This allows him to play virtually every game ever released in exactly the manner it was intended to be played. It is also a tremendous amount of work.

Some people either don’t have the time (that’s me) or the know how (not me) so they go the prefab route.

This is the panel I would most likely purchase. It would handle 99% of my needs. It of course is close to $600.00 and out of my price range at the moment.

The biggest issue with purchasing one is it feels like the easy way out. Ultimately I still need to get the basement re-carpeted before doing any of this work so I’m still 2-3 months away from really digging into this little project.

Tomorrow our ISP switches us over to their new DSL network. We will be switching from a DSL modem that just passes the info on to our router. Currently the router handles logging us onto the network. Looking at the instructions, it looks like the new modem will handle that task.

The phone company tells me that we will be switched over between 10:00AM and 2:00PM. If this page isn’t back up by 7:00PM or so my worst fears will be confirmed. It is entirely possible that this new network will block my ability to run this little page from home. If so I will be scrambling to find a new home for it. I’m guessing that will take me at least a week.

We had the party this weekend and you were loaded up with all kinds of new Buzz Lightyear toys. Things I will remember about this age:

Talking about your day as you lay in bed, ready for sleep.

Trying new foods – and liking them!

Your imitation of Mom.

Your insistance on having socks with no holes in them.

Your recreating entire scenes out of your favorite movies, Toy Story and Toy Story 2.

“My blue shirt has no dinosaurs on it Dad.”

Your drawings on the Magna-Doodle.

Hope you have a great day!