Gaming « Braglio.com

Heading for the finish line

CP in place

I removed four bolts from inside the arcade cabinet on Sunday, whacked it a couple times with a hammer to loosen up the paint that was holding it in place and the original control panel popped right out. The raw opening is larger than the new control panel (you can see into the cabinet now if you look along the backside edge of the new panel) so I will need to insert a bracket to both fill the gap and support the new wider, deeper panel.

I anticipate forming up a box that I will anchor to the insides of the cabinet. Then I will place a wooden ‘plate’ across the top and attach that to the box. Finally I will place the control panel on top of the plate then screw it into the plate from below. This should provide me with a rock solid foundation and prevent any movement even under heavy duty play. I’d like to have this finished by the end of February if at all possible.

After the panel is in place I will begin to work on integrating the PC into the cabinet, settling on a UI and finishing the outside as well.

Hold It Now Hit It

After shipping my MAME controller back to the manufacturer I was presented with a straight up replacement of the existing Plexiglas top and essentially trying it again as is. I was also given the option of anchoring the Plexiglas in place with several tiny black screws:

Screw Template

After mulling it over for a day I decided to go ahead with the screws. This way I know for sure that the issue is not going to occur again. My current control panel on the cabinet has these black screws on the surface and it doesn’t take away from the looks of the panel at all.

I’m hoping that I can get the panel back by the end of next week. I’m itching to tear out the old panel and begin mating up the new one to the cabinet.

100 Gaming Cupcakes

I’ve always had a special love for cupcakes. I nice chunk of cake with some sweet icing on top, I think I like them better than actual cakes. Something about pulling back the wrapper appeals to me. Go here for a collection of 100 cupcakes decorated with various games, both board and video by Robin Dahlberg who apparently is a jewelry designer by trade. A few of my favorites (in no particular order):

Zork WoW Mario
Battleship Clue Hungry Hungry Hippos Spin the Bottle Chutes & Ladders Bezerk

I think it’s a shame to eat them they all look so good.

The Christmas Report

This Christmas was like many others in our house – very much a video game year yet again. There were other gifts to be had for sure but the boys are gamers like me so I will focus on them. Some of the more notable additions to the gaming stable were:

Boom Blox:

Created as part of a joint venture between Electronic Arts and Steven Spielberg, Boom Blox is a fun intuitive game that is easy for people to learn to play. This game was far and away the favorite of the boys for at least the first 72 hours post Christmas. We could hear them laughing among themselves as they progressed through the game.

Game play is set within a virtual world that loosely follows the rules of Jenga. Towers of blocks are presented to the players with the goal sometimes being to knock them down quickly or to slowly remove pieces without letting others fall. The concept is very simple yet fun. The sequel is sure to join our game library.

New Super Mario Bros.:

The purchase of this one was pretty much required. The only truly new feature to this game is the ability for four players to play this side scrolling game at the same time. I played with the boys for 20 minutes or so and while it was fun I felt like I’d played this game so many times before that it wasn’t worth devoting the time to play this one too. I know the boys will feel differently and they did play it for a good bit over the weekend getting maybe 4 or 5 worlds deep last night alone.

Little King’s Story:

A combination RPG (role playing game) / RTS (real time strategy) created from the ground up for the Wii from heavy hitters in the gaming industry, Little King’s Story has received great reviews as a nice intro to this gaming genre for players that are new to the game. Son #1 played it for a very short time over the weekend and while the initial pacing was a bit slow I expect it to pick up and suck him in.

Scribblenauts:

Scribblenauts is an innovative DS puzzle solving game that allows the player to take their ideas and create solutions with the stylus. Can’t reach something in a tree? Scribble a ladder and use it to climb up and grab it. Son #2 did spend some time playing it but I didn’t get to see much of it happening myself.

Mario & Luigi Bowser’s Inside Story:

Son #2 loves the Mario & Luigi series and the Nintendo RPG series in particular. He tore into this one and seems to enjoy it quite a bit. I’m sure it will get played over and over by each of the boys and I will never get to try it.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village:

A puzzle game bought to stretch the thinking process of our boys, this game was highly rated in reviews with many people saying that the brain teasers are fun to figure out. I’m not sure this one made it out of the box yet.

Son #4 made out really well with many new additions to his Thomas the Tank Engine train collection. We had the family over on Friday night and everyone seemed to have a nice time.

All in all a nice Christmas for the boys, which makes me very happy.

The Finishing Touch

Saturday marked the arrival of the final piece of my MAME puzzle, the custom control panel I ordered from North Coast Custom Arcades arrived. Here it is still in the box:

CP in the box

It was packed well with a series of foam bridges sitting across the top of the panel. I was a bit surprised to see not one but 3 USB connectors hanging out of the back of the panel as I only have one open USB port on the PC running my cabinet. I’m going to have to play around with my options there. The fit and finish of the panel was very nice. I don’t think I could approach this level of craftsmanship if I had built it myself. The only issue I see is that the Plexiglas top I paid for as an extra is not completely flush in two spots. It pops up above the t-molding in two places creating a possible point where a player could catch it with a sleeve and pull it up higher. I plan to contact the seller today and ask for some advice in correcting the issue.

Closeup of CP

Here is the panel sitting in front of the cabinet before installation. It is a good bit wider and shallower than the original. This will require some building up of the base of the cabinet to get a solid fit. I plan to remove the original CP then take lots of measurements. I want the new panel to fit in seamlessly but I also want to make it so I can remove it at any time if the need should arise.

Panel on floor.

To the right of the panel you can see a USB hub. First I tried to connect it to the PC without power to the hub. The PC quickly told me that the hub didn’t have enough juice to supply all of the devices. I connected power and all 3 devices were recognized and installed. I was under the impression that all of the joysticks and buttons would be recognized by MAME once the PC found it. This was not the case as I’ve had to go into the settings for each game I want to play and manually edit them to the correct buttons. Once they are set they work great but the thought of having to manually do this for the hundred or so games I want to play is daunting. I’m hoping that I can find a configuration file somewhere that I can drop in the MAME directory and it will do the rest.

I’m hoping to have it installed over the Christmas / New Years break. I’ll post pictures of the installation when it happens.

Xbox360 & Netflix - a Match Made in Heaven?

Two months ago I purchased an Xbox 360 to fill the gaming gap that was left from my quitting World of Warcraft. One of the added bonuses for me was the ability of the Xbox to directly interface with Netflix, allowing us to download and watch both standard and high definition movies via web streaming. After two months I have found the service to be both great and frustrating at the same time.

First the good stuff; the system is fast, select a movie and it begins playing in approximately 30 seconds, briefly pausing to calculate your video quality based off of your net connection. We run an older speed DSL at home and despite that we get the highest video settings unless both of the upstairs PCs are also being used. The controller functions as a decent remote, you can pause and shuttle throughout the show just like you would any DVR program or other video. There is an option to add a show to your ‘instant queue’ allowing you to bypass the loading process. There are various outputs you can select from wide screen, grey bars, etc. I haven’t noticed if they provide subtitles or not.

The frustration mainly comes from a few simple options that most people would assume to be nearly mandatory. The biggest missing feature is a search function. There is simply no way to quickly sort the videos that are available and select the one you want. Instead the interface gives you a long line of virtual video ‘boxes’ just like you would see at the now defunct video store. This forces the user to ‘scroll’ through hundreds of choices before settling on something. Even stranger, every time we enter the Netflix menu system both the categories and the movie choices themselves change. Simply starting the Netflix up, exiting it and re-entering it can sometimes change the choices. On a few occasions I’ve seen categories that seem to be a summary of choices we might like based on what we’ve watched in the past. Other times they aren’t available. Video titles appear for one night only to be missing the next.

This service has a lot of potential and I have to say that when we do finally settle on a movie we do enjoy it and haven’t had any issues with the actual watching of the movie. The process of getting to that point is very unfinished to say the least. Here’s to hoping they will release an updated interface at some point in the future.

Front Ends

My MAME/arcade cabinet project took another step forward this week when I selected the front end I will be using to display the game choices of each emulator I will be running. Emulation doesn’t just stop with Mame – many old and not so old home arcade systems are also available. I plan to have the several Nintendo, Sega and Atari emulators available as well. Having all of these emulators available via one menu system is my goal.

In order to achieve that goal I’ve turned to MaLa. MaLa will allow me to switch between different emulators very quickly, will hide the operating system and allow for that seamless switching I’m looking for.

There are a few other options for front ends that would be nicer looking but they require more power under the hood than my PIII can supply. Additionally, MaLa is free and that makes it attractive as well.

Here are a few screenshots of how MaLa is currently configured for me and how I hope it will look when I’m done:

MaLa Gameex

I had nothing to do with the creation of these wonderful layouts, you can get them here.

When I’m finished I’m hoping to use a file tree to give each emulator it’s own look:

Mame:

Mame

Nintendo:

Main Menu Nintendo

Nintendo List

MAME Post WoW

With the monkey that was WoW off my back I now find myself with extra time to work on projects that have hung around the house for well, forever. Tops on my list is finishing off the basement or as my wife describes it ‘The Man Room’.

I’ve written about The Man Room in the past. It started out as a really ugly space with orange indoor/outdoor carpet, dark brown paneling and a stained dropped ceiling. A good friend and I ripped out the ceiling and installed a new one. We nailed new paneling over the old. It really changed the appearance of the room.

Here is what it looks like today (my boys love Gauntlet):

MK Cab One

With a Wii, Xbox 360 and blu ray player tied into a 42″ LCD and surround sound system it is a great place to game, watch movies or the big sporting event of the moment. Plenty of seating for myself and all of the boys, a big bookcase to hold numerous board games, another bookcase for multimedia. Now to finish off the next piece of the puzzle.

I’ve recently acquired the full 0.135 romset for MAME and I’m now copying it all onto an old PC that is equipped with a special video adapter that ties directly into an old Arcade cabinet that I picked up a good 6 years ago.

The cabinet:

MK Cab

It also uses a special adapter (JAMMA adapter) that connects directly to the video output of the arcade monitor and ties the control panel of the cabinet into the PC.

The video adapter ($87.00):

adapter

The JAMMA adapter ($59.00):

jpac

Tied into my old PC running Windows XP I can now launch upwards of 5000 old time video games any time I feel the old time gaming bug biting me.

The final touch is to rip off the current control panel and retrofit in a custom panel that will allow us to play games with the controls they were designed to played with. Many of my favorite games require a track ball or spinner to play and the current set up is useless for that. The hardest part of the custom panel is deciding if I should get a 2 person or 4 person panel. There aren’t many games that allow 4 people to play at once but as this is a onetime purchase I’m worried I will end up regretting the 2 player, especially with 4 boys in the house.

A two console household

My most recent birthday was a big one – forty. In order to keep the mid life crisis to a minimum in conjunction with finding a new gaming fix I was given the following:

Xbox 360 Elite
4 wireless controllers
Xbox Live Gold Membership
Halo 3
Madden 10

So far I’ve managed to get it set up, hardwired to the internet, my Live Gold membership validated and the Netflix add on installed. I played Halo 3 for about 20 minutes and Madden for an hour or so. So far I’m liking Madden a lot more than Halo. Probably because I’m used to playing shooters like Halo with a mouse and keyboard. Give it another week or so and I’m sure I will be knee deep in Halo.

The Netflix add on is fantastic. Not every movie or TV show is available but for someone like me that doesn’t get to see movies as often as the general public this isn’t a problem. All I need to do now is set up the parental controls so my boys aren’t watching things they aren’t ready for yet.

Perhaps the best part of the 360 is the ability to download so many game demos prior to purchasing them. Way better than the old PC days. I downloaded a few but haven’t had a chance to try them yet.

The look and feel of these games is so far ahead of the Wii we have, it’s a generational difference. I’m looking forward to getting a few RPG type games for myself for the holidays.

Shifting My Gaming Fix

Three or so weeks ago I finally admitted to myself that I was at the end of the line with World of Warcraft. I played the game for a long time, since the original beta in fact and after almost 5 years of playing the game – I was done. I still enjoyed the online camaraderie quite a bit and the people that I was working with (note the choice of word there) had become good friends over the year that I had helped to administer that guild. This was just my fourth guild in 5 years and the second that I was not directly in charge of. The first was disbanded by me in September of 2006 due to frustration with trying to cater to two groups of players that wanted different things from the game. The second guild I formed from the ashes of the first is still going strong. So strong in fact that it is now frequently appears in top 50 US lists of guilds. This is exactly what myself and the other people that formed it wanted to achieve and although I’m not directly involved in the management of it anymore I still feel a sense of pride with regards to their achievements. My third guild choice fluttered and exploded, leaving me looking for a new home. I found that in my last and current guild. Filled with people that have a similar mindset with regards to achieving a lot with little time I felt right at home.

The sad (or not so sad depending on your perspective) part is I found myself getting bored with the game and disappointed in where the developers were taking it. I was finding it harder and harder to find a reason to log in and play other than the ‘I have 24 other people waiting/relying on me’ reason. After some thought and discussion with the other officers in the guild I decided to take a break from the game. I imagine I won’t be back to it.

So, where too from here? I still enjoy playing games and don’t want to lose that time to unwind. I’ve been browsing a lot of gaming sites looking for games that aren’t persistent, don’t require multiplayer and aren’t a treadmill – all things that describe WoW and any other MMORPG. It’s been a good 5 years since I played anything other than WoW so I will post what I’m finding here. Who knows, maybe there are other WoW refugees that are in the same boat as me, looking to reconnect with the gaming community sans WoW.

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