Another Spring Clean

The PSP's going, all my PAL NES games are going, some of my NTSC NES games are going, all my PS2 games bar Ridge Racer 5 are going as well. The Dreamcast.... I don't know, I really should sell it, I love it but I don't play on it, it's only there because of the memories it conjures up and I really feel it's time to move on.

New PC! From the 90s!

I finally picked up a 9x gaming PC. It's a 500MHz P3 with 128MB RAM, a 20GB HDD and a built in ATI Rage Pro. Overall it's not too bad, plays just about everything, it's a prebuilt Compaq machine and although I am quite impressed with how they managed to fit so much stuff into such a small case, it's quite limited when it comes to upgrades. I was pretty bloody excited when it came and immediately installed Windows 98 SE. For some reason it just refused to boot though and after spending a couple of hours trying to sort it out I gave up and just threw ME on there because really, all I wanted to do was see if all my old games worked, and they did!!!

ME's impressed me quite a bit actualy, it has mass usb storage drivers out of the box and had drivers for all of my hardware. The GPU drivers had to be updated of course but apart from that it was ready to go from the first start up.

In the future I'll probably build my own custom machine, this system's more of a mid to late 90s 9x machine than a DOS machine as well so I'd love to pick up some older hardware, the Amstrad Mega PC would be great to own for example. It's a DOS PC AND a Megadrive for crying out loud! And it has a dual sync monitor, it's on my wishlist.

Stolen bikes, broken consoles and moronic ebayers

My bike was stolen, chain and all. My PS3 is now on eBay as spares and buyers that have no clue what they're doing are accusing me of selling faulty PC parts before sheepishly apologising when it turns out they missed one stupidly basic step when fitting said items. Throw in some council tax bullshit and some kind of infection that took over the back of my throat, mouth and right ear and I'm just about ready for this month to end.

Goodbye Gaming PC

My Macbook Pro arrived on Friday, work have a deal set up with Apple that allows you to get a Macbook (and the OSX/Windows versions of Microsoft Office) at a discount. I've been wanting to downgrade for a while now and I've been quite impressed with the iPhone so I put in for one. All in all it's very impressive which is to be expected I suppose. I tried some games on it and it holds its own well enough. Not as great as my PC of course but that's OK. The plan now is to give some of the parts from my PC to my parents to speed theirs up and sell the rest. I'll probably buy an OEM version of Windows 7 at some point for the occasional bootcamp game before putting some money aside for a 46"-50" TV. Then I'll put a HTPC together to go under the telly and I'll be all set.

I'm also abandoning current gen console gaming altogether. So little of what's out there interests me, a couple of old consoles, the occasional handheld and Steam all do a far better job as far as I'm concerned.

Oh yeah, PIC! ^_^



I installed Steam and instantly had 47 games including Civ V. Gota love those SteamPlay titles.

My Dreamcast lives!

Why did I even doubt it? The old girl always comes back to life, she's yellowed and scratched and develops the reset fault every couple of months but she always comes back to life. I opened her up, pressed the front of the board down a bit and the led light refused to come on. I lifted it a bit and it came on, I lifted it slightly more and I got a picture! Sweet, gorgeous Dreamcast RGB :') I played some Jet Set Radio to celebrate, still as amazing as ever.

I should have some more DC games arriving very soon, can't wait to get stuck into them.

3 Dead Consoles. Christ Almighty.

My NES, my DC and my PS3 are all dead. Yes, dead. I cannot fucking believe this. I mean the DC is forgiveable, it's 10 plus years old and been on its last legs for some time now. The NES only received its routine clean however and the PS3? The PS3 hardly gets bloody used! I've been playing Megadrive games on the fucking thing this month.

This really sucks... :(

TVs, the PSP and my NES.

I really want a HD TV, I recently moved to a new place and a 42-50" would go great in the living room. The only issue is what do I do with my old TV/consoles? I can't stand how they look on anything but a CRT TV. I'm just gona have to find somewhere to put the old TV or maybe downgrade to a smaller model or something.

I picked up a PSP again, I just couldn't stay away what with all those amazing RPGs. I gave the Phantasy Star Portable 2 demo a try, not expecting much but it reignited my love for the PS series. I really want the full game but I'm torn, I could buy a physical copy but then I have to make do with disc loading, I could buy a UK PSN copy but then I'd have to authenticate my account every time I wanted to play US/UK games or I could buy the US PSN version but that costs $40!!! What a joke. I considered going back to CFW and just ripping the physical copy but then what do I do about online? I've grown very tired of the whole cat and mouse aspect of homebrew anyway.

Finally, my NES died :( It was constantly giving me the flashing lights so I opened it up and cleaned it. Nothing unusual but now it no longer works. I didn't touch anything I wasn't supposed to so I don't know how I've done it but yeah, it's gone. I'm gona have to buy another one I think...