The Spam Thread!

[huckleberrypie]

Hmm... this ReShade thing is interesting. I had to look it up to make sense of your video, to be honest. So with ReShade, you can inject things like ambient occlusion and better lighting effects in real time from what I'm reading.

As for me personally, I'm finally making headway on getting my backlog of old VHS tapes converted to MP4/MKV files. Once I get good transfers of these old tapes, I plan on discarding most of said tapes to free up space and reduce baggage, in case I ever have to move somewhere. Tapes that are far more important to me or have sentimental value I am keeping.

I was also playing through another Chinese bootleg game... Super Contra 8. It's the exact same game as the other Chinese Contra knockoff, Super Contra 7. The only difference is an English title screen. It actually could be a rather decent Contra clone if it weren't for the bad enemy placement and enemy bullets that sometimes spaz out and bounce uncontrollably on screen.

Indeed. A lot of games can be given a facelift with this tool, provided you can access the depth buffer in some way which is how ambient occlusion and screen-space GI effects can be injected. I was able to shove in AO effects to the Barbie game as the buffers can be poked into with some tweaking, but that is unfortunately not the case with Disney's Tangled as I couldn't get any depth buffer-dependent effects to load up.

[cpd2009]

I'm sure you remember BonziBuddy. I actually remember downloading this to my family PC back in the day, but ended up uninstalling soon after. The program crashed upon first launch. Figures.  

But yeah, the little purple gorilla has seen new life in the 2010s thanks to YouTube and the fact the ad tracking servers are no longer active.

[huckleberrypie]

BonziBuddy was also harshly chastised for COPPA violations as it collected personal information from minors amongst other things.

[cpd2009]

Played some Pinball FX3 earlier tonight, and found out Zen Studios offered a free "care package" of three different licensed table packs for those stuck at home. They consist of Star Wars, Marvel, and Alien tables. Once you download them, you can keep them forever. (well, granted if Steam keeps it's promise to let users keep their purchased games should they ever go out of business)

I also took note of the graphical performance while playing one of the Williams pinball table recreations. The graphics are far better than the Switch, with more realistic lighting effects and smoother appearance overall.

[huckleberrypie]

Played some Pinball FX3 earlier tonight, and found out Zen Studios offered a free "care package" of three different licensed table packs for those stuck at home. They consist of Star Wars, Marvel, and Alien tables. Once you download them, you can keep them forever. (well, granted if Steam keeps it's promise to let users keep their purchased games should they ever go out of business)

I also took note of the graphical performance while playing one of the Williams pinball table recreations. The graphics are far better than the Switch, with more realistic lighting effects and smoother appearance overall.

The benefits of having a high-end graphics card with you lol. Not to mention that videos do render faster on Vegas overall with AMD VCE enabled.

[huckleberrypie]

On top of being already a pariah as far as mainstream social media outlets are concerned, Google finally yanked Alex Jones's InfoWars app from the Play Store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai...s.official

My friend and I tried to report the app previously to no avail, but it looks like it took the human malware debacle for Google to ban Jones's app off the platform for peddling misinformation. Not that it won't keep his sheeple from mirroring it, or for other Cloudcookoolanders to develop alternative clients and upload it to F-Droid, but at least that's something of a victory.

Perhaps ironically enough, InfoWars's terms of service states:

You will not post anything libelous, defamatory, harmful, threatening, harassing, abusive, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, racially or ethnically objectionable, or otherwise illegal.

Remember: you are a guest here. It is not censorship if you violate the rules and your post is deleted.

Yet he and his merry band of imbeciles have constantly violated the very same rules they drafted. Or maybe that's just the skooma they regularly ingest.

[cpd2009]

I was planning to record some shows off cable TV using Daffodil, and I discovered the audio has a very loud buzz sound. It's a ground loop issue.

Turns out the source of the ground loop buzz is the CATV line coming out of my wall. Disconnect the CATV from the cable box and the buzz goes away... and so does my cable TV.

I have two options.
1 - Purchase a stereo ground loop isolator box for the audio cables going to Daffodil.

2 - Find an HD capture device that supports analog HD recording. I found such converter box on eBay. It's a Pyle PVRC75, with hardware H.264 encoding, USB flash drive support (no need for a PC if USB recording works well) and support for analog HD input. A used unit costs around $80 USD give or take.

[huckleberrypie]

I was planning to record some shows off cable TV using Daffodil, and I discovered the audio has a very loud buzz sound. It's a ground loop issue.

Turns out the source of the ground loop buzz is the CATV line coming out of my wall. Disconnect the CATV from the cable box and the buzz goes away... and so does my cable TV.

I have two options.
1 - Purchase a stereo ground loop isolator box for the audio cables going to Daffodil.

2 - Find an HD capture device that supports analog HD recording. I found such converter box on eBay. It's a Pyle PVRC75, with hardware H.264 encoding, USB flash drive support (no need for a PC if USB recording works well) and support for analog HD input. A used unit costs around $80 USD give or take.

Haven't actually watched cable in over a decade, largely as the programming is getting stale and repetitive when Dad had our cable subscription shuttered in 2003, and that the breadth of internet TV programming has made it very much moot.

In other news, the 2.1 speakers on my main gaming rig kicked the bucket again, and it doesn't help that this plague-induced lockdown has made logistics a royal pain in the arse.

[cpd2009]

Do those speakers use an AC adapter or is the PSU inside the subwoofer? I've come across issues with electronics where the AC adapter/power brick was at fault and the device started working once I found a suitable replacement. Finding the right voltage/polarity can be tricky. Rusty currently uses that Sony CMT-MX500i that I had to fix due to that shipping damage. It sounds rather good. Daffodil is using some old Sony iPod speaker dock I found at the flea market.

As for cable, yeah, it's a bit spendy, but I still like just changing through channels and finding what's on. There's still a channel here called Qubo that airs a lot of older cartoons I'm interested in saving, hence the need for recording them via Daffodil. It's standard def, so recording to MPEG-2 is no problem. It's the HD programming that suffers since the cable box downscales all HD content to 16:9 letterbox. Why couldn't they just do anamorphic 16:9 like with DVD?

Also, this...


Here's part two, because the forum won't let me embed two videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPxYgKO0F9g

Here's another childhood TV memory. I remember watching this on my bedroom TV late at night during summer of 1998 or 1999. The two actors from the more infamous Magic Bullet commercials make their appearance here shilling a grill that claims to be a "portable outdoor kitchen". In true infomercial fashion, they cook up all sorts of foods that, apparently, you can't cook on a regular grill such as Texas Chili, an entire breakfast, and even a whole roast turkey using a dome attachment. I thought this grill was amazing and I seem to remember mentioning to my parents about it. In theory, this product could have been revolutionary.... if it wasn't a blatant fire hazard.
https://recalls.justia.com/household-and-office/grills-smokers-and-accessories/02-159/

https://www.federalregister.gov/document...-complaint

So yeah, as with many infomercial products, this one ended up getting recalled a few years later due to the way the grill is lit. The instructions were apparently confusing, stating that you should light it at the burner, yet providing no illustration pointing this out. So people lit it at the air intake valve which caused the catastrophic failures. The instructions also didn't state the danger of lighting the grill at the intake valve. So much for ReadTheFreakingManual.

As for the infomercial, I'd love to get a complete copy someday from a random VHS I find. If I do, I'll make sure to post it as the copy that exists isn't the best recording. It's also missing some parts as well.

[huckleberrypie]

The speaker's power supply is mounted internally into the subwoofer. A quick glance at it showed no apparent damage; Dad could've probed it with a multimeter but we sadly don't have one of them atm.

As for the informercial, I remember being somehow intrigued and obsessed with them lol. Among the ones I had fond memories of are the Dura Lube/Dura Shine and Restore 4:






"The manga was better,"