The Spam Thread!

[cpd2009]

Another annoying bug wit the AMD Adrenalin control panel is it has a tendency to spawn off to the lower right of the screen, sometimes completely off screen. I have to shift+right click on the taskbar icon and Maximize the window to get it displayed properly. As for it's functionality, it works well for configuring games and quality settings and seems to be rather quick to load up. I remember the days when the older AMD/ATI control panels were so slow and bloated.

And thinking about that, does Nvidia's control panel (not the Experience app) still have icons from the Windows XP era? I'd LOL if they still do. (but then again, Win11 still has some icons from Vista, like programs that have no icon will show a generic app window icon straight from Vista)

Scraping ROM metadata is still going, because the site EmulationStation uses, ScreenScraper, has a daily limit for free accounts. And the Super Console X had thousands of ROMs from different systems, so it's going to take several days just because of that daily limit.

And speaking of the SCX and all it's ilk, it's making be a bit upset. When these things are sold on the market, the retailer or console box boasts about all the games it can run, sometimes with flat out lies. The SCX can indeed run most of the classic 8-bit and 16-bit stuff great, but start trying to play anything with N64, PS1, or more advanced arcade emulation, then you hit the little box's limits. N64 games ran horribly on the SCX as the little Amlogic chip isn't powerful enough. On the Dell Ryzen rig, it runs perfectly fine with no stuttering or frame-rate drops, but that's to be expected for an eight-core x86-64 rig. It's just the flat out lies of these shady kiosks and retailers that sell these things just to boost the game counts and attract people into buying them. When I got my SCX from that kiosk, I sort of knew what I was getting into, and getting overcharged of course, but over time I discovered the SCX's limitations outside of emulation. The SD card is partitioned in a way you can't update the built in RetroArch/EmulationStation OS because of little storage space, there is noticeable input lag, and some of the scaling options don't work correctly. All of these work on my custom-made EmulationStation setup using the Dell rig and input lag is barely noticeable. (Win11, RetroArch, ES Desktop Edition) I use either a "Team Kitty" XBox One USB controller or a Nintendo Switch USB gamepad, both by Power-A.

The only positives are that I now have a massive set of classic game ROMs on an SD card so I don't have to search sketchy ROM sites for collections (because Nintendo takes the good ones down), and I've overcome my aversion to emulating ROMs too. Nintendo appears to be the only game company that takes out ROM sites and supposedly people selling bootleg systems. I still see the latter often, and no matter how hard Nintendo tries, they will never succeed. There are too many people selling those systems, and many more trading ROMs for free just so these games can be preserved for future generations. Yes, it's piracy, but it's the only way to play the majority of retro games that aren't rehashed to death on modern consoles. Cartridges and consoles won't last forever, which is why preservation through emulating both is so important.

And hence one motivation of restoring the Dell rig.

And I think it will be wonderful!

[huckleberrypie]

The only positives are that I now have a massive set of classic game ROMs on an SD card so I don't have to search sketchy ROM sites for collections (because Nintendo takes the good ones down), and I've overcome my aversion to emulating ROMs too. Nintendo appears to be the only game company that takes out ROM sites and supposedly people selling bootleg systems. I still see the latter often, and no matter how hard Nintendo tries, they will never succeed. There are too many people selling those systems, and many more trading ROMs for free just so these games can be preserved for future generations. Yes, it's piracy, but it's the only way to play the majority of retro games that aren't rehashed to death on modern consoles. Cartridges and consoles won't last forever, which is why preservation through emulating both is so important.

And hence one motivation of restoring the Dell rig.

And I think it will be wonderful!

Piracy is a necessary evil, so to speak. It's wrong if it's in the case of recent games especially indie titles who do deserve the money, but not as much with older and more obscure releases where the copyright holder went belly-up, making it an orphaned work. No matter how Nintendo tries to demonise it as a felony of some kind, they have no other choice but to face the stark reality that it is through bootlegs that their wares have become more popular to begin with.

[cpd2009]

The final ROM gaming setup is complete. I'm in the process of scraping metadata, which will take a couple more days. The ROMS were from my backup of the SCX SD card and have been placed on a hard disk, a 320GB 5400rpm spare laptop drive. Once the metadata collection is finished, I will make an image of the drive as I want to swap it with an SSD in the future. The current disk works fine so far, and ROMs load and play rather quickly, but an SSD will still add in a little more speed to the whole process.

As for additional storage, I'm making do with two spare 500gb hard disks, 3.5 inch. One is for a PVR folder, used with my Kworld UB435-Q ATSC TV tuner dongle, combined with SichboPVR. The other is just spare storage for anything, really. The two disks will get swapped out with two 2TB drives in the future.

[huckleberrypie]

Obligatory post to keep the thread alive lel

[huckleberrypie]

So I got my hands on a OnePlus 7 Pro lately:




It's significantly more powerful than the Realme C3 I had which I gave to my mum. Apparently there's an issue with the 90Hz display mode so I have to fall back to 60Hz, but meh.

[cpd2009]

So I got my hands on a OnePlus 7 Pro lately:




It's significantly more powerful than the Realme C3 I had which I gave to my mum. Apparently there's an issue with the 90Hz display mode so I have to fall back to 60Hz, but meh.

I know it's not Thanksgiving there, but have a Happy Thanksgiving anyway! ? How is emulation performance on this phone compared to the Realme C3?

In local tech news, I have come across a very huge roadblock with the Win11 install on the Dell. While the first version of Win11 installed without issues, the newest feature update is no longer compatible with it. I have no idea why. The UEFI settings have not changed since I initially installed it. Tried doing a direct upgrade from the USB drive, but the setup program won't allow it. I heard you can make a custom USB Windows installer using Rufus that lets you disable the TPM checking during setup, but if I have to do that with every single Win11 release going forward, then I'll have to pass on it. I imagine MS will try to close that loophole at some point in the future.

Because of that, I have chosen to switch gears regarding the whole HTPC setup. And it means having to let go of the Dell rig at the consignment shop, both as a way of trying to get some additional money while I search for a new job, but to open up some more space at my apartment by including my now-unused Dell monitor with it. I spent most of today removing all the additional hard drives I installed and adding in a barely-used 2TB WD drive for data storage. I will do a SMART check on it before I let the Dell go. I'm also preparing to run some benchmarks for a few hours to ensure the GPU is stable.

The Dell will be getting a fresh Win10 install before I let it go. Clean image. No Dell crap other than the light-bar controller app.

And here is a trick I only learned about today. I have to keep Win10 in it's OOBE state, but didn't want to create a user account, set it all up, and run Sysprep afterward. Turns out all I had to do is press Ctrl+Shift+F3 when the Windows setup wizard appears at first boot. The system then boots into "audit mode" with a full desktop and Sysprep automatically opening. I can then use this mode to install all the drivers and updates, run the benchmarks and uninstall those, and then use Sysprep to reboot back into OOBE mode.

As for what will replace the HTPC? I have several options.

1: Pull out my ancient PowerMac G4 and tinker with that to see if I can play at least my DVDs and MP4s in good quality. BluRay is out of the question.
2: Save up for a 2009 MacPro, dual boot between MacOS and Linux, and use it as the HTPC and emulation box.
3: Get one of those used office Dell PCs off eBay and reconfigure one of those as the HTPC.
4: Just use my ancient Gateway laptop as the HTPC. The GPU is quite ancient, but it should have no problem playing DVDs and MP4s, along with emulating some of the less intensive game consoles.
5: Keep my inner tech geek alive by finding a cheap Android TV box and set up the ultimate streaming/emulation box.

Only time will tell which option I pursue..

[huckleberrypie]

Emulation on the 7 Pro is mighty fine though since it's a 2019 device newer SOCs obviously run circles around the Snapdragon 855.

And it's clear that M$ and other corpos are pushing people to buy buy and buy new hardware every so often.

[huckleberrypie]

Test reply from a PS Vita browser just to see how usable this is as a mobile internet device in this day and age.

[huckleberrypie]

It's been a while since we last had a post here.

[huckleberrypie]

So a family friend asked if I could replace the LCD panel on his phone: