Hobby Tools Finding a New Use

As an avid listener of The Broken Token Arcade and Pinball Podcast I’ve enjoyed following Brent’s adventures into getting into 3D Printing and Vacuum forming. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how the ability to make your own parts at home can be handy.

I’ve had an eye on 3D printing for hobby usage back since a really insightful article from Microsoft Developer Blogger, Scott Hanselman back in 2015.

My takeaway from both, broadly, was that 3D printing would be a massive time suck. Who has time for that?

Well, it turns out we are quarantined at home now and my social calendar just freed up for 30-90 days. Time to jump in.

Three different printers had my eye.

Budget Conscious: Creality CR-10S

I see lots of forum posts where people struggled to get started with the Creality CR-10 and CR-10s printers.

“Please refer to the 50 page sticky post about common setup issues and how to solve them”

Once running and once the material specifics are worked out, most owners seemed thrilled with their choice, though. Almost to the point of shilling for the machine and overlooking minor flaws.

Pros:
Nice Entry Price (~$500)
Impressive build surface ~(12.75 x 12.75 x 15.5) inches

Cons:
Kit-built
Easy but fidgety assembly and setup
Machine footprint, Spool placement
Looks like the offspring of an erector set and Johnny 5

Middle of the Road: Prusa i3 MK3S

Time and time again the only bad thing I could find about the Prusa MK3S was that it wasn’t a major change from its predecessor. Usually with a footnote of “but we can’t really think of anything we’d like changed” though. The Prusa came up time and time-again as the winner amongst Maker enthusiasts in posts and articles, based on my research.

Pros:
Reasonably priced (~$750)
Good (but slightly compromised) build surface ~(9.8 x 8.2 x7.8) inches
Flexible options, available as pre-built or as a kit
Good Software
Exceptional reputation amongst enthusiasts, known to be a workhorse

Cons:
Occasional failures on long prints
Still has the erector-set aesthetic.

The ”All In” Option: Ultimaker 2+ or 3

The Ultimaker was the only one that seemed to offer a hassle free setup process from the beginner’s perspective. Most of my research landed on “we love it but it costs too much” as the shared consensus amongst Maker enthusiasts. The Ultimaker machines support NFC chips installed in the Ultimaker material spools. This means that the machine has built in profiles for Ultimaker materials and automatically adjusts by reading the NFC from the installed spool. It seemed to me that the vast majority of bad prints come from improperly calibrated settings in respect to material type, so extension of that logic is:

Foolproof material settings means less fouled prints.

Pros:
Easy setup
Comes pre-assembled
Well-supported by manufacturer
Parts availability
Automated print settings when used with Ultimaker Materials
Gold-Standard in Slicing Software (Cura)
Helpful companion apps for iOS and Android (monitor prints, reprint, pause - resume

Cons:
Highly priced (UM2+ is $2500, UM3 is $3500)
Slightly smaller build surface ~(8 x 8.5 x 8) inches
More expensive parts and consumables

Ultimaker 3

After much deliberation I went with a refurbished Ultimaker 3.

I chose the Ultimaker line (among other reasons) because it seemed like a more self-contained machine, something I’d be apt to just leave set up on my desk. I chose the UM3 specifically because it was Wifi capable, supported dual-extrusion: the ability to print with two materials at once. I chose refurbished because of parts availability, factory warranty and because my Amex reward points only go so far. :)

Software Stuff

Slicing

Slicing is the process of ingesting a model and material properties and building a print plan for the printer to follow. (GCode File)
If you’ve ever done professional publishing where you send off print-ready file formats to the publisher - this is basically the same thing, at the high level anyway. Ultimaker Cura is a gold standard solution for Slicing, it is made by Ultimaker and is free even if you aren’t using Ultimaker printers. Having a 1st class slicing experience contributed to my decision to fork out the extra dough for an Ultimaker printer.

Design

SolidWorks is the Gold Standard Engineering and design solution. At $3400/year for the Standard edition, I can’t even consider this right now. <Closes Tab>

Tinkercad is an awesome solution for building printable 3D models. Schools often use it in STEM or Gifted labs as an introduction to engineering and design concepts.. It is cross platform and has AutoDesk support behind the product. It’s also free. The limitations will come in on high-polygon count or heavily complex models as well as certain import interpolations. But for simple 3D printing, TInkercad is the goto.

If you have an iPad and Apple Pencil, Shapr3D is very powerful middle-of-the-road option.

Shapr3D shares the same solid modeling Engine as SolidWorks (Siemens Parasolid™). It is iPad-only and requires the Apple Pencil but since I’m an iOS and Android Developer I didn’t have to look far for an iPad to commit to this use. The software is free to try and is about $240/year for the pro version. $1 apps might make that seem like a lot but taking in the app’s powerful foundation, level of polish, performance and extensive training library - $240/year sounds like a bargain to me.

Future versions will support object import via the iPad Pro’s new LiDAR camera. (There are videos of this in beta available on Youtube). So, I’m using a combination of TinkerCard and Shapr3D for modeling work.

The Tools are Here, Now What?

This is the point in this story where I’d normally be showing you 3D printed realized objects created from scratch in service of the pinball and arcade hobby. Things like that hard-to-find coil bracket for Ice Cold Beer or 3D printed unobtainium replacements like the Data East Star Wars Death Star plastic that I once paid $175 for.

But first, the ongoing global pandemic and the shortage of PPE have me focused on trying to be helpful in some small way in aiding those efforts.

Make the Masks

The Montana Mask is a 3D-printed mask initiative started by three medical professionals and tested at a clinic in Billings, Montana. The design includes a two-part reusable mask with a place for a filter insert.

Complex prints with overhangs and suspensions will be printed with scaffolding or support material (dissolvable or break-away). This mask design was clever in that it attempts to keep the angles shallow enough to prevent the need for support material, decreasing print times. Currently I’m at about 4 hrs to print each mask at a reasonable quality. I add window seal from MD Building Products, which is a super-awesome company - they donated two cases to me for this cause. Finally, I add in filter material: Flowmark Filters if you can get them. Blue shop towels or tripled up coffee filters can also work.

Stack o’ Completed Masks from Easter Afternoon

Other Opportunities to Help

In addition to masks there are clever initiatives for creating face-shields, respirator parts, ventilator valves and more.
It’ll be neat to get to work on the printer in the future for more entertaining purposes but for now, it whirls away 18 hours a day making stuff related to the pandemic, trying to show appreciation and aid protection for those who aren’t as fortunate as I am to be able to shelter in place and play on the computer all day.

If you know of any front-line medical workers or first-responders with a need for parts that I can print, reach out to me by email and I’ll get something sent your way.

Pandemic Risk Mitigation & Pinball-Arcade Expos

I normally don’t care to comment about current events, politics or the Headline Du Jour publicly. I’ll deploy that overused and probably mis-attributed Einstein quote:

Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.

Plus, this particular site and the majority of my facebook and twitter feeds are optimized, generally for fun and nerdy things. Global health crises, partisan politics, market economics and people typing vigorously over to the top of one another regarding the kerfuffle of the day: These are all decidedly not fun, for me anyway.

But.. this blog for me acts as a record for hobby posterity and I suspect that in the same way that large-scale geological events can be sussed out from sedimentary rock layers on Earth, I think it is possible that the current Novel Coronavirus will leave its mark on our arcade and pinball hobby long after the current health crisis and related (justified or not) hysteria have passed.

At the time of this post, the Coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 and related infection COVID-19 are the headlines of every major news organization on the planet. Sure, the partisan finger pointing is in there too. American criticism of Chinese Wet Markets, thought to be the origin for the disease and all of the partisan finger pointing that have become the new normal for us here in the States. The late night comedians are having their fun with it, the financial markets are freaked out by it and people are starting to stockpile food, hand soaps, sanitizer, lysol, paper towels and toilet paper. Why toiler paper? I don’t really know..

..and somewhere, right now people are feeling real pain and loss and real fear for their loved ones in higher-risk cohorts. I wouldn’t begin to trivialize their loss or think myself immune to being touched in some way by it.

As of 3/11/2020 122,205 active known infections. 1,002 of those in the United States.

Heat maps like this, predictably always become population density maps. As of today, no known confirmed cases have arisen in my home state of Alabama but I have no doubt the virus is already in our community. Hell, my neighbors were on the Diamond Princess maybe a week before the infected passengers that were quarantine. Not everyone gets tested (most probably do not) and the tests themselves have a poor reliability record. it doesn’t help that the pollen index in our part of the south is 10.5 (out of 12) and COVID-19 early symptoms are shared with seasonal allergies.

Given these factors, I suspect that the public numbers of infected trend lower-than-actual which means the fatality estimates are probably trending higher-than-actual. But, I’m not a health expert, just someone with some BI experience looking at cold numbers with an eye for risks to accuracy.

So how does this all come back to the hobby?

Typical Crowd you might see around arcades at a Con. (This was AWS Re:Play party in Las Vegas)

As of the time of this writing, South by Southwest in Austin has been cancelled. A delay of the Summer Olympics is being considered. Near my career, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Google IO in May are all cancelled. Apple is internally evaluating if they will hold WWDC in June.

Shanghai Disney has been closed since January 25. Tokyo Disney closed on February 29th.

Update: 3/12/2020 - It was just announced that Disney Land will be temporarily shutting down.

Currently, Disney World hasn’t announced a closure plan but I suspect that might change as things progress.

It might seem trivial but,

When Disney closes. You should pay attention.

NBA Season has stopped. NCAA March Madness has been stopped.

International flight restrictions are increasing.

Louisville Arcade Expo just completed.

Update 3/12/2020: Texas Pinball Festival was cancelled this afternoon.

There’s Pinfest, Golden State & Rocky Mountain Expos in May, Northwest & Pintastic in June. Southern Fried Gameroom expo in July.

What impact might cancellations (voluntary or otherwise) have on our favorite Pinball & Arcade expos and the vendors that rely on them?

The answer is: Probably a lot.

SFGE 2018 Crowds

I had some interest in co-founding a gulf-coast arcade and pinball festival, so I’ve spent some time in the last few years talking with event organizers and they all tell a pretty similar story. These shows often start with a generous financial benefactor and/or sheer willpower and volunteer effort. They then grow (often modestly) year over year with this year’s ticket sales barely covering next year’s venue fees.

Show-goers have a tendency to think that these expos are giant financial successes based on anecdotal observation and attendance numbers. They are really more often made viable only through extraordinary effort year after year from the organizers. “Just enough to keep going” is the theme I often hear.

I think there is inordinate pressure on show organizers and hotels to keep the events going whenever possible. But I also predict that in the wake of a mass-spread illnesses like this will generate mounting pressure for cancellations. At this point, I consider every pinball show through summer to be iffy. Yeah, I know: serious bummer.

I urge that we all be patient with the show organizers of your favorite pinball / arcade expos in the coming weeks and months and try to be flexible. We are all in this together and we will get through it and be back to normal before you know it. :)

Update 3/12: Kaneda’s Pinball Podcast Predicts TPF will be cancelled in the first part of his podcast today.

RetroStone 2 Follow-Up (Video)

A month later, I took at look at how RetroStone 2 is progressing. It has come a long way!

The 8 Year Rule

In a recent kerfuffle, Sonos (makers of mid-high speakers) announced that out of necessity, they’d soon cease support for new updates to some of their older equipment. Twitter got mad, bloggers blogged, tech pundits bristled while others apologized. It was a whole thing. The Sonos CEO issued further statements to add clarity and to try to calm the mob.

In the hobby of retro gaming we are constantly reviving 30+ year old gadgets. It occurred me that in other parts of my life (when looking at products) I operate under a proclivity to be selective in some cases and lax in others in adapting new tech. As as much an exercise in introspection as explanation, I thought it might be good to look at this topic and ultimately consider how to might apply to the retro-gaming, arcade and pinball hobbies.

A while ago, I got a text from a pinball-player friend.

I met him in front of a 80’s constructed home on an oversized lot in one of the largest subdivisions in our region, about 3,000 homes. He was playing coy b/c he had found a steal. As we walked down the basement to find his snag, I felt like we were transported to 1996. 1990’s furniture (in surprisingly good shape) buffeted a room with 1990’s Bose sound equipment, a ping pong table, a period entertainment center and in the corner of the room a mid-90’s Williams Pinball of some renown: Tales of the Arabian Nights. 25+ year old electronics, all of it.

The thing is, the stereo and tv still worked. The pinball machine needed some repair (which was why he bought it as a fixer-upper) but it was totally repairable with skilled hands and bench-typical soldering tools.

A Thought Experiment

Now, imagine the technology you have today in your living room, your gameroom or your pocket and imagine jumping ahead 25 years to walk in the room exactly as it is today. Sort of like Sam Flynn flipping on the lights in his Dad’s arcade.

How well do you think your smartphone will work? If the battery hasn’t exploded in the intervening time, the cellular network will surely no longer support the same mixture of communication protocols and radio frequencies we call LTE. Probably a commercial running on the holo-emitter for “17G, from Disney Wireless: All the power to drive your 20k holo-displays.”

Your smart-home devices, will they work? “Alexa, turn on the pinball machines.”
The internet will look dramatically different 25 years. More than likely having long sense dropped support for IPv4. Your cable or DSL modem will no longer have a compatible peer to connect to. No way 2025 is still using DOCSIS 3.1 over hybrid-fiber-coax. DSL probably won’t even exist.

The fancy fridge you bought with a giant iPad on the door - still doesn’t make ice correctly and while it keeps your food moderately cold, the display’s internals have long-since failed. The wifi-connected stove doesn’t turn on anymore. The motherboard has failed in your smartphone-accessible Washer and Dryer.

I know, it’s a long walk to a known conclusion

Technology ages in dog-years.

Specialized & physical vs generalized & virtual

That 25 year old Pinball machine is powered by solid state through-hole components. Electrolytic capacitors, carbon composite resistors, field effect transistors. The smallest components are still easily serviceable with a desoldering pump and soldering iron in most cases. Even better, the full original board schematics are available for free and are part of the public domain.

Simple logic gates and good electrical design make that 25 year old boardset as easily repairable today as it was 25 years ago. What’s more, it is repairable with 40-50 year old tools. I can fix nearly anything on these games with a good multimeter, diode tester, soldering tools & a logic probe. Hell, even the sound and logic ROMS are available so you can burn new ones.

WPC-95, WPC-DCS, SAM, Sega WhiteStar, DE V3 are all pretty simple to maintain with common bench tools.

No operating system, just (relatively) simple, well-documented logic circuits.

But, technology must advance. Excelsior!

Most modern JJP, Stern or Chicago gaming machines have some flavor of Linux at the bottom of the stack. For you non-PC folks, Linux is an Operating System, like Windows but not. MacOSX under Intel architecture is a Linux-adjacent operating system in some ways. Embedded Linux and Embedded Windows are what we call it when the OS runs as part of a distinct hardware framework or chipset. Odds are that your media center DVR, your smart fridge, your connected-washer & dryer, your smartphone, your Alexa Speaker and yes: even your Sonos speakers are running some flavor of an embedded Linux OS.

Operating systems are bootstrapped hardware abstraction platforms. Layers of hardware-interface software (drivers) with numerous common services and platforms on top. These services encapsulate and simplify more complicated tasks. Things like the 3d graphics and physics engines OpenGL or DirectX on PCs or METAL on iOS. Things like a Network IO stack for communicating with other machines and local IO Services for interfacing with peripherals. When you have to wait 6 minutes for Windows to boot or 45 seconds for your old Android phone to boot - you are watching the hardware load the operating system and related services.

Embedded-circuits are designed and purpose-built to provide a certain set of behaviors time after time. There is no operating system in the traditional sense outside of instructions encoded to roms and processors. A real “computer” has an operating system and is suited for tasks that require higher complexity or more dynamic. Ultimately, you can sometimes get away with using a computer beyond the limited constraints of its limited design but an embedded circuit will rarely show the same level of adaptability.

Without knowing the symbols the pinball diagram looks incredibly complex and difficult but if you trace functions by pinout to their related circuit you can use these schematics with success to get to your problem areas. The key is reducing your focus to parts of the board related to specific feature features. In the schematic above, when a switch that is ultimately connected to J2 on the board no longer works, you can pretty readily isolate all of the components in the circuit to find your problem area.

Software stacks are often more complicated to troubleshoot, sometimes by design. The schematics for your 25 year old pinball are available but the source code for Windows (usually) isn’t. In addition you still have the risk of underlying hardware that will eventually fail but with often less-clear symptoms.

Through-Hole vs Surface Mount

Modern logic boards (PCBs, motherboards, etc) are comprised of mostly surface mounted components while older equipment was often through-hole. That is to say that an older Arcade or Pinball mainboard might have a bank of dozens of resistors and half-dozen transistors that are stuck through holes in the board and soldered in place, interfacing with traces that were printed on the board. By comparison, modern PCBs are mass-produced and often the components are laid down in a very specific grid (envision the mesh that holds together tile backsplash but super-tiny) and later applied to the host board with hot-air.

Surface-mount components are a fraction of the size of their through-hole counterparts, in most cases. They are also often “different” in some way, internally. For instance, 80’s and 90’s resistors are usually of carbon composite construction where modern resistors are “film” constructed. Guess which ones are more reliable? It’s debatable. In theory, a smaller component with less conductive material should generate less heat. (Heat is the enemy because temperature cycling contributes to component failure over time.) But, smaller isn’t always cooler. When smallness is achieved be densely packing components together the heat scale can often go the other way.

A modern i5, i7, i9 processor bottoms out at around .014 micron. That’s equivalent to 2.7 billion transistors packed into a roughly 1 inch square. It gets hot.. quickly! Hot components = reduced service life.

Side Note: If we were to print a schematic for the typical i7 quad-core processor with the same scale as the pinball PCB schematic above, it would wrap around the earth at the equator once. So that other schematic seems more manageable eh? :)

A Tech stack, for Tech stack’s sake

Modern Pinballs, Arcades, Refrigerators, Smart Speakers, Dishwashers, Toasters and more have tiny low-powered computers on them running a manufacturer variant of some operation system or another. This allows your smart speaker to connect to your favorite music streaming service over wifi, your Sonos multi-room audio to sync up, your Galaga/MsPac Reunion to boot an emulated version of the original games.

We’ve been in a trend where “tech layers” get added to everything from kitchen appliances to the company operations of luggage manufacturers and other traditional companies.

Hey, computers are great and tech can enhance our lives. When you attach a computer to an appliance you immediately speed up the aging process for that appliance. Today’s smart fridge with 3 cameras and a smart assistant is tomorrow’s bricked android device.

It wasn’t uncommon for our parents to get 30 years out of a dishwasher or washing machine. Now, they have motherboards (single-board-computers or SBCs) that run a software stack to enable the smart features. Even your LG, Samsung, Vizio Smart TV is partially monetized from aggregate data collection on how you watch it and which smart apps you choose. You totally read the privacy policy, right?

This marriage of technology provides a wonder of convenience, sure. But will that LG wifi-enabled Dishwasher stand the test of time? It isn’t reasonable to assume so. I’m a programmer. I’m proficient in many languages, can muddle my way through anything from an a mainframe to cloud services backed machine learning running on a smart phone. Even I.. a card-carrying nerd find myself eyeballing needless tech in appliances as potential future weaknesses.

8 Years

The number I’ve settled on is: 8 years. That $1000 wifi-connected washing machine? In 8 years you’ll (probably) need another. That Nest Thermostat? Plan to replace it in 8 years. The crazy-awesome technology features in your new Ford? 8 years.

Granted there isn’t an actual 8-year electronics death clock out there running somewhere in ULs labs.

The 11 year old somewhat-computerized stereo bluetooth nav system in our SUV still works.. mostly. We all have 30+ year old consoles that still work. I have a 2009-era iMac that works. But, I suspect that these are more attributable to Honda, Apple and Nintendo using quality parts or over-speccing components.

When these tiny components fail, it usually isn’t a complete failure either. The preset station ‘4’ on my 08 Mercedes Convertible no longer recognized button presses because the surface-mount-resistors around the button had failed. That Harmon Kardon stereo would still Jam, though. In fact, I think I miss that radio more than the car… (focus, Bill.. focus..)

When the SUV’s bluetooth controller failed, I was able to fix it once with a heat gun and eventually replace it for about $400.

Increasingly, I’m feeling the trueness of that “they don’t make them like they used to”, sentiment being muttered at barber shops and country breakfast buffets across our fair land.

And it’s true: They don’t. They use machines to make other machines that are (in some ways) millions of times more complicated than what was necessarily 2 decades ago.

That’s progress. I’m not railing against it but I want to have fair expectations.

Bringing it Back to The Hobby

Every new Stern Pinball designed after 2015 has Single Board Computer (SBC) in the back box. It handles lamp control, registers switch hits and powers coils through a modular system of ethernet-connected peripheral PCBs (node boards).

Stern SPIKE:
Proprietary SBC in the Back, Many Proprietary PCBs in the Cabinet

Stern's SPIKE 2 System (in the backbox)

Typical Stern Node Board.

Typical Node Board Placement

CGC/PPS:
Proprietary SBC in the Back, Big n’ Honkin PCB in the CAB

Every new CGC/PPS Pinball includes a similar design and adds a half-playfield-length board beneath the playfield that handle coil control, switches, controlled lamps & flashers.

Typical CGC Backbox (SBC Controller)

Typical CGC under-playfield board

Tiny little mass-produced surface mount components in all of it.

JJP:
Blended / Modular Approach

Every new JJP pinball that was ever made includes an actual PC connected to an IO controller to make all of that pinball magic happen.

Hobbit and Woz both used a commercially-available MSI ATX motherboard, ATX power supply mixed with a proprietary IO Controller and sound card. Notably, the IO Controller still has fuse-able circuits and transistors. I credit JJP for these decisions. Those modular designs with open components will-be repairable in 20+ years.

What about The Others?

I personally wouldn’t be too interested in owning a pinHeck-based Spooky title. Nothing against the electronics design so much as the pinball designs themselves didn’t jive with my tastes. I actually like the modular nature of Danesi’s Total Nuclear Annihilation but the clear-coat curing issues around posts scare me off from that game. I don’t know enough about Rick & Morty’s electronics to comment as of this time.

Closing thoughts

Pinball machines are computers now. You know what that means, right? That means they inherit all of the bullshit you get from computers. Boot times, patches & hotfixes and boards that will be increasingly difficult for a hobbyist to repair. Somewhere, someone is having a SCRUM standup related to a pinball software release. shudders poor bastards

Nearly every arcade machine from the 2000’s on have been some form or another of computer. Sometimes they look more like repackaged console systems and sometimes they look more like traditional PCs. But make no mistake - they are PCs. You know what that means right? You shouldn’t be surprised by the failure of the Big Buck Hunter hard drive or Hydro-Thunder PC.

Mario Kart GP/ GP2, Maximum Tune 3, Tekken 5 & order mid-2000’s arcades are running Tri-Force hardware that is very close to GameCube.

Offroad / Hydro / Arctic Thunder looks something like this

On the upside.. It also means you inherit all of the cool stuff attributable from having a computer under the hood. Expandability through software, richer audio-visual experiences, fine-grained control of components (like pinball coil strength or video game joystick sensitivity), social gaming features and a more-connected future.

It also means that we might be entering into a world where our $1000-$15000 collectible toys have a comparably shorter lifespan.

Those tech-stack dog years might not be kind to us.

The next time I buy a “modern” or NIB pinball, I’m leaning towards a CGC/PPS Remake or JJP for the overall build quality and design. Either way, before I buy another NIB or modern pinball (or arcade for that matter) I’m going to ask myself some questions.

• How proprietary are the components of the game?

• Are parts available today and at what cost?

• Is it likely that this company will be operating in 10 years?

• If the company folds, how likely is it parts (or parts analogs) will be available?

• Do they have a customer-support reputation, post-sale?

• What is my average game-retention time? Is the game likely to “age out” in that window?

It is fair to note that in the case of pinball boards, boutique electronics companies filled the void long after the original manufacturers left the space. Rottendog, Alltec, Great Lakes Modular & others stepped up to build replacement boards that blended the old design with modern components. (With subjectively mixed results compared to the originals.) This was made possible through availability of original schematics, ample demand in the community and an increasingly empowered Maker’s culture.

Who knows, maybe 20 years from now we can buy electronically guided, micro-scale hot air rework stations for the price of a shovel at Home Depot, making these boards reasonably repairable again.

Sometimes, the best way to deter obsolescence is to go modular like JJP did. All-in-one solutions will only last as long as the weakest component. For those folks that bought a high end SONOS speaker system, the traditional approach of a receiver + speakers + components would probably have aged better.

Data is Beautiful, Video Game Sales Data is Sublime

I ran into this on the SFGE Facebook page and wanted to share it. Kinda fascinating.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019 Release) Campaign

Story Spoilers for a 3-month old game follow.

COD and Me

I’ve enjoyed all of the Call of Duty campaigns that I’ve played through. Though, admittedly I’ve sat out for a few in the current-gen console releases. The Original Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2, as well as Black Ops and Black Ops II were a neat experience, as were the WW1 & WW2 predecessors.

I still frequently enjoy playing split-screen multiplayer against bots in Black Ops and I used to really enjoy meeting up for squad-based action with coworkers and their ridiculously talented teenager kids. I unfortunately don’t have the pleasure of working with those folks anymore and their teenagers are in college now. So….. yeah, I’m pretty stale.

With increasing focus over the last half-decade towards multiplayer experience juxtaposed against a phoned-in single player experience, I’m happy to see that they spent the resources and gave this Call of Duty a first-class campaign experience.

Campaign

The campaign story-writers did an excellent job of borrowing from (and remixing) elements from recent military history to make the campaign relatable.

A nebulous proxy war with Russia involving Islamic freedom fighters & WMD intrigue? Check!

Old guy with creepily similar name to recent events, big forehead & dirty motives? Check!

Omar Sulaman, Bad Guy du jour

Good guy with bad mustache and familiar sounding voice? Check!

Alex (Mason?) – Aka “Echo 3-1” - I’m redesignating him as: Friendzone

Campaign Mission Breakdown

Fog of War

You are a CIA operator in pursuit of chemical weapons. Military jargon ensues. Characters are introduced. Stuff happens.

Piccadilly

You are in a carload of fellow plain clothes military operators with small arms. Civilians everywhere. How can that go sideways? Shades of the July 7, 2005 London bombings but with some key differences.

Embedded

You are a CIA operator embedded with a group of freedom fighters in the fictional nation of Urzikstan. Conceal carry, amateur masonry and pyrotechnics are on tap for this adventure.

Proxy War

Fight alongside Urzikstan’s freedom fighters as you attempt to neutralize the base of forward operations for a (rogue?) Russian general. Non conventional weapons at your disposal include R/C planes with C4 and molotov cocktails.

Clean house

Follow our favorite SAS operative as you infiltrate a 3 story home occupied by terrorists. Lots of on-rails breach and clear action using suppressed weapons and night vision.

Hunting Party

Meet up with a marine division, make tactical use of a mobile heavy-armor. (Think: Honey Badger from previous installments of the franchise but with more umpf.) Seriously cool and technical infiltration of a hospital with complex cover and unexpected shooting lines. Super creepy friend or foe judgement calls, culminating in a seriously dug in MG nest. I really like this chapter. COD at its best.

The Embassy

The first part of the embassy mission are a combination of the 1979 Hostage Crisis in Tehran, the 1984 Embassy Annex Bombing in Beirut and some fiction sprinkled in for flavor. The second half of the embassy mission is proof someone at Infinity Ward watched 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and/or read the book it was based on. After evacuating the embassy to a nearby compound, you defend from the rooftops through multiple waves of assault. They have the numbers. They have technicals. They have mortars. You have flares, better guns & training, high-ground that would make obi-wan proud and best of all: drone support, which makes for stark differences from how it went down in the real-life events from which this was inspired.

Highway of Death

You get a sweet new gun with an even sweeter scope. 600 yard shots, you get to deal with distance and wind.. A solid sub-coriolis sniper mission from a poor & exposed position.

Hometown

I could have done without this stage. Origin story from a primary character, you play as a child through the hellscape of an ethnic-cleansing committed by genocidal Russian soldiers under orders from a particularly asshole-ish general.

The Wolf’s Den

This starts as Zero Dark Thirty and ends as the underground staircase from National Treasure.

Captive

Meant to provide character development and motives, this stage instead serves as a first person perspective of torture followed by an unlikely battle with strange technicalities. They convinced me to like this character (and I do) but I don’t like this stage.

Old Comrades

Very much a Matrix-style Agents vs Neo chase scene to capture (alive) as hostile through an improbably large supporting suppression force. I believe I also saw this scene in Hitman’s Bodyguard or Self/Less on Netflix. It has a chase vs fight dynamic that is complicated by limited ammunition and the presence of friendlies along with a “he got away” timer to keep you from digging in for any particular portion of the engagement. It has an uncomfortable conclusion for you black hat gamers who chose to play through it.

Going Dark

A pretty cool night stealth search & rescue mission with a solid technical dynamic of using the environment to increase cover. I liked this stage alot.

Into the Furnace

As far as boss battles go, this.. is one. Lots of shooty-shooty-bang-bang. You start with reasonable armor and aerial support against an uphill, dug-in adversary. You infiltrate a multi-level industrial complex with plenty of cover and unexpected targeting lines. There are drones, sniper rifles, rpg’s, a mini gun, a big Russian dude laughing at you from beneath improbable amounts of armor. There are bad guy monologues and (maybe) some character sacrifices to be made. That’s a big maybe.

Post-Credits

Post Credits scene provide nods to long-term fans of the franchise, hinting to the return of some familiar names and providing a smooth segue into the Special Ops (Co-op missions)

Should I let my kid play this?

Depends on the kid, I guess. It is ESRB rated for 17+ for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes & Use of Drugs. I don’t recall any drug use or sexuality in the game. It is violent and does bring into question some topics like torture, murder of civilians (including children) and these topics can be a bit much for some kids. I let my 14 year old daughter play through parts of it with me and we discussed some of the topics along the way. I didn’t let my 10 year old anywhere near it. YMMV.

Closing Thoughts on the Storyline

The two flashback missions involving Farah Karim are a little jarring in terms of continuity and frustrating in terms of playability. At the end of the first, her and her brother are captured by Barkov and then later you wake up 20 years older, imprisoned by Barkov. Yet, in the intervening time Karim has become a full commander in her militia. So, when did they get let loose as kids? Barkov captured them again as young adults? Why does Barkov look like Lou Diamond Phillips? He doesn’t seem Russian at all Get this man a fuzzy hat or a bear to ride on. Something.

Aside from confusion around General Lou Diamond Phillipski, I thought the story was mostly good. It was also a treat to see Nick Tarabay rendered digitally. I liked his work in The Expanse.

Having grown up playing Red Alert, I’m finding myself uncomfortable with the Zeitgeist that our antagonists always have to be tied to Russia in some way. Can we please just stop antagonizing the other superpowers? Thanks.

Multiplayer

You’ll note the title of this article specifically references Campaign. Lately, my ability to enjoy a multiplayer experience has felt frustrated by the combination of 40-year old twitch reflexes, a wifi-connected PS4 and playing on a larger-than-optimal for competitive-play, TV. I really need “drunk mode”, “old guy”, “big tv”, “distracted room” matchmaking. Get on that, Infinity Ward.

While, I don’t see those matchmaking customizers coming anytime soon, this installment of Call of Duty Modern Warfare Multiplayer brings the ability to play matches between PS4, PC & XbOne owners via something called Cross Play. Destined to answer once and for all the question of which is better: Keyboard & Mouse or Gamepad, I think this is a really neat and hopeful turn in multiplayer dynamics. Other games have done it with mixed success but I’m glad to see Infinity Ward take a stab at it.

Build it and they Will Come

A great multiplayer platform is one that is open enough for unexpected things to happen but closed enough so that it doesn’t get out of hand. You’d like players to discover new combinations of perks, loadouts, kill-streaks and score-streaks to be able to create stand-out moments that get everyone pumped and are share-worthy.

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Enemy team was talking trash so we hit’em with that Beta cheese from r/modernwarfare

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In the same accord, you don’t want the entire game to migrate under the map through boundary-clipping bugs or certain load outs that create repeatable lopsided advantages.

Such glitches have riddled Call of Duty games and other (more?) popular battle royale-style multiplayer games.

For games with this sort of visibility, studios usually do an admirable job of patching them quickly. It’ll be interesting to see if Crossplay makes that easier (or harder) given the particular implementations of PSN, xBox Live & PC Net gaming.

So far, what little I’ve played of the COD multiplayer has me wishing for those days when we’d squad up with coworkers a few nights, each week. Between the solid campaign and a strong multiplayer it seems like Infinity Ward has a winner on their hands with 2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

RetroStone 2

yeah, my living room table is a little bit of a catch-all. keepin’ it real, ya’ll.

On a cold night one of my favorite things to do is to sit by the fire with a handheld game system. This simple wish was my hope for the RetroStone 2. I’ll briefly walk you through how that’s worked out, so far.

What’s a RetroStone?

There have been a myriad of portable retro gaming offerings over the last few years in a variety of form-factors. Everything from jailbroken PSP’s or PSP-clones to custom-built raspberry pi handhelds and everything in between.

Looking ahead for the holiday gifts, I ran across the Retrostone through a few articles & reviews. In the process I found that they were planning a hardware refresh, the Retrostone 2.

Pi-based retro gaming systems have been popular projects over the last few years. Even Amazon has Raspberry Pi-based kits that can be built into NES, SNES and other clone cases. For a small fee, including SD cards pre-loaded with games and ready to go. Over the holidays I bought my son this handheld retro multi-game from Amazon.

The Retrostone is essentially this, built into a Gameboy-esque case. The average Gameboy multi console on Amazon costs between $45-$100, the one I mentioned above was $60. This Retrostone 2 costs around $225 by comparison. I ordered the Pro version in order to get the 8gb NAND and gambling those load outs would ship first.

Hardware

The Retrostone 2 runs an ARM Cortex-A7 A20 processor running at 1.0GHz.

Why they opted for the custom board vs the $35 Raspberry Pi 4, I’m not sure. Assuming it has something to do with power draw.

At first impression, I’m seeing performance issues galore but this 1Ghz dual-core should be more than enough for most classic games.

For now I'm going to just have to trust the smart-guys’ judgement on this.

Complication Station

This is the part that’s annoying. Because of the legal and licensing minefield associated with such things, the RetroStone comes without any software installed. You have to handle that part and as far as I can tell there isn’t an abundance of folks willing to stick their necks out with pre-configured microSD cards. Like most MAME and console emulator builds these things are a kludge of loosely related bits of mostly volunteer maintained open source software. I’ll try to remove some of the “who does what”, below.

Retrostone runs RetroOrangePi, which is a bundle of various open-source tools optimized for the Allwinner CPU.
RetroOrangePi includes a variation of Armbian, a Debian ubuntu linux distribution for ARM CPUs.

It also includes RetroPie, which itself includes RetroArch and Emulation Station. These lines are less clear but you can think of it is a multi layer bean dip with Armbian on the bottom with RetrOrangePi modifications, talking to RetroArch in the middle which is standardizing I/O between multiple emulator hosts and Emulation Station on the top providing a slick launcher front end to launch your games.

Initial Impressions

The Pro versions did ship a few days earlier than the rest, so that gamble paid off a little.

Packaging was good. Lots of padded envelope goodness.

Holding it and pressing the buttons, it had good tactile feel. The case is a bit on the chunky side but I don’t see that as a knock, it feels well built and has good weight. The screen-size, which is report-ably the big upgrade over v1, seems really nice.

From there, my initial impressions are frustrated a bit by the software side of things. On the day my RetroStone arrived, I found dead links at the Retrostone 2 tutorials pages, dead links for some of the RetroOrangePi variants OS and little or no documentation.

In this way the Retrostone 2 reminds me alot of the ArpiCade. Relying on the goodwill of people on an enthusiast forum to get your $200 toy to work. In fairness the Retrostone site and related kickstarter pages are very clear that it doesn’t include software.

I would imagine that is because: lawyers and because: support. I get that, really. But it doesn’t change the frustration level for me as a person that “does computer troubleshooting and programming things” for a living when my hobby has me doing similar computer troubleshooting and programming things to a degree that isn’t expected.

Reading on forums of others who aren’t necessarily as technical and unable to figure it out, I saw an apologist throw out this line:

Why would you expect anything different? Cars don’t come with gas from the manufacturer and guns don’t come with bullets loaded".”

Which, to me, is an asinine comparison considering every car sold by a dealer has a full tank of gasoline and a sticker telling you exactly what kind of gasoline to use. The bullet analogy is misguided too. More accurate would be if you bought a gun and have to make your own shells from existing reload supplies. But,I digress…

First Impression: Oh crap, is It Completely Broken?

My third downloaded image from the RetroOragePI site was labeled “Retrostone 2 Beta” and was under a “Full” heading, implying the build that would include the full linux support. Initial bootup showed a “No Gamepads Detected” welcome screen.

Welcome, indeed.

Clicked all buttons and d-pad, did nothing. I sat it down to grab a whiskey and when I came back, the D-Pad inputs actually worked.
This happens on every boot. A 30-45 second “lock up” and error message complaining about the gamepad.

Looking at the RetroOrangePi forums it seems like this might have been a bug as a result of the late addition of wifi as part of the kickstarter stretch goal. Initially, when I got the error above, I went on to try other (and earlier) Retrostone builds. My thoughts were:

Hey, the kickstarter as all of these screenshots of this thing working, maybe I can get some joy from an older build and just adopt the recent build when its ready for primetime. “

Evidently the existing tutorials and docs for Retrostone 1 don’t apply to Retrostone 2 and I suspect they may not even apply to Retrostone 1 anymore because the software stack has changed considerably.

The most noticeable example of this is in the instructions on how to add games.

Problem is in this version of the software the Start-button popout menu does not include the launch desktop feature.
After some digging, I found the Desktop feature. It is under RetroPie-(System) then RetroOrangePI.

After plugging in a USB keyboard and mouse combo, you have a full X server linux desktop to interact with. From here, you can file copy roms from a thumbdrive to the running machine image so that they will show up in the menus.

UPDATE: After getting to this point, I found this sticky forum post dated 1-7-2020 that covers the location of the Desktop and steps to get wifi connected.

its go time…..?

After successfully solving the escape room UI puzzle to get the linux desktop going and get some ROMS loaded, my brain dropped a little dopamine to give me a spike of excitement that maybe we were ready to rock with this thing!

The result?

Unfortunately that first build wasn’t ready for primetime, at all. At that point in my adventure, every game on the system that I tried across multiple systems (NES, SNES, Megadrive) including those sample games included with the image are too laggy to actually be playable rendering the Retrostone 2 as a paperweight or nerd wall-hanger.

Another trip to the forums and I found a new build was ready, this weekend…

The latest version of the software does have the linux desktop shortcut on the start menu, though when I tried from that menu it locked up. The retroOrangePi shortcut continued to work, though. The dev had a few suggestions following the build that weekend, one was to disable gpio and the other was to change the default SNES emulator to snes9x2002. I believe both of those suggestions are formalized in the latest build.

Lag Fixed? Success!

The latest build was much better. NES, SNES & Megadrive games all seemed to be playable. Sometimes there is a lag but nothing quite as disruptive as before. The latest build starts to normalize the emulation station config, as well. Putting the Desktop feature on the start menu (though that part actually hung when I tried) and tweaking towards a generally cleaner theme.

Summary

My suspicion is that this is one of those projects where the “the hardware team” and “the software team” behind the scenes aren’t fully gel’d up. I suspect, though that those are teams of 1 (person) doing it part-time, for fun on the side. (But that’s just a guess.)

Over on the software side, I’m monitoring the forum and trying to send good vibes to the volunteer work going on to solve some of these problems. I’m trying to be useful but not in the way. I’m not really mad at them, seems like they got the final hardware on the same day I did. Alexkidd released a few builds this weekend, alone & I expect there will be future updates while it has his attention.

I’m not really mad at the hardware side either.

Over on the kickstarter comments of the hardware side, people are giving Pierre hell about shipping delays and every other imaginable thing. Sometimes kickstarter is like Twitter but worse because everyone paid to be there. I’ve found Pierre to be very responsive over on the 8BCraft site. That said, I didn’t really pick the Retrostone looking for a kit. Had I wanted a kit experience I would have thrown the best possible hardware at it and minimized the software stack to my purposes. It definitely isn’t a polished system right now but I think it has alot of power & potential to be an ultimate handheld solution.

I did get finally get to spend some down time on a cold night with a dog snuggled in on one side, the cat snuggled in on the other, a black coffee on the table and some retro gaming goodness in my hand..

Concluding Thoughts

I’m good w/ my purchase but at this time I don’t think I can actually recommend the Retrostone 2 given the current state of affairs. This is based solely on value & performance. Retroarch gets chunkier with each release as new, advanced features get piled on. (Things like streaming, recording, network stack support, bluetooth controllers and more.) This creates a platform baseline overhead in CPU and RAM consumption. The Retrostone 2 screen is really quite good but I suspect the choice to step backwards in CPU capability is going to haunt this device’s upgrade potential over time.

of course.. I could be wrong. I’d like to be proven wrong.

I plan to revisit the project in a month to see how it has developed and I’ll update my opinions if I see a performance optimization miracle. In the meantime, I urge patience for those customers of the Retrostone 2 and I also suggest Retrostone 2 customers consider making a donation to the RetroOrangePi developer for their efforts on this project. If you do, reference Retrostone in your donation and it’ll inevitably get the technical love it needs to go from good to great.

Nintendo, The Over-achiever

My son’s been complaining on and off for a couple months that one or more of his Nintendo switch joy-cons were drifting. Thing is, when he handed me the controller it would stop as soon as I gave it an input.

Honestly, it seemed like a nitpick to me and admittedly at the time my Mr Fix-it priority list looked something like this:

1. Why the heck isn’t this c# app compiling and why does Nuget package restore keep failing

2. “Honey”, the car has been making a funny noise

3. “Honey”, the heater fan in the house has been running non-stop for days

4. The lawnmower sounds like a Blue Man Group concert when you engage the blades

5. “Honey”, the gas stove delivery people said they can’t handle the install

6. Medieval Madness’s left orbit kick-out is hanging at the top of the VUK during gameplay

7. Scared Stiff’s crate is eating balls during multiball

8. Galaga’s Fire button is loose

9. Cocktail Table needs to be Degaussed

10. “Explain Common Core Math to me”

11. Christmas is coming

12. Miles’ Joy-Cons occasionally drift.

Finally, over the holidays I took some time for a stay-cation and to catch up on my Mr. Fix-it list and found myself a couple days before Christmas, looking at his Joy Con issue.

Turns out, it is a real thing. I found this article from over the summer: The Verge - Joy Con Repair is a Thing

”Cats in the cradle and the silver spoon”…

..I started to feel like a real Daddy-McJerkface for shrugging off his concerns and not looking at this sooner.

Admittedly, though I have a little controller-spend PTSD, partially attributable to Microsoft.

Yeah, this tool box in my garage is a bit of a mess. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

There, in my garage toolbox, three allegedly broken XBox 360 controllers sit like abandoned Andy’s Toys waiting on me to verify their functionality, fix or throw away. Another 2 or 3 of these $69 money-pits are lurking somewhere in my office as well, awaiting me to get around to repairing them.

Solution

We bought Miles two more joy-cons (which cost about half what the other systems charged) and it only took about 10 minutes to test and identify the affected controllers, fill out the RMA form and print the (free) return label.

Seriously, Nintendo even covered postage.

2 major holidays and 3 weeks later, the impacted joy-cons arrived back - fixed and ready to rock.

If you’ve ever had to endure the mostly common sense Customer-Service training that large corporations thrust upon their employees under the guise of an employee benefit, it goes something like this:

Day One: A look at Disney hospitality
Day Two: Role Playing: Turning a negative into a positive

The gist is that an unhappy customer on the phone is an opportunity to dazzle them and win loyalty.

Looking back, Nintendo really did just that. It was a fast, hassle-free repair arrangement and… at no cost to the consumer, even for shipping? Nintendo is an Over Achiever ya’ll.

Progress Bars are Hard

In 2020 even Pizza Deliveries have progress bars that are more accurate than Windows, Mac, ChromeOS and Linux. Seriously, the math behind a progress bar is:

100 x (([Number of Operations Total] - [Current Operation]) x .1)

But the best and brightest software companies on earth (ever) just show a spinning circle during long operations or a bar that looks like a coked-out squirrel running back and forth at the bottom of your TV.

See below, Nintendo (in partnership with a third party dev firm) ported a version Mario Kart to iOS.

Look at that glorious progress bar… Not only do you get real progress bars but they went so far as to include an extra decimal point. Nintendo is just showing off their mad 4th grade math skills to the world.

I’m sorta half-kidding here but all joking aside that port of Mario Kart from the Switch / Wii codebase is pretty good considering the limiting nature of touch controls.

Speaking of the Nintendo Switch

Maybe the reason I have a sensitivity towards progress bars is that we are stuck staring at them so frequently. Every time I turn on the xBox One (when it worked..) or PS4 it seems like another 10-30gb update is waiting and needs to be applied before you can play.

Meanwhile after being switched off for 2 months, I pick up one of the classic NES controllers for the Switch and press A. It turns on, applies a quick 200mb update and within 20 seconds I’m at the game-selection menu of their quite awesome Classic NES library of games.

Just to appreciate the hidden complexity of that mundane task… This Switch has bindings for 5 total controllers. The controller, which still had a charge -turned on and woke up the Switch, which assigned to Player 1 status and booted up ready to go.

No “resync” the controller nonsense. It.. just .. works.

Repeating the theme “It Just Works” zooming out on the right, huddling in the dark - there is my 35 year old NES which.. also .. still works. Above it, the 23 year old Nintendo-64, still works.

So do all of their accessories.

Meanwhile over at Microsoft…

For contrast: There, beneath a pinball machine amongst a sea of parts totes and a broken guitar amp sits my XBox One. Lonely, unplugged and unplayed for over a year. My $500 Day-1 XBOne was unplugged for good following the 5th optical drive failure and about 16 total hours invested in frustrating technical support/RMA calls and emails with Microsoft.

A VCR-sized paperweight with just about as much utility. Part DVR, part game system, all missed potential and confused strategy.

When it was working, load times were long and update necessity was frequent. X-Box Live was a very good experience, otherwise.

To say I was a Microsoft gaming fan is an understatement. You can find pictures of me standing next to the Master Chief statue at the old XBox offices in Washington following a series of interviews with another division at Microsoft. There are no fewer than 4 working XBox 360s in our home. My license plate was D0tN3t for Pete’s sake.

This was the road from a nearly fanatical apologist fan of all things Xbox to the dusty & dejected hunk of plastic you see above.

Honorable Mention: Playstation

Also: good job, Sony.
In the interest of fairness. Our two PS4’s, PS3 and Vita all work, have always worked and I’ve never had to fix or replace anything on any of them. Their game load times were a little faster between the PS4 and XBone (for the same game title).

Updates and downloads are still large… Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019) needed a 90 gb initial update to be playable but that’s as much on Activision and Infinity Ward as it is Sony. PSN can sometimes be a slight pain or feel like an afterthought by comparison to X-Box Live.

But all things considered the Sony ownership experience has been a solid one, as well. Sony’s exclusive titles haven’t grabbed me like Halo did back in the day but Sony has earned my loyalty.

Conclusion

Ten months from now the next-generation of consoles are going to be competing for your hard-earned money and coveted spot beneath the Christmas tree. As I stare at the two displays trying to decide what to get:

I’m going to remember that the xBox One was a hot-mess designed by the disjointed committee that brought us Windows ME and not the visionary genius that gave us the original x-Box and later made the x-Box 360 so dominant.

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I’m going to remember my overwhelmingly positive ownership experience with Playstation products, how much fun we had with PSVR and how great God of War was.

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Finally, I’m going to remember that for 35 years Nintendo has been making and delivering solid hardware and software with few exceptions On the rare occasion that I had an issue, they made it right. Over-achievers that they are.