PS5

I scored a (retail) PS5 last month. Pretty wild when you think about it that the PS5 was released in the end of 2020 and in the 1st third of 2022 they are still hard(ish) to come by; outside of scalpers.

My in, was the Best Buy Total Tech membership. I had signed up for it in order to get access to a GPU for a virtual pinball and gaming PC build. Aside from other benefits around warranty and rewards points, the Total Tech Membership gives you early access to hard-to-find things as they come into stock. The membership is $199/year (kinda steep IMO) but since I was able to buy an RTX 3070 and RTX 3090 at retail, it already paid for itself in my view.

At any rate, I’m not a huge modern console gamer but there are some touchstone titles that I feel compelled to play. On Sony’s Platform, for me: God of War & God of War Ragnarök are must-haves. The original game left such an impression, I was excited to revisit it with upscaled graphics in preparation for the new game this fall.

Astro’s Playroom

The PS5 is bundled with Astro’s Playroom. This game is great, especially considering the tenuous footing from which it was created. The point of the game is to acclimate you with the controller on the PS5 and the game itself is little more than a playable commercial for Sony PS merch. In it, you play as this little robot, Astro and explore hardware-themed levels and unlock Playstation memorabilia. That’s it. Doesn’t sound fun, but it really is.

The primary thing that makes Astro’s Playroom great is level design coupled with adorable characters. I know, that makes me sound like a pre-teen girl referring to a favorite stuffed animal but Im a 40-something beer-and-whiskey drinking nerd guy, unashamed to tell you the characters are cute. If you stop playing for awhile, it pulls out a little PS Vita or PSVR and entertains itself. At times, you can see the character shaking its little robot ass to the theme music of the stage you are on. All hail our future ass-shaking robot overlords.

Most gamers are probably aware of the history of Mega Man and its influence on level design that reaches even into modern games. Kitamura paid special attention to level difficulty, the idea being to allow the difficulty of the game to ramp up at a natural pace while maintaining a consistent-average-play-time per level. He wanted the game to teach the players how to play gradually, wanted to reduce the chance of players being stuck and frustrated and emphasized re-playability.

Astro’s Playhouse is a bit of a love letter to these early tenants of game design. The level design finds a balance of feeling open-enough to not be claustrophobic while balancing difficulty, skills and power ups to keep it engaging. Cute characters, good theme music and sound effects and quick respawns round out the experience to make Astro’s Playhouse a very fun game. (Despite being a giant Playstation Commercial.)

As a bonus, the PS5 is powerful enough to play Astro’s Playhouse while other games are installing. Pretty bad-ass.

Unreal Engine 5 City Sample

Unreal Engine 5 released a playable demo alongside the streaming and blu-Ray release of Matrix Resurrections. The UE5 City Sample includes cameos from Reeves and Moss and offer two modes: a playable car chase reminiscent of The Matrix Reloaded and a free-world environment to explore the City.

City Sample is available for free on the PS Store (search for Matrix Awakens) and the City Sample is available for download for free within the Unreal Marketplace. It includes assets, textures, models and examples to highlight UE5’s capabilities for film makers, creators and game devs.

Going Virtual, The State of VR (dis)UNION

The other day, my son was playing Rec Room on PSVR when I heard a high pitched youth voice crackle through the den speakers “Man, I wouldn’t ban you, you are my BEST FRIEND!” Let me be clear, I have no idea who he was playing with but I guarantee it wasn’t someone he actually has met IRL.

As my kids try out Virtual School, I found myself wishing Virtual School operated a little closer to what was described in Ready Player One (the book). The kids get settled in a place with comfortable temperature and stable power and pull on their school-issue headsets. From here they are jacked into an instance of an educational planetoid: Ludus, where the main character attends OASIS Public School #1873. Their avatars are seated together in a virtual classroom. The teachers aren’t bound by physical limits and can transport the classroom to approximations of ancient battlefields or star-maps of far-away galaxies for study. The kids inhabiting these avatars have at their disposal a compendium of human knowledge and entertainment. Ironically, a world-class education that in their society does nothing for providing opportunities for advancement.

Okay, so maybe that last part is a little too real.

Instead of Über-engaging and mind-expanding lessons pinball’ing through space and time our kids lessons are more mundane. Link-lists of assignments with supported material coming from a disjointed cluster of sources from old-school publishers using technologies like PDF and browser-based Flash. (Which will soon be disabled.) Their classrooms are more like the Brady-Bunch tile screen that have become a hallmark of Pandemic 2020 than the shared virtual experience outlined in Ernest Cline’s vision for virtual education in the future.

Plenty Of: 401 Unauthorized - Please login again
and
Not Enough: Neo-Goonies adventures with virtual classmates after class.

At least the fully-dystopian collapse of society as depicted in Ready Player One hasn’t come to pass. Yet. (2020!)

If you are reading this, odds are you are in my target demographic of “nostalgia nerd” and I thought it might be fruitful to take a few minutes to look at where we are in terms of Virtual Reality.

First, some terminology.

Virtual Reality (VR) - Headsets, technologies & experiences that put the player into a virtual environment. Think: Lawnmower Man but not necessarily with the seizure inducing fractals.

Augmented Reality (AR) - Handheld displays, headsets, technologies that present a virtual objects into a real environment. A simple smartphone example would be Pokemon Go!, a simple standalone example might be the Terminator HUD or Google Glass. A more complex example is Microsoft HoloLens.

Augmented Reality

It seems like Augmented Reality is a technology in search of a problem to solve. Mostly you see AR being used from a smartphone for gaming (Pokemon Go!) or novel uses around use-cases like “will this dresser look good in my bedroom?” where they digitally paint and object with spacial awareness into your camera view.

Google Glass used AR (of sorts) to give you a personal Heads Up Display but at the expense of turning everyone into cybernet photographers. Many people on the other end of that head-mounted camera found it off-putting. Glass-holes became a term to describe it.

Apple has plans to dip into AR and maybe even VR hardware later this year or early next year if patents and rumors are to be believed.

Microsoft’s HoloLens might have been one of the most ambitious visions for a future inclusive of AR technologies

But mostly, AR is relegated to the “a neat idea” without a ton of practical implementation. I’m sure somewhere there may be high-tech rocket engineers collaborating in real-time with their engineer counterparts across the globe via a shared AR experience but mostly, to date, AR’s greatest contribution has been towards solving problems for VR.

Virtual Reality

The explosion of VR in the last 8 years was partly driven by improvements in spacial sensor tech used in smartphones. Gyroscopes, accelerometers and inexpensive imaging sensors used in smartphones were the breakthrough components to solve the VR Head tracking problem. The basic principle of modern VR is that you could strap a cellphone to your face with blinders on the corners and two lenses. Head tracking maps your head movements into look-controls on the display. The effect is that as you look around the VR image changes 1:1 with your head movement. The ability to naturally look around gives you the feeling of immersion.

The major players in VR right now are Oculus, HTC Vive & PSVR.
(plus a bunch of cardboard and plastic phone-based things I’ll discuss in a minute)

HTC VIVE

For awhile the HTC VIVE had a solid head start for serious VR experiences and gaming. The VIVE headsets require a VR-ready gaming PC though they offer some choices for wireless connectivity. Most VIVE editions handle tracking through the use of triangulation towers in the room, which makes setup and portability take longer than other VR headsets. (Though, the Cosmos now supports the “multiple cameras on your faceplate” method for headtracking similar to Oculus. )

The headsets and controllers are on the top end of the market but they also hold up incredibly well. Several commercial-use VR lounges that I’ve been to use VIVE Hardware. For games and VR Experiences VIVE owners are mostly going to stick with SteamVR library games, I believe VALVE even had a hand in developing their tracking technology.

Vive Cosmos By The Numbers
Dual 3.4” diagonal display
1440 x 1700 pixels per eye (2880 x 1700 pixels combined) @ 90hz
110° field of view
Price: $699 / $899

PSVR

When Sony launched PSVR, I’ll admit that I was skeptical. I think flashbacks of the letdown in expectations that were set by Nintendo Virtual Boy Commercials back in the 1990’s may have colored by expectations in crimson.

Never fear Console-based VR Enthusiasts, the PSVR is a pretty solid value and includes a nice game list. Most multi-platform games will come to Steam or Oculus before PSVR but that also means you aren’t actively testing out beta software for the game developer by the time it lands on your console.

For head tracking, the PSVR uses a single camera mounted on or near your TV and clever lights that help the camera to calculate head position and controller locations.

I appreciate that the PS4 has enough horsepower to drive the PSVR and the primary HDMI at the same time. This makes possible some party / social VR gaming with games like Beat Saber.

That way, your friends will know what you look like when you walk through a spider-web.

There are two revisions (currently) of the PSVR headset. They look more or less the same but the newer Rev moves the On / Off & Volume controls from a pack on the cords to the headset itself. It was a quiet but useful improvement; makes the cables less prone to tangle. Sony claims that you will be able to use PSVR with the PS5, though it may require an adapter. I’d be surprised if they didn’t eventually make a PS5-specific upgraded version of the headset.

The resolution is lower on the PSVR than you might get from a PC-Driven headset but not to the point of being detrimental on most games. The PSVR headset padding (Forehead & Head Strap) are made of a very soft foam-rubber. I’ve found the original pads aren’t resilient to light cleaning. We tend to lysol and wipe down the pads between players. They also aren’t resilient to buzz-cut haircuts on the head strap. Being a bald guy, I’ve noticed a 2-day head stubble will act like sandpaper to that foam rubber. Sony doesn’t have a great solution for replacing these pads, either. It can be done but I had to call them… on the phone… like a savage.

GAMES

You get PSVR games at the Playstation Store, alongside other Playstation games.

Star Wars: Battlefront (I) included a free add-on VR Mission that was absolutely incredible. Star Tours at Disney World level of Incredible. Unfortunately, they only ever created the one mission. Even with the single mission being able to fly an X-Wing in VR was worth the price of admission to PSVR, for me anyway. Remember, I built the dome thing so I’m slightly obsessed with this concept.

Star Wars: Squadrons, releasing October 2nd, 2020 might finally answer the need for more space battles in VR.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare wasn’t a great game IMO but it didn’t include the Jackal Assault VR Experience, another single-mission space-based battle sim.

SuperHot VR is a neat take on a Matrix-y bullet-time gun and fist game. It is cartoony but still visceral at times. Parents, be warmed though: One portion of the game encourages the player to shoot themselves in the virtual head to show their allegiance and escape the simulation.

Beat Saber came late to PSVR but they took the time to get it right. The PSVR is especially good at Beat Saber b/c the motion controllers feel like light-saber hilts, because most PS4s are hooked to a thumping home audio system and b/c the two-screen experience makes it a good party experience.

Other PSVR games of note include Pistol Whip, Thumper, Rec Room, Vacation Simulator, Job Simulator, Battle Wake, Ace Combat 7, Arizona Sunshine, Everybody’s Golf VR, Vader Immortal. The Sony PSVR catalog has grown nicely over the last few years.

PSVR By The Numbers
Single 5.7” panel
960 x 1080 pixels per eye (1920 x 1080 combined) switchable between 120hz & 90hz
~100° field of view
Price: $349

Oculus Rift

Oculus was acquired in 2014 by Facebook. I think it is called Facebook Labs now? At any rate, I have complicated and mixed emotions regarding Facebook but I’m pretty clear-eyed where John Carmack is concerned. As a developer, I see him as a legend and some of his work and philosophy resonates with me.

My first experience with Oculus was in 2013, I tried to use a DK1 (Oculus Dev Kit) with a Drone for FPV (First-Person-View) Controls. At the time, my experience was that the amount of time it took to process the dual FPV camera feeds into a single VR-Ready video stream was too high to be applicable to fast-pace flight. Such a lag slows down effective reaction time too much. I was impressed with the build quality of the DK1 but promptly passed it on to someone that to could it more … appropriately.

Late last year, I started looking at VR solutions that might be compatible with one of the PC gaming platforms like Steam. I really didn’t want to install light towers or position cubes in the room. I was also hesitant to go with something that might require me to build out a full gaming PC. I didn’t want to get pulled into “Daaaaaaaddddd, the VR PC is asking for updates again, what do I do?” family tech-support tasks. Even though it doesn’t natively support Steam, I was seeing a decent cadence of games porting to Oculus Quest. The largest appeal being the Oculus Quest doesn’t require an external PC in order to operate.

Oculus Quest & Sony WH-1000XM3’s

Out of the box, I was impressed with the build-quality of the Oculus Quest. The materials seem to be a good bit more resilient and modular than those of the PSVR. It is a lot like the build-quality of the Vive, actually. It seems as though a light-cleaning with alcohol wipes or lysol between players or a stubbly head won’t destroy the straps.

As mentioned earlier, the Oculus Quest is unique in that it doesn’t require connections of any kind, to anything. It is fully wireless which is incredibly freeing. Understand though the trade off of being fully wireless is there is more weight in the headset for battery and phone-like internals.

SETUP

Head tracking on the Oculus quest moves the (4!) cameras to the headset itself. Four of them provide what is called an inside-out head tracking experience. No light or position towers, everything is right inside the headset. The brilliance of this is that you can take the headset into any room and play. The headset detects when you are in a new room and keeps track of play areas that you define. It is really quite ingenious. While wearing the headset, it detects that you are in a new room and the display shows you a Terminator-vision Augmented Reality view of the room. You use the controller to draw a boundary and set the floor height and the Oculus saves these as room profiles it calls Guardians.

It seems like a lot of thought went into the UI here (and throughout) to make the Oculus Quest a very intuitive experience. The blend of AR and VR for boundary-keeping and notifying a player of objects in the boundary is very good and sensitivity is configurable for those trying to play in a tight space.

SOUND

The Oculus Quest differentiates itself in the sound department. It includes a set of speakers that directionally fire sound into your ear holes. The effect is sort of like when you take off over the ear headphones and wear them around your neck but keep playing the music. It is good enough for casual play but no so loud to be distracting to everyone in your household. The Quest also has headphone jacks for in ear or over the ear headphones. It supports bluetooth audio as well but the experience is laggy.


GAMES

You get Oculus Quest games via the Oculus Store. Some of the same popular titles as the PSVR, including Beat Saber, Rec Room, SuperHot and Job Simulator.

Oculus gained an exclusive upfront deal on Vader Immortal before it came to the PSVR in May 2020.

I enjoy playing Pistol Whip, a techno-music scored John Wick conveyor-belt shooting gallery.

With bowling alley’s being shut down I’ve found Premium Bowling to be good fun. It has decent hook physics and supports a pretty neat multiplayer experience.

VR EXPERIENCES

The Quest has a solid offering of VR Experiences through a variety of curated sources (Youtube 360, Amazon and many others) which makes it an incredible value for exploration entertainment. Whether you want to see the perspective of the rear seat of a Blue Angel or float down an a River passage on the Amazon, Fly above the ground on a WingSuit or check out a new rollercoaster; there is a lot to do and see.

Parents Note: Most things on the internet only takes a few clicks to find Porn. It was important to me that my kids not stumble onto this stuff accidentally. Later, when they go looking for it… well, that is a problem for another time. I’m appreciative that the VR experiences that I’ve seen on the Oculus Quest seem to be pretty well curated. There is language and violence in some instances but nothing overtly pornographic that I’ve stumbled upon.

Be warned though as the Quest opens up for certain web browsers with native WebVR support this may change and bring easier accidental adult discoveries on the platform.

or.. if you are a grown-up looking for that - WebVR is the key technology to allow less-curated content to play on the Oculus Quest.

PEAKING OVER THE WALLS OF THE OCULUS WALLED GARDEN

Oculus released a USB-C based fiber optic cable and supporting software called Oculus Link allowing the Quest to be connected to a VR Ready PC. So you get the capabilities of the original Oculus Rift and Oculus Rift S along with the Quest built in features.
Using an i7-based Dell XPS8930 w/ 32 gb of RAM, a 1tb SSD and GTX 1080 (8gb) video card with the Quest, I’ve been able to play pretty much any SteamVR content that I’ve tried.

VIRTUAL PINBALL
One of the reasons I was looking to expand towards the PC-VR space was to be able to play Pinball in VR. The Oculus Store for Quest has Pinball FX2 in VR, which includes some of FX2’s fantasy tables that are often knockoffs or riffs of popular pinball classics. PinballFX2 is to real pinball what Spinner Hubcaps are to Rims. (There, I said it.) All flash and no substance.

With the full back catalog of Bally / Williams tables on The Pinball Arcade on Steam, I was hoping the introduction of a VR headset would allow me to play those games in VR.

None of that worked. I guess Farsight’s efforts to support VR are limited to the Stern Pinball Arcade. I’ll have to continue to research to find a way to get Bally - Williams tables working with VR. It looks like there may be options with more steps and kludgy freeware but I was hoping for the decent physics in The Pinball Arcade..

finding out my $$$ spend in Bally-Williams tables doesn’t translate to VR..

Using Oculus Link I was able to play Stern Pinball Arcade on the Quest. Stern & Farsight’s joint venture currently offers the following tables:

Ghostbusters
Harley Davidson
High Roller Casino
Last Action Hero
Mustang
Phantom of the Opera
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Starship Troopers
Star Trek

SAMPLE GAMEPLAY

If you have your barf-bag ready, feel free to venture into one of the videos below. These are captures from VR gameplay in Stern Pinball Arcade.

Interestingly enough, 4 months ago I could play AC/DC but it now says the game is no longer available. Their license expired, I believe. No new games have been added in that time. This makes Stern Pinball Arcade feel a little stale.

Stern Pinball Arcade Pros and Cons

Pros
Extremely Good Recreations of Stern Tables
Realistic physics compared to the real thing
Good Leaderboards
Good variety in types of Stern games

Cons
Stern-Only
Clunky Menu
Overly complicated in-app purchase terminology
Many 1-Star Reviews (people reporting issues)
No new tables in awhile (abandonware?)
Sometimes lags

VIRTUAL ARCADE

Continuing with the theme of stretching the Oculus Quest beyond its original limitations, I’ve also seen videos of people managing the Side Load Oculus Arcade (original from the GEAR and GO hardware) onto the Oculus Quest

Even though my VR Arcade and Pinball side-goals with the Quest have had some roadblocks, I’m seriously impressed with the Oculus Quest. It is a well done, integrated and well-designed piece of equipment and related software. The biggest downside I see with the Quest as compared to a VR headset that more naturally connects to your home entertainment setup is that it is generally a solitary experience. We play PSVR at parties, not Oculus.

Oculus Quest By The Numbers
Single OLED ~5.5” panel
1440 x 1600 pixels per eye (2880 x 1600 combined) @ 72hz
~95° field of view
Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 8 Core
4 Kryo 280 Gold (ARM Cortex-A73 based) @ 2.45 GHz
4 Kryo 280 Silver (ARM Cortex-A73 based) @ 1.9 GHz
4gb of RAM
64 or 128gb of Storage
Price: $399/ $499

Cardboard & Milk Cartoons Strapped to Your FaCe vs LASERS in YOUR EYE

As alluded to earlier the real breakthrough in VR was the smartphone. Awesome screen, check. Lots of sensors, check. Strap it to your face and sock off your peripheral and you’ve made a VR Goggle. Samsung has some cheap ones made out of plastic, Nintendo has one made out of cardboard. I’ve seen home-brews made from egg crates and milk cartons.

Everywhere you look there is another 2nd or 3rd class-citizen in the VR offering landscape. Ultimately, the thing that will make or break a given VR platform is going to be content. In the beginning of this I talked about Ready Player One; in the book the breakthrough that allowed for the mass adoption of OASIS was the company’s breakthrough retinal-projection technology.

The HTC VIVE was a generational leap over its predecessors and the Oculus Quest is another generational hop in the right direction.
Ultimately, VR is going to look more like the Oculus Quest than the PSVR within the next decade. Wires & dependence on a kludge of loosely connected software running on a nearby computer will give way to smaller, more powerful (and portable) innovations. The software developers will follow these hardware innovators and ultimately only a few clear winners will emerge.

As John Carmack and his son head home to work on Artificial General Intelligence, I hope the team left behind at Oculus continues to innovate and push the envelope, staying clear of Facebook’s tendencies to step in it with Washington, with consumers, with advertisers and with their employees.

Update: Oculus Quest 2

About a week after I posted this, Oculus updated its VR model lineup and introduced the Oculus Quest 2. The Quest 2 will replace the Quest 1 (Quest 1 no longer produced but still supported) and the Oculus Go and Oculus S are both going away in favor of the Quest 2. For a more in-depth look at the Quest 2, here is a review I found very helpful (below).

Blow On It

Remember, blowing into your NES cartridge to fix it? Did it actually work / help?

There are smart people out there that tend to agree: No, it didn’t.

But then again, maybe Robot Chicken has the right of it. Video games are a constant source of joy for us, so maybe a little blow now and then is the least we can do to return the favor..

Whichever side of the blow / no-blow divide you may fall on, the NES Cartridge design is iconic. It is both incredible for its ability to hold up over the decades but also frustrating for the tendency over time of the ZIF socket to require “just re-insert it” - type actions to get a good connection.

A year ago, I bought an EverDrive N8 and picked up a 20” Toshiba CRT TV from a Facebook marketplace listing. I had classic NES gaming on the mind and I’ve been meaning to get back to it. Last year, I also installed a “New” 72 Pin Connector in my NES to alleviate some cartridge loading issues.

Only a month into owning the EverDrive I found myself in a familiar spot. The NES EverDrive would sometimes boot to a solid color screen or certain games would have jumbled intro screens. I did all the things we did when we were kids, blowing on the cartridge, slamming it into the toaster mechanism with varied levels of force and eventually using a Game Genie with it in order to create enough force for the cartridge contacts.

The thing is, the Krikzz forums are pretty clear that you aren’t really supposed to use this thing with a Game Genie, it can create unexpected mapping errors or inconsistent boot situations. The entire point of the EverDrive is that they have better (OEM) voltage consistencies compared to other multi-carts. What impact a Game Genie or other Wedge-card might have, isn’t probably heavily tested.

So, the NES has sat collecting dust once more as It ended up in my “I’ll get to it later” queue.

Then, I flipped on Netflix’s new High Score Mini Series about retro gaming intending for it to be a background watch while I worked on the laptop late one evening. Many reviews have been “nothing new here” but Episode 2, which partly covered the 1990 NES World Championships triggered my desire to get my NES whipped back in shape.

I suppose memories of The Wizard (1989) and my own childhood dreams to play in the Nintendo World Championships. Alas, the nearest cities to me at the time would have been Indianapolis or Cincinnati and the two hour drive and overnight stay would have been more than my parents would have been willing to fork out toward’s their nerdy son’s video game obsession. Probably for the best, based on the scores they put up, I wouldn’t have stood a chance at the national level!

But…I would like to try to arrange for a NES Mock-Championship game night post-COVID…

Motivation Found. Time to fix it!

This time, I found a good discussion about the pros and cons of NES 72-Pin connector repair approaches and from this thread I ended up with two paths forward.

Path one: Go back with a refurbished or NOS original connector. The remade connectors aren’t as good as the original.
Path two: Go with something like BLW, which is a redesign of that entire mechanism and connector.

”GO LEFT” <RETURN>

OEM is Probably Better

Where the 72pin edge connectors are concerned, it turns out the original Nintendo parts are pretty well made, so I decided to go this route, for now. Not picking on the BLW redesign here, I will probably go the BLW route the next time it acts up in order to see how it holds up by comparison. But, it seems that the modern remakes of the original 72 pin edge connector are less-than the OEM in terms of resiliency.

I couldn’t find my original connector though I’m sure I have it somewhere in a box. So, I bought a refurbished OEM connector from a FleaBayer.

It arrived quickly, though I was a little put off that it actually had rust on one of the pins. Refurbished, indeed. YMMV.

Armed with my trusty can of DeOxit, an eraser and Phillips screwdriver, I set to task and replaced the connector again… or again again? again again agin? I’ve honestly lost track of how many times I’ve done this. :)

About 20 minutes of work that could have been achieved faster if I didn’t have OCD screw-handling tendencies and my NES was back in business.

And.. after all this I got to check out the Nintendo World Championship 1990 game, thanks to an EverDrive Update.

Nice to have the option to play it without buying a $$,$$$ collectible cartridge or a $$$ reproduction. There is an an easy hex-edit of the original rom to allow P1 Start to begin the game and Voilà:

How’d I Do?

Turns out, I wouldn’t have been World Championship finals material anyway!

In SMB, I collected the coins leading up to and including the underground pipe, went back up the pipe, then suicided Mario.

You start back at the halfway point near the 9-block. I jump up while the Goombas roll by and hit the upper coin block, then the 9 block quickly before the Koopa can get there, go right, collect a couple coins and then suicide Mario again.

Next life, back to the 9Block and maybe +1 coin for 50. I think I could probably shave 20 seconds off that portion of the time. I cleared Rad Racer, got two Tetrises before running out of time.

Using the strategy of shorting SMB in favor of more time in Tetris, my highest score is 292,745.

Lap 1 = SMB, Lap 2 = Rad Racer, Lap 3 = Tetris

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.

Mortal Kombat 11 (Now w/ PTSD!)

Mortal Kombat 11 boasts a strong fighting engine with excellent potential for more technical fighting, diverse combos and amplified attacks. Unfortunately, I found the enhanced gore of the animations to be a heavy distraction from gameplay rather than a motivation to keep me engaged in learning finishing moves.

Tagline, 1993. I’m 14. Living in a new town, 600 miles from everything I’ve ever known. Our house is a strange mix of cable-spools and lawn chairs for living room furniture and the smell of new waterbeds wafting down the hall.. I do have a computer and I eventually have a dedicated modem line to run my OBV/2 BBS, The Graveyard. At night, Razor1911 couriers are dialing into the PC to drop 0-Day Warez and I hear mom and dad in the other room arguing -talking about “maybe going to jail” because of [wah-wah - insurance, something-something - wah-wah] that I didn’t fully understand at the time.

We lived in a hotel the previous summer - The Ramada Inn on the Causeway in Mobile, Alabama that has since been demolished - near R&R Seafood. I suppose we were technically homeless but getting a new start. Growing up on 10 acres on the edge of an Indiana Forestry I found myself for the first time with the suburban freedoms enjoyed by kids in my favorite Spielberg movies.

Me, my bicycle and a BP gas station a few blocks away with a Mortal Kombat acade machine & Taco Bell Express. My teenage mind was blown with the opportunity. I fed so many quarters into that machine and played against football-playing high schoolers that were twice my size and a tendency to menace me when they lost. Admittedly, sometimes I let the Wookie win.

Sometimes, I didn’t.

This person named Hillary Clinton was on the television talking about censoring my favorite albums (2 Live Crew, RATM, Tool, Gravity Kills, God Lives Underwater) and the dangers posed by this new menace to America’s youth: Video Game violence.

- ”Is all the world Jails and Churches?”
(well, that was VietNow (1997) but you get the point)

Agreed that is a long walk to get you into my headspace. Now that you are here, pull up a lawn chair and let’s set at the cable-spool turned-coffee table and have a chat about video game violence, 26 years later.

I remember being annoyed when Mortal Kombat (1 and 2) were finally ported to home consoles with minimal gore, no-blood and paired down graphics. It just wasn’t the same game, anymore. Mortal Kombat 1 was the first arcade game I ever bought. I own and often still play a MK4 w/ MK1, MK2, MK3, Mk4 PCBs in it. I let my 13 and 9 year old kids play it and think nothing about it.

Enter, Mortal Kombat 11. MK11 (I’m playing on the Nintendo Switch) continues a trend in the MK franchise through the introduction of mid-fight super-move sequences that can be triggered during a match when a player’s health bar reaches a critical part. MK9 called these X-Ray moves because they used an X-Ray camera view to show the devastation being wrought to the opponents skeletal structure.

If you think of MK3, where there are improbable grapples where an opponent might crack the fighter’s neck or damage their spine during the match. It’s like that. The moves do an incredible amount of damage at the expense of player control for both players but do not necessarily completely drain the opponent. As unlikely has it might seem, Liu Kang can hop back up and keep fighting after Katana snaps his neck..

Mortal Kombat 11 calls these Fatal Blows and they are a strategic crutch that either player can employ to provide momentum for a comeback or level the health meters. The thing is: Fatal Blows in 2019’s Mortal Kombat 11 are the equivalent of 1993’s MK1 or MK2 Fatalities.

Which means.. the fatalities… are more so.
How much, more?

Maybe, PTSD levels of more.

In my best Obama, “Let… me.. be.. clear:” I’m not saying that playing through MK11 gave me any form of PTSD. But I will say that MK11’s fatalities in particular probed the edges of what I’m comfortable watching and classifying as entertainment. Several points during my initial play through of the game, I had a sensation that I can only describe as my neural-net-firewall throwing a warning. “Hey, there are things going into your eyeballs that you should be aware that we aren’t sure is good for us.”

Sure, previous Mortal Kombat games were equally horrible in the fatality death of a character through evisceration, explosion, decapitation and more. This installment in the franchise pauses at the worst bits of horror while the reward and menu system delay to return user control by to the player.

For instance: You get to see Kronica tear your character in half length-wise. Pause. Put you back together through a time-rewind and then tear your character in half at the waste. Repeat as many as 6 times until the menu renders allowing you to navigate the game.

Most fatalities now end in the complete drawn-and-quartered explosive destruction of the opponent and the game developer seems pretty proud of their bloody accomplishment as featured through the game credits.

Searching the web, I found that there is at least one case of an individual who worked on the game being treated for PTSD:

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/05/one_mortal_kombat_11_developer_had_to_see_a_therapist_after_violent_dreams

Take that with a grain of salt, it was picked up as click-bait by half of the internet. No such thing as bad publicity, right?

I’ve met soldiers who operated turrets from inside armored vehicles in Afghanistan. Instead of gunning from an exposed position, “Playstation Johnny" sits in the relative armored comfort of his vehicle as he mows down the enemy from a computer monitor and gamepad. Despite this, Playstation Johnny has just as much potential for combat fatigue and mental trauma as the guy with boots on the ground carrying a rife.

In the mid-90’s I found myself frowning at the Pant-Suited Politician trying to censor my video games and music. 26 years later I find myself wondering if the ratings label on this game is an adequate communication device juxtaposed to the affect it might have on an emotionally developing mind.

I feel like I should love this game but I don’t. The hazards of adulting, I suppose? If my 14 year old self could see me now, he’d probably kick me in the nuts.

“Go get laid, kid.”