Game Room Update

I made a few tweaks to the game room that I thought I'd share. I added a Sega Genesis to the mix. I gave away the Sony TV I had because I was never thrilled with its performance. In its place is a Sony PVM-3230 pro monitor. It's a 185lb. beast of a display, and difficult to calibrate, but the picture is damn nice. It's capable of running games at 15KHz low resolution RGB, which is basically the best picture quality for any video game system. I have several of these Sony PVM's in various sizes, and they're the best thing to ever happen to retrogaming. The consoles are attached to the monitor via SCART cables, which is a European standard not available in the US. The SCART cables attach to a special adapter that is used with the Analog RGB input of the monitor. I have SCART cables for the Xbox, Genesis, Dreamcast and PS2. They all look magnificent on this set. The NES runs composite and N64 runs S-Video, both same as before, because RGB is not an option for these. I also got rid of the receiver because the monitor has speaker hookups. The cable box is gone because I didn't ever watch TV in here.

Next post will be about my attempt to Retrobright my Dreamcast to remove the yellow, and to change its battery.

My Game Room

For the first time in my life, I have a room dedicated to gaming. I finished setting it up this weekend. Just enough room for all my gaming hardware. Nothing on the walls yet, but I have plans to hang some arcade cabinet marquees and vintage game ads and posters, once I buy them, of course. My actual game collection is not really that substantial yet, but it's growing all the time. I have about a few dozen games for each system. Quite a few controllers as well. But what I lack in physical games, I make up for in emulation. Mostly due to the Xbox emulators, I have about 10,000 playable games total in this room. Not bad. Many good times will be had in this room.

Game Room Inventory
Neo Geo MVS Bartop (M.A.M.E.)
X-Men Vs. Street Fighter "Big Blue" Cabinet
Sony Wega 32" TV
Yamaha Receiver
Aiwa Speakers
Sega Dreamcast
Sony Playstation 2
Microsoft Xbox (w/ XBMC)
Nintendo NES
Nintendo 64
Motorola Cable Box

XBMC4XBOX: The Best Media Center

For years now, I've been using XBMC on my Xbox (original, not 360) to listen to music in my living room. I also use it to watch standard definition videos, stream web-based video, and occasionally to look at picture slide shows, not to mention play thousands of emulated video games from over a dozen old-school consoles and arcade titles. I'd say that my Xbox has gotten more use than any other device in my living room.

XBMC over the years has been great, but not without its quirks. Certain things became either wonky or outright broken over time. Playing videos, watching movie trailers, random play for music, all needed work after a while. A few years ago, the developers of XBMC, citing the Xbox's obsolesence, and a need to focus on development for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, ceased Xbox development. A few Xbox diehard developers decided to carry the torch under the moniker XBMC4XBOX. Up until recently, there hadn't been any major releases of the software. May 2011 brought XBMC4XBOX v3.0.1 stable. Hooray! Utilizing Confluence, the beautiful default skin for the other XBMC platforms, a modern build of XBMC is now optimized for the Xbox hardware, with added features and bugfixes.

Having used it since its release, I can easily say that this is the definitive release of XBMC for the Xbox. It's flawless. The software looks gorgeous. I customized it with black backrounds, giving it a sharp, clean, easy-on-the-eyes look, which I love. All of my former gripes have been addressed. "Party Mode", a.k.a. random, actually plays random tracks from my music library every time, not just one of five or six "random" playlists. Apple Movie Trailers works wonderfully. All of my downloaded video files play flawlessly, regardless of file type. All of the Internet-based TV "channels" of streaming video that I'm interested in, like Revision3, have built-in support.

If you're looking for a way to watch videos and listen to music in your living room/bedroom/game room, especially if you're into retro gaming, then do yourself a favor and pick up and old Xbox from a garage sale or eBay, look up how to "softmod" it (Hint: it's not tough. Youtube is your friend.), and install XBMC4XBOX 3.0.1. You can get a remote for it for cheap as well if you don't like using a controller. I prefer a remote myself, especially since I use a universal remote. It's cheap, does 720p HD over component, supports digital audio, is networkable, runs video game emulators, and it does everything more expensive set-top boxes do and more, except HD video. If you can live without that, get an Xbox. You'll be glad you did.

Update to Neo Geo Bartop: Perfection

I'd like to follow up on a project I "finished" last year. Read about it here. After its initial completion, two things kept my beloved Neo Geo MVS Bartop from being the perfect Neo Geo emulation machine:  finding the correct software configuration for 100% arcade-perfect emulation, and keeping the PC from overheating under heavy use.

Regarding the heat issue: My original PC setup inside the cabinet was an old AMD-based Socket A chip. It got way too hot way too quickly and would often overheat and shut down the system after only an hour of use or less. Even the 5 cooling fans inside the cabinet could not keep the temperature low enough. I replaced it first with an Intel Celeron D-based setup with a ASRock board. This ran much cooler, but the board and chip did not get along very well. The CPU was not officially supported by the motherboard and would sometimes reset 10 seconds into boot-up, then boot normally. This was a minor inconvenience that I put up with until I realized my second issue, which I'll explain next. For now, I had the machine running well enough for me and everyone else that played it.

Regarding the software issue: After a few months of play, I noticed that there was some screen tearing going on in certain games where full-screen scrolling occurs, i.e. Captain Tomaday, Twinkle Star Sprites, and Blazing Star. This annoyed the hell out of me. I inquired several places (message boards, emailing vendors) as to why this was happening. The answer I found was that the Neo Geo has an odd vertical refresh rate of ~58.185Hz, which tears when set to the standard 60Hz refresh rate. Long story short, I had to buy the newest version of the ArcadeVGA video card that supported custom vertical refresh rates (via the ArcadePerfect utility), which also required a new motherboard and RAM, since I had an AGP card, but needed PCIe. A positive side effect of getting a new board was that the rebooting issue above has disappeared. Anyway, getting new hardware almost did the trick. It got my video looking perfect, but now the audio in M.A.M.E. was out of sync. It would skip every 5 seconds or so. The standard install of M.A.M.E. doesn't have a "soundsync" feature. Luckily, a custom build called GroovyMAME does. After a few false starts, GroovyMAME got my audio synced with my now 100% accurate video emulation and all is well. Setting "triplebuffer" and "soundsync" in the mame.ini file was the key. There is zero perceptible video issues on any Neo Geo games I've tried.

If you're looking to emulate Neo Geo MVS games in M.A.M.E. with 100% accuracy, the only way to do it, to my knowledge, is to do it with the combination of hardware and software that I have currently running. I'd be happy to answer any questions about my setup. Just email me or comment below.

I've gotten so much joy out of building, configuring, and playing this Neo Geo cabinet. I don't think I can ever get rid of it. Now I just need to get a real MVS.

Review: OCZ Vertex2 60GB SSD

After having played with my Asus Eee PC 1215N for about a week or so and determining that it should be faster, I bought an OCZ Vertex2 60G SSD for it. After some initial headaches (my netbook wouldn't recognize it), I finally got it to install after upgrading the firmware. I made a mistake that would come back to bite me, though. After using a 2nd PC to upgrade the drive, I formatted it as well. This, I found out later, caused the drive to be "misaligned," which I still don't completely understand, but it has something to do with the block size matching the flash memory sectors. So, upon running a benchmark after my initial install of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit, I saw that my write speeds were less than half of the advertised rate of 275MB/s (read speeds were as advertised). My actual write speeds were about 120MB/s max using ATTO, the recommended benchmark. After I found out about the misalignment from the OCZ forums, I wiped the drive and reinstalled Windows, letting the Windows installer do the formatting. This yielded an aligned drive (info via AS SSD). However, my write speeds as of now are no higher than 180MB/s. This is much better than before, but I still feel cheated. Maybe there's a limitation from the system I'm using, but I doubt it. Other people with my model netbook are posting higher write speeds than me. Oh well, it was cheap and it's still way faster than the stock drive. The only other bit of advice is that if you can avoid installing the Intel Matrix Storage drivers for your chipset, do so. Using the stock Microsoft AHCI increased my write speed performance drastically. To summarize, buy this drive if 280MB/s read and 180MB/s writes are good enough for you.