I wish.

I guess I’m more or less settled in the new place, but one of the last things to be moved over from Gan and set up is the temporary studio I’ll be writing and recording in over the next few weeks. It’s going to be tight.

I mean that of course in the sense that it will be cramped and in many ways, leaving very little room for the musicians, which is alright I guess because I’m it.

Here’s what’s here.

• MacBook Pro with Ableton Live
• TASCAM DP-008 digital 8-track recorder
• Behringer UCG102 Guitar-to-USB interface
• iPad with various instruments, effects & GarageBand
• Hohner Piano 26 melodica
• Roland E-15 keyboard
• Korg MicroKorg synthesizer
• Electric guitar
• Handful of effects, mics and some amps

Still to come

• Moog Taurus III bass pedal synthesizer
• Eowave Ribbon
• Electric bass guitar
• Acoustic guitar
• Novation Xiosynth
• More effects, speakers, stands, MIDI gear and amps

I’m not going to make any promises about what’s coming out of this, but it would be a real shame if I set all this up and it didn’t go anywhere. I haven’t had a dedicated room to use as a studio, cramped or not, in a long, long time so having a place I can go when the urge strikes me definitely has the potential be a great experience. I can also be loud here, which is really, really fantastic. I like it loud.

So it’s not really a secret project any longer, but I’m moving out of Gananoque in a few weeks for a three-month housesitting gig in Rockport. This means my three years of accumulated material possessions need to be sold, sorted or boxed. Blech!

Well the good news is that I’ve decided to make a bit of a game out of the process. The mechanics are still a bit fuzzy, and there’s some coding left, but basically there’s this PDF and a QR-coded encounter/inventory website to keep track of both all my stuff and the points. It all ends up as a loosely fleshed-out pen & pencil adventure game with an online component.

As you can see from the PDF, I’ve divided the house into quadrants & sectors, some of which will be fairly tiny and rather quick to process and some of which are multi-hour sorting affairs, like the bookshelves or the dark nebula which is my computer desk. From the beginning of the game (December 10th) as I move into one or more sectors in each quadrant, sorting, boxing and registering my progress via the PHP app, I gain territory. In addition, the number of boxes I process – donation, long-term storage and to-be-sold – are all app-tracked and can then be used to upgrade my offensive and defensive resources, which is important because it turns out that deep space ain’t safe…

As I work through the game, and especially if I remain idle, I will potentially risk annihilation from the Procrasst Nation. A war-like race of space-faring wolf-pirates, they will stop at nothing in their bid for galactic dominion. I get notified by e-mail when they’ve started moving in on a sector, and when that occurs I have a certain amount of time to clear that sector and save it from their merciless invasion force. If, however, I neglect the warning, and it gets to the point where they’ve officially taken that sector over and enslaved its inhabitants, then they gain a stronghold in that quadrant and can more quickly move in to take over neighboring sectors. If a quadrant is fully taken over by the Procrasst, I’m penalized – a $100 IRL fee is required to hire mercenaries to clear the quadrant and return the status of the sectors to neutral.

Yep, it’s decidedly nerdy, but I generally despise sorting and boxing, and games make things fun! Expect more of a look into the game play by the end of next week

I kind of wanted to be done with the computer tonight and maybe do a bit of tidying up, but I rather suddenly had it in my head that I should instead work on an online inventory of my arcade parts (less the joysticks).

When I was in the Playdium store this weekend I realized I had no idea what colour OBSF-30s I had back home, so this was the direct result of that decisiony moment where I resolved to buy the last two of their orange stock rather than risk the chance that I didn’t have any at home (I had two at home).

Made a quick MySQL database and sortable PHP display page and then went through all my shiz. The end result looks pretty great, especially on an iPhone for those moments you just need a quick reference…which is probably never again considering I get to the Playdium store about once a year….

Check it out here: http://www.blackandgreen.com/arcadeparts and feel free to wonder what the hell I’m working on based on some of those colour-schemes and quantities. There are six or seven fully fleshed out (ie., design complete) projects waiting to be assembled in there, two of which are as old as this blog, and a few that just got underway a month ago. How many end up on here as finished pieces, let’s hope we can get em’ all done by next Spring!

It’s been a long time and all that, but the Album Art project forges onwards, marred by some snags purchasing some rather rare LPs that are also unfortunately quite expensive. The Moog Taurus also marches onward, but that’s more of a too-lazy-to-post-what-I’ve-been-doing rather than any particularly valid excuse. Tonight though is something different.

It’s not often that I can say I began and finished a project in one night, but there was a lot of preparation and research that went into this. Vaily and I were discussing greatest consoles of all time, as we do, and I realized that if I could only have one device hooked up to my TV it would be a PC-Engine Duo-R/X. There’s a healthy mix of three factors in making this decision, which as a lifelong SEGA fanboy to Andrea’s SNES-love makes me ultimately choose Other in this hypothetical desert-island vidya question.

Factor 1: Nostalgia

My Mom used to work in the Place d’Orleans mall in the Ottawa suburb I grew up in. I’d often go in with her on PD days, partially because the mall was cool and partially because I couldn’t exactly go to work with Dad. While she’d be selling high-end knives, which is another mild obsession for another time, I’d wander around and invariably go check out Radio Shack. I guess it was 1989 when all of a sudden this new video game system showed up right on the outside of the store, and that system was the TurboGrafx 16.

Bonk’s Adventure, Splatterhouse, and a few others, but mainly those two became obsessions during my Rat Shack visits. Since the system was ridiculously expensive I made due with these infrequent visits, but I was hooked on the awesome music and bright visuals in the former game’s repertoire, and the senseless bloody violence in the latter’s.

Factor 2: Japanophilia

It’s no secret that a subset of North Americans are quite seriously obsessed with Japanese culture, including video games. In my case I just think that with relation to the vidya, they basically got most things right, and a still very inexperienced Hudson did a fantastic job in working with NEC to create an amazing system. By the time they got to the Duo-R/X hardware revision, they’d basically fixed the few negative details the system had working against it in Japan. It had a fantastic library of games, both on the tiny HuCards and the awesome CD-based titles available. Platformers, Shmups, RPGs, even fighting games with the six-button joysticks that came on the market. I’m a huge Neo-Geo fan, but I have to say the variety and quality of titles on the PC-Engine eclipses even that incredible platform. It’s close though.

Unfortunately a lot of games never made it to North America; competition with Nintendo for exclusive access to big name developers and poor marketing meant that sales were pretty glum as well. Just another reason that while NES and Genesis are household names few remember the TurboGrafx-16 and even fewer the TurboDuo.

Factor 3: Shmups

In the same way that the Neo-Geo will always be synonymous with fighting games for me, the PC-Engine has an enviable host of vertical and horizontal shoot em’ ups. Arcade ports, original exclusives and even some pretty funny takes on the ’spaceship avoiding bullets while turbo-firing’ genre. And just as I’m not prodigy with fighting games, I’m pretty mediocre at the shmup, but the fast-paced gameplay, variation in mechanics that help to distinguish individual titles and the rocking soundtracks have me hooked. So much so that there is another secret project going on right now that is on a far larger scale than this one, but closely related to the shmup genre.

Conclusion

When I was in Japan I was sorely tempted to pick up a Duo-R or a Duo-R/X, and I really should’ve I realize now, despite them being anywhere between $160-180. I’m still planning on grabbing one and having it shipped back, but while I was there I did pursue my PC-Engine love by grabbing some controllers. I came home with three Avenue Pad 6 controllers and a Hori Fighting Pad Pro. The piece-de-resistance a Hori Fighting Stick PC 6-button arcade stick. This would allow me to use the proper PC Engine controller with emulated games when I got home at the very least, once I found a USB adapter.

That wasn’t easy. No one knew of any when I was asking around in Akihabara, and when I got home and did some googling it looked like only two or three people had attempted to do something like this. One of them was next door in Quebec, RaphNet, and he sold PCBs you could wire up to your controller, but no completed adapters. So I contacted him when I got back and asked whether he’d be interested in building some adapters, or possibly building the USB adapter into the controllers themselves (with an extra long cable – I never understood why the PC Engine cables were so short)

I never heard back from him, which was pretty disappointing, so I decided well ain’t nothing to it but to do it. I hadn’t wanted to go through all this effort, but I didn’t seem to have much choice if I wanted to have a USB capable PC Engine controller. I placed an order through Monoprice for some old-Apple-stock mini DIN-8 male/female cables and some cheap USB to old-cell-phone cables. I’d cut these up and wire them together with one of Raph’s PCBs in the middle – that way I’d have an “extension cable+” instead of hardwiring one of my controllers directly to the PCB+USB end.

So the above shot is the PCB in the little plastic baggie in the bottom left, the USB cable cut with the wires exposed on one end above that, and to the right my multi-meter and below that the mini DIN-8 cable with the male end cut off (ouch!) and its wires exposed. I used the multimeter to map out which wires corresponded to which plug, realizing at the very end I needed to flip them all horizontally because the female and male ends are mirrors of one another. Close call!

I really suck at soldering. It’s one of those self-trained things I really wish I’d had some serious help with, because I never feel like I’m doing it right, and know enough to realize I’m often right about that feeling. In any event, here’s what an hour’s worth of electronics work gave me, in addition to a sore back.

All that was left was to test it with some TG16/PCE emulators and then glue-stick the connectors so they don’t pull out. I didn’t really have a little matchbox sized project box, but I did have some matchboxes and electrical tape.

After all my hard work, success….well sort of. Raph only had access to 2-button TG16 controllers, so he hadn’t programmed them to handle the 6-button jobbies. I’m not going to learn C, but I might pass along some information I found on how the Avenue Pad 6 input polling works – maybe he can roll the changes into a new update and make my six-button USB adapter dreams come true.