• The aforementioned payphone

    jwz’s payphone runs Linux now:

    One of the props that I picked up to decorate DNA Lounge at the first Cyberdelia was an old payphone. It wasn’t hooked up for the first party, but just in time for the second party, it now runs Linux.

    When I was trying to decide what I wanted the phone to do, “making phone calls” was obviously the least useful thing. Nobody needs that: that’s why payphones are extinct in the wild. It’s also why we no longer have Internet kiosks.

    So instead, when you pick up this phone, it “rings” and connects you to a “voicemail” system. Press 1 to listen to our schedule of upcoming events (the same message you hear when you call us at 415-626-1409); press 2 to listen to your saved messages; press 3 to record a message.

    Here is the sordid tale of how I made a payphone run Linux. I’m not so great at hardware hacks, and it shows. My bumbling exists for your amusement.

  • Todd Van Luling has an article for the Huffington Post about the sad garbage people who got too caught up in Sega’s marketing to recognize that Sonic gameplay was awful and their sad hunt for finding the hidden connection in Sonic 3’s soundtrack to Michael Jackson.

    Spoiler, Jackson didn’t even want to be associated with the crap Genesis sound processing:

    Jackson and the team wrote the music “high-profile,” Grigsby said, meaning that although replicating the music on the Sega console would eventually require massive compression and simplification of the audio, they started out sounding like typical Jackson songs.

    Sometimes, Grigsby remembers, Sega developers would drop by to hang out or help the team compress the songs — which, according to Grigsby, were recorded aiming for a “cinematic type of sound” Jackson sought at the time — into Sega-ready versions. “It all had to be squashed down for the game and they made more room for the graphics,” Grigsby says. “They had more data happening with the graphics and they had very little allocated for audio.”

    […]

    Buxer, Grigsby and Jones say Jackson pulled his name from the game – but not his music – because he was disappointed by how different the music sounded on Sega’s console when compressed from that “high profile” sound to bleeps and bloops.

    “Michael wanted his name taken off the credits if they couldn’t get it to sound better,” Buxer claimed.

    Even the sad garbage people now recognize that the gameplay was terrible:

    “Someone would track down someone who originally worked on Sonic 2, like a level artist,” said James Hansen, a Sonic fan from the Forest of Dean, near Gloucester. “Then they’d just get bombarded with a million emails and then you’d never hear from them ever again.”

    […]

    As a teenager, Hansen was more interested in the “secrets in the Sonic games” than the games themselves, he says now.

  • Turns out, we’re up to 1,800 games on Steam that run under Linux. It’d be great to know how many of those are vegan, charlotte/georgia-based, handcrafted, locally-sourced, artisanal, native ports and how many are pretendulated, factory-farmed, gmo-enhanced, toxic garbage from Virtual Programming.

  • Christopher Livingston has become obsessed with safety in a new game, INFRA:

    I began walking around, exploring the terrain, looking inside power plants, dams, and other structures, and solving the occasional puzzle. I quickly found, however, that I wanted to my job–that of a structural analyst–more than I wanted to solve puzzles or investigate a mystery. Yes, I found some suspicious documents and figured out how to power up a generator to allow me to open a door… but what I really wanted to do was photograph safety issues. All the safety issues. Screw mysteries, I wanted to tally up infractions and write a detailed report and issue fines. That’s what putting a camera in my hand does to me. It makes me want to do my job. If a ghost had floated out of a service tunnel, I’d probably only have photographed it if it hadn’t been wearing a hard hat. Safety first!

  • TheThrillness reviews the HD60 Pro, the first pci-express HDMI capture card from Elgato:

    I was pretty sceptical about a card that only accepted HDMI. I found it very weird that they dropped Composite/S-Video/Component support from the original Game Capture HD design.

    After having time to reflect on it, I think Elgato has chosen wisely. The future is HDMI and this card is meant to cater to that. Recently I’ve been getting into PC and PS4 gaming so keeping around older consoles like a Super Nintendo doesn’t mean much any more. Time to move on and embrace the new! Eventually some hardware based solution that doesn’t suck (Retron 5 etc) will come out and we can all enjoy the glory of HDMI even with our older games.

    TheThrillness’ reviews of other capture devices are the most definitive and thorough reviews out there. I didn’t buy the HD60 Pro due to the lack of input options, and one of the things I had been hoping to capture with a device like this was Windows and Linux gameplay captured to my Mac which isn’t possible as the HD60 Pro is an internal pci-express card which won’t connect to a Mac laptop. Turns out, Elgato’s Mac support for game capture with their Game Capture HD I bought is abysmal anyway (doesn’t work with OBS on a Mac), and capturing Windows games with OBS is usually fine. After reading this review, I know now that I should have gotten the HD60 Pro, upscaled older gaming devices, and put together another machine for capture. My one question is how resource-intensive capturing would be with the HD60 Pro, as cards like this should offload most of the CPU burden.