Archive for March, 2008

Hmm. I guess I over-exaggerated my updating of the sidebar.

Otherwise, Jeanne D’Arc would have been in the Playing section for the last month and a half.

This is a truly wonderful game. No turn based RPG has engaged me like this since… well, FF9, I guess. (Kingdom Hearts II just took too long to get to the good stuff). The game is just beautiful in everything it does. Maps, characters and music. All very rich.

In-game, the characters have that cute, jap-anime (think Super Puzzle Fighter) look about them and the cut scenes (although not 3D rendered like the usual Square-Enix fare) are animated to a very high quality. I also believe that the story is very strong and I wouldn’t have minded just sitting down to watch this in its entirety.
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Right. Back to what this journal was intended for. Project update!

I’ve recently gone back to working on my cocktail arcade cabinet. This is something that has been on hiatus for a little while. And when I say “a little while”… I mean that I have gotten married and had a child since last making any progress on this endeavour.

I guess it didn’t help that the last time I tried, I completely blew out every capacitor on the keyboard’s PCB with my el cheapo Hot Rod soldering iron.

But watching the movie The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters lit the ol’ fire again. And in a matter of days, together with my new temperature-controlled soldering station (which I received for Christmas), I had mapped out my keyboard matrix, soldered the connections to some terminal blocks and wired up the joystick and buttons that had been patiently waiting in the control panel. And it worked! Thanks to these flawless instructions. Yes, I could have bought a KeyWiz but saving money is important these days. And I also feel like I accomplished something.

I tried it out and it worked 99%. One minor mod required in that the backslash and forwardslash keys I used for the 2up buttons 5 and 6 were both sending the same scancode. It must have just been a quirk because I changed B5 to the openbrace key and all is well. Tweaked the mame.cfg file and had a quick game of Double Dragon. But it really needs Street Fighter II or something as a full test.