Finally getting into using joystick! (and other miscellaneous updates)

 I had been wanting to try playing with an arcade stick for a while. Back in 2016, I got a very cheap ($40) Mayflash stick... and while it gave me a taste, it was more frustrating than anything because the quality wasn't very nice. 

Fast forward to this year.. I was doing a little research and found some mid-entry level joysticks that can also be modified with nicer parts, coming out with something that is very high quality for not too much $. 

So, I took the plunge and I ordered the Qanba Drone. It's about $75 on Amazon. It was actually a pretty decent stick out of the box.. But I did some modifications that have made it much better.. and I really, really like it. 

The mods I've done are:

* Replace the lever (the actual stick part) with one called "Sanwa JLF". It's basically an industry standard part in Japanese arcade machines, and is responsive and durable. This part was about $25-30 on Amazon.

* Replace the buttons with Sanwa parts. A set of 8 is about $15-20 on Amazon.

* Replace the "actuator" (the part underneath the stick that contacts the switches) to an "oversized actuator".. Making it bigger actually reduces the "throw" (movement) of the stick.. Which is preferable, especially for bullet hells. This part was $5 plus shipping, from a website called focusattack.com

* Replace the "restrictor plate". This is the part underneath that guides the bottom of the lever. The default shape for a restrictor plate is square. The problem is if you're playing a shmup and you're making a bunch of quick movements, it's actually further to move the stick to the diagonals than it is to the cardinal directions. I replaced it with an octagonal restrictor plate (About $8 on Amazon), and now the stick stops in all 8 directions, and also does not travel as far to the corners. It took me a few hours of getting used to, but it's awesome.

* Added a button down low. I didn't realize how much mess the drilling would make (I'll post a picture below). I had to disconnect one of the other buttons (the black one is not connected to anything)

I'll post some pictures here.. I had taken some of the internals when I had it opened one time, but I can't find that set right now.. but if I come across them I'll add them to this post. 

Just a cozy night at home with my new stick and DDP

I bought a drill and a special bit just so I could do this. I had no idea it would make such a mess!

Here's what it looks like right now. I've been doing some experiments with playing certain games with the buttons only... For example 2D platformers where you're mostly doing left/right. So for example, the yellow buttons would be the left hand, and the right buttons the right hand.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I actually got a little crazy with it and ordered another joystick.. The Mayflash F300 which was a bit cheaper than the Qanba, and I've ordered the same parts to modify it as well.  I've already tested out some dual stick shooters (Robotron, Smash TV, Total Carnage, etc) and it is soooooooo cool to have a setup like this.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also worth mentioning... For the last 9 months or so, I've undertaken a project.. A project that I've started and abandoned multiple times before. Watching videos of gameplay footage of every game for a particular system. (There are a lot of videos on youtube which have about 10-15 seconds of gameplay footage of every game, all in a massive video). The difference is, this time I'm actually finishing most of them. I make spreadsheets of a list of all the games I want to try, what genre they are (if I can tell from the footage), and then a rating of the game eventually after I've played it a bit. This has been a DEEP DIVE... MAME alone was something like 18 hours of gameplay footage. 

Here's an example of one of my spreadsheets:

Part of what motivated this project is that I got a bit better of a graphics card (Geforce GT 730, when before that I only had the onboard graphics), and so now I can emulate Gamecube, Wii and PS2 on my PC!

Here are the systems that I've watched and made lists for:

PSP, Sega CD, Game Gear, SNES, Master System, Gameboy Advance, PSX, Nintendo DS, Gameboy, Atari Lynx, Saturn, NES, Gamecube, Dreamcast, Turbografx 16, Genesis

Also working on (but haven't finished): Gameboy Color, 3DO, N64, PS2, Wii, MAME.   <--  These include releases for all regions, so I've got a BUNCH of obscure Japanese stuff. Some good, some not so good. I'm also working on DOS games, although I don't think there will ever be an entire database of all the games. I may eventually do Amiga as well. 

It's been tedious work at times, but it's also exciting and rewarding -- Finding a new game that I've never heard of and getting excited about trying it out... and then the wonderful feeling when you find a new game that turns out to be AWESOME and you're like "How the heck did I not know about this before!?"

I've discovered some VERY good MAME games over the past few weeks... So I'll just drop a couple of names/screenshots right now.. and then I may end up doing a "retro game of the indeterminate period" kind of article, just highlighting some games. We could maybe even pick from them for doing a future round. 

So, here's a couple of games I've discovered lately:

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Shock Troopers -- This is a top down run & gun. It uses a single stick. You can fire in any direction, but when you hold the fire button, then it locks your movement for strafing. It's got beautiful pre-rendered sprites, and the gameplay is very, very fun and satisfying. The camera angles are done really well, and your character usually stays near the middle of the screen.. So you don't feel like you're getting cheap shots from stuff off the side of the screen or anything like that. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuFGB_h1_3Q

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Magical Crystals -- Another top down run & gun. It looks cutesy, but it is certainly a serious game with a moderate challenge. The movement is incredibly responsive. It's got a bit of platforming to it as well. The levels are short but fun... and there's some pretty epic bosses. VERY fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c03VytA1hQ

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Air Assault -- Probably the most generic shmup that ever existed. (But, it's by Irem, so you know it can't be bad) Just another drab pseudo sci-fi, pseudo military themed shmup. Shoot and bomb, and upgrade your shot.. That's it. But there's just something about it that's got me hooked lately. It's not too difficult, and it always feels fair when you die. I've been practicing it a decent amount... and I surprised myself by getting a 3CC the other day! I may keep working to see if I can get a 1CC   :) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=565rOZePGZ0

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, that's it for now! I'll be dropping a bunch of games/videos/screenshots periodically on here.

Matthea!

Round 10 - Maldita Castilla!

Round 10 will be "Maldita Castilla". A free game by Locomalito, released in 2012.

It's a platform game which has obviously been inspired by things like Ghouls & Ghosts. It's beautiful, challenging, and extremely fun!

We'll just leave round 9 going indefinitely until we care to finish it.   :)    No need for too strict of rules here I think.

Screenshots:

Goals:
* High score on 1st credit
* Try to finish game in 3 credits or less

Go go go!!!

Round 9 - Batsugun!

ROUND 9 COMMENCE!!!

For round 9, we will play Batsugun!

 

A 1993 shmup from Toaplan

It was one of their last games before they went defunct, and is widely regarded as the first ever "manic" or bullet hell game.

Therefore it has an interesting place in gaming history, positioned between oldschool and newschool shmups. It's about time we played it for the RGC. One wonders what went through the minds of the first ever players of Batsugun when they saw so many bullets for the first time   :-D

 

 

 Goal will be the usual: See how far you can get on 3 credits. 

No time frame on this one, we'll just play it casually until we get tired of it. 

GO GO GO GO GO !!!!!

Joystick Review: Mayflash PS2 PS3 PC USB Universal Arcade Stick

After many years, organic io finally obtained a proper joystick. I got this back last autumn and haven't used it much since then, but that will be changing soon   :)

The stick is the Mayflash Universal Arcade Stick:

It can be connected either via the Playstation style connector or USB. Works great in Windows 7 and Windows 10.  It has 8 main buttons, a smaller 9th and 10th button, and an "auto" and "clear" button.

I put it through its paces tonight with some games I'm very familiar with...

Under Defeat which I have 3 cc'ed before:

Gigawing which I have 2cc'ed before:

and finally Progear which I have also 3cc'ed before:

The joystick has a nice large heavy base. It fits well in my lap and doesn't slide around during play at all.

The stick itself has a nice satisfying clicky feel and you can even hear it "click" when it moves around. It is very responsive. The buttons feel nice and responsive as well.

Initially during Under Defeat, I had it plugged into a USB hub. When I started playing Gigawing I noticed a slight bit of input lag, and so I plugged it straight into the computer's USB port. Clearly the faster pace of Gigawing made me notice the input lag, so it is definitely recommended to plug straight into the PC to make sure there is no lag.

Overall the stick works really well, bordering on perfect. No complaints here.

It's also so solid that it's satisfying to just hold in my lap and tap on it like a percussion instrument. Bonus points for being a practice percussion instrument!!!

Overall quite a good stick and well worth it.

Batsugun, prepare to get destroyed   :-D

Circumstantially...

Due to various factors, it appears that the Quake and Bodypad rounds are just not going to work out at the present time.

I think we started Quake in March, and I still haven't played it hardly at all.

Also I don't currently have access to the bodypads nor do I know when I will (unfortunately).

Therefore I am retiring those rounds for the time being, but when life circumstances become more stable, we can always revive those rounds as necessary and even copy/paste the original posts.

For the time being, no game is active, however I think some Wardner is in order starting around September 1st    :)

:-D

That image is from the Genesis version, but there is also an Arcade version. Either is fine with me.

I'll update the site in about a week with the start of the long overdue Wardner   :)

Wooden NES Controllers from Spitfire Labs

Absolutely beautiful! Laser engraved. They're all sold out except the Contra one. But you know what, I would have probably chosen the Contra one anyway   :)     It's only $35. I seriously might have to allocate some disposable income towards that this summer    :-D

Their website

They also did some "Cartridges", various wood carvings and skateboards. But the controllers are just so perfect, I think I have to have one   :)

How NOT to dual boot Windows 10 and Android on an Acer Aspire Switch 10 E Laptop/Tablet hybrid

Update: Originally I was going to call this article "How to dual boot...", but after somewhere between 8-12 hours of intense research and trial and error, I still haven't reached my goal. So I post this in hopes that it will come up in a future google search for someone who has some specific questions about the Acer Aspire Switch 10 E. Later, once I actually get it working properly, I'll post a proper "how to" article.

In this article we'll be talking about configuring Phoenix OS alongside Windows 10 and how to get a bootloader working with it, which is especially challenging with this UEFI only laptop. It's a long read, but I'm hoping this will be useful to someone in the future who has similar problems. It will be faster for you to read through my woes of what didn't work for me, than to do trial and error yourself. This article assumes you have at least intermediate knowledge of computers, which would make sense if you are wanting to dual boot your PC   :)

OK, this is only partially related to the RGC as it has to do with the Acer Aspire 10 E which I just got this past week for the excellent price of only $100 on Amazon new...

This is a pretty sweet and fun little computer! The first time I took it apart from the keyboard and just held it as a tablet and browsed a website, I marveled at it for a minute and it felt great! I couldn't believe I was still using full blown x86 Windows on a tablet like device. This thing is very versatile.

So, one of the first things I did with it obviously was to upgrade it from Windows 8 to Windows 10, since that is still free at the time of this writing, until the end of July I believe.

After that, I started to speculate whether I could get some android apps running on it. But I didn't really want to go with virtualization... I've had bad luck with that in the past on my older laptop.... Virtual machines just simply refusing to start.

So I did a little digging and found out about this thing called Amiduos, made by American Megatrends, the same guys who have been making computer BIOS systems since I was 4 years old! So I thought this sounded promising... It says it is the "fastest android emulator for PC". OK, these guys must know how to code some sweet dynarecs in assembly or something, they are the BIOS guys after all   ;)  

It took a LONG time to get Amiduos configured... In fact, if I hadn't been so exhausted that night and falling asleep while it was running, I probably would have assumed it had frozen up and given up on it. But eventually it did load. And I was able to download some android games to test.

While it did run all the games I tried, they were slow. Not painfully slow, but too slow to be playable.

So I knew there had to be another way. A way to actually run android on an x86 machine?

So after a little more research, I discovered several options....

* Android x86, which is the oldest and probably now the least mature of the products

* Remix OS which has been around for a couple of years
and
* Phoenix OS... Chinese newcomer on the scene, but appears to be very competitive with Remix.

After reading their spec sheets I chose Phoenix for a couple of reasons, mainly because if you run it off a USB stick, Remix requires USB 3.0 and Phoenix can be run off 2.0. There were a couple other reasons as well, but I can't remember specifically.

Anyway...   It was time to try it out...

At the time of this writing, Phoenix is at version 1.0.8 RC (Release Candidate). You can download it from their site here:
http://www.phoenixos.com/en/download_x86

Installation is theoretically very simple. You just run their installer exe and tell it what USB stick or Hard Drive to install to, and then reboot and run it.

In practice it's much more complex, especially due to the fact that my Acer only has a UEFI system as opposed to a legacy BIOS. This is my first experience with one of these after messing with it for many hours, I'm not really thrilled about it.

Supposedly there is a firmware update for some of the Acers to give them a menu option to revert to legacy bios. Not the Switch 10e. I updated the firmware from 1.02 to 1.09 (newest) and there is no such option when you boot to the UEFI.

So the weird part is this: each operating system that you want to boot from has an .efi file which contains information about the OS, presumably where to locate it and stuff like that.

But, by default the Acer UEFI utility is set for "Secure Boot", which is supposed to add some kind of extra protection... Protection against what I'm not sure....   In my mind it's protection against being able to install your OS's and use your computer how you want to... But I digress.

So, the weird dichotomy with the "Secure Boot" feature is that in order to use a different .efi file, you have to manually add it to a kind of whitelist. To do this, you go into the UEFI menu, into the "Security" tab, and then under "Select an UEFI file as trusted for executing". After you've done this, you have to save and exit the UEFI, and then next time you load the UEFI up, it will show in the list of boot options along with Windows Boot Manager, USB HDD, etc.

What makes it weird is that most places recommend you disable the "secure boot" feature in order to make things "easier". The problem on the Acer UEFI is when you disable secure boot, it also disables the option to go in and add an .efi file as trusted, and therefore disables the method of adding them to the boot list. I guess you can leave secure boot on first, add the efi files, and then disable secure boot afterwards... I haven't messed with it enough to confirm this with 100% certainty.   [ I will try to update this later once I confirm ]

Anyway, back to PhoenixOS....   I got it up and running just fine, and as of 1.0.8 RC it has Google Play services, which is awesome. It doesn't come rooted by default, but, this post on the Phoenix OS forums has a link to a system.img which you just replace in your PhoenixOS directory, and then it will be rooted.

So I liked this PhoenixOS! It runs very fast, and the same games that I attempted in Amiduos ran almost flawlessly in Phoenix. Full speed. Very nice.

The problem came when I was testing Phoenix OS, every time I tried to boot back into Windows 10, it seemed to have corrupted Windows 10's startup files (I'm not exactly sure what), I just know that I had to sit there and wait 10 or 15 minutes for Windows 10 repair itself every time.

So I knew it was necessary to get a bootloader going if I was going to take this thing seriously.

Initially I was going to use rEFInd. However I noticed in its instructions for manually installing inside Windows 10, it says that the instructions are based on Windows 8 and don't work for Windows 10. Great.... Google searches didn't reveal anything about how to get it to work in Windows 10.
But, it said the best way to do it was inside Linux. OK, no problem.... Let's set up a Linux bootable USB stick real quick and get this thing done...

So I tried several flavors of Linux, and I couldn't get any of them to boot! ubuntu mini remix, trisquel, I was about to try vanilla Ubuntu, when I realized it's probably not the Linux's, it's probably my computer. I found a thread where someone was having a similar problem of not being able to boot from USB. One guy's suggestion was to upgrade the firmware to one that supports legacy Bios. As I said, that is not available. The other suggestion was to use a USB OTG adapter instead of using the regular USB type A port. OK, whatever I thought, I've got a USB OTG adapter that I know works, so I'll give it a shot. I even formatted it with the RUFUS utility like he said, GPT, Fat32, everything. I tested it inside windows to make sure the files were showing up... Yeah, I could see my Linux installs. But try to boot from it... No go. Eventually I got some kind of error message, I forget exactly what it said but it basically said that USB Booting was not supported on this computer.

Wow. Just wow. Then why is it even an option in the UEFI? Seriously. Bad Acer, bad. But I'm willing to overlook it because it's still an awesome computer at a great price.

So anyway..... Frustrated with not being able to install rEFInd, I looked for an alternative to rEFInd. I came across the utility "Grub2win" which is supposed to be able to easily install Grub2. Tried it out, and while it did install Grub 2, I couldn't figure out how to point it to PhoenixOS. It also threw some error about the fact that it was UEFI only and it couldn't support as many features.

Giving up in frustration on that one, then I tried EasyBCD, which is supposed to easily install "neogrub". Following the tutorial here:  http://www.quickfever.com/2016/02/dual-boot-phoenix-os.html
But again, EasyBCD throws an error about my system being UEFI only and it won't have as many features. Then indeed when I get in and try to add a new entry, the options for Neogrub are grayed out. Perfect.

So I'm back to maybe figuring out how to manually install rEFInd.

I was getting intense at this point. Not desperate, just determined. (I had already been working on the issue for many hours, probably 6+ hours straight).

So I figure if I just manually move the rEFInd .efi file onto the EFI partition, I should be able to select it in the UEFI and it will work, right?

Remembering a post I read earlier in the night, I referred back to it...
http://superuser.com/questions/965751/how-to-access-efi-partition-on-windows-10

It highlights some peculiarities about manually accessing your UEFI partition on Windows 10. Even after you taskkill explorer.exe, it still gives an error about accessing the partition.

Someone suggested that you just type the drive letter straight out of task manager, it would work.
 I couldn't get that to work, but fortunately the command line worked.

To make it simpler for this blog, here is what I had to do to access the EFI partition:

open cmd as admin...

diskpart
sel disk 0
sel part 1
assign letter=b
exit
taskkill /im explorer.exe /f
explorer.exe

Then, just open a cmd window as administrator and type the following commands:

b:

cd EFI

mkdir rEFInd


After that, you need to go to the location where you have the rEFInd .efi file. For me it was like this:

c:

cd \

cd 0_home\refind-bin-0.10.3\refind

Yours will of course be different. Then copy the .efi file. I'm using the 32 bit version, but you would need to copy the x64 file if that's what you're using. So the next command would be:

copy refind_ia32.efi b:\EFI\rEFInd\

That just simply copies the file, like we used to do in the DOS days   :) 

The next step is simply to go back to the UEFI and add the rEFInd efi, and hopefully everything boots up and it sees both Windows and PhoenixOS and all is good   :) 

So... Fingers crossed, I added the rEFInd, restarted, and YES, it loaded rEFInd! And it shows Windows 10 and Phoenix OS! Now time to test.

Windows 10 loaded fine. So I came back to rEFInd, and launched Phoenix OS....

Instead of showing a PhoenixOS splash screen like it had been doing, now it was showing some Linux kernel stuff like you'd expect if you were booting up Ubuntu with verbose messages. Then it gets stuck on "Detecting Phoenix OS". I let it run for at least 20 minutes and it didn't seem to do anything.

So next... It's time to read the rEFInd manual. Maybe I'm doing something wrong in pointing it to Phoenix? OK.... It's got a whole section about how secure boot causes problems for bootloaders, and several proposed solutions to fix it. I'm going to try the easier method which involves "preloader".

It involved renaming the rEFInd efi to "loader.efi", and then downloading a "preloader.efi" and "hashtool.efi". I manually loaded them to my EFI partition through the command prompt again, and then I got to this cryptic statement in the tutorial:

register PreLoader.efi with the EFI by using efibootmgr in Linux or bcdedit in Windows.  

OK? So I figured it would be self explanatory. Turns out bcdedit is a command line utility, which I'm usually not scared of, but when I ran bcdedit /?, none of the options had any verbage at all about "register" or "registration". So I thought it must be officially called something else. Google search turned up very little. So I decided to do what I sometimes do in weak spots like this....  Find a GUI version of the utility   :)    So I found "Visual BCD Editor".... The website says it needs some .net framework dependencies, but fortunately it ran for me without adding any .net stuff. 
So I stare at Visual BCD editor for a few minutes, and it becomes apparent that "registering" it means the same thing as "adding a new OS loader" for the preloader.efi. So I did that, everything looks good to go. 

Rebootion time.... I'm feeling pretty good about it all at this point. Certainly something is going to work this time, right? So I add the preloader.efi to the "whitelist", restart, and....  Preloader loads... But...

"This 64-bit application couldn't load because your PC doesn't have a 64-bit processor... etc blah blah"...

Oops, right, I forgot to check whether I got the 64 bit or 32 bit version of the preloader/hashtool, right?

Not quite. I can't find anything at all about a 32 bit version of it. It appears there's just the one release. 

..... Now I'm FINALLY starting to get frustrated, after something like 8 to 12 hours of work. Up until that point, the whole journey has actually been pretty fun. It's like a puzzle to solve.

But no... Now it's just like.........   I gotta take a step back and re-evaluate how I'm going to approach the puzzle and hopefully figure out the most efficient solution   :)

So this is where our story ends for now... Of how ABSOLUTELY NOT to dual boot Windows 10 and Android on an Acer Aspire Switch 10 E.

To be continued, the right way     :)