This Jerk, Right Here
Marco:
what did you use before google and you know modern like dot dot go like what were your first web search engines altavista and uh wasn't there a web crawl something was actually called web crawler i thought wasn't that was one i mean there were a bunch back like in the late 90s there were a ton that were really getting off the ground um you know google really didn't take over and become the thing until like 2000 and later uh you know most of the 90s it was a a very dynamic landscape
John:
We just talked about this on Rectifs.
John:
Oh, yeah?
John:
Oh, man.
John:
I mean, not much.
John:
I don't know how we got on the topic, but yeah, we were talking about that.
John:
The search engines before Google.
Marco:
Yeah, I think AltaVista was the best one for a while.
Marco:
I remember using that a lot.
Marco:
I briefly used Ask Jeeves.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
I was waiting for it.
Casey:
I was waiting for it.
Marco:
There was, like, you know, Lycos.
Marco:
I used Yahoo for a while.
Casey:
Oh, that's true.
Casey:
There was a window of time early on that Yahoo was actually very good, and now it's...
Marco:
Yeah, Hotbot was a big one back then.
Marco:
There were a whole bunch.
Casey:
That does not sound like a search engine anymore.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But yeah, it was a while before Google really took it over.
Marco:
I never used MSN, which later became Bing.
Marco:
Never really got into the Microsoft services side of things.
Casey:
You know what I did use by way of my grandparents?
Casey:
My grandparents had and loved, and it actually was really good for them, and I say that with no sarcasm, they used and loved the Web TV, which eventually became the MSN Web TV.
Casey:
Did you ever see these?
Casey:
Did you ever use these?
John:
I remember doing web development, and the worst browser to support was Web TV.
Casey:
It was extremely cool, extremely bad technology.
Casey:
And it really was a great introduction to my grandparents, who at the time were in their probably 60s and had never really had a computer.
Casey:
It was a great introduction for them to...
Casey:
to the internet and, and to email and things of that nature.
Casey:
So I don't begrudge web TV because I, pardon, partly because I never had to develop for it.
Casey:
I mean, it was a piece of garbage and it was terrible and it was slower than dirt, but it was very, very cool and worked reasonably well for being a complete piece of garbage.
Marco:
Well, it was a reasonable idea because, you know, not only, you know, you mentioned like, you know, it was for like your older grandparents, like that, that was the target market really.
Marco:
It was, it was for like generally older people who were intimidated by the idea of getting, getting a computer or couldn't afford a computer and, and, you know, they wanted, but you know, they already have a TV because everyone had a TV.
Marco:
So, you know, it would be like a, like a gateway and maybe like a, you know, dipping your toe in the water.
Marco:
Like it's funny to think back, like, you know, during at different times of technology and,
Marco:
different parts of the computing devices were very expensive and that that would drive everything and during that time screens were still very expensive it was actually prudent to have a system where you know what we're going to be able to let you use the screen you already have which is your tv and we'll just sell you some kind of small box and i mean other parts of it were expensive like memory like that was still expensive back then but
Marco:
But still, like the screen was a big deal.
Marco:
Like now they put screens in everything now because it's cheaper than putting like physical controls.
Marco:
Like now you can get a color touch screen for cheaper than it is to make like a control panel with some buttons on it.
Casey:
Yeah, it's so true.
Casey:
I remember vividly – I feel like I just told this story on the show, but I remember vividly getting a 20-inch – I think it was like a 20-inch CRT that weighed about a billion pounds.
Casey:
And it was like – I think it might have been Trinitron.
Casey:
Maybe I'm wrong.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
But it was beautiful.
Marco:
Yeah, most of them were.
Marco:
Most of the 20-inches were Trinitrons.
Casey:
Yeah, it was amazing.
Casey:
And then I remember a friend of mine, a couple of doors down from me in the dorms at college.
Casey:
This was very early 2000s, like literally the fall of 2000.
Casey:
I remember he had an LCD screen for his computer.
Casey:
Oh, that jerk.
Casey:
He must be frigging loaded.
Casey:
He has a flat panel display for his computer.
Casey:
Those things are a fortune.
Casey:
How does a college kid have one of those?
Casey:
I was so jealous for the longest time.
Marco:
Yeah, I remember the first ones, I saw them like the same year or so, like around like 2000, 2001.
Marco:
is when you start getting desktop LCD monitors.
Marco:
And I remember they were only 15 inches, and those were about $1,000.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Just for the monitor.
Marco:
Just for a crappy 15-inch 1024x768 LCD.
Casey:
I wish I had... Eventually, a couple of years later, I got one from dad.
Casey:
And remember, dad worked for IBM for almost my entire life.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Oftentimes, there was equipment, and I don't mean that he stole it.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say that at all.
Casey:
But equipment that they didn't need anymore, he would end up finding.
Casey:
Again, this is sounding like he's stealing it.
Casey:
I'm not saying he's stealing it.
Casey:
But some way or another, it ended up at home.
Casey:
And then it ended up at college for me.
Casey:
This sounds way worse the more I talk.
Casey:
So I'm just going to plow right along.
Casey:
But I had this ancient IBM LCD screen.
Casey:
And it had, again, there's surely a technical term for these connectors.
Casey:
But it had these connectors.
Casey:
It was like composite devices.
Casey:
but it was on the back of the screen and you would like, it was like quasi coaxial thing, but it was one of those things where you would, maybe that's what it was and you would stick it in and then twist.
Marco:
Those are BNC connectors.
Marco:
That's probably RGB inputs, which I actually have a lot to say about later for a totally different reason.
Marco:
But yeah, those were probably, because I think like professional video monitors back then would use RGBHV and yeah.
John:
Our color X terms at school had those connectors, which were distinct from the regular X terms, which of course were not color.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I have a lot more to say about analog color inputs for monitors coming up later.
Casey:
You know, not to totally jinx us, but I'm actually very excited for this entire episode.
Casey:
I think this is going to be a good one.
Casey:
I have more to say about Casey's Computer Corner, but we have some related follow-up first.
Casey:
If you recall last episode, as we were recording, the Synology had rebuilt its entire six-drive RAID array, or so I had thought.
Casey:
It had marched all the way to 100%.
Casey:
I had taken a screenshot when it was at like 99% thinking, oh, of course, this is when it's going to die.
Casey:
And no, it didn't die at 99.
Casey:
It started over.
Casey:
And it started over from zero.
Casey:
And several different people wrote in to talk about this and why this is.
Casey:
And they also said that Synology's on-screen GUI display of what's happening is not the best.
Casey:
And what you really need to do is you need to enable SSH on the Synology, which I did not have enabled for security purposes.
Casey:
And what you really need to do is to look at the file in PROC.
Casey:
And the file is called mdstat.
Casey:
So it's, you know, you would cat slash proc slash mdstat.
Casey:
And that will tell you with more detail exactly what is happening.
Casey:
So I did that.
Casey:
And I realized, okay, it is legitimately doing something.
Casey:
I have no idea what it is, but it's doing something.
Casey:
It told me that it was going to take literally a week to finish, which was very disheartening.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And then I found from somebody else's tip, there's a place in around the same spot in the Synology where you can tell it, I don't care if this uses a lot of like CPU power, just crank this thing out as quickly as you possibly can.
Casey:
And so it ended up finishing, I don't know, at some other point, we'll talk about that later, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
But the point is, there's a blog post about how to check the progress and why is this happening because
Casey:
Well, and now I'm getting way out of my depth and maybe, John, you can be my parachute and save me here.
Casey:
But apparently SHR, which is Synology Hybrid RAID, is basically taking several different like RAID 5 or RAID 6 or something like that volumes and lumping them together using LVM, not LLVM, mind you, but just LVM, which is Logical Volume Manager, and making one...
Casey:
Big, like, logical volume out of all of these smaller RAID arrays.
Casey:
That is about as best as I can understand.
Casey:
So, John, maybe you can help me out here.
John:
Yeah, I saw the same feedback you did.
John:
I didn't check up on it.
John:
But what it sounded like – I mean, the last show, Marco briefly described it as kind of like what Drobo does.
John:
But it actually seems like it's much less sophisticated than that, which makes sense if you look at from the outside what can –
John:
Synology Hybrid RAID do versus what does a Drobo-type approach do.
John:
Synology Hybrid RAID is basically the same as a RAID 5-type approach.
John:
The only difference is you can swap in disks that are not the same size, and if you eventually swap in enough of them, you gain some storage, whereas RAID 5 really wants you to use disks that are the same size or build a new array.
John:
in the traditional way um and according to this feedback what it's doing behind the scenes is simply uh when you put it in a new drive making a new raid array with like the the newer changed drives and then making these multiple raids that it's managing behind the scenes look like one volume using logical volume management that's what lvm is that's what it does makes perfect sense to me it's fine but uh you know
John:
And understandably, if they are sort of accurately reflecting the rebuilding of each one of these raids that they're maintaining behind the scenes, it can look like what Casey just saw where the progress bar starts and finishes and then starts over again because it's actually doing multiple raid rebuilds behind the scenes.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
But, yeah, it seems like everything's OK, and we'll talk about that a little later.
Casey:
Would one of you like to tell me about Dark Sky and location-specific data, please?
John:
Brian Brush had this notion that what Apple might bring to the table in the case of a weather app like Dark Sky is that everybody who has an iPhone is essentially a distributed device.
John:
barometric measuring device because our phones do have barometers in them apparently and assuming those are accurate enough to be useful it's not just that apple now has a good weather app and can uh incorporate the prediction services and all that into its applications but potentially depending on how apple wants to do this they can use iphones as measuring devices i have no idea if that is founded in any kind of reality i just thought the idea was interesting that uh
Marco:
you know that actually dark sky would gain some benefit from being part of apple instead of just vice versa and i don't know much about weather or the barometer in iphones but i would guess the main value in that is not necessarily measuring absolute air pressure but in measuring change because that that can that's probably like a strong predictor of rain about to happen right isn't isn't like oh there's a big pressure drop
Marco:
And so if you have a bunch of iPhones out in the field that you can kind of tell like, hey, the pressure just dropped noticeably in this area for almost everyone, then that would be significant data.
Marco:
So I bet they could do something with that if they wanted to.
Marco:
I don't know if they will, but that's a really cool idea.
Marco:
And it's a way that you can basically...
Marco:
make the entire fleet of iphones into a giant uh short-term weather prediction thing now it's not going to give them like radar and forecasts anything like that but that probably is helpful and i would guess that the barometers inside of iphones probably are sensitive enough
Marco:
Because the whole point of them is to do things like measure when you've gone upstairs for activity tracking, like to measure flights of stairs.
Marco:
So I would imagine the air pressure difference between like one floor of a house and two or three floors up is not that great of an air pressure difference.
Marco:
So again, I don't know anything about any of this stuff.
Marco:
But just going on a hunch here, I bet they are sensitive enough to at least know, hey, the air pressure is changing and it's dropping for everyone in this area right now.
Casey:
That is definitely a very interesting idea, which I had not thought of.
Casey:
And speaking of weather data, Luke Schulman, amongst others, have pointed out that the weather data industry has consolidated, leaving only two major players in the United States in 2012.
Casey:
IBM purchased the assets of the Weather Channel, which included software and data products, and the cable channel was later spun off.
Casey:
They, in turn, later acquired Weather Underground, which is basically a community of personal weather stations.
Casey:
The other major player is AccuWeather, which has its own data and media products.
Casey:
None of these organizations operate weather stations.
Casey:
They simply process and repackage data from the National Weather Service, which is available for free and in the public domain.
Casey:
So I guess if you really want to go to the National Weather Service, maybe you could make heads or tails of it.
Casey:
One way or another, AccuWeather and IBM have for years been lobbying to Congress to change the law so that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the NOAA, model data is no longer released to the public.
Casey:
Of course they are.
Casey:
But basically you can get this data if you really want to try hard enough or you can use something – well, could have used something like Dark Skies API, which I guess kind of puts a nice facade in front of all of that.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So it's hard not to see why Hover is a popular choice for people starting all kinds of businesses.
Marco:
It's frankly just super pleasant to use.
Marco:
The interface is really smooth and nice.
Marco:
It's very quick and easy to find what's available.
Marco:
Whenever I do any kind of business start or any kind of project start,
Marco:
first thing I do is try to get a good name.
Marco:
And one of the key parts of that is seeing if I can get a good domain.
Marco:
And Hover is where I go for that search because it's just a really nice search.
Marco:
They have good word matching, different alternatives you could find.
Marco:
Of course, they can search all the TLDs.
Marco:
So it's just wonderful.
Marco:
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Marco:
You can get a 10% discount with that link on all new purchases.
Marco:
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Marco:
Make a name for yourself with Hover.
Casey:
Let's go through Casey's Computer Corner.
Casey:
I made some brief kind of updates earlier.
Casey:
Like I said earlier, the rebuild did complete.
Casey:
I think it finished on – it was overnight from Saturday to Sunday.
Casey:
And so that is to say the restore began when – that was begun Wednesday evening.
Casey:
It was finished, you know, what, three or four days later.
Casey:
So the way it stands right now, drives one and two, still a time machine, still old drives if I recall correctly.
Casey:
And then I have three, four, five, six, seven, eight are all the big master volume, if you will.
Casey:
Drive five is that new 10 terabyte drive.
Casey:
Drive eight, still hanging on.
Casey:
Still there, still working for now.
Casey:
Well, after everything was updated, the first thing I did was immediately re-rsync everything to that 12 terabyte external, make sure it's all as good as can be.
Casey:
The second thing I did was hook that 12 terabyte external back up to the Mac mini,
Casey:
And immediately sign it up for Backblaze with my own money.
Casey:
And it is currently uploading that 12 terabyte drive to Backblaze.
Casey:
And it is, I think, two or three terabytes in.
Casey:
And so what I wanted your guys' advice on is what to do next.
Casey:
And I tried to do this in Slack.
Casey:
And Marco probably rightly said, save it for the show.
Casey:
I'm not telling you.
Casey:
But here's my thought process.
Casey:
So currently I have about 10 terabytes of data.
Casey:
on that big volume.
Casey:
Now it's a 20 or 30 terabyte volume, I think 20 terabyte, but I have 10 terabytes of actual data on it.
Casey:
Drives one and two together, they're currently RAID zeroed, you know, so they're no redundancy, nothing.
Casey:
And all it is is time machine.
Casey:
So, you know, whatever, who cares?
Casey:
But drives one and two currently have, I think, only six terabytes.
Casey:
I can verify, but I'm pretty sure it's only six terabytes in there.
Casey:
But I do have a couple of brand new 10 terabyte drives sitting here waiting for me to do something with them, like if drive eight dies.
Casey:
So here's my thought.
Casey:
What if I destroy that volume, that first volume, drives one and two, I destroy that volume, I lose my time machine backups, whatever, I don't care.
Casey:
I replace one of those three terabyte drives with one of these new 10 terabyte drives and make another RAID 0 no redundancy array, a 13 terabyte or thereabouts RAID 0 zero redundancy array.
Casey:
I duplicate everything from the big array into the little array.
Casey:
I think I probably should do that, irrespective of the next step.
Casey:
And then this way, I would have two complete copies of my data, and admittedly, on the same box.
Casey:
Like, there's plenty of problems here.
Casey:
This is not foolproof by any means.
Casey:
But it's more than one copy, which is a good thing, right?
Casey:
Two is one, one is none.
Casey:
And so my thought is, what if I do that, and maybe I just eschew Time Machine 4,
Casey:
forever because I can't remember the last time I've done a time machine restore.
Casey:
And given all the frigging computer problems I've been having recently, my computers are effectively ephemeral anyway.
Casey:
I've gotten so darn efficient at reloading them that I can do that reasonably quickly and easily.
Casey:
So that step one is, are you guys on board with that idea?
Casey:
And then there's a second step that I'd like to talk about first.
Casey:
Or am I being silly by throwing away the time machine volume and having a duplication of all of that data?
Casey:
Let's start with Marco, please.
Marco:
Is your backblaze backup finished yet?
Marco:
I already know the answer.
Marco:
No, no, no, no.
Marco:
No, it isn't.
Marco:
No, it's not finished.
Marco:
So the answer is don't do a damn thing.
Casey:
Fair, fair, fair.
Marco:
Don't touch it.
Marco:
Back away slowly.
Marco:
Just don't touch it.
Marco:
Let the backblaze backup finish and don't do anything else until it does.
Casey:
Well, and to be clear, the Backblaze backup is being sourced by that 12 terabyte external.
Casey:
I do not disagree with you.
Casey:
I do not disagree with you.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
But let's assume for the sake of discussion it is not done.
Casey:
But let's assume for the sake of discussion it is done.
Casey:
And I super pinky promise I will not touch anything until that Backblaze stuff is squared away.
Casey:
What would you do then?
Marco:
Right now, you are recovering from a near disaster.
Marco:
You are lucky that you got out of this.
Marco:
So step one is get your insurance policy in place.
Marco:
Get these backups done.
Marco:
Step two might be start fixing things that aren't broken again, like John said last week.
Marco:
But here's the thing.
Marco:
We're still in COVID-19, quarantine, everything.
Marco:
It's slow and difficult to get new parts delivered to your house quickly right now.
Marco:
So if things go wrong, or if you change your mind, or if your needs change, you lucked out with your Best Buy parking lot hard drive, but...
Marco:
It might not be easy to get more stuff.
Marco:
So if you do something and then three drives die in the process, I don't know.
Marco:
It could have happened, right?
Marco:
How hard is it going to be right now to get new hard drives?
Marco:
It might be hard.
Marco:
It might be tricky.
Marco:
It might take longer than you think.
Marco:
This is not a good time to be making changes.
Marco:
So I suggest that because it's hard to get supplies right now,
Marco:
This is not a great time to mess with it.
Marco:
Let the backup finish.
Marco:
Let this just continue the way it is going.
Marco:
And then consider other options once you can get hard drives delivered same day or tomorrow from Amazon.
Casey:
All right, so let's assume then that now we are in 2025 when all this is blown over.
Casey:
Then what would you do?
Casey:
Would you nuke the time machine?
Casey:
Would you eschew time machine entirely to have a second copy of all this data?
Marco:
I actually like time machine.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
It is incredibly slow and incredibly old and comically terrible in the UI.
Marco:
Like, you know, things like, you know, missing progress bars.
Marco:
By the way, talk about missing progress bars in the new Catalina version.
Marco:
finder integration for uh plugged in ios devices to access their files so you know how like itunes forever had that section where you could actually like drag files in and out of certain apps using itunes you can do that now in the finder in catalina but it's so incredibly half-assed so like we were trying to transfer our minecraft game from adam's ipad to tiff's
Marco:
And this is the method that this was able to be done.
Marco:
You could plug in the iPad and Minecraft exposes it to data directory through that old iTunes file transfer interface.
Marco:
And you can drag the files out and put them on a different device.
Marco:
That's what I did.
Marco:
The directory I was dragging out was something like, I don't know, a couple of gigs.
Marco:
It's showing folders, but you can't actually like open those folders.
Marco:
You have to just like drag the entire folder out.
Marco:
So you can't take like just a subfolder.
Marco:
You can't actually browse beyond the top level.
Marco:
That's limitation number one.
Marco:
Limitation number two is when you drag that folder that you have to copy the whole folder of out from the fake iTunes interface in Catalina Finder onto, you know, your own computer onto, you know, some other folder, you drag it, you drop it, and there is no feedback whatsoever.
Marco:
Nothing.
Marco:
You have no clue what's going on.
Marco:
Now, if you're transferring a two gig folder, that actually takes a minute or two.
Marco:
Like, it's not an immediate thing.
Marco:
There is no feedback.
Marco:
There's no progress bar.
Marco:
There's no spinner.
Marco:
There's nothing indicating that anything is happening, except if you try to do it again, something weird happens.
Marco:
I forgot what it was, but...
Marco:
So eventually it pops in like it shows up.
Marco:
It's just like I just love how they didn't even code a progress bar.
Marco:
Nothing like it's so gloriously half assed.
Marco:
But anyway, it's just yet one more way in which the breakup of iTunes actually made everything worse.
Marco:
Anyway, so going back to your thing.
Marco:
What I would suggest, I actually like Time Machine because I hardly ever need to fetch anything off of it.
Marco:
I think I use it maybe once a year.
Marco:
And usually it's like, you know what?
Marco:
I had something working in a code file that I was working on.
Casey:
I've been there.
Marco:
I had it working last night.
Marco:
I didn't commit it.
Marco:
And I messed it up today and I can't get it back to the way it was.
Marco:
Let me just revert to how it was at 10 p.m.
Marco:
last night.
Marco:
And I pull that one file out, and that saves my butt about once a year, and I'm glad I have it.
Marco:
And it's slow as hell, but I'm really glad I have it during that time.
John:
That's a feature that Xcode should add that I sorely miss, and it made me actually consider switching my editing from editing and Xcode to editing in BBEdit.
John:
BBEdit has this amazing feature that I wish Xcode had, which is that
John:
You can configure it so that every time you save a file, it saves a backup copy of the previous version of that file in a folder of your choice.
John:
Text files are small.
John:
It is a no-brainer.
John:
I have had this feature enabled for many, many years, maybe decades at this point.
John:
I have a giant folder on my computer with the old version of...
John:
Tons and tons of text files are organized by date.
John:
It has saved my butt so many times.
John:
Because, yeah, sometimes you forget to commit.
John:
Sometimes you don't commit.
John:
Bringing up the commit interface, even using a keyboard accelerator in Xcode, takes time.
John:
And it's just, you know, you have to think of a commit message because it makes you write one.
John:
It's just...
John:
I don't want to have to think about it.
John:
And also I don't want to have to restore code files from time machine.
John:
Never had to do that when I was using BB edit already using Xcode for the short amount of time.
John:
Occasionally I said, I've done it in the same situation.
John:
I forgot to commit.
John:
I'll just get it from the backup folder.
John:
Oh no, it doesn't exist.
John:
So if you're listening, Apple, and you work on Xcode, add this feature.
John:
It's so easy to add.
John:
You just make a bunch of folders by date, and you put the file in there, and you stick a timestamp on the file name, and maybe there's a little bit tricky logic about truncating for someone who has a 255-character file name, but honestly, they should be punished anyway.
John:
So please add this feature.
John:
People will use it.
John:
It's great.
John:
we'll just make time machine better well that that too that's a different team yeah right i know and and but like and is there really much of a team there like has has time machine been touched yeah yeah but it's it's updated to use the apfs snapshots like every time we've talked about this like even though progress is extremely slow and should be faster it is still changing which gives me hope that it hasn't been entirely abandoned that someday somehow we might get a version of
Marco:
time machine that takes full advantage of the modern technology stack in mac os we're not there yet but every version gets a little tiny bit better yeah oh speaking of which by the way i don't we didn't prepare to do this news at all but uh there's a new version of arc the backup app arq it looks really cool it uses apfs snapshotting to to make the backups really fast and so i i actually i'm going to upgrade to that i'm going to check that out because it looks really cool and casey it actually might
Marco:
be an option for you at some point in the future maybe um because it supports fully now uh or it better supports uh amazon's super cheap glacier uh version and google archive which is basically google's glacier um which i and i believe they each charge about a dollar per terabyte per month so if you can make that work for you that could back up your stuff actually legally for like 12 bucks a month
Marco:
yeah i had heard a little bit about that and i haven't had a chance looked in to look into it but that does sound very very appealing you should look at what the restore prices are though because unlike backblaze they will not ship you a drive for free yeah yeah and i will i will say like the the process of using glacier with arc a couple years ago when i when i tried it was miserable but apparently it is better now but i don't i don't know how much better
John:
I just peeked in my in my VB at a backup folder by the way apparently I must have started fresh in this machine because the oldest folder is from November 16th 2008.
John:
Wow that's awesome.
Marco:
Like there's no reason why Apple can't do this with like that because like we have like that weird local time machine thing.
Marco:
I've never had a good concept of how and when and why this works but there is that concept of like local time machine snapshots when you don't have a remote disk or when you're not near it.
John:
Even if you do it still doesn't even if you have a remote disk it's always doing local snapshot backups now.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So like in theory, it should be really fast and easy to, you know, some files that you modified last night to be able to go back, assuming you have any free disk space at all, to be able to go back and say, and just the OS should be able to do all that locally.
Marco:
Just all right, give me this file from, you know, last night.
Marco:
I don't know if it's that easy in practice.
John:
Yeah, it is fast to do it if you do it from the command line and know how to do all the magic, but the UI, like you said, it seems silly, but when they got rid of the space vortex UI, it's like things went downhill after that.
John:
That was like the most frivolous, you know, fanciful...
John:
what was the word we're always using?
John:
We're talking about whimsical interface, right?
John:
And it's like, well, maybe it's kind of too whimsical.
John:
Maybe they should just improve it only.
John:
What they did was they got rid of the whimsy and did not improve it in any other way.
John:
And now every time I go into the interface, I'm frustrated at like,
John:
how slow it is, especially with the, you know, uh, Synology, uh, backup, like over the network.
John:
So navigating that interface and getting to the point where you can initiate a restore can take forever.
John:
And it's, yeah, it's bad.
John:
But anyway, you can, you can do it from the command line.
John:
You can access those things.
John:
It's inexcusable that they don't have a very fast lookup of local snapshot stuff.
John:
Like Margo said, you should be able to right click a file in the finder.
John:
and say show me all the local snapshot versions of this file and then just pick one and restart.
Marco:
Isn't there that revision system?
Marco:
I've never used that either.
John:
That's a different thing.
Marco:
Why is that a different thing?
John:
Because that was for saving file versions.
John:
It wasn't the same as like time machine local snapshots of your whole disk.
John:
They might be both use
John:
Maybe if I snapshot those points, but honestly, I don't think they do.
John:
The file version thing started out using this weird SQLite database with diffs in it, and it was this terrifying thing that I'm glad more applications didn't adopt because honestly, it's just me.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I agree with you that in a perfect world, I would prefer to have Time Machine, no doubt.
Casey:
But I cannot remember the last time I've restored anything from Time Machine.
Casey:
in part because it's so slow, in part because it's on the Synology.
Casey:
I mean, a lot of this is my own choices.
Casey:
But I am willing to sacrifice Time Machine in order to get a redundant copy of my data, again, understanding that it's on the same physical device, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
So, Marco, you sound like you're not too keen on this idea, even in the future state where I can get a hard drive easily and all the backups have been done, et cetera, et cetera.
Marco:
first of all i don't think it's worth losing the functionality of time machine for a raid zero copy of this data sure that's fair even though i do use a raid zero array for time machine but again well but you know and and that's because when i set this up like that was actually a large amount a large amount of disk space now it's not and if i was setting it up again today i wouldn't be doing this but
Marco:
You are setting it up again today, and that's why I'm suggesting that you go with simpler solutions, because drives are so big and so cheap, and your data usage has not grown with the size of drives.
Marco:
They've grown a lot faster.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I suggest still leaning towards simpler solutions.
Marco:
If you still want Time Machine, either put in one or two disks not in RAID and use that for Time Machine.
Marco:
They don't have to be very big because your built-in SSD isn't that big.
Marco:
They can be pretty modestly sized drives and you can put them in RAID 1 or just have a single disk and have that do Time Machine with no redundancy at all because it doesn't matter that much.
Marco:
But
Marco:
For your actual other copy of this data that you have, I still suggest getting another Best Buy parking lot drive if you can and just having it be on a drive that is basically put in cold storage that you unplug that is not being run until this backup is done and then you repurpose it for whatever you need.
Casey:
All right, John, at this point, what is your thought?
John:
Margot already hit the main point I wanted to, which is I didn't hear you say that you had gotten a second 12-terabyte drive.
John:
So that should be step zero in your thing.
John:
You didn't mention it.
John:
Margot, just do that for crying out loud.
John:
As for the time machine thing, two points on that.
John:
One, even after all the dust settles and the backblaze thing is done, yada, yada, yada,
John:
it still never feels good to me to even momentarily quote unquote momentarily reduce the number of copies of files that you have right uh so saying oh well those time machine anyway and i'm going to rebuild it in a second so i can just get rid of these backups and then i'll just i'll remake you know i'll remake a new backup somewhere whether you use arc or time machine or whatever during the time between when you tear that down you're like yeah it's not a big thing i'm just going to make it again you've lost one copy of all the data that's on that
John:
Uh, and so it's better to make an additional copy before you lose that one.
John:
So then the number of copies of your data doesn't go down.
John:
You bring it up briefly, then bring it back down to what it was.
John:
That's, that's that point.
John:
Second point is I like the idea of you continuing to use time machine because like for sort of, uh,
John:
Diversity of backup software, right?
John:
So rather than having five super duper backups, I'd rather have one super duper, one arc, one backblaze and one time machine because all these pieces of software have their own bugs and their own, you know, upgrade cycles and their own potential for mistakes and so on and so forth.
John:
Having more of them gives you more sort of biodiversity in terms of, you know, if some plague comes and it only affects AWS or it only affects Backblaze or it only affects Time Machine, you always have something else.
John:
And in particular, the upgrades like the Time Machine one changes when a major new OS comes out and it totally changes the way Time Machine works.
John:
I could totally bork your Time Machine back up.
John:
which is why it's good that you backup with something other than time machine.
John:
Same is true of backblaze.
John:
Same is true of arc.
John:
You know, if you have a bug in one of those things or super duper, you know, it gets hosed by some version, a upgrade version of the operating system, but time machine still works because Apple makes that one.
John:
Uh, I'm very heavily in favor of keeping a time machine backup.
John:
Just, uh, just, just because it's one more backup program.
John:
And also, by the way, it's the backup program that thus far is ostensibly supported by the platform vendor.
John:
So pretty much guaranteed to work.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with all that.
Casey:
But again, I think the difference between the two of you guys and me is that I genuinely and maybe maybe I'm lying to myself, but I genuinely consider the data that is on my computers less valuable to me than the data that is on that Synology.
Casey:
I would much rather lose all the data on my iMac Pro than lose all the data on my Synology.
John:
So on that point, by the way, the recent versions of Time Machine have an option, a checkbox hidden in the little options thing that says don't back up system files or applications.
John:
So if you check that box, it won't waste its time backing up your operating system, which is on a read-only volume anyway, and you can't customize it all.
John:
And it won't bother backing up your applications, which it assumes you can redownload or get from the App Store or whatever.
John:
It will only back up whatever data you happen to have on the thing.
John:
And I know you think it's ephemeral, but you actually do produce data that hangs out there.
John:
And if you accidentally delete something you had on your desktop yesterday, you're going to be happy to be able to get it back from Time Machine or wherever.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with everything you said.
Casey:
I think it's just, from my perspective, if I have to choose one, even for just a little while while I'm doing some dancing around with data in the Synology, I would choose a duplicate of the Synology data.
Casey:
So, okay, so it sounds like you guys aren't going to like what step two was hypothetically going to be.
Casey:
So my hypothetical step one was nuke the time machine volume, like I'd said, put in a bigger drive so that I can get a...
Casey:
an over 10 terabyte array out of two disks, copy everything from the big six-disk array into this two-disk array, and then I was starting to think, oh, this BitRot thing's starting to mess with my head.
Casey:
What if I do indeed...
Casey:
at this point, when I have two copies of the data on the Synology, I nuke the big array and redo it all with BTRFS or ButterFS or whatever it's supposed to be called, possibly even with two-drive redundancy if I can, and then I bring everything back from that RAID 0 array to the new...
John:
butter file system btrfs btrfs file system uh six disk array and then at that point if i want to go back to using time machine on that two disk array then so be it and i was hoping that i would win you over here john but perhaps not you can totally do that but just follow the thing that i said before don't reduce the number of copies if you want to do that and i think you should it's a good idea you can't do that until you get that data to one more location so increase the number of locations that data is stored this is above and beyond the other 12 terabyte best buy drive that you're going to get
John:
You're going to get one more of them now.
John:
And you're going to copy it to a third location.
John:
Then you are free to nuke your thing.
John:
You make a new BTRFS thing, blah, blah, blah, and put it back.
John:
This is the discipline.
John:
This is the system.
John:
Do not reduce the number of redundant copies.
John:
And as long as you follow that rule, you can feel free to experiment, you know.
Casey:
Well, in my hypothetical, I am increasing the number, well, briefly increasing the number of redundant copies.
John:
But at the cost of killing your time machine backups, which you think you don't need.
Casey:
I don't care about my time machine.
John:
Don't you back up more than just your computer on time machine?
John:
Isn't like the laptop backed up on there?
John:
Don't you back everything in the house to that one big volume?
Casey:
There's three machines going to that one big volume.
Casey:
It's Aaron's MacBook Air that's been underwater seven times, which probably needs a backup more than any.
John:
It's not just your computer.
John:
I'm in the same situation.
John:
The whole house's computers are backed up to my time machine thing on the Synology.
John:
And I wouldn't wipe that thing unless I had redundant copies of all of those computers.
John:
Because if you wipe that thing, you're like, I don't need it.
John:
It's fine.
John:
And then, you know.
John:
Someone needs some file on that computer or it finally succumbs to another glass of water or whatever.
John:
It's like a slide puzzle, right?
John:
You're trying to find a free space.
John:
You've got to get more spaces.
John:
You've got to get more drives and put the stuff on it.
John:
and it won't be wasted money because you know those drives what was the the email we got uh referred to it as shucking the drives like an ear of corn i loved hearing that that was so great you peel off the outer layer and you get interestingly someone also had feedback that occasionally uh you'll shuck a drive and the mechanism inside there will have some weirdness about its sata connector where it won't actually work out of the box if you take the mechanism and put it inside your thing unless you like customize the cable to you know i forget what the details were but there's
John:
There's some difference on the cables and voltages as expected that won't make it work until you hack with it a little bit, which is super annoying, but still technically impossible to overcome.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Fine, then.
Casey:
I thought you were going to be all on board with this BTRFS idea.
John:
I mean, we're on board with it, just not on board with you reducing your redundancy.
John:
Wait for your things to finish.
John:
Get your second 12-terabyte backup.
John:
Get in it.
John:
Any other move you want to make, you need to get a new square on the tile puzzle.
John:
Put the stuff there, and now you have a free spot that you can mess with.
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Casey:
I actually am interested in talking about video game stuff, but we're going to do most of that later.
Casey:
However, you, John, need to complete or further along, perhaps, an arc that started many, many years ago.
Casey:
There is a new controller out, and I know you have not handled it in your hands, but...
Casey:
But continuing the classic episode number 49 of Hypercritical from January 6, 2012, eight years ago now, would you please, John, critique the new PlayStation controller to the best of your ability?
John:
This is a weird, slow rollout of the PlayStation hardware reveal.
John:
Microsoft has revealed basically everything about their hardware, their controller, the box.
John:
We talked about it in past shows or whatever.
John:
Sony has been trying to challenge them with press release or press release, but not revealing as much.
John:
So they had a separate press release and blog post just about the PS5 controller.
John:
So they told us the PS5 specs.
John:
They told us the performance.
John:
They told us stuff about the 3D audio.
John:
They told us all sorts of things, but we still haven't seen it.
John:
Here now is the controller.
John:
I feel like these, the sort of, you know, I was going to say the big boy consoles or whatever.
John:
Let's say the non-portable consoles because the Switch, Nintendo is all in on the portable hybrid thing or whatever.
John:
And thus far, Sony and Microsoft are not.
John:
Desktop consoles.
John:
yeah there you go uh and among those their controllers have not been particularly daring microsoft got burned by the connect probably rightfully so uh that turned out not to be the future of how we control our video games even though it was really cool technology uh and but both systems have not really been interested in changing their standard controller much um
John:
And so the new PS5 controller, it looks striking and new.
John:
It's got this two-tone appearance.
John:
It's kind of futuristic looking.
John:
It looks, you know, I was trying to discuss in one of the slacks, like, what does this look like?
John:
There's a sort of future look that has been used in movies and art on science fiction magazines and everything for decades.
John:
And I was trying to think of where it originates, the sort of
John:
A white outer shell with glimpses of sort of a black interior where the machinery is.
John:
So the white outer shell is very smooth and matte finish or maybe glossy, but very sort of smooth and, you know...
John:
is characterized by joints and lines and then with certain regions where you can peek into the interior in some respects like uh eve from wally is a little bit like this but she doesn't have the thing where you see the interior anyway that's what this control looks like we'll put a like a stormtrooper yeah stormtrooper is like that a little bit too but again there's not it's not like you're seeing into it they just have regions that are black this is more of an outer shell type thing you can find lots of examples and i was wondering is there one artist that pioneered this in the 60s or something but
John:
it's i couldn't trace it to its origins uh every time i think i found an older one someone goes back farther depending on how you characterize it someone's like look at this here's 2001 and in the 60s but the 2001 has the white outer stuff but not the black inner stuff anyway it's cool looking controller
John:
all this is to say fine it looks cool uh it has its very different striking look but it's not actually that different from the ps4 controller the ps4 controller i don't remember if we talked about this show uh or i must have at some point but anyway ps4 controller blessedly fixed many things that were wrong with the ps3 ps2 and original playstation controller um
John:
But it's still stuck to the basics.
John:
Two analog sticks in the sort of lower middle part, a D-pad on the upper left, and four symmetrical, equally sized buttons on the right.
John:
And then some triggers, and they've messed with that a little bit.
John:
This new controller is like an optical illusion.
John:
When I first saw it, I was like, oh, well, at least they've gotten rid of one of my big pet peeves is when you make a controller as if it's like a piece of art or like it's interior space in a house or something where you make everything at 90 degrees and 45 degrees, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
because that's not what hands look like their hands are not at right angles they do not have sharp edges and they are not all 45s and 90s it looks good when you make a thing that where the buttons are exactly at the four corners of a diamond and the buttons are all exactly the same shape but that has no bearing on how your hands or your thumb lands on a controller that you're holding in your hands none whatsoever and
John:
Uh, and I'm always been angry about all the buttons being the same size because there is, there are very few games where you use all four buttons equally.
John:
Most games have a dominant button, a second most dominant button and like a tertiary button.
John:
Anyway, all that aside, this looks like, oh, they finally made it so that the buttons and the, and the D pad aren't on these little perfectly circular, perfectly flat and level, you know, plateaus like they are on the PS4 controller, which is one of the few remaining sort of, uh,
John:
parts of the ps4 controller that say no we can't get away with it we love perfect geometry we love perfect circles right angles you know perfect cones straight lines be just because they look good the ps4 controller did away with almost all of that they said let's make it a sort of you know bulbous shape that fits people's hands better but still put two perfect circles exactly flat to host the buttons in the d-pad and
John:
And make those buttons and D-pads exactly vertical with the controller, you know, vertical and horizontal, north, south, east, west.
John:
Like, they're not tilted in any way, despite that they know your hands and fingers are going to be coming in on them in an angle.
John:
Which is not necessarily bad, especially since people are kind of used to that, but still, it's a...
John:
It's a jarring sort of departure from the design language.
John:
This one looks like, oh, everything is organic and curvy.
John:
No longer do you have these circular plateaus.
John:
And it looks like they twisted the buttons to sort of align better with your hands, which, by the way, the XTox controller does and has done for its entire life.
John:
Its buttons are laid out to try to be comfortable for your fingers, not to be perfectly vertical and horizontal when looked at in like a plan view in a CAD file.
John:
But I took out my trusty X scope on my Mac and pulled out some guides.
John:
And lo and behold, all of the buttons are still exactly aligned as they used to be.
John:
They just look like they might be twisted, but they are not.
John:
So the circular plateaus are gone, but the buttons and the joysticks seem to be in exactly the same positions as they were before.
John:
The only thing that they've done to make a concession for increased ergonomics is they have tilted the triggers slightly.
John:
The triggers used to be more or less, again, completely like...
John:
If you drew like a straight line through the triggers, like a 90 degree angle to their hinges, it would just go straight up, right?
John:
These look like they are tilted, again, like the Xbox triggers tilted slightly outwards because they know your fingers are coming from the sides on them and they want to tilt them a little bit so they're more comfortable.
John:
but other than that and of course you know they moved like the the options button they changed the touchpad shape and they did some other stuff like that they made the playstation button into a weird raised logo thing there's a microphone built in which i think is very smart although it probably sounds like garbage but it's better than better than nothing it's good to be built into the controller um anyway i haven't held this thing
John:
but it basically looks like a dressed up ps4 controller i hope it is as comfortable as the ps4 controller because i like the ps4 controller it looks a little bit fatter and sony emphasized that they had worked hard to make it feel slim even though it's bigger the reason it's bigger i think is because they're hiding more sort of haptic engines like apple's little what do they call those little uh
John:
inductor widgety shaky fans yeah like but it's but it's like a it's like a linear coil thing of it's it's a more sophisticated way to make things vibrate and they've put more of those and more sophisticated versions of those inside this controller which take up room they also have them on the triggers themselves to like to have tension on the triggers or something so there's more crap inside there which is why they had to make it bigger
John:
But honestly, I'm looking at it at all the different angles.
John:
It doesn't look that much bigger than the PS4 controller.
John:
And right down to the edges of the thing and the cut lines, it looks like it will not be a shock to anyone who has a PS4.
John:
Which is fine.
John:
I like the PS4 controller fine.
John:
It could be improved.
John:
If the only improvement to this is that the triggers are a little bit more comfortable.
John:
I'll take it, I suppose.
John:
But anyway, that's that PS5 controller.
John:
It is not a disaster.
John:
It looks mostly fine.
John:
Still don't know what the console looks like.
Casey:
Now, John, you have or have not ever owned a PlayStation in the past.
Casey:
I don't recall.
John:
I have a PlayStation 3 and a PlayStation 2.
Casey:
But no, I'm getting myself confused.
Casey:
It's the Xbox that you refuse to buy.
John:
No, I have not.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay, sorry.
Casey:
On an Xbox.
Casey:
Gotcha.
Casey:
So no Halo for you because you played the original whatever it was called.
John:
I played Halo on the Mac.
Casey:
Yeah, there it is.
Casey:
What was that called?
Casey:
Marathon or something like that?
John:
You're the only person.
John:
No, I played actual Halo on the actual Mac.
John:
Because I was promised it at Macworld.
John:
And I did, and I played it, and the frame rate was terrible, but damn it, I played that game and I finished it.
John:
It was pretty good.
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Marco:
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Marco:
Get a $20 credit with promo code ATP2020.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting my stuff and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I'd like to talk to you about my new favorite toy.
Casey:
And for me, I have fallen in love with the thing I've been waiting to fall in love with.
Casey:
I just couldn't find a reason.
Casey:
I love the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
If you are not familiar, we talked about this probably a year or two back because you used a Raspberry Pi for your short lived question mark stereo thing.
Casey:
Right, Marco?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I did a few experiments with them back.
Marco:
I talked on the show about kind of making a card record player kind of thing, where I had this NFC reader that I could stick a card for an album in front of, and it would start playing that album into my speakers.
Marco:
And so it was kind of like simulating an old CD or record player, but in a modern way.
Marco:
It's still sitting over there.
Marco:
I wonder if it's still working.
Marco:
I haven't gone near it in a long time.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So if you're not familiar with the Raspberry Pi, I might get the particulars slightly wrong, but the general gist of it is it's a full, honest-to-goodness Linux-based computer that's at its most expensive something like $50.
Casey:
And granted, when I say $50, you're literally getting a motherboard and that's it.
Casey:
You don't have a power supply, you don't have a keyboard, you don't have a monitor, nothing.
Casey:
But you can get an entire computer...
Casey:
for 50 bones.
Casey:
Like, that's really not bad.
Casey:
And not a bad computer at that.
Casey:
Yeah, and it's not a bad computer.
Casey:
Like, this is a computer that can drive two 4K displays for 50 bucks.
Casey:
Now, it's Linux-based, which obviously has its own long list of problems, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it is 50 bucks.
Casey:
You can get the Pi, so that's for the Raspberry Pi 4, and that's for the four gigabytes of RAM model.
Casey:
They have another one that's two gigabytes of RAM that's like 10 bucks cheaper or something like that.
Casey:
They also have a Pi Zero, which is a physically smaller and far less powerful Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
I believe it's $10 for the one with a wireless chip on it so you can get on 802 to 11B Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And it's, I think, literally $5 for an entire computer if you don't want Wi-Fi.
Casey:
It is bananas how cheap these computers are.
Casey:
And I've wanted one for the longest time.
Casey:
I couldn't figure out what I was going to do with it, though.
Casey:
Now, put that aside for a second.
Casey:
I told you guys, I think like maybe six months or a year ago, I had installed PyHole onto a Docker container on my Synology.
Casey:
Now, PyHole is a – it was originally, as far as I'm aware, originally it was written to run on a Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
And what it does is it's a DNS server where it will not reply to DNS requests for things that it knows or adds.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So your computer, if it's using your piehole as a DNS server, it'll go to, say, CNN.com.
Casey:
And CNN is adorned with nothing but ads everywhere you look.
Casey:
And so it says to the piehole software running presumably on a Raspberry Pi, in my case it was on a Docker container in my Synology, hey, I'd like to go to ads.cnn.com or what have you.
Casey:
And the piehole would say, I don't know where that is, tough noogies.
Casey:
And so the net effect of that is you don't see an ad.
Casey:
There is no ad.
Casey:
And so among other things, it actually saves a little bit of bandwidth if you care because you're not downloading whatever that image or JavaScript or gosh knows what is.
Casey:
So it worked out really well, but then...
Casey:
I don't know, maybe three or four months ago, Verizon Fios, at least where I am, started turning on IPv6.
Casey:
And all of a sudden, I was seeing ads all the time.
Casey:
And it turns out maybe Fios was on IPv6 for a while.
Casey:
Maybe it's that Google's AdWords went on IPv6.
Casey:
I don't know what it was.
Casey:
But it seemed to me that something decided to turn on IPv6.
Casey:
And I was suddenly seeing ads everywhere all the time.
Casey:
And I started investigating, okay, how do I get IPv6 into the Docker container on the Synology?
Casey:
And I'm sure that there's fairly easy ways to do that when you're not on a Synology, but when you're on the Synology, it was not easy.
Casey:
And so finally, finally, gentlemen, I have a reason to buy my $50 computer because I want to run Piehole and I want to run it on Raspberry Pi where I know I have more control over the networking and so on and so forth.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
For my birthday, I had asked for and received the CannaKit Raspberry Pi 4GB Starter Max Kit.
Casey:
And the reason I got this is because I knew nothing about what I was doing, and I knew this would have everything I needed within that box, which was completely true.
Casey:
If I were to do this again, now that I know sort of what I'm doing, I would go a different route.
Casey:
But if you're like me and don't really know what the hell is going on, this worked out really well.
Casey:
You can get them on Amazon.
Casey:
You can get them directly from CannaKit.
Casey:
And so what it includes is a Raspberry Pi 4.
Casey:
It includes a microSD card, which is effectively the quote-unquote hard drive for the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
It includes a microSD card reader for your computer computer.
Casey:
It includes a case with a fan mount and a fan.
Casey:
It includes a power supply, some heat sinks for the CPU, I think the GPU, and maybe the USB controller or something like that.
Casey:
I forget what else.
Casey:
It includes two micro HDMI to HDMI cables because the Raspberry Pi is so physically small.
Casey:
It's roughly the same surface area of a credit card.
Casey:
And so in order to get HDMI out, they're actually little teeny tiny micro HDMI ports.
Casey:
And so there are two cables to go to regular HDMI ports.
Casey:
And it also, interestingly, it included a USB-C switch that just interrupts power if you want, because there's no power switch on the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
And that was $115.
Casey:
So it was like a little over twice the cost of the entire Raspberry Pi, which is silly.
Casey:
And again, I probably wouldn't do it again knowing what I know now.
Casey:
But ultimately, like $115 is not nothing, but it's not that much money.
Casey:
And I got the entire setup, and I'm happy as a pig in poop.
Casey:
And I put in my Pi hole.
Casey:
I followed this really nice setup guide.
Casey:
And I did not use like the...
Casey:
make your Raspberry Pi be only a pie hole thing.
Casey:
I actually installed it myself on top of Raspbian, which is a Linux distro specifically oriented around the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
And so now I can use my Raspberry Pi for other things, which is going to become relevant in like 10 seconds.
Casey:
But I got to tell you,
Casey:
This thing is so freaking cool.
Casey:
The Raspberry Pi is amazing.
Casey:
And I think what makes it so appealing to me is that I really am impressed with how good the ecosystem is.
Casey:
When you install Raspbian, which is, again, the kind of default Linux distro, it includes xWindows.
Casey:
And in xWindows, it has some stuff to get you going, like a Python IDE, if you so desire.
Casey:
um it has like configuration that's specifically for the raspberry pi but then if you drop down to the command line if you don't like x windows hey guess what there's a command line like whole menuing system for doing all the same stuff so if you want to you know turn on or off wi-fi and you want or if you want to set up some i can't think of any good examples off the top of my head but there's all sorts of stuff that has this like reasonably easy reasonably straightforward user interface even on the command line like even the ssh you can do this stuff it's amazing and
Casey:
And that's what I think is so cool about the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
You could probably create an equivalent computer for way cheaper, but the ecosystem around it is just amazing.
Casey:
And there's so many examples of, oh, I want to add a push button to run a shell script.
Casey:
And oh, okay, you need these three parts, and you need this shell script running in Python, and you'll be right as rain in 10 minutes flat.
Casey:
It is amazing, and this is the coolest little toy I've ever seen.
Casey:
So I've been talking a lot...
Casey:
I will give Marco a chance.
Casey:
I would actually really like to hear, Marco, what your thoughts are.
Casey:
But very quickly, John, you do not have one of these in the house.
Casey:
Is that correct?
John:
I think I'm in the same situation as you used to be in, and I think as Marco used to be in.
John:
This definitely seems cool to me, but I don't have a use case for it.
John:
And I've never been able to say, well, even though you don't know what you use it for, you should just get it, because then I would just set it up and just stare at it.
John:
So, you know, it definitely does seem cool.
John:
And, you know, this is... I think this is part of the... Raspberry Pi happened because, like, you know, when you're not paying attention, you know, as the price of compute goes to zero, computers can get very small and do lots of interesting things.
John:
And, like...
John:
If you look at the specs on this, these specs would be fantasy for a childhood version of me looking at the specs of computers.
John:
But this stuff is so cheap and so small.
John:
You look at what it includes.
John:
As you noted, the main problem with this in terms of the current technological landscape is that
John:
uh modern connectors for as small as they are are so big that they are the they are the major hardware problem with this that you can't physically fit connectors of all the kinds that it can support so you have to have this little you know funnel of adapters going from micro hdmi to regular hdmi or usbc to usba and uh yeah so it's kind of funny um
John:
So it'll be, you know, I'm hoping that all of our connectors will continue to, I don't know if they can continue to shrink that much because eventually they'll be about the size of the wires that they connect to.
John:
But that seems to be the major barrier here because, you know, the price of compute and the price of memory and, you know, SSDs and all that stuff will continue to go down.
John:
And if you're just doing something
John:
like running linux on it with no major sort of gui or even if you are running a gui doing basic stuff is very easy which is why we have those conversations about oh can i do development on a mac mini can i do development on a macbook air sure yeah modern computers are very powerful if what you're doing is text editing and compiling and stuff like that so i find these things fascinating and i'm on the lookout for any thing in my life where i might need something like this but thus far nothing
Casey:
Right now, Marco, you and I have a lot to talk about that's kind of off to the side, and I'd like to keep that off to the side just for a minute.
Casey:
But with regard to the Raspberry Pi itself, how do you really touch them in between the jukebox time and now?
Casey:
What is your Raspberry Pi situation at home?
Marco:
It's basically been like John's.
Marco:
Like I had that project I did back, you know, whatever it was, two years ago, a year ago, whenever that was, I did that project and it was fun.
Marco:
I played with it a lot for like, you know, a couple of weeks when I was doing that.
Marco:
And then I ran out of things to do with it.
Marco:
And so I just kind of set that hobby aside for a while until recently when I came up with something better to do with it, which will be our next segment.
Marco:
But we'll get there in a minute.
Marco:
But really, like for me, it's very much like I didn't want to like...
Marco:
keep tinkering with it into like well what else can i do with this thing like i had a specific purpose i did it and and it was great for that and then once i got tired of that purpose or i moved on or it was done then i just kind of left it until i had something else to do with it
Casey:
Yeah, and it's funny because as much as I do love the ecosystem and some of the incredible software tooling that Raspberry Pi and Raspbian have put together, you still can't avoid the fact that it's Linux.
Casey:
And so for me to set up – and I know that there's a little bit of wonkiness with regard to IPv6, and I know that I don't know basically anything about it.
Casey:
But suffice it to say, I wanted to set up –
Casey:
a consistent IP address on both IPv4 and IPv6 for the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
So this way, I can have my Eero's use the Raspberry Pi as the DNS server.
Casey:
So this way, when any of my devices come on my network, they will look to the Raspberry Pi for the DNS server, which means you need a static IP.
Casey:
Well, for IPv4, that's very easy.
Casey:
You can just go into the Eero app and it's 30 seconds and you're done.
Casey:
But, ooh, did I have to dig and screw with config files all over the place in order to figure out how to get an IPv6, not reservation, but reservation squared away.
Casey:
I did get it, though, and it seems like everything's fine across many reboots and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But that's the thing is I got the pie hole set up, and this is way too much Raspberry Pi just for pie hole.
Casey:
I could have gotten a much cheaper and much simpler one.
Casey:
I'm probably...
Casey:
But I specifically got the best one I possibly could because I figured I might want to do something else with it.
Casey:
And after I'd finished my configuration of Piehole and didn't really have much else to do, I immediately needed a new project, like Marco was saying.
Casey:
And so it occurred to me, wait a second, I know people are using these for emulation.
Casey:
And I got literally the best Raspberry Pi one can get, all $50 of it, as of, you know, three weeks ago.
Casey:
Maybe I should dip my toe into this whole emulation thing.
Casey:
And oh my word, this has been a ride and it's been amazing.
Marco:
So Casey, what game console are you using right now?
Casey:
Well, it's a miracle that I've participated in this show at all because I have all kinds of game consoles on my Raspberry Pi right now.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
i've been i haven't spent a lot of time on any particular one of them but it's been extremely extremely fun going through old nes games that i loved going through all super nintendo games that i loved i've even been able to play with reasonable about reasonable amounts of speed nintendo 64 games that i loved like give me wave race i love that piece of garbage game it was
Casey:
my jam and I've been able to play it on this little tiny box that's about the size of a credit card or maybe 50 credit cards stacked on top of each other it is incredible and I can even now play Genesis or for everyone else in the entire friggin world what is it Master Drive?
Casey:
Mega Drive there you go
Casey:
I can play Genesis games.
Casey:
Like earlier today, I sent you a message in Slack, Sonic the Hedgehog, so delightful.
Casey:
I've only ever played like a couple hours of it because I never had a Genesis.
Casey:
It's so delightful.
Casey:
And so what I had done was at your recommendation, I had gotten an 8-BitDo or 8-BitDo Bluetooth controller.
Casey:
And the particular one I chose, which I think was at your recommendation, Marco, was one that physically resembles a Super Nintendo controller, but with two analog sticks.
Yeah.
Casey:
And I got to say, this is where Linux is still Linux.
Casey:
So I get this controller and I go and I look at the software that's doing all this emulation is called RetroPie.
Casey:
And I install RetroPie on top of Raspbian because I want to continue to use this thing as my pie hole.
Casey:
That sounds really funny, but be that as it may, I want to continue to use the pie hole software on my Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
But I'd also like it to be an emulator.
Casey:
And rather than dedicating the Raspberry Pi strictly to emulation, I installed all of it on top of the existing OS installation, which in years past on Linux was a disaster.
Casey:
This worked out no problem.
Casey:
But I go to set up my Bluetooth controller.
Casey:
I'd been using it via USB just fine, no worries.
Casey:
But I decided, no, I want to use it via Bluetooth.
Casey:
That's what it's there for.
Casey:
And so I go and I look at the RetroPie documentation and step one is, okay, go to register and connect Bluetooth devices and you can select your Bluetooth devices, Mac address from here.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Yeah, sure.
Casey:
And they include a screenshot.
Casey:
This is the official documentation, gentlemen.
Casey:
They include a screenshot that says, please choose the Bluetooth device you would like to connect to.
Casey:
That is their official screenshot.
Casey:
That's what they're showing you.
Casey:
And then it turns out one of them actually says Nintendo blah, blah, blah on it.
Casey:
But it blew my mind as someone who has lived in the sweet, sweet land of, well, generally sweet, sweet land of living on Apple devices.
Casey:
I am literally looking at frigging Mac addresses trying to connect my controller over Bluetooth.
Casey:
It is so barbaric, but yet, but yet.
Casey:
It did connect reasonably easily.
Casey:
And sure enough, it did show, you know, 8-BitDo or 8-BitDo, whatever it's called, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah on there.
Casey:
And so it actually wasn't as bad as I'm painting it.
Casey:
But it was just so striking and hilarious to me that that was the official documentation was to look at a wad of Mac addresses and figure out which one was right.
Casey:
And then I was complaining to you, Marco, that the Bluetooth wouldn't work, it wouldn't reconnect.
Casey:
And I was asking you to show me what settings you were using.
Casey:
And it turns out I just needed to update the firmware on my controller.
Casey:
And then suddenly everything worked out great.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Which is wonderful and also very Linux-y, right?
Casey:
Like again, such a Linux problem to have.
Casey:
But I finally got that squared away.
Casey:
And then the only other major problem I had was I had no idea how to leave a game once I entered it.
Casey:
So what I did was I pulled the power on the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
for the first few times because i couldn't figure out how to leave leave the game and you said no you go to the in-game menu what there's an in-game menu yes you moron well you didn't say that but that's basically what was being said yes you moron i don't blame you this is documented almost nowhere like they don't they don't tell you this anyway it's so bad
Casey:
But eventually I realized, okay, well, on this 8-bit do, they have the standard four ABXY buttons.
Casey:
They have select start.
Casey:
They have D-pad.
Casey:
They have the analog sticks.
Casey:
They have four shoulder buttons.
Casey:
They also have two other buttons that I never set up during the setup process, which in and of itself was wonderful because it auto-detected the 8-bit do.
Casey:
It said, okay, do you want to use this one?
Casey:
Just hold a button.
Casey:
We'll start configuring it.
Casey:
Yes, great.
Casey:
I probably did this literally 15 times because I kept hitting the wrong button.
Casey:
It was entirely my fault.
Casey:
Entirely my fault.
Casey:
It's very clear what button they want you to hit, but I kept hitting the wrong button and there was no clear way to say, oops.
Casey:
And I felt like for those of you who are as old as I am, I felt like dialing a rotary phone, you know, where it's like, you're trying to dial one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, four, now 10 minutes of a lapse doing that five, seven.
Casey:
Oh, crap.
Yeah.
Casey:
Hang up, try again.
Casey:
Hang up, try again.
Casey:
One, two, three, four, five, eight.
God!
Casey:
One, two, and eventually I got it, right?
Casey:
But it was exactly like dialing a rotary phone.
Casey:
It was preposterous.
Casey:
But eventually I got in there, and holy crap, like once you get everything squared away, and this is, I feel like Linux is usually good in this regard.
Casey:
Once you get everything squared away, it has been working, knock on whatever I have nearby, it has been working very well.
Casey:
And the Nintendo 64 emulation is not perfect, but it's pretty good.
Casey:
And everything else is just amazing.
Casey:
And I have basically every video game I could ever want from the 90s.
Casey:
on this device.
Casey:
And it is so cool.
Casey:
And it is so amazing.
Casey:
And what's even cooler is sitting Declan in front of it and saying, Hey kid, you know, that Mario cart game that you love on the switch.
Casey:
Well, let me show you where all that started.
Casey:
And the best thing is he's actually enjoying it, which I don't think is unique to Declan.
Casey:
Like I'm sure most kids would feel the same way that we're actually allowing him to sit in front of a TV and play video games.
Casey:
But still the fact that he's not like, Oh,
Casey:
What is this garbage?
Casey:
It's very, very cool to watch.
Casey:
Also, games were hard back then.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Games were really hard.
Casey:
I'm sorry, Marco.
Casey:
I've been talking way too much.
Casey:
I'm just so enthusiastic and excited about this.
Casey:
But what is your because you have, I think, both the same and different retro gaming setup.
Casey:
So what take me through your world, if you don't mind.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So first of all, I've brought on a relevant guest.
Marco:
I can't talk about gaming alone.
Marco:
I'm not qualified enough.
Casey:
Oh, hi, Adam.
Marco:
Too late.
Marco:
He's in bed.
Casey:
I kid.
Casey:
I kid.
Casey:
Hey, Tiff.
Marco:
Hey, I wouldn't let him talk about games without me.
Marco:
I was like, there is no way you're getting away with this.
Marco:
I am busting myself into that office.
Marco:
yeah also like i'm talking about a lot of tiff games here as well because as you mentioned casey you know you were a nintendo person you envied the genesis people i was a genesis person i envied the nintendo people but who we both really envied were those jerks that had both this jerk right here there she is big jerk
Marco:
We went on this big retro gaming odyssey.
Marco:
It was kind of kicked off by Tiff's family.
Marco:
They had kept all their old systems.
Marco:
And I had my Genesis in the attic somewhere.
Marco:
Tiff's parents and brother had preserved these systems for all these years.
Marco:
Well, they had them all set up.
Marco:
At one point, we daisy-chained them all up.
Marco:
Marco helped us set it up.
Marco:
I just said, Marco just gave you credit.
Marco:
I watched and brought drinks.
Marco:
One of my holy grails, which I'll revisit here in a little while, but one of my holy grails is I love not having to switch inputs between multiple systems.
Marco:
and with the old way they would connect to tvs through those rf modulation boxes where you would pick like channel three or four on the box right and it would just kind of shove the video signal into like the antenna signal on the back to the back of the tv because that's the only input a lot of tvs had back then um and you could actually those little like you know rf modulator things you could daisy chain those so just put the output of one into the input of another one i don't think i knew that
Marco:
I mean, none of this is great for video quality, but it worked.
Marco:
And so you could connect a whole bunch of systems all data-chained to each other with those RF boxes, and just whichever one of them was frontmost in the line that was powered on would be shown on Channel 3.
Marco:
Yeah, so they were all set up in my family's house, and through some family shuffling and moving around, they got put away and into storage.
Marco:
And just recently, we were home for the holidays, and they're like, hey, we have all these.
Marco:
Do you want them?
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
Yes, we do.
Marco:
And so they gave us all these big bins, the original box to our NES.
Marco:
We have it.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
I felt so John Syracuse, like it's coming down from the attic, this original box.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
We had everything.
Marco:
We even have a super scope in there.
Marco:
There was an Atari there.
Marco:
Everything.
Marco:
Podcast.
Marco:
Piles and piles of cartridges.
Marco:
So they came into our being and they ended up in our house.
Marco:
And Marco took it on as a pet project to hook them all up for us.
Marco:
Now, before we get to using the real systems, I do have, you know, comparing it to emulation, there are a bunch of reasons why emulators are better.
Marco:
There's also a few ways in which emulators are worse.
Marco:
First of all, I must acknowledge that we are now entering crime-committing corner.
Marco:
Because emulation, usually, the way most people do it, most of the time it's illegal.
Marco:
Because usually you're using a bunch of pirated ROMs.
Marco:
The BIOS from the system is probably pirated if it was a system that was modern enough to have a BIOS, etc.
Marco:
So generally speaking...
Marco:
the way most people do emulation is not legal because it involves some degree of software piracy.
Marco:
Um, I think the world emulation is fantastic, uh, for lots of reasons.
Marco:
And it has major advantages over playing a real system.
Marco:
So obviously it's way cheaper, way cheaper.
Um,
Marco:
Because if you want to actually build up not only a collection of old systems, but a collection of games for those systems, that's going to cost you a small fortune.
Marco:
Certain systems more than others, you'd be surprised.
Marco:
But anyway, it's also just simpler.
Marco:
It's physically simpler.
Marco:
You don't have all these systems and controllers and wires and everything to deal with.
Marco:
Much, much simpler.
Marco:
Much smaller physically, so if you don't want to take up a lot of space or anything, great for that.
Marco:
It's also a good solution if you have a lot of systems you want to emulate.
Marco:
So if you just want to have your old NES, you can get an NES or you can get your old one out of the attic.
Marco:
It probably still works.
Marco:
And you can plug cartridges in and it's fine.
Marco:
But if you want to have six different systems, that's a big setup.
Marco:
Whereas an emulator, that's fine.
Marco:
You mentioned the Raspberry Pi does it.
Marco:
And RetroPie, the software that manages this on Raspberry Pis,
Marco:
RetroPie is amazing.
Marco:
I can't believe how polished it is.
Marco:
Even though things like Bluetooth require you to drop into the comical Linux underbelly, for the most part, the center path, the main path of using it, especially if you have a wired controller, is fantastic.
Marco:
It is so polished.
Marco:
It's so easy.
Marco:
The whole OS is designed for you to just stick it on an SD card, put that SD card in a Raspberry Pi, and boot it up with a game controller.
Marco:
You'd never need a keyboard or mouse for any part of it.
Marco:
You can plug it in if you want to, but you don't have to.
Marco:
You can do the entire setup of the system with a gamepad, and it can work with tons of different gamepads.
Marco:
The first one I used before I got my 8-bit Do, and by the way, the 8-bit Do controllers are fantastic.
Marco:
I will get back to those, but
Marco:
you can plug in a lot of console controllers.
Marco:
We had a PS3 controller that we weren't using, and so I just plugged the PS3 controller over USB into it, and it worked unmodified.
Marco:
Out of the box, just great.
Marco:
And I used that for the first couple of weeks with it, and it was fantastic.
Marco:
So emulation, it's practical, it's cheap, it's small, it is physically much simpler.
Marco:
It's also really good for systems where using the physical system can be prohibitively expensive to find or to get or to keep in working order.
Marco:
I always joke how when we were growing up,
Marco:
you've never seen a Neo Geo.
Marco:
Like, no matter what, like, everyone knew it was this legend.
Marco:
Everyone knew when they would, like, you know, complain on the playground, well, I have the Genesis, I have the Super Nintendo, mine's better than yours.
Marco:
Always some kid was like, well, the Neo Geo's better.
Marco:
And no one had, none of us had ever seen one, including that kid.
Yeah.
Marco:
somebody would be like somebody would be like well my my cousin had one and he was always lying wait tiff tiff didn't have a neo geo i i did not have one i did not have one yeah because like it was it was super expensive the games were like 100 each back then and like and they were all just fighting games anyway and if you're not interested in that genre who cares
Marco:
Yeah, they were mostly arcade games, because that's the kind of company they were.
Marco:
But that was back when memory on cartridges was very expensive.
Marco:
And the reason the OG games were so expensive is that they just used massive amounts of memory.
Marco:
They were like 10 times the memory size of a typical Genesis or Super Nintendo game.
Marco:
But the economics didn't support that, so they were just super expensive.
Marco:
But anyway, none of us had ever seen the Neo Geo, and it turns out they didn't sell that many of them.
Marco:
So if you actually want to buy Neo Geos now, you can.
Marco:
They're like $800, and the games can be hundreds or even, in some cases, thousands of dollars each because there aren't that many of them.
Marco:
So there's a lot of systems like the Neo Geo, or they're systems that didn't have enough games
Marco:
to really be worth owning the 32X.
Marco:
Not enough games that if you're going to have a collection of systems that you're probably going to buy one of these systems.
Marco:
The more obscure ones, the 3DO, you're probably going to want to use emulation for the more obscure ones, right?
John:
One thing about emulation, though, we're going to talk about the advantages of emulation and disadvantages.
John:
We're in an interesting point in history where all the advantages you're talking about emulation are real things, but pretty quickly, if we're not there already, we're going to get into a situation where
John:
Emulation alone can't give people the ability to play their childhood games.
John:
And I'm thinking about all the kids who grew up playing, for example, the Wii.
John:
There's no emulator that's going to let you play the Wii.
John:
You need a hardware component.
John:
And it's not just a controller.
John:
You need the sensor bar.
John:
And now you're hooking up things to your TV.
John:
And now you've got wires running and different things.
John:
And I'm sure...
John:
They'll make, you know, 8-BitDo will make your fake Wii sensor bar, but then you get to things like the Kinect, like, all right, now this is getting much more difficult.
John:
What if your favorite game as a kid was some game you played on the Kinect?
John:
Now I need, you know, the 8-BitDo Xbox controller, plus I also need the Kinect thing and the camera and the PlayStation Plus motion thing.
John:
And, like, you know, maybe we're going back to a realm where that's not a big issue because those things seem to have come and gone.
John:
but there is always this hardware component and the hardware component, like as it gets more diverse, like this 8-bit 2 controller is quote unquote great.
John:
I think it's an abomination, but great because, because it has, it's, it's an SES, SNES controller.
John:
It's also an NES controller.
John:
It's also a PlayStation controller.
John:
They just, they just shove everything on one thing.
John:
Right.
John:
But it's not a Wii controller and it's not a, I can't even remember.
John:
What was Tiff?
John:
What was the name of the PlayStation one?
John:
Was it motion plus?
Marco:
Oh, I didn't have a PlayStation one.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
The motion accessory that Sony came out with for the PS3.
John:
Anyway, we can't remember the name.
John:
They had a really good ping pong game.
John:
Anyway, if you want to play that, you probably need some kind of wave around one and someone's going to have to make a wave around one that emulates the Wii remote and the Wii Motion Plus and also the PlayStation one.
John:
It's going to get more difficult before it gets easier again.
John:
So, you know, this is not relevant to our discussion because I'm assuming you're not emulating Wii bowling on these things.
John:
Well, maybe you'll surprise me and tell me you are.
Marco:
We couldn't get the super scope to work, which, spoiler.
John:
Hardware accessories, and it's not just accessories, like, because arguably the Wii, that's not an accessory.
John:
That's core to the gameplay.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, go on.
Marco:
The systems are also getting more complicated.
Marco:
It's fairly easy.
Marco:
One of the disadvantages of emulation is that it isn't always perfect.
Marco:
Sometimes emulators just can't emulate or they haven't yet developed enough to emulate all the edge case behavior of the system.
Marco:
And this is...
Marco:
Certain systems are simpler than others.
Marco:
We're talking about mostly – what I'm focusing on on our setup here is mostly the mainstream cartridge-based systems of the early 90s to mid-90s.
Marco:
So it's like NES, Genesis, SNES, N64.
Marco:
That's really what I'm talking about here.
Marco:
I'm not going into the CD area, the 3D area really much at all.
Marco:
In part, I'll get to some of the reasons why, but in part also because a lot of those systems you can't emulate very well.
Marco:
Some of them are just too complicated and the demand is too low.
Marco:
Like the Sega Saturn is very complicated and I don't know if there's any good emulators for it.
Marco:
I don't think there are because it's such a complex system and there's also not a lot of demand because the Sega Saturn wasn't very good.
Marco:
Anyway, emulation...
Marco:
In most cases, when you're doing these super old systems, you can usually get good, perfect emulation or nearly perfect emulation.
Marco:
They're well understood.
Marco:
You can run them on cheap hardware like a Raspberry Pi, which is amazing.
Marco:
It's also nice – again, going back to Crime Committing Corner here – it's also nice that the complete ROM sets for these systems – ROMs, they're the dumps of the cartridges, so all the game files –
Marco:
because cartridges were so small back then a game might only be like a few hundred kilobytes or a couple of megabytes and so it's so preposterous they're so small and so you can get like the entire complete rom set of like every game that was ever released for a system and it might be like a couple of gigs maybe it's not we're not talking about large amounts of space here and so it's very practical with very low hardware needs with today's hardware to emulate these old systems very very much now
Casey:
Yeah, so like real-time follow-up, The Legend of Zelda ROM, 131 kilobytes for the entirety of the original Zelda game, 131k.
Marco:
Yeah, we're talking not large amounts of data here by modern standards.
Casey:
I mean, for perspective, I think the peek of you icon in its largest size is like 10 times that or something like that.
Casey:
It's ridiculous.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Carry on.
Marco:
There are disadvantages of emulation.
Marco:
Again, number one, most of the stuff, the way we're using it is illegal because you're using pirated copies of games and everything.
Marco:
That's not great.
Marco:
There also, you have this kind of
Marco:
overabundance problem that leads to a type of paralysis of choice for me of like when you have every single game available to you it's often hard to know what you want to play whereas like when we first unpacked these systems we had bins that included the systems and the games that kind of a combined tiff and i had for these systems and you only had the genesis stop pretending
Marco:
Well, that was part of the game.
Marco:
Me too, me too.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But like we, you know, you had for each system maybe like 15 games to pick from.
Marco:
And so it was a narrow sentence.
Marco:
Oh, I want to play that.
Marco:
I want to play that.
Marco:
In a way kind of similar to like the appeal of vinyl that I discovered, you know, last year or whenever that was two years ago.
Marco:
Even though we have these modern libraries of everything in the world that we can call up by voice to play any music that was ever made ever, I never know what to ask for.
Marco:
and maybe I only ask for the same three albums, I can't think of anything else.
Marco:
Whereas if you have a library of albums, that is providing you with, here's 15 to 30 things that you have decided you like already, and so it's easier to pick one to play.
Marco:
And the same thing applies for games for me.
Marco:
When I'm looking at the giant list of all games that were ever available for a system...
Marco:
I have a hard time picking and going for any kind of variety, whereas when you have a bin full of your old cartridges that you have 15 to choose from, oh, I'll do that one.
Marco:
It's actually much easier to choose, and I end up playing a greater variety of games that way.
Marco:
I think for me too, when we first open up all of those boxes of cartridges, it becomes a, I can hone in very quickly on the games that I loved because of those are the ones that you owned, right?
Marco:
And it has this, we've had emulators for years.
Marco:
And just like you said, it's the excitement of rummaging through those cartridges and finding the game you wanted because of the artwork or, you know, you knew what system it was for.
Marco:
And so you're, you're finding it and it's
Marco:
so tactile and it's real, it's present and you're seeing the artwork.
Marco:
You're not just scrolling through a list of titles and then taking that cartridge out to the system, sliding it in, pushing it down, hearing the squeak of the spring and that satisfying little plastic clang of the closing lid and then pushing the start button and having the music like instantly play.
Marco:
It's just, it's all so...
Marco:
much more exciting than emulators for me, which I think that it kind of, when we were setting this up, sorry, Marco was setting this up.
Marco:
We have a headache.
Marco:
We do have a headache.
Marco:
Credit, credit, credit.
Marco:
And it was like this balance of he got into the emulator side of it.
Marco:
But for me, I was like, oh, we've done that.
Marco:
We've done the emulator stuff.
Marco:
We've, we had that fun, you know, like we felt like college.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
We did that in college and I loved scrolling through like the list of crazy named games that we never heard of and we would find them and play them.
Marco:
But it wasn't the same as pulling out kind of an old favorite and putting it in.
Marco:
Like there's this one game for the NES, 1941.
Marco:
And it's like a plane game and you're shooting down other planes and some battleships.
Marco:
I've never gotten past the second level.
Marco:
And it's like this.
Marco:
I remember this game vividly.
Marco:
It's really very hard, but super simple.
Marco:
And Marco found it on the emulator and he found a predecessor to that game.
Marco:
What was 1931?
John:
1943 was the sequel.
John:
And I was really good at that game.
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, there it is.
Marco:
There it is.
Marco:
But it just it wasn't the same pulling out that game like it was like, oh, that's cool that you found it.
Marco:
But it wasn't the oh, sweet.
Marco:
This is the plane game I played all the time because I knew exactly what the cartridge was like and putting it in.
Marco:
It was just it was a different level of joy and satisfaction.
Marco:
And I actually liked the restrictions that it brought with it.
Marco:
yeah and like and you know there are there are a lot of like you know trade-offs with emulation like i think what you mentioned a second ago is is super on point like when you plug it in you know you put the cartridge in if it's the nintendo you might need to put it in a couple times because they have that wonderful and then take it back out and then blow it in and put it back in and then take it back yeah by the way blowing on it was always actually like a placebo yeah
Marco:
you still had to do it it didn't matter no you just had to put it in and out a few times because the cartridge pins would wear out anyway or like the slot pins it was a very flawed design it's like shaking a polaroid it's just like you know you just have to do it not supposed to do that either but like muscle memory but there is something like when you plug in a cartridge and you turn the system on with these old systems the games boot instantly
Marco:
there's no loading screens there's no interface there's no menus you turn it on and boom you're the game starts instantly there's no os they're all ssds just like the ps5 i yeah i hope that's that's their goal though there's less than one second no but they did that when it happened it was like i was prepared to wait and then i'm like oh wait the game's here yeah
Marco:
Because in reality, modern systems, they have OSs.
Marco:
They have software updates.
Marco:
They have online services.
Marco:
They have user profiles.
Marco:
Then the OS gets updated.
Marco:
Then the game has to get updated.
Marco:
Then you have to download additional content.
Marco:
There's so much overhead in modern gaming of just going through menus, maintaining the system, maintaining the computer that is the modern console with web services and updates and everything.
Marco:
It's a pain in the butt.
Marco:
whereas you you plug in 1943 into into a nintendo and you push power on and you're in the game in about a second and a half it's so fast and simple it's fantastic and there's no instructions yeah that's another thing yeah because like like back then like because back then games came with manuals and you you generally read the manual like in the car on the way home from the game store or whatever and and so like they don't explain anything about how to play the game in the game
Casey:
If I may interrupt briefly, I asked you to suggest some Genesis games to play.
Casey:
And you suggested, I think, Super Bomberman or something like that.
Casey:
Mega Bomberman.
Casey:
And I know this is peculiar, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
It was a Bomberman title.
Casey:
And I had only ever played Bomberman like once at Mike's bachelor party.
Casey:
I just skipped Bomberman.
Casey:
Not deliberately, it just happened.
Casey:
It just happened.
Casey:
And so anyway, I tried playing it and I had no freaking clue what I was supposed to do because there was no...
Casey:
explanation of any kind it was just okay you're there go and and i really wish i had the manual because i could have read for a little bit and figured it out and i'd also like to just very since i have the floor just very quickly something you were saying about the uh the paralysis of choice i i have loaded only like 10 to 20 games for each system onto my raspberry pi however what i've noticed is i am bouncing between them like
Casey:
within seconds it feels like you know i'll play like a stage or a level or a round of one game and be like okay yeah that was fun let's try something else and you know i haven't committed for more than like 10 or 20 minutes to any particular game because i have so much stuff i can play oh it's like all these memories are just flooding back into me oh i'm gonna play a little bit nba jam oh
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
I'm going to play F-Zero.
Casey:
Oh, I really want to play a lot of F-Zero.
Casey:
Okay, I got through that one stage.
Casey:
All right, Mario Kart time.
Casey:
And it's just like, it's nonstop.
Casey:
I must look like a crazy person.
Casey:
If somebody was watching me just bounce between all these games, it would look like I was bananas.
Marco:
That's how we were too, for sure.
Marco:
We're doing the same thing here, but with cartridges, and it's just very noisy.
Marco:
also like about two-thirds of the cartridges don't work anymore so there's also just like you know having to plug in and out all right does this one work no try the next one does this one work but uh but yeah so before we leave i have a few more things to say about emulators before we before we go into the the main hardware here but like emulators to a large degree have a lot of these same problems that i'm just i'm complaining about with modern consoles they have their modern software platforms they're running on computer systems so
Marco:
You have to install software.
Marco:
You have to manage configurations.
Marco:
You have to go through menus, lots of menus.
Marco:
And these are inevitably fragile things, especially, you know, the way the next world works, the way I complain about package managers.
Marco:
But like software is always changing, especially hobbyist stuff like this.
Marco:
And so what works today may not work if you try to change something in six months, right?
Marco:
Like I've already, so I, we did all this stuff in January.
Marco:
We set this all up.
Marco:
Casey was playing this this past week.
Marco:
So I was trying to tell him how to do certain things.
Marco:
I've already forgotten how to do almost everything that I set up with the Raspberry Pi that I made three months ago.
Marco:
Like it's, it's very, it's a computer.
Marco:
You have to configure it.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
While it is amazing, especially for something that people are doing this volunteer for free, it's amazing how well it works, but it is still a computer with an evolving, living software ecosystem that you have to manage.
Marco:
Whereas you take your Nintendo out of the attic and you plug it in, and it works the exact same way it did 20 years ago.
Marco:
and there's no changes.
Marco:
It just instantly just works, and you don't have to do anything.
Marco:
You don't have to go through menus.
Marco:
You don't have to install software.
Marco:
You don't have to remember, oh, what's the weird combination of buttons that I press to make it go into the menu to change the setting?
Marco:
There's none of that.
Marco:
It just works, and that's really nice.
Marco:
You just have to remember the contra code.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
All right, so...
Marco:
Before we leave emulation totally, I do want to mention the world of legal emulation.
Marco:
This is kind of this new-ish, kind of halfway point between emulation and real hardware.
Marco:
It's basically legalized emulation in different ways.
Marco:
One of the most common ones is...
Marco:
retro game sales for new systems things like the nintendo virtual console uh where they'll actually make old games available for new systems and what those are doing is emulation like they're just packaging up an emulator with their old game usually making no or minimal changes to it the downside of this is that only a limited number of games are available because it's like whatever they want to sell you whatever they have the rights to sell you
Marco:
a lot of these game companies that made games back in the nineties don't even exist anymore.
Marco:
So there's nobody around that you could even get the rights from, let alone like be able to negotiate a deal with, you know, to make them almost no money, you know, from whatever conglomerate has absorbed, whatever assets were left over for these companies back in the nineties.
Marco:
But the way copyright law works, they can't just give them away without getting permission from something that was only around 20 years ago.
Marco:
So there's very few games for the systems that are actually available.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Yeah, I was really surprised by that because just in the last month or so, I finally ponied up the 20 bucks a year, which is really very affordable for the Nintendo Switch Online game.
Casey:
And part of that is you get – just like you were describing, Marco, you get some Super Nintendo games, some Nintendo games that you can play on the Switch.
Casey:
And to your point, it's emulation.
Casey:
It's legal emulation, but it's emulation nonetheless.
Casey:
And they definitely have some good games on there.
Casey:
Like they have F-Zero.
Casey:
They have Super Mario Kart.
Casey:
And I wouldn't say that the selection is bad, but it is not terribly robust, though.
Casey:
Like, there's, I don't know, maybe 50, 175 games on here.
Casey:
And given that there is an unbelievable breadth of games for either one of those systems, probably hundreds for either one of those systems, and between the two of them, there's only 75, I was actually very disappointed.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I was glad to have some of the ones that I was really looking for.
Casey:
Again, F-Zero, Mario Kart, Super Mario Brothers, etc.
Casey:
But I was expecting to get way more out of it than I did.
Casey:
And I was kind of disappointed by that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And also, a lot of times, the emulator that they use is not actually very good.
Marco:
And so you might have issues with the emulation itself.
Marco:
It might not be perfect emulation of the original games.
Marco:
It's a fine solution for some games.
Marco:
But it's a very narrow solution.
Marco:
um similarly there have been recently the these mini console hardware re-releases oh yeah it starts like the nes mini the snes mini the ps1 mini like they all the major consoles now have been doing this because they can make money they're also emulators just you know package up in hardware they're pretty good values they're pretty inexpensive and
Marco:
But they have the same problem of only some games are on them.
Marco:
Because the games just come preloaded.
Marco:
They don't read cartridges.
Marco:
They just have built-in games in their built-in memory and that's it.
Marco:
They have other limitations as well.
Marco:
So it's not great.
Marco:
And they aren't widely available.
Marco:
They go in these limited releases and everything.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
And then finally, before everybody emails me about this, there's this company called Analog that makes these FPGA consoles.
Marco:
They're basically FPGA-based emulation.
Marco:
So it's a whole different type of emulation, a whole different degree.
Marco:
It's very accurate emulation.
Marco:
It's focused primarily on accuracy.
Marco:
They're pretty expensive, $300-ish each.
Marco:
But they provide very, very good emulation.
Marco:
And they play, they have cartridge slots.
Marco:
They play the original cartridges if you have them.
Marco:
So you can get all that stuff with those.
Marco:
And also they have lots of great video settings and filters and everything.
Marco:
Downside is it's a lot of money and you still need the cartridges.
Marco:
You still need the original cartridges to play in them.
Marco:
They're a fun option, but that's probably a better option if you want like the absolute best emulation of one system.
Marco:
And maybe you have a flash cart, which I'll also get to in a moment.
John:
Are they actually emulating or are they just re-implementing the actual hardware in their FPGAs?
John:
Obviously there's a bunch of crap around it for the HDMI output and so on and so forth, but do any of them essentially try to reproduce the NES hardware, like make a single chip version of the entire NES down at the gate level?
Marco:
I think that's what the FPGA thing is about.
Marco:
I don't know enough to say for sure.
Marco:
I think it's something like that, though.
Marco:
Certainly, that's the purpose of using FPGAs is to have more accurate implementation like that.
John:
Because an emulator is like you're running software that is reading the instructions for a CPU that you don't have, and you take those instructions and you either translate them to a different instruction set, but more likely you say, when you see this instruction, call this C function in my emulator, and so on and so forth.
John:
But the actual sort of like...
John:
Hardware cloning is make a single... Because if you take all the circuitry in the NES, you could put that on a single chip easy because the feature size was so huge back then and everything was all separate, right?
John:
But in various cases, there's like...
John:
you know things stopping you from doing that you don't have you don't know the actual circuit layouts of those things or there's still something that's proprietary or you can't do but my impression was at least for the nes ones that they're trying to make an actual hardware copy so if you don't have your existing nes in your parents attic or whatever but you want the hardware experience and you don't want to buy one on ebay this is i feel like this is what these systems are the role they're trying to fill so
John:
my understanding is they're not actually emulation but i could be wrong about that but either way that that i think that will be an increasingly important market like i said for the wii and for stuff like that when these systems go out of fashion and if no one is making new ones again someone will have to make work-alike hardware in some fashion and especially if the hardware starts running software like the connect is not just like it'll be harder for 8-bit do to make a connect clone because that's a hardware software thing right
John:
It's not as easy to make that as it is to make a controller that just sends a bunch of inputs and button presses and stuff like that.
John:
Trying to preserve the legacy of this kind of art.
John:
Will this art just disappear?
John:
How much of this art has already disappeared, speaking of games that require a servering component or whatever?
John:
Will only be able to tell tales about...
John:
insert massively multiplayer online game here that no longer has its servers up we'll just be able to tell people about that unlike most other arts the human has ever made is that we you know if the painting is preserved it can last you know hundreds of years and of course books can be infinitely copied and get more or less the same experience and even movies we have ways of preserving that more or less but video games is this whole realm of art that is going to live for a time but eventually be
John:
Unable to be experienced by future generations unless we continue to do exactly everything you've just described, make emulators, make these hardware clones, make ways to continue to experience this stuff into the future long after maybe even the companies that made them are gone.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Because one of the reasons why I love this era of systems so much, this 8- and 16-bit cartridge systems plus N64, it's kind of the outlier, because it's still a cartridge system.
Marco:
But I love this type of system, this generation, because it was a lot simpler than a lot of the modern stuff.
Marco:
As you mentioned, it's going to be hard to emulate a lot of the more modern systems for lots of reasons, but generally they're just much more complicated.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
these old systems you know they have all these advantages i love this era of games for lots of reasons as i mentioned like speed like one of the very first things like when we when we got these hooked up and we pressed power on and the game booted instantly even our son he commented how fast it was that you're just in the game he noticed immediately and he has you know a nice you know current generation ipad mini and he's played switch games a lot like he's he's very experienced with with modern games and
Marco:
and yet he had never seen a game boot up that quickly, even on the iPad.
Marco:
Like, just boom, you're in the game, and he commented on that.
Marco:
And a lot of that is also just down to cartridges.
Marco:
Cartridges are great.
Marco:
Yeah, they were small.
Marco:
Yeah, they couldn't have full-blown CD-quality sound with the size they had back then, but...
Marco:
For the time, and for a good deal of time afterwards, cartridges were the superior format to the early discs.
Marco:
I don't have on this list any first-generation disc-based systems because they sucked.
Marco:
Like the Sega CD, the Saturn, the PlayStation 1, those systems sucked.
Marco:
Because CDs were very slow.
Marco:
You had all these load times, seek times.
Marco:
It was not a good time for gaming.
Marco:
Also, I would argue that all the first generation 3D systems, with the exception of the N64, the 3D sucked on those.
Marco:
Whereas what it was graduating from was really well done 2D.
Marco:
like the 16-bit era of 2d was amazing it was like the the pinnacle of this art form of the of these 2d games and then we when we got into 3d it took a it took a couple generations before it didn't suck um yeah i gotta say the ps1 it was the first game system i was like pass hard pass like i don't even want it like it doesn't look appealing at all i'll stick with what i have thanks
Marco:
Yeah, the whole industry went 3D, but the 3D sucked.
John:
We're going to get a lot of angry email about the PS1.
John:
People love the original PlayStation because of the games.
John:
I agree with you about the 3D technology, but there's a lot of good games to the original PlayStation.
Marco:
And this is an area where emulation is actually potentially useful.
Marco:
3D emulators...
Marco:
are able to use better 3D filtering technology now to actually improve the way the games looked.
Marco:
And, you know, so all emulators have offered, like, visual filters.
Marco:
Like, you can play an SNES game and turn on, like, a visual filter that will...
Marco:
scale up the graphics and soften the edges and and and upscale and blur and everything so it looks kind of like a painter drawing that's great i did that all through college it was it was wonderful but what emulators could do to like n64 or ps1 games was way better because they could actually render the polygons at higher resolution to begin with and do texture filtering tricks and things like that and so these systems that look like hell on the real hardware actually look significantly improved in the modern world of emulation of these early 3d systems
Marco:
Which is, again, another reason why in my hardware Odyssey I didn't include those CD-based systems.
Marco:
I do have an N64 here.
Marco:
That's TIFF's N64, but we'll get to that in a little bit.
Casey:
Well, and just really quickly, in the defense of the PlayStation, I am definitely looking with rose-colored glasses because I haven't played an original PlayStation in, what, 20, 25 years, whatever it's been now.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I remember the load times were awful, and in that sense, it was atrocious.
Casey:
But some of those games, I think, John, you had said this a second ago, some of those games were amazing.
Casey:
That was the first exposure I had to Gran Turismo, which was amazing.
Casey:
Even though it wasn't as fun as everyone thought it was, it was still an amazing and technical achievement.
Casey:
That was the first time I'd played any Metal Gear games.
Casey:
Like, Metal Gear Solid, still to this day, kind of blows my mind.
Casey:
And maybe there were other ones that were better or different before that, but that was my first exposure to it.
Casey:
And there were other games I can't remember off the top of my head, but I remember...
Casey:
That being a very solid system in terms of the games that were on it, I don't debate that it was nothing but waiting for everything.
Casey:
I don't debate that it could have been way, way better.
Casey:
But I don't think it was quite as terrible as the Armands are perhaps painting it at the moment.
Casey:
But I certainly did miss, having come off a Nintendo 64, I absolutely missed the instant load times of cartridge consoles.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
And there were lots of reasons why those are better left to emulators, like the other CD systems, I mean.
Marco:
For one thing, the old cartridge systems have no moving parts, with the exception of the NES, a stupid cartridge pop-up and down thing, which breaks all the time.
Marco:
But otherwise, there's no optical drives.
Marco:
There's no CD lenses.
Marco:
There's no motors.
Marco:
There's no fans, even.
Marco:
They operate in silence.
Marco:
They're all low-temperature devices.
Marco:
Most of them don't even have heat sinks on the processors.
Marco:
They're just very...
Marco:
basic devices they're they're like low complexity and they don't have moving parts and so they they're optimized really for longevity and simplicity like the only system that we powered on that worked last time we used it but didn't work now was the xbox 360 got the red ring of death like everyone else like and and to be fair like this long to red ring i'm pretty proud of it
Marco:
yeah but it's been off for like four five years at least like yeah so anyway that's the one thing that didn't come back from the dead uh the the atari we couldn't get to work the atari 2600 but i we don't know if it was working before um so but otherwise okay in my heart
Marco:
Yeah, but everything else worked.
Marco:
And I think in part that was because these are all like super simple, you know, cartridge based systems with no moving parts.
Marco:
One of their advantage before I move on from this is that these old ones back, you know, the simpler ones, the controllers were much simpler.
Marco:
Yes, I want to talk about this.
Marco:
The one system we have a bit of a problem with the controllers for is the N64, because it's been sitting in an attic and everything, and they were worn to begin with, and so the analog sticks are all kind of rough on all the N64 controllers.
Marco:
They're not in great working order.
Marco:
If you get a system that was before analog sticks, there's a lot less about the controller that can wear out.
Marco:
And so again, like you're optimizing for longevity by going with these older systems.
Marco:
If you want hardware, if you want like to be actual playing on the original hardware, 16-bit and 8-bit and maybe N64, you're generally better off.
Marco:
Oh, and they just feel so good in your hands.
Marco:
Like they are so tiny.
Marco:
It's almost like the old original iPhone.
Marco:
Like when you get hold of an old iPhone, you're just like, oh, you just like feel really good.
Marco:
Like where were you?
Marco:
And
Marco:
that's what those, you know, the little NES rectangles feel that way.
Marco:
The SNES ones, because they were just a slight modification, but just the simplicity of having a few buttons to control everything that you need to do is wonderful.
Marco:
It makes you be able to play these insanely, oddly hard games very easily.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
And let me say, I don't miss a rumble pack.
Marco:
I didn't think for two seconds, oh, my controller's not rumbling.
Marco:
Why is this?
Marco:
This is so odd.
Marco:
Like, not at all.
Marco:
I wasn't bothered by the cord into the system because actually their cords were pretty long.
Marco:
I got to say, they thought that out.
Marco:
They had very long cables from the controllers to the systems, which I appreciated that.
Marco:
But we got them all tangled up.
Marco:
All right, Marco?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The N64 ones are real bad.
Marco:
They're all over the place.
Marco:
But yeah, the controllers themselves felt way better in your hand.
Marco:
And I'm comparing this again to the emulators where there always felt like there was some sort of a slightly something off about the interface, like interacting with these games without their actual intended controllers.
Marco:
Like there's just when you're used to playing them, like when you're used to playing these games as they were with these controllers that,
Marco:
to interact with them and then going to an emulator and just and having a generic controller for that it was it's it's a different feeling it's like oh yes i'm playing this game and i'm getting the joy of playing this game that's all there right but man there is a whole nother level uh it's like your smile just brightens that extra little bit because you're actually holding the right thing in your hand and those red buttons are staring back at you and you're like yes i get you
Marco:
There's only one D-pad.
Marco:
Thanks.
Marco:
Thanks for that.
John:
That's so, so nice.
John:
It's because those emulator controllers, like I said, are an abomination.
John:
Yeah, I feel like that's part of, I mean, make fun of, you know, Marco's weird vinyl, whatever, emulation thing with the cards for the music.
John:
But honestly, we've said this before, when you're playing a game,
John:
your experience is yes sight and sound but also touch like that is your interface to the game is the thing you're holding in your hand you're like oh i want that experience of playing this old game that controller is a huge part of the experience and yeah you can get a you know some mongrel monster controller that tries to have all the things that you need for seven of these systems but it will never feel like playing the actual system did on those controllers even though some of them may be ergonomic nightmares presumably you're not playing these for too long and speaking of chord length by the way
John:
You can't survive that long.
John:
You die.
John:
They're too difficult to play.
John:
You've got to get those skills back.
John:
The NES in Japan, the Famicom system, had extremely short cords on it.
John:
And they were, if memory serves, you couldn't disconnect them to put in a bigger cord.
John:
They were attached permanently at one end.
John:
And they were very short.
John:
I forget how long they are, but my memory is that they were like three feet long.
John:
They would never work in an American home.
John:
They basically forced the children to sit where your parents would yell at you for sitting right on the TV.
Marco:
So suppose you want to game on your original hardware.
Marco:
You get out your old system in the attic.
Marco:
It probably still works.
Marco:
The games...
Marco:
Might work, they might not.
Marco:
You might need to clean the cartridge contacts or clean the cartridge slots in the system.
Marco:
They might have corrosion, you know, but otherwise, like, your old system probably still works.
Marco:
Controllers are, like, one of the very first things you go to, right?
Marco:
And everything you have just said, you and Tiff, John, everything you've said is correct.
Marco:
Like, there's so much about the feel and the nostalgia of the system that
Marco:
Part of the reason why you're playing on original hardware, if you've gotten to this segment, is that you want that nostalgia.
Marco:
And while I do love some of the aftermarket controllers for other reasons, for nostalgia, you can't beat the original ones, especially for the NES.
Marco:
The Super Nintendo and Genesis have pretty good third-party controllers now.
Marco:
The NES doesn't.
Marco:
Nobody makes a perfect NES controller clone.
Marco:
And so the NES, I feel like you really need that original one.
Marco:
But one big difference is that cord length.
Marco:
And these systems were all made in the era where we had CRT TVs.
Marco:
You were lucky if you had a 27-inch TV.
Marco:
They weren't very big.
Marco:
And you weren't sitting very far away from them.
Marco:
And this was before wireless things were really prevalent.
Marco:
You had to have a wire to the system, but they didn't make them that long because you weren't sitting that far from a 27 inch TV.
Marco:
Now, one of the challenges of running these on a modern TV is you're generally having much larger TVs now and you're sitting further away from them than we did back then.
Marco:
And the cords are all too short.
John:
The Famicom controller, by the way, was two feet long.
John:
oh my word would that even reach like from some people's entertainment centers to the floor my phone charging cable is longer than that for casey's tv that's on top of his mantle it would it would just dangle casey would have to stand in front of his mantle on a stool
Marco:
Yeah, so one of the technological advances that I have moved to for some of these systems is that company 8BitDo, which people in the chat are saying it's pronounced 8BitDo because it rhymes with Nintendo, which I guess makes some sense.
Marco:
Anyway, 8BitDo or Do, they make a bunch of controllers for old systems, including they have versions of a lot of these controllers that have little receivers that are wireless that plug into a Genesis or Super Nintendo.
Marco:
And we have these, so I actually bought a pair of each of those.
Marco:
I have their version of the Genesis 6 button controller.
Marco:
I have two of those.
Marco:
Each of them has a little receiver that plugs into the Genesis and is powered by the Genesis.
Marco:
And so you have two wireless controllers that are always there.
Marco:
And the controllers occasionally need to be charged by micro USB, but very occasionally.
Marco:
And you have a wireless Genesis.
Marco:
And same thing, I have the same setup with Super Nintendo.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
It's not as nostalgic as the NES controller with its long wire, but for a clean, modern setup that you don't have to worry about being too close to the TV or pulling the console accidentally by the cable.
Marco:
It's actually really, really nice.
Marco:
So that is one area where if you want to play an original hardware, but you want...
Marco:
A nice modern-day amenity of wireless controllers, you can do that with these 8BitDo and other companies, but I think 8BitDo is the best ones.
Marco:
They make fantastic wireless controllers that will plug into the old consoles.
Marco:
Anyway, they're not quite as nostalgic, but they're very good.
John:
One thing you're missing out on, though, I'm sure you're going to get to this when you start talking about video, but part of the retro gaming experience...
John:
is the wired controllers and an RF interface to a CRT, mostly because the input lag in that system was so insanely short compared to any modern system.
John:
Any modern system that... Forget about wireless, which is going to add huge delay, relatively speaking, but any modern system that goes through an HDMI converter that goes into your TV that has, like...
John:
10 to 100 milliseconds of input lag just on the display device before you even consider any of those stuff and then you add a wireless controller now if you're dying in two seconds anyway because you're old and your reflexes suck now fine but i feel like if you were going to go to these lengths and this is what you know the really hardcore people do you need a crt that's hooked up with rf to your thing with a wired controller i will get there
Marco:
i will get there especially if you want like light guns to work and everything yeah trust me i'll get there but anyway before we get too much into the video output section which is significant if you're going to be retro gaming on old hardware we have to briefly revisit crime committing corner
Marco:
I feel like you are a person who's presenting like a 1950s school video.
Marco:
Hi.
Marco:
If you would like this new modern technology in your life, follow these simple steps.
Marco:
No, we are revisiting Crime Committing Corner to talk about flash cartridges, also known as Everdrives, because that's the brand of the most popular one.
Marco:
A flash cartridge is a cartridge that goes into an old game system that has an SD card slot on it.
Marco:
And you can load it up with ROMs for emulators and put it on the SD card slot.
Marco:
And then it shows a menu when you boot it up.
Marco:
And you can just pick from the ROMs and you can play any ROM file on original hardware.
Marco:
It's kind of a hybrid between the world of emulators and the world of original hardware.
Marco:
It has some of the advantages of each world.
Marco:
most of the advantages of the original hardware uh but it opens you up to like you know one of the things about emulators is that you can play games that weren't actually released for the system uh you can play things like rom hacks where fans have like altered uh old games to you know add levels or fix things or improve things whatever um you can play homebrew games
Marco:
some hobbyists granted not a lot but some hobbyists are actually like writing original genesis or super nintendo games today um it's it's a fun little world and if you have a few of those they're naughty yeah yeah oh yeah but if you have don't test them in front of your kids yeah yeah like so if you have either an emulator set up or if you have a flash cart you can play that type of game it's also nice like
Marco:
A lot of these games, as I mentioned, are pretty rare and hard to find or very, very expensive if you do find one on eBay or something because they're rare or they were unreleased or whatever.
Marco:
And so this opens you up to be able to play games like that that you either can't get at all or that are kind of prohibitively expensive to get.
Marco:
It also saves wear and tear on the cartridge slots.
Marco:
On some systems, this might not be an issue.
Marco:
I would strongly advise this is very recommendable on an NES.
Marco:
Because again, it has that flawed cartridge slot design where the pins wear out.
Marco:
And there are various ways you can get certain aftermarket things to try to fix that.
Marco:
But one of the easiest ways to fix that is to use a flash cartridge instead of using real cartridges.
Marco:
And then not only do you have all the games, but you also then don't have to constantly be like,
Marco:
putting the cartridge slot up and down, up and down, up and down, and wearing out those pins even more.
Marco:
I also recommend if you're going to be in this world, again, we're in crime committing corner.
Marco:
I'm sorry if this offends you.
Marco:
Just skip forward 30 seconds.
Marco:
Trust me, look for things called EverDrive packs.
Marco:
These are complete ROM sets.
Marco:
but they are well organized.
Marco:
They are also editorially categorized.
Marco:
So you'll have the A to Z folder, and then you'll have subfolders of genre categorizations.
Marco:
Oh, here's all the action games.
Marco:
Here's all the shooters.
Marco:
Then you can have subfolders that are editorially picked subsets, like the best shooters, the games that define the system, the best platformers.
Marco:
It's awesome.
Marco:
It's a great way to improve on that kind of paralysis of choice that you get with
Marco:
just having massive amounts of emulator ROMs and just makes these things a lot more useful and easy.
Marco:
And it lets you discover good games instead of having to just go through the list of 500 and just pick randomly.
Marco:
So trust me, you want EverDrive packs.
Marco:
Search for those, you'll find them.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
disadvantages of flash carts are number one they are illegal like the same way emulators are you're talking about pirating software here pirating these old games it's up to you whether that bothers you or not um i think systems is old you're not really harming anybody because again it's like it's hard to even find anybody who would even have the rights to this and to arrange any kind of payment it's pretty much impossible um
Marco:
Other disadvantages are these flash carts are actually pretty expensive, especially like the N64 one is fairly expensive that you're looking at like up to $200 for some of them.
Marco:
They also, you know, they introduced that similar paralysis of choice that emulators have, and it definitely loses some of the nostalgia value when you're not inserting the real cartridges.
Marco:
So there are some disadvantages.
Marco:
I find that having a flash cart on the real system is a really good balance of modern convenience and having all those games available to you while also having the nostalgia of playing the original hardware.
Marco:
But it's up to you where you might try that line.
Casey:
This is very impressive, this whole EverDrive thing.
Casey:
So there's an SD card, you said, on each of these, and you would just pop that out, put a ROM on, and then pop that back in, and you're good to go?
Marco:
You pop it out, you put on the EverDrive pack of all the ROMs in the world, and you never touch it again.
Marco:
Ah, fair enough.
Marco:
Okay.
Casey:
I was going to say, because, you know, you're still popping this in and out, but of course, I didn't even consider that.
Casey:
You would just put everything on there and just have to scroll through a list of a billion games.
Yeah.
Marco:
The technical accomplishment here is incredible to make these kind of things.
Marco:
They show menus and everything.
Marco:
It's a wonderful hobbyist world.
Marco:
You kind of can't believe somebody took the time to do all this, but you're so glad they did.
Marco:
It's so amazing.
Marco:
It is legally iffy and it does introduce some of the downfalls of emulators.
Marco:
But some of the...
Marco:
some of the Genesis ones can actually do save state and load state on the real hardware, which is something that like you would think normally only emulators could do that, but no, they can actually do it on some systems.
Marco:
You can do it with the cartridge.
Marco:
Like it's incredible.
Marco:
Like what these things can accomplish.
Marco:
It really is.
Marco:
It really is quite something.
Marco:
But anyway, now comes the big question and the big downside video output.
Marco:
Now, most of these old systems,
Marco:
They natively were rendering 240p.
Marco:
Old analog CRTs, TVs, if you ignore the tiny subset of HD CRTs, which I actually had one, it was, don't go there.
Marco:
Anyway, if you just consider CRTs to be the old standard deaf ones, the US ones would take in roughly 480i.
Marco:
And by the way, if listeners out there, if you don't know how analog TV signals work, it's actually fascinating because
Marco:
look it up on youtube there's some great videos on it um i like the technology connections guy he does a lot of videos on this kind of stuff the way analog and crt tv signals worked is fascinating so these systems render 240p internally eventually like as you got more advanced like the xbox would render like 480p and eventually like you know you get more advanced systems that rendered higher resolution but for the most part you're dealing with 240p being rendered on a 480i screen
Marco:
The way you would usually connect these systems, the way most of us did, as I mentioned earlier, those RF modulators, those channel three, channel four black boxes that would plug into the coax cable slot in the back of the TV and you'd plug the VCR or whatever back into the back of that.
Marco:
This is the way most people use their consoles.
Marco:
Generally, these are the worst video quality, but they have advantages.
Marco:
They're simple.
Marco:
They're easy to data chain.
Marco:
Most TVs back then didn't have any other inputs.
Marco:
It wasn't until the late 90s at least that you'd have a TV that might have a composite input or something like that, or maybe later on component, but that came much, much later.
Marco:
I'm trying to run these on a LCD 40-something-inch TV that we bought probably seven or eight years ago.
Marco:
Just some weird Panasonic LCD thing.
Marco:
It's not like a high-end TV, and it's not super new, but also not super old.
Marco:
I could not get RF modulation to work on this TV.
Marco:
I suspect maybe it lacks the old analog tuner circuitry.
Marco:
Anyway, I couldn't get RF to work, which is good because it sucks anyway.
Marco:
But I did want something that I could, like, daisy chain in all the systems if possible.
Marco:
So that didn't end up working.
Marco:
The next step up from RF modulation in old analog video is the composite video plug.
Marco:
This is that ubiquitous circular, usually yellow color coded plug.
Marco:
It's a circle with a stick in the middle.
Marco:
So it's like two conductors.
Marco:
It's called an RCA plug.
Marco:
That's that style of plug that, you know, the red and the red and white ones are always audio, stereo audio, like the yellow was composite video.
Marco:
Those are all RCA plugs anyway.
Marco:
So composite, this is one signal.
Marco:
It's a ground and one video signal.
Marco:
It squishes together into that one signal all of the color and brightness info and all the sync info to make that analog video signal work.
Marco:
All of these game systems, all these old systems, can output composite easily.
Marco:
Most of them have a port on the side or like...
Marco:
a cable that either comes with it or is easily available can output composite video.
Marco:
So this is probably the best option.
Marco:
The problem is composite video looks like crap on modern TVs.
Marco:
It looks like total garbage.
Marco:
The main thing is when you have only that one wire blending everything together, all the signals together,
Marco:
you only have a certain amount of bandwidth where the TV is able to distinguish.
Marco:
Like, okay, can I just distinguish this color one pixel away from this color and have them not bleed into each other or anything like that?
Marco:
There's issues like that with composite where...
Marco:
It looks like crap on modern TVs.
Marco:
Is this looking like crap your version of looking like crap or the public's version of looking like crap?
Marco:
Well, it's like the colors bleed into each other.
Marco:
The edges are blurry.
Marco:
You might have incorrect coloration on certain edges or certain patterns.
Marco:
You might have interference patterns where you have dots that actually don't belong where they're being rendered because it's analog interference.
Marco:
There's all sorts of weird stuff.
Marco:
And then also...
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of issues when outputting to modern TVs, which I'll get to in a moment.
Marco:
Composite tends to exacerbate a lot of these issues.
Marco:
It makes it especially hard to see stuff in dark scenes.
Marco:
And certain colors, like on our TV, red is oftentimes butchered.
Marco:
And it's like when playing Tetris on the NES, one of the levels, somewhere in the 7 or 8 range, one of them, it turns red and black.
Marco:
And it's so hard to see certain pieces on that level, no matter what your brightness is turned to on the TV.
Marco:
The signal's just getting crushed.
Marco:
Anyway, moving up from composite quickly, there was a brief window of time where the world tried to use S-Video.
Marco:
S-Video is that little black multi-pin plug that's kind of like a keyboard plug, but it's black.
Marco:
I remember that.
Marco:
S-Video separates the color signal from the brightness signal.
Marco:
So you're going from one signal line to two.
Marco:
This is a huge improvement.
Marco:
All the colors are still combined into like, you know, there's brightness and there's color.
Marco:
So all the colors are still combined into one and they just like modulate, you know, differently to distinguish them, but it's significantly better than composite.
Marco:
It's almost as good as you can get.
Marco:
But the problem with S video is that almost none of these consoles supported it and almost no TVs have S video inputs anymore.
Marco:
Um, later on we had component video.
Marco:
This is those green, blue, and red RCA plugs.
Um,
Marco:
The Xbox the first Xbox had an option for this that this came along later it supported HD resolutions component achieves great quality because it separates the three colors from each other so you have separate signal pass there's no interference between them and you can get like tack sharp you know pixels next to each other they don't bleed into each other there's no blurriness it's awesome.
Marco:
And so what these old consoles could do, since Component came along later and wasn't around, the older consoles could use an older standard in some cases of RGB video, usually using the European SCART connector.
Marco:
I, like most Americans, had never seen one of these.
Marco:
But Europeans will possibly remember this giant rectangular connector with these vertical pins in it.
Marco:
It looked almost like a big printer cable with a diagonal connector coming out the side for the wire.
Marco:
It's a very strange-looking connector.
Marco:
And again, as an American, I've never seen one.
Marco:
But apparently, they were fairly standard in Europe.
Marco:
The SCART connector supports...
Marco:
rgb video similar to component in that it separates the three color signals onto their own signal lines so when you're dealing with these old systems rgb is usually the best you can get it's the best quality that you can get out of like a genesis um super nintendo and
Marco:
The NES has to be modded to output this, but it can.
Marco:
And you can find people who mod them for you on eBay and stuff.
Marco:
Or you can buy pre-modded systems if you want to go that route.
Marco:
It's not the cheapest thing in the world to go that route, but you can.
Marco:
And, of course, that's what I did.
Marco:
And let me tell you.
Marco:
using rgb output on these consoles looks incredible it is tack sharp it looks as good as the best emulators but on real hardware on your tv now how you get the video signal onto your tv that's a whole different thing too as john mentioned these games were all designed for crts if you can have a crt for this setup
Marco:
And you can get a good one that will work and doesn't have problems and you have space for it.
Marco:
Just do that.
Marco:
It's way cheaper than what I'm about to recommend.
Marco:
Way simpler and in many ways better.
Marco:
You know, it's more nostalgic.
Marco:
It's more authentic.
Marco:
The games were designed.
Marco:
The graphics were designed for CRTs.
Marco:
CRTs render things in a certain way.
Marco:
They have certain artifacts.
Marco:
These games were designed for that.
Marco:
And so in some ways, games look worse when they're not shown on CRTs because they're being shown in a way they weren't designed for.
Marco:
If you can get a good CRT, you probably don't have to pay much for it.
Marco:
You can probably find one for free or for very cheap because people are always dumping them because they don't want them.
Marco:
The problem is that, you know, if you have a CRT,
Marco:
you're probably not going to want to use it for anything else these days.
Marco:
Like, you're not going to want to, like, watch your HD movies on your CRT.
Marco:
So, like, you really need, like, a dedicated retro gaming space that you can have your CRT set up if you're going to go that route.
Marco:
We didn't want to do that.
Marco:
I don't want to do that.
Marco:
We didn't?
Yeah.
Marco:
well maybe maybe we'll graduate to that at some point but setting up a giant first of all we don't have a crt we'd have to find one that shouldn't be too hard i think there's one across the street right now on the curb yeah yeah but also like you got to find one that's like still in good working order you know it's it's non-trivial and they're really big and heavy and anyway so is it going to be more difficult than like ordering parts from japan and all kinds of crazy things that you've been doing in that room
Marco:
well yeah so just put it out there just put it out there it would be a lot cheaper uh so i'm here for the insight into the behind the scenes world of this whole discussion yeah and i endorse the crt plan they're not that big you can get a small like atom size one you deserve this setup deserves to have a crt it's better maybe listen to john everyone loves syracuse so they think he's right listen to him
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
But anyway, and certainly for things like input lag, like again, I strongly advise if you're nerdy enough to listen to this show, watch these videos and how analog video signals work.
Marco:
It's fascinating.
Marco:
And even just and how these systems rendered their video, because keep in mind, these systems, they were rendering a 240p image.
Marco:
None of them had enough memory to keep a 240p image in memory themselves.
Marco:
They weren't rendering it to a frame buffer and then having some chip output that to the TV.
Marco:
They were rendering it line by line manually, every single line that was rendered.
Marco:
The system would take most of its time rendering each pixel, and then in the very, very short interval when they were waiting for the scanning electron gun to change lines, that's when they would do the game computation.
Marco:
It's fascinating how these things worked.
Marco:
Anyway, look that up.
Marco:
It's a wonderful thing.
Marco:
I'll try to link to some videos if I can remember.
Marco:
So anyway, CRTs, though, make games look right.
Marco:
There are filters you can use on emulators and other solutions that I'll get to in a moment to try to emulate the look of CRTs on modern, you know, LCD or whatever TVs.
Marco:
There's a few different elements to this.
Marco:
One of them that's been getting around recently is there are these like pixel shaders that will actually warp the entire image to mimic screen curvature.
Marco:
Because CRTs were not flat.
Marco:
Even the flat fronted ones behind them was a curved surface of the glass.
Marco:
Like just the front surface was flat.
Marco:
The back surface was curved.
Marco:
So there are these filters that will kind of like fake the curvature of the glass.
Marco:
I don't like that.
Marco:
I think it looks too fake, and it doesn't, yeah, I don't love that at all.
Marco:
CRTs also, they didn't render pixels in a very sharp, precise way.
Marco:
They didn't even technically really have 40 pixels across.
Marco:
It didn't work that way.
Marco:
So when you look at images rendered on a CRT, they don't have sharp edges around each pixel.
Marco:
They're blurred.
Marco:
And so there are emulators and things that you can actually apply a blur filter, kind of just a gentle blur over the whole screen.
Marco:
To me, when I do that, it looks better.
Marco:
It looks more correct for the way these games looked.
Marco:
More advanced emulator shaders might also take advantage of the fact that when CRTs would render colors, bright colors, like white, would actually bleed slightly into the surrounding pixels.
Marco:
more so than the way that like a darker like a red might render so certain colors would actually blur around themselves more than others there are there is some effort out there now to actually replicate that behavior in pixel shaders which is really cool for emulators now the last thing i'll talk about in this in this area is scan lines
Marco:
again if you look at the crt up close there are slight black gaps between the lines especially of the tv again the way the way the horizontal and vertical uh rendering worked is different most of the time this is this is visible as like slightly dark gaps horizontally between the lines so you have like a very thin hairline black line horizontally between each line of pixels emulators and stuff don't do this and modern tvs don't have this
Marco:
But there are filters that you can apply even on the Raspberry Pi.
Marco:
And there's actually a couple of hardware solutions to do this on your TV to add blank black lines between the pixel lines to emulate the look of CRT scan lines.
Marco:
I thought that's crazy.
Marco:
Like, why would anybody want to do this?
Marco:
Then I did it, and I played a game, and I instantly fell in love with this effect.
Marco:
It sounds crazy that you would add, artificially add, thin black lines between all the bigger, chunkier pixel lines that are being rendered, but to me, it makes these old games look right.
Marco:
That was the thing that popped in my head, and I even yelled at Tiff, I'm like, oh my god, it looks right now.
Marco:
He did, that's true.
Marco:
And I still remember when I was doing... I first saw it on Mega Bomberman for the Genesis.
Marco:
And I played this game like crazy.
Marco:
The games I'm playing, I played for many, many years as a kid.
Marco:
And so when I first turned on that Scanline filter on the Raspberry Pi, I was so happy.
Marco:
Oh my god, it looks right.
Marco:
It finally looks the way these games looked.
Marco:
And so some of these effects I thought were too much.
Marco:
The curving of the screen effect, that didn't look right to me.
Marco:
But a very slight blur plus scan lines looks great to me.
Marco:
Now there is a bit of a downside to scan lines in that if you're drawing black lines between all your blocky pixel lines, it's going to make the overall image darker.
Marco:
So you're going to want to turn the brightness up.
Marco:
And depending on what resolution you're outputting,
Marco:
is a question of like, well, how many lines are there of color before you get to a black line?
Marco:
You know, if you're outputting 480p and you're doing scan lines, then every other line is going to have to be black.
Marco:
And that's going to make a very, I think that kind of looks like too much of the effect.
Marco:
That doesn't look good.
Marco:
And it also makes the image very dark.
Marco:
It looks just kind of fake and dark.
Marco:
But if you're outputting 720p, then you can do every third line being blackened.
Marco:
That, I think, looks great.
Marco:
If you go higher, you go to 1080p, you can do every fourth line.
Marco:
It looks even better.
Marco:
And so, again, like the CRT, it had a thin hairline of blackness between each thicker line of rendered pixels.
Marco:
The higher resolution you're rendering at, the better you can render these CRT-simulating effects because they depend on sub-pixel-level details of how it looks.
Marco:
There's actually devices out there that will take the input of hardware consoles and make them look this good on modern TVs, including things like scanline effects.
Marco:
So the main problem is that when you connect one of these consoles to a modern LCD, OLED, whatever TV, they have to read the signal, which they expect to be a 480i interlaced console.
Marco:
old composite video signal or something and try to scale it up and render it on a natively progressive higher resolution screen.
Marco:
So they have these converter circuits in them, these upscaler circuits that are assuming that they're being sent interlaced video.
Marco:
But these old consoles are rendering 240p and outputting it in a way that it happened to be interlaced in the output, but they're really rendering progressive content as 480i.
Marco:
And so the way these converters work on the TVs, it makes game content look bad.
Marco:
Like it has certain...
Marco:
Certain rendering artifacts or scaling artifacts that kind of mess with game content in weird ways and makes it look wrong.
Marco:
So there's this whole category out there of custom designed scalers that are made specifically to scale old game content onto modern TVs in a way that doesn't break them and introduce artifacts the way that the built-in scalers do.
Marco:
Uh, this goes from, you know, simple things like there's like this little like HDMI converters for individual systems.
Marco:
There's like one for the N64 that plugs into the back of it and everything.
Marco:
Um, there's also, um, a company called RetroTink.
Marco:
They make one that's just a line doubler.
Marco:
So it's very simple.
Marco:
It takes in the 240p signal.
Marco:
It just line doubles it all to 480p.
Marco:
And that way, your TV doesn't have to deinterlace, which is the part that introduces a lot of the artifacting.
Marco:
They're inexpensive, and that solution, like a line doubler, introduces almost no latency.
Marco:
The modern ones even have scanline filters built in, but because they are only doing 480p, they're making very dark lines, because they have to darken every other line instead of doing every third or everything at higher resolution.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I wouldn't recommend this solution if you want a scanline filter.
Marco:
But if you want an inexpensive, good scaler, RetroTink is good for that.
Marco:
There's a few other options in that price range.
Marco:
There's also the OSSC, the Open Source Scan Converter.
Marco:
This is like $200-ish.
Marco:
It is more complex.
Marco:
It's mostly a line doubler like the RetroTink, but it has a few more features.
Marco:
They have an experimental 3X 720p mode that doesn't work with all TVs.
Marco:
It's kind of weird, but it's also a pretty good option.
Marco:
Kind of the Cadillac of options is the XRGB Framemeister.
Marco:
Of course, it's the most expensive.
Marco:
It's like $350-ish.
Marco:
It does things in a different way.
Marco:
It's actually doing a much more complicated scaling thing.
Marco:
It actually introduces, I think, one frame of latency.
Marco:
But it has really, really high quality output and it has the best scan line mode because it can render at 720p or 1080p.
Marco:
So you can actually have it look really good.
Marco:
So that's what I got, of course.
Marco:
I even got this, I'll link to it.
Marco:
I even got this automatic RGB multi-input switcher.
Marco:
So now I have basically my data chain console set up.
Marco:
It's called the G SCART SW.
Marco:
Like just some guy makes it custom made just for video game console enthusiasts who like RGB output.
Marco:
So this is like, you got to figure this is not a, not a big market here.
Marco:
But so far, I have three systems connected to it that have RGB output.
Marco:
I'm waiting on the modded N64 to get back.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
I have now my awesome setup.
Marco:
I have the XRGB Framemeister that is the scaler that adds scan lines, that scales everything awesomely to my TV.
Marco:
I have all the old systems.
Marco:
I have flash carts for many of them.
Marco:
I have wireless controllers for some of them.
Marco:
And I have an automatic switch that I can just turn on any of them that are plugged into it, and it just comes up on the TV.
Marco:
And it is the most ridiculous, over-the-top, like...
Marco:
Needlessly complicated, needlessly expensive, needlessly large setup that I could possibly have come up with.
Marco:
But it's so cool to actually play.
Marco:
And this is probably more effort than any of this is worth.
Marco:
But it's so amazing.
Marco:
I'm incredibly satisfied with it.
Marco:
And I don't recommend that anybody actually do this because it is really ridiculous.
Marco:
But man, is it fun.
John:
You're so excited about all this latency, a whole frame of latency just for your scalar.
John:
And then you have all you need to get a CRT.
John:
I'm not very good at games, John.
John:
The CRT automatically does all that stuff with the scan lines and dealing with the brightness or whatever.
John:
And it has no latency.
Marco:
Yeah, but then he wouldn't have had a month worth of a project to do.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
so you can get a crt for much less than the cost of that scaler oh i know but but i but like where am i gonna put a crt and how am i gonna find a good one on the floor in front of the place where all these consoles are we're gonna put it on top of the non-working crt yes
Marco:
No, again, this is a crazy, ridiculous setup.
Marco:
This is really for true, real enthusiasts of this craft.
John:
No, the enthusiasts have CRTs.
John:
I guarantee the enthusiasts have CRTs.
John:
You made a prosumer setup is what you did.
Marco:
There's this whole market of enthusiasts who seek out old pro video monitors because they would actually have those BNC connectors that Casey mentioned three hours ago.
Marco:
They would actually have those.
Marco:
So you could have your RGB output for super sharp color separation and everything on a CRT, which is the best you could possibly get, really.
Marco:
But the problem is professional video monitors are...
John:
way less common and they were usually not very large and they're very expensive so like that's really if you want the marco solution it's to find like a 30 inch pvm somehow that has rgb input and use that but i'm not doing that but it doesn't need to be 30 in 30 inch you would start to see weird artifacts that you never saw on your normal size television as a kid right you just need a plain old 24 inch crt you'll be fine would you do it christmas gift if i was going to have a retro console setup absolutely i would get a crt
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Surprising.
Casey:
Where would you put it?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Where would I put a retro console?
John:
If I was going to do that, the whole point is it would have to be original hardware, original controllers hooked up to a CRT because that's what it was like.
Marco:
Some parents turn their kids' room into gyms.
Marco:
I think John's going to turn his first kid who goes off to college, his room, into a retro gaming room.
Casey:
Do it.
Casey:
So, Marco, in a rough order of magnitude, how much are you into this financially?
Casey:
Are we talking a couple hundred dollars?
Casey:
And you already have all the systems.
Casey:
Are we talking like a couple hundred dollars, a couple thousand dollars?
Casey:
As vague as you would like to be is fine.
Casey:
But I ask only because, you know, I am like...
Casey:
200 bucks in and that's because i got the really expensive fancy raspberry pi like dummy setup you know if i had done if i had done the uh you know what you're doing setup i would be like a hundred bucks in it sounds like you are in a lot deeper than i am so far yeah i haven't added up but you know it's like less than a macbook pro but probably not like a ton less okay
Marco:
But again, if you're just doing one or two systems, it's a lot simpler.
Marco:
And if you are okay not having the fancy RGB output with professional scaler, this is where a lot of the money goes.
Marco:
If you don't do a flash cart and if you instead just get 15 or 20 of your favorite games on eBay that are fairly commonly easy to find games, again, these are all things that can make it significantly cheaper.
Marco:
I just went the ridiculous route.
John:
You?
John:
Surprise, right?
John:
Your TV is too far away for you to play emulated games on anyway.
John:
Casey, if you want to get a cheap setup, buy a CRT.
John:
Get a used console.
John:
Boom.
John:
Done.
John:
Less money, and it will have better latency, and it will look right.
Casey:
No, I'm very, very, very happy with my setup here.
Casey:
I really want a second controller, which I'll probably order sooner rather than later, so I can play with Declan rather than one of us watching the other.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I cannot say enough good things about the Raspberry Pi and RetroPie on top of it, and PieHole, for that matter.
Casey:
I mean, this setup, for not that much effort, you know, it definitely needed some tweaking here and there, and if I didn't already kind of know how to do this sort of thing, it probably would have been very infuriating, but...
Casey:
For the kind of person that probably listens to the show, it's definitely within reason to put this together.
Casey:
And in terms of like the physical assembly of the Raspberry Pi and putting it in the case and all that, it's basically like Lego.
Casey:
You just snap stuff in and you're off to the races.
Casey:
So I am not trying to say that Marco's setup is...
Casey:
is not way better than mine it marco and tiff setup is way better than mine i'm not arguing that i'm just saying for almost no effort and almost no money kind of i have a really decent setup that if you're not a super purist then i'm obviously not then it works really well and i am very very impressed by it to the point that i'm wondering if i should get a new raspberry pi to leave in the office to do the pie hole thing and
Casey:
and then move this downstairs to our big TV where I can play video games on it on this 4K OLED screen, which, as you guys have been discussing, is not at all what they're designed to be played on.
Casey:
But it's still, it's just fun.
Casey:
It's just a lot of fun.
John:
You should probably scale the effort and cost it to how much time you actually think you'll spend playing games.
John:
Because the Raspberry Pi and emulator is a great
John:
thing of like wow i'm just gonna take a tour of all these cool games and have fun with them or whatever but like eventually if you're not gonna be like so are you gonna play through the original zelda and beat it or do you just want to take a brief tour of games and you're not gonna touch it again right so don't if you invest like you know hundreds or thousands of dollars into a big setup and then realize okay that was that's all i wanted to get out of it was making the setup and now
John:
I'm not actually going to spend 300 hours playing classic games.
John:
I mean, this equation changes.
John:
Obviously, there's more than one person in your house who wants to play the games.
John:
Maybe you have a kid who is actually going to dump 50 to 100 hours into a single game, in which case it pays off.
John:
But if you're just doing it as a cool, fun thing, consider whether Casey's Raspberry Pi approach will let you sort of get it out of your system without making it a big, expensive project.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's probably what most people should do, if I'm honest with myself.
Marco:
That's probably what I should have stuck with.
Marco:
But every time the emulator setup would act like a computer, and like, oh, now it's, you know, I got to, like, make the Bluetooth pair again, or now I got to, like, remember how I got from this menu to this other place.
Marco:
Where was that setting again?
Marco:
How do I do this?
Marco:
Oh, look, it just grabbed the input again because the HDMI, CEC, and Raspberry Pi sucks.
Marco:
Like, it's just, there were so many, like,
Marco:
computer-y parts of it that just made it feel like work that were just adding friction to the experience.
Marco:
I mean, you have the actual old system.
Marco:
There's almost no sources of friction at all.
Marco:
I mean, granted, before I got the nice scaler to plug into the TV, I did have issues with the TV showing the wrong aspect ratio or cropping off the corners because it didn't have overscan correction options, stuff like that.
Marco:
I had a lot of problems getting it to look decent on my TV before I went the pro route.
Marco:
Once I went the pro route, those problems disappeared.
Marco:
So again,
Marco:
Probably the smartest thing to do is the Raspberry Pi.
Marco:
The second smartest thing to do is to get a CRT.
Marco:
But the dumb and ridiculous thing to do is to get all this crazy stuff.
Marco:
And I'm not saying anybody should do this, but it's pretty cool.
Casey:
So Tiff, how often are you and or Adam playing any of these systems and games and whatnot?
Marco:
Oh, almost never.
Marco:
Well, the problem is that we set all this up about a month before we developed a family super Minecraft addiction.
Marco:
So we haven't played them like this past month at all.
John:
but they're there they're ready for us whenever we're ready minecraft should be easier to play in like 2055 um because like its input is very flexible you don't need any special controller you're not going to need to keep around some sensor bar by another thing and it's the type of game where it's probably not too onerous to just keep it running on every system like minecraft has already run on so many different platforms and it will probably continue to run
John:
there's the ray tracing version of Minecraft that people are playing with that will probably be the next iteration but Minecraft may actually still be a game you can buy when Adam is setting up his retro gaming system when he hits his midlife crisis so that's a good thing about that particular game so if you're going to sink time as a family into Minecraft that'll probably be time well spent and you'll be able to relive that experience later
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Linode, and Eero.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they did it in me.
Casey:
Tiff, thanks for stopping by.
Casey:
Not that you have to leave or anything, but I appreciate you stopping by.
Marco:
Thanks.
Marco:
Yeah, you guys going to talk about Apple now?
Marco:
You missed that part of the show.
Marco:
Let's all just go play some Mario Kart.
Casey:
oh god the both of you mario mario i'm gonna go play some mario card you sound like my grandparents long island is strong this week to be honest i don't usually hear long island from either of you guys and then i hear a mario dropped and so there it is i can't say mario that's too bougie now you're gonna ruin it because now i never thought of it that way it's that way but
Marco:
And thank you guys for letting me crash your show.
John:
Anything we can do to help you get a CRT in the gaming room.
John:
That's what it's all about.
John:
The end game.
John:
It's a long con.
John:
No, we're here for you.
John:
Did you see, by the way, Tim, did you see that Last of Us Part 2 is delayed again?
Marco:
It's delayed again?
John:
Again.
John:
Well, you know, virus.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Which is fitting.
Hmm.
Marco:
i still have to play um life is strange too i still want to yeah i have that sitting in my place in the show i haven't even started it it's just been so much so much minecraft yeah well for me so much destiny still still so much destiny aliens aren't gonna shoot themselves too thank you for risking your life and protecting us all someone's gotta save the universe who's gonna do it marco no he's running around collecting rings
John:
And then dropping them all when he gets a tiny hit.
John:
Touched by an enemy and the rings just go everywhere.
Marco:
You should really see Marco in Minecraft right now.
Marco:
He's amazing.
Marco:
I want him on my team all the time.
Marco:
Well, I'm trying to take out my first one of those ocean fortresses with the big spike fish in them.
Marco:
And that's not easy.
John:
That is not easy at all.
John:
I don't want to make Marco feel bad, but I'm still measuring to see if Marco is matching up to Alex when he was eight.
John:
He's almost there.
Marco:
Oh, Adam is incredible.
Marco:
The stuff he knows.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
You come to this thing late, but what is the Bane quote?
John:
Adam was born into it.
Marco:
He basically was.
Marco:
That kid was born from Minecraft.
Marco:
I tried attacking the Spikefish Fortress by coming up from under it.
Marco:
I had an island a little while away that I had a little establishment on, so I just tunneled under the ocean and came up under the fish fortress, which actually is not a bad idea if you just want a whole bunch of those cool blue blocks.
Marco:
doesn't make it any easier to kill the spike fish and i keep getting the spoon disease where i can't mine anymore from the big ghost spike fish and it's really tricky it's like it doesn't make it that much easier to come from the bottom you guys should graduate to creative mode soon no come on survival i like that it's hard to get some of this stuff it's gonna happen it's gonna happen eventually eventually when you start building your giant world eating computers you're in creative mode for a long time
Marco:
You need to see the Dubai Friday server and the stuff that people have built in survival mode.
Marco:
It's absolutely incredible.
Marco:
Have you been on there yet?
John:
Me?
John:
No.
John:
What's wrong with you?
John:
I live this Minecraft phase already.
John:
My children are older.
John:
Right.
Marco:
Just get on there and walk around and check it out.
John:
I did enjoy hearing Merlin joining the server and then walking into the water and drowning.
John:
It's a very Merlin thing to do.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
it's literally just walked into the ocean i feel like i feel like it's much more impressive if you can do really cool stuff in survival mode because it like it adds it adds cost it adds difficulty like it adds it adds resistance right but but eventually your ambitions outgrow survival mode and you need the freedom afforded by an entire universe in creative mode i don't know i think we're doing okay it's amazing the people want us to have a gaming podcast john
John:
Yeah, well, hmm.
Marco:
That's what it would be.
Marco:
It'll just be me being like, John, isn't this great?
John:
And be like, hmm.
John:
That is accurate.
John:
No, I would be super into it if I could get an extra 10 hours in each day and or not have a job.
John:
Eh, new job, game.
John:
Jobs are overrated.
John:
Yep.