Thoughts on Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions (PSP version)

Made another too-long comment on YouTube and it'd be a waste to let it disappear into the ether so here it is: 

I still want to play the PSP version the most, if only for those extra characters and classes, but it needs all sorts of hacks for a comfortable experience. 

Slowdown: Fixed with LivePatch or a patched ISO. 

Graphics: Fixed with LivePatch or a patched ISO, and probably combined or bundled with the slowdown patch.  Makes the game look absolutely perfect on PSTV with Sharpscale, or on original hardware with component output with a RetroTINK 4K zooming in. Many PSP games actually have "pixel perfect" screen modes that shrink the game area to 240p for extra sharpness; such modes are too small for me to bother with on an actual PSP screen, but benefit tremendously when playing on a TV. 

Soft Reset: Best plugin I've found for this is GameMenu, also known as In game VSH menu (satellite). Highly configurable so you can even hit that musical note button on your PSP to bring up a menu in-game where you can reset, but I like binding it to Home + Select so I can reset with a Dual Shock 3 when playing on a docked PSPgo. There was another plugin called EzGameReset but it tended to crash the game back to the XMB instead of resetting.

Spell quote restoration: Need a tool called Valhalla, but I don't think there was much progress made on this and I haven't bothered with it. Hopefully someone out there documented all the Ivalice Chronicles spell quotes so they can be easily implemented.

Music restoration: Practically modern-day sorcery and I have yet to attempt this. Ideally you'd use the Final Fantasy Tactics OST rip. Then you'd have to do the hard work in Audacity with finding and marking beginning and end loop markers for each track, encoding to .at3 with AT9&AT3 Converter, then putting it all together with UMDGen. At least I think that's how it works. When I've solved all my other problems, have all the free time in the world, and am bored of absolutely everything else, I suppose I'll try this for real.

Swytch e-bike kit: legality and longevity

Legality in the States in 2025: 

• Ebike Laws by State 2025: What Every Rider Should Know
• Swytch kits: "They are made to order and comply with the highest standards in eBike battery safety regulations worldwide including CE, UKCA and UL2271"
• Overview of worldwide standards

UL Certification:

• What does it mean for something to be UL 2849 Compliant?
• What is UL Certification and Why is it Important for Batteries?
• Battery Safety Testing and Certification (UL.com)
• E-Bikes Certification: Evaluating and Testing to UL 2849
• Legal E-Bike Conversion Kits: Where to Buy in 2025
• Notably: 
• 3. Swytch – London, UK (Ships Worldwide)
• Highlight: Featherweight 250 W front-hub kit that snaps on/off with a quick-release power pack.
• Compliance: Certified to EN 15194 (EU) and CPSC wattage limits for U.S. customers.
• List of battery packs that are UL certified?

Battery Repair and Replacements:

• SWAP-E Swytch Adapter (https://www.swap-e.co.uk/) - "This kit allows any 36V third party battery to be used instead."
• Adapters for both Gen2 and Gen3 are available 
• To be used with a generic battery like this which is UL2271 Certified
• Found from this thread: "Solution for Swytch Kit Users Needing Battery Replacements or Longer Range", namely this post
• Swytch Max Battery Teardown
• I Built a TINY E-Bike Battery— How Far Will It Go?

Wyrmwood Hex Tile Planning

My goals: 

• Have one of each configuration and color
• With four tiles (minus Tavern) and eight woods, I want a pair of each tile
• Each tile pair should be different woods
• Each tile pair should also be on opposite ends of (1) color and (2) price
• And based on all of this, it should be easy to distinguish similar-looking woods (e.g. if it's a very dark Solo Tile, it has to be Ebony because my pair of Solo Tiles is either Elm or Ebony)
• For each hex tile pairing, there should be one more of the cheaper wood tile than the higher-priced wood tile (e.g. 2 elm & 1 ebony, or 3 padauk & 2 wenge)
• Total number of hex tiles should be 14 because that's two hex tile racks or one hex party tray's worth

What I have / am aiming for so far:

• 2 Solo Tile / Elm (own x2)
• 1 Solo Tile / Ebony (own x1)

• 2 Duo Tile / Cherry (own x1)
• 1 Duo Tile / Bolivian Rosewood (own x1)

• 3 Card Tile / Padauk (own x1)
• 2 Card Tile / Wenge (own x2)

• 2 Combo Tile / Black Walnut (own x2)
• 1 Combo Tile / Purpleheart (own x1)

Got the official Steam Deck Dock!

And I am not happy!

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/11xbgfx/comment/n07o7os/

Edit: 

Seems I have a lot more success if I have the TV input already set, and then connect the dock while it's already on. In other words, don't have the dock in standby mode when you connect the dock (with power and HDMI already connected) to the port on the top of the Steam Deck. 

Sites I use for manga purchases

It's been hard keeping track of all the different sites I use for my manga fix, so I'm just gonna list them here:

Comikey - Officially translated digital chapters as they come out. My go to for Kengan Ashura, Kengan Omega, ST☆R: Strike it Rich (aka ISSK, or Isshou Senkin). I've also enjoyed Are You Okay with a Slightly Older Girlfriend? and Baki.

Book Walker (English) - I go here for How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? (a Sandroverse series that's NOT on Comikey along with Blue Ursus), but these are officially translated complete volumes, not just individual chapters. Also available: Blue Lock and Apothecary Diaries (manga and light novels). JP page example here and yes I was able to buy one of those JP comics there and read them on my EN account, though the series I really wanted to double-dip on are still region-locked:

• はじめの一歩
• BLUE LOCK

Viz - Official English translations of weekly Shonen Jump chapters and Viz Manga... though I'm having a hard time figuring out what the difference is. It says I'm a Shonen Jump member, so I can read the latest chapters as they're released as well as everything that ever was on there (or most of it anyway), meaning the Viz Manga membership is for... something else?  I notice stuff like Ranma 1/2 and Welcome to the NHK aren't on Shonen Jump, but are available by volume on Viz Manga.

Kinokuniya - I use this link to buy physical Japanese-language manga from the Sandroverse. I very much regret buying used manga from eBay that ended up costing the same or more and often didn't even have the obi! 

Manga-One - Kengan Omega （ケンガンオメガ）original Japanese source. Originally at Ura Sunday.

Manga-One - ST☆R: Strike it Rich （一勝千金 ）original Japanese source. Originally at Ura Sunday.

Manga-One - Blue Ursus original Japanese source.

Manga Poke (Kodansha Shonen Magazine) - The original source for Japanese manga by Kodansha, maybe others. It's got some heavy hitters like Attack on Titan and Blue Lock. I made an account for Hajime no Ippo but I spent way more than I probably should since they're individual chapters and not the volumes, and navigating to the chapter you want is difficult. You have to almost close your eyes to avoid the thumbnails and hitting "more" a dozen times is annoying. They take overseas Visa at least. My own personal Hajime no Ippo bookmark: 760

K MANGA - Official English Kodansha site. It's nice that the site looks exactly the same as the Japanese site, though they are separate sites requiring separate accounts unlike Book Walker. I'm linking to Blue Lock here. Hajime no Ippo is here but they're only, oh, 1,311 chapters behind. That's 1,540 days, or put another way, 4 years, 2 months, and 17 days behind. Mind you, that's the date the manga was put online; the manga actually goes back to the 1980s, I believe. 

DLsite - All sorts of manga in Japanese and English, including the kind that makes you want to remove articles of clothing. Some of them require a VPN to purchase, like Hajime no Ippo and Baki. Others, like Bleach or Dr. Stone, you don't. I guess Viz is cool like that. Anyway, you'll need to add points with a gift card, turn the VPN on to Japan, then add to cart and purchase. Or you used to for a brief time; now they're okay with US credit cards again.

Fanza Doujin - More eguti.

Irodori Comics - More eguti.

Storage cases from Amazon - I use these and love them. These used to be about $20 shipped and now they're double the price. FRUCK TUMP

Making a Magic Memory Stick for PSP Jigkick in 2025

This was way harder than it needed to be because of all the outdated information out there. 

Starting with ARK4 and DC-ARK (aka ARK DC?), I kept getting an error on the PSP itself that pointed me to "Team C+D mspformat PC Tool" that apparently only runs on 32-bit Windows XP or some crap. You don't need that. And the ARK-4 readme points you to MagicMemoryCreator which requires Python and command prompts that I don't understand and you don't either. That's all unnecessary too. There was also Resizer Portable which was an "improved" method, but who knows when in the timeline that was, and it didn't work anyway. 

It took a video from one of the legends of the PSP scene to point me to the right direction. You just need a PSP utility called PSP Tool. 

Here's exactly what I did, even if some parts were redundant:

1. Run PSP Tool, format memory card. PSP restarts.
2. Copy over PSP Tool again and run it, and choose to create Magic Memory Stick. When it's done (takes several minutes), press Home to exit.
3. Copy over firmware 6.61 to the root of the Magic Memory Stick (and name it 661.PBP or 661GO.PBP for PSPgo), and run DC-ARK This also takes several minutes. 

When it's all done, you'll be back at the XMB. Shutdown and place that memory stick some place safe. 

Thinking of building a candy cab...

Out of nowhere I had the urge to get a 2-player metal control panel from a Japanese-style arcade cabinet. I think I got a good deal on mine: $130 shipped from Japan, with two Sanwa levers, eight action buttons, two start buttons, and two button plugs included. That's probably about the price I'd have to pay for a high-quality repro from Arcade Art Shop shipping from Britain, and those are just the bare panels with overlays. In the future, though, I think the mountings on the repro panels allow for a greater variety of sticks, 

This video gave me the idea of making a box for the panel, and that you don't necessarily need to have an arcade cab to use it. Then this video gave me other ideas. And then I thought, why not modular? I got to thinking:

• Ideally I'd be able to have a box for the control panel now and use it like any other bespoke arcade joystick setup to put on a table or maybe your lap, and then connect it back to the cab when I want to play on the cab. 
• Entire should be easier to assemble and disassemble to fit through doorways.
• Even just the base and the control panel is a good thing to have; we can worry about the monitor later. 
• Should be able to swap out different panels for different layouts (e.g. one-player games on a 4-way stick on a single-player panel)
• If I don't want to use the arcade panel I should be able to remove that part and just use commercial sticks... maybe with clamps? 
• Auxillary buttons could go... somewhere else 
• Monitor should be easily rotatable
• By keeping it simple (i.e. no cutouts to keep the metal panel flush), you can switch between the curved Sega panels and square Vewlix panels. Plus, zero chance your arm gets pinched by any gaps between the metal panel and any cutout
• Blender is a free alternative to Sketchup

Info Dump:

Using the Sega Saturn Virtua Stick Pro as inspiration, matching the dimensions should be width: 23 cm and depth: 13 cm. 

Vewlix panels are 68.0W x 14.4D cms