Quick update

So yeah, back in late February / early March my family cancelled DirecTV and AT&T (which were decades-long subscriptions) and got Charter cable. The Internet's cheaper and faster and we have more TV channels, so it's a win all-around. But the Charter DVR box completely sucks; the interface is as ugly as sin, the remote was infrared only, and not even all the options were selectable. I was trying to make the HDMI audio output plain old stereo instead of Dolby Digital and I just couldn't do it. I think the available options were "On" and "Auto" and no matter what my brother and I tried, we had to resort to RCA audio like animals.

Having had enough, my brother decided to get TiVo again (last time we had TiVo was around 2003). We got the Roamio and I agreed to shoulder the cost of the DVR box and service. Thanks to careful budgeting on my end, it's not too big of a problem; my brother only wanted 1/4 of the cost of the box, but I'll happily chip in for 1/2 of the box and 1/2 of the service. Of course then my brother got a TiVo Mini and upgraded the harddrive to 1 TB... or 3 TB, I forget. I'm only willing to pay 1/4 of the hard drive.

I must say, the quality of the channels isn't quite as good as DirecTV; it seems lower-priority channels like Lifetime really get hit hard with the compression while HBO is as clear as ever. But I need Lifetime to be clearer because of Hoarders. And sometimes you really can see the compression in sports; when the camera zooms in on a moving player (e.g. after scoring a point), the crowd in the background looks like pixelated vomit.

We noticed an issue where Food Network and Travel Channel weren't displaying the correct shows, but an email to TiVo cleared that up.

My brother went to Japan a few more times. (Why? Who knows.) But he got me Persona 3 Portable (Japanese version, of course), so now I'm more motivated to clear some of my backlog. There are a couple of guides for max social links in a single playthrough, but they're never as clear as they should be. I've found that you need to keep these things in mind:

1. All the Personas you need between dungeon visits for social links (Arcana and the number of Personas)
2. Level up to make sure you can actually carry that many Personas at the same time 
3. The money you need for stat-raising activities 
4. The money you need for summoning and fusing Personas

I'm currently playing Persona 4 Golden and I'm at just about Level 25 where I can finally hold 10 Personas. I think I was underleveled beating the first dungeon, but I didn't have a choice; there was simply no cheap, sustainable way to replenish SP. A large part of these max social link runs is clearing each new dungeon in a single day, so going back some other day was out of the question. I just barely beat the first dungeon at Level 9 or so, when the person I rescued turned out to be Level 15, I believe.

As for eBay adventures... I've been buying all the well-known NES must-have series for about $50 each. Last year I got all Mega Man 1-6 and Ninja Gaiden 1-3, and within these last few months I bought Contra & Super C, Double Dragon 1-3, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1-3. All that's left on my radar is Castlevania 1-3, though those sets tend to go for $60 or $70 for some reason. I do have Castlevania 1 for Wii Virtual Console and the Japanese Castlevania 3 (Akumajou Densetsu)... and I'm not in any rush to get Castlevania 2 thanks to a certain infamous video review. 

I did finally sell something on eBay for the first time ever, though what finally pushed me to sell was an eBay promotional offer. Well, all those promotional offers mysteriously disappeared from my inbox as soon as I sold something, so I ended up paying the listing fees anyway, and I'm certainly not expecting any $25 coupon code. Apparently I'm not alone. Was this how eBay got so big? By baiting and switching? I think eBay owes us all at least $5. 

And that item I sold? That was my double of Mega Man 1, and despite me going out of my way to make the most perfect item listing ever, the buyer still hasn't given me positive feedback yet. I shipped it as quick as possible and he received it in two days. What the hell is he waiting for?

With all this game buying, it looks like the video mods for my Atari 2600 and NES will have to wait a little while longer, especially since I'm probably going to Las Vegas in the summer.

On a positive note, I actually did the NES Max d-pad mod all by myself! I hopped on eBay and bought red Xbox 360 controller parts for a little over $2 from Hong Kong. It took some trial and error with the sandpaper, but the most important thing I found was to make sure there was just a little slack when installing the stick and connecting the black rings. As for which way to connect the rings, make sure the little 5 goes on top of the little 3 (they're a little hard to see), and then hold the controller up (facing down) and look under to make sure the ring pops out evenly in the front of the stick. If one side of the ring sticks out too much and another side too little, just rotate the ring until it's all balanced. 

And the mod works great! A part of me still prefers the plain old original d-pad (muscle memory and all that), but this Max mod turns the controller from a 5/10 usability rating to a 9.5/10. If I ever get over my fear of breaking it I'll raise my rating to a 10/10. But I did clear Mega Man 2 with that mod and the controller worked great. Before I would have to push harder than I'd want to go in a direction; I'd sometimes just stop walking. Now jumping over holes and grabbing on to ladders in Mega Man isn't a problem at all because I'm confident in the diagonals again.