Got the official Steam Deck Dock!

And I am not happy!

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

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 - 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. I'm also a fan of Apothecary Diaries so I picked up the first light novel there too. 

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 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.

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 while hitting "more" a dozen times is annoying. They take PayPal at least, which is how I was able to buy points. 

DLsite - All sorts of manga in Japanese and English, including the kind that makes you want to remove articles of clothing. Some of them you need to need 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.

Fanza Doujin - More eguti

Irodori Comics - More eguti

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

Capture Card doesn't get audio from OSSC Pro when using HDMI video and HDMI audio

I've recently taken a liking to chaining my RetroTINK-5X Pro into my OSSC Pro. The RT5X just does 240p/480i resolution switching better (especially in 1080p Over mode), and I really love the HDR injection which the OSSC Pro itself has too, but never worked for me. But I still need the OSSC Pro for its ultra-fine picture control, better compatibility with arcade boards, and guaranteed 4:4:4 chroma subsampling... or was that color space? I dunno. 

The one downside to the RT5X-OSSC Pro chain is my capture card doesn't see any audio activity when using AV4 (HDMI in) and Digital Audio at the same time. I would still get hear audio thanks to my audio setup that can extract audio from HDMI sources (even if it's quieter than straight up RCA), but the capture card doesn't see audio, resulting in videos with silent audio. 

Most of the consoles I use output RGB, so after transcoding RGB to component, I split the audio and video where they reach both the RT5X and the OSSC Pro. And I can have the OSSC Pro selected to the HDMI (which is the output from  RT5X) but use AV2's RCA audio for input.

I wondered if it was the port itself or the RT5X, so I tried Nintendo Switch > OSSC Pro and that works.

Here's what doesn't work:

RT5X > OSSC Pro > TESmart HDMI Switcher > two HDMI splitters > capture card

RT5X > OSSC Pro > TESmart HDMI Switcher > two HDMI splitters > capture card

RT2X > OSSC Pro > TESmart HDMI Switcher > two HDMI splitters > capture card

Here's what does:

RT5X > DVDO Edge > TESmart HDMI Switcher > two HDMI splitters > capture card

Nintendo Switch > OSSC Pro > TESmart HDMI Switcher > two HDMI splitters > capture card

So I don't know what the problem is with the OSSC Pro. There used to be a problem with the OSSC Pro's audio recognition in my capture card that was fixed, so here's hoping this will be addressed too. 

Organizing the PS1 library

I acquired the full PS1 library in downloadable form somewhere online. That place no longer hosts it, but another place does... and it's just as well; the handful of corrupted zips from the former were not corrupted on the latter. 

Once downloaded, I unzipped them all to be Xstation-ready. In hindsight, I probably should've left the European games zipped, but at least now I know the zips were 99% good.

I originally decided to sort by letter regardless of region, which was good, but not great. 26 letters felt like too large of a choice for an initial sorting. And many games can have several variations. There are the US and JP versions, and then a whole bunch of European language versions, of course in crappy PAL format, which I'd like to skip altogether. 

So I decided to sort like the Smokemonster EverDrive packs I've found. The first directory (for now) looks like this:

• 1 US and Canada - A-Z
• 2 Europe, UK, and Australia - A-Z
• 2 Japan - A-Z
• 2 Other Regions - A-Z
• 3 Emulators
• 3 My Own Personal Dumps
• 4 Betas, Prototypes, Revisions
• 4 Hacks
• 4 Homebrew
• 4 Translations
• 5 Tools & Service Tests

So let's look at the first folder. I put all the USA games, plus the two or three Canadian games, in a single folder. I want to split that giant folder into somewhat even-sized groups (this stackoverflow thread gave me some ideas), so let's count the number of games per letter for now:

• 1 US and Canada - A-Z

1960 items, 888 GB total

# & A: 105 /// B: 106 /// C: 121 /// D: 120 /// E: 41

F: 103 /// G: 76 /// H: 34 /// I: 47 /// J: 31

K: 35 /// L: 41 /// M: 143 /// N: 150 /// O: 69

P: 149 /// Q: 6 /// R: 98 /// S: 201 /// T: 142

U: 12 /// V: 28 /// W: 71 /// X: 23 /// Y: 5 /// Z: 3

Getting the ideal average size grouping of games: 1960 / 4 = 490

Adding letters to hit approximately 490: 

A through E: 493

F through M: 510

N through R: 472

S through Z: 485

This section is now renamed and these split folders are in the top directory: 1 US and Canada - A-E

• 2 Europe, UK, and Australia - A-Z

3667 items, 1.71 TB

# & A: 246 /// B: 149 /// C: 223 /// D: 393 /// E: 312

F: 237 /// G: 110 /// H: 86 /// I: 46 /// J: 42

K: 73 /// L: 107 /// M: 219 /// N: 165 /// O: 55

P: 196 /// Q: 8 /// R: 175 /// S: 317 /// T: 203

U: 33 /// V: 65 /// W: 135 /// X: 52 /// Y: 11 /// Z: 12

Getting the ideal average size grouping of games: 3667 / 4 = 916

Adding letters to hit approximately 916: 

A through D: 1011

E through K: 906

L through R: 925

S through Z: 828

These split directories will NOT go to the top directory, and will remain in the 2 Europe, UK, and Australia - A-Z folder. 

• 2 Japan - A-Z

4709 items, 1.85 TB

# & A: 246 /// B: 217 /// C: 233 /// D: 325 /// E: 100

F: 162 /// G: 194 /// H: 208 /// I: 49 /// J: 102

K: 278 /// L: 102 /// M: 317 /// N: 158 /// O: 82

P: 340 /// Q: 12 /// R: 143 /// S: 783 /// T: 314

U: 50 /// V: 58 /// W: 106 /// X: 17 /// Y: 64 /// Z: 49

Getting the ideal average size grouping of games: 4709 / 4 = 1177.25

Adding letters to hit approximately 1177: 

A through E: 1121

F through L: 1095

M through R: 1052

S through Z: 1441

• 2 Other Regions - A-Z

30 items, 13.3 GB

This folder has regions from: Asia, China, Korea, Israel, Russia, Taiwan. Anyone know if "Asia" is PAL or what? The Chinese-named games probably are, but I don't know about Suikoden.

• 3 Emulators

It Might Be NES

• 4 Betas, Prototypes, Revisions

I like having the latest version of the games in the main folder. You can find which games had revisions by "(Rev)" in the file name, so just note those and move out the other one.

• 4 Hacks

CDRomance. Love those Biohazard 1.5 builds!

• 5 Tools & Service Tests

PadTest

Editing in AviSynth, then encoding in HandBrake

Why am I ditching MeGUI*?

While MeGUI does do x265, it's not the GPU-accelerated kind, so good quality (i.e. "Slowest" speed and 2000 kbps) on a 24-minute video takes literally about a day. As in 24 hours. Zero complaints on quality, but it's just impractical! And I have other videos to encode that are longer than that. No thank you. NVENC would only take 15 minutes to encode a 24-minute video. 

HandBrake does do GPU-accelerated encoding with H.265 NVENC, but it doesn't load AviSynth scripts directly. There's lots of outdated info out there, but I figured it out. Some links:

• The latest AviSynth+. The installer seems to install both 32-bit and 64-bit, and you have the option to install one or the other or both. Choose both anyway; it won't hurt. I ran into "cannot load 32-bit dll in 64-bit AviSynth" errors in my search for a solution but if you're on Windows 11, you're only really using 64-bit. You won't run into any problems with VirtualDub either if you use VirtualDub2 and stick with VirtualDub64.exe in the archive.
• AV FileSystem, aka AVFS. Apparently there are plenty of programs called "AVFS" and many sites refer you to the older version of the program which is no longer updated and will not solve the problem. Requires:
• Python 3.9.x
• VapourSynth Portable zip and drag AVFS.exe out of there.
• No need for some rando Pismo utility that VideoHelp points you to... but their procedure is otherwise correct. 

My entire D drive is raw captures and templates. so I put AVFS.exe there. To get started, I open Command Prompt. From here, I type in D: to change directories (learn more here), then avfs "template.avs" and hit Enter. The virtual avi is created almost instantly in C:\Volumes. Windows Explorer says the 24-minute virtual AVI is 336 GB, but it doesn't take up any space. And HandBrake will load it up no problem!

Still, the consensus is GPU encoding isn't as good as CPU encoding, even if the speed is amazing. But my counter to that is, remember what we had to do with the old x264 standard: 2-pass Very Slow encoding and 12000 kbps would be damn near lossless, but would also take forever to encode and they would be huge! So if I have to bump up the bit rate a bit, well then, okay. We're still already at over 50% savings in file reduction anyway. This other guy on reddit, has more faith in the quality of NVENC, and you know what? I'll take his side.

I started encoding just animation at 2500 kbps and it looked good; it's already a higher bit rate than those old One Piece rips with multiple languages, which I consider the gold standard. But then my live action captures looked good too at this setting so I guess I'm staying at 2500 kbps, with Encoder Preset at Slowest and rc-lookahead=32. I think 3000 kbps was the lowest I would go for x264 captures at 720p, so doing 2500 kbps for 1080p is a great savings. 

Also learned a neat term from all of this: JND (just-noticeable difference). 

Those One Piece settings, by the way, are: 

Format                         : Matroska
Format version                 : Version 4
File size                      : 235 MiB
Duration                       : 23 min 50 s
Overall bit rate               : 1 380 kb/s
Frame rate                     : 23.976 FPS
Encoded date                   : 2019-03-06 23:55:59 UTC
Writing application            : mkvmerge v9.2.0 ('Photograph') 64bit
Writing library                : libebml v1.3.3 + libmatroska v1.4.4
Attachments                    : OpenSans-Semibold.ttf
Video
ID                             : 1
Format                         : HEVC
Format/Info                    : High Efficiency Video Coding
Format profile                 : Main@L5.1@Main
Codec ID                       : V_MPEGH/ISO/HEVC
Duration                       : 23 min 50 s
Bit rate                       : 1 278 kb/s
Width                          : 1 920 pixels
Height                         : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio           : 16:9
Frame rate mode                : Constant
Frame rate                     : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Color space                    : YUV
Chroma subsampling             : 4:2:0
Bit depth                      : 8 bits
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)             : 0.026
Stream size                    : 218 MiB (93%)
Default                        : Yes
Forced                         : No
Audio
ID                             : 2
Format                         : AAC LC
Format/Info                    : Advanced Audio Codec Low Complexity
Codec ID                       : A_AAC-2
Duration                       : 23 min 50 s
Bit rate                       : 96.0 kb/s
Channel(s)                     : 2 channels
Channel layout                 : L R
Sampling rate                  : 44.1 kHz
Frame rate                     : 43.066 FPS (1024 SPF)
Compression mode               : Lossy
Delay relative to video        : 22 ms
Stream size                    : 16.7 MiB (7%)
Language                       : Japanese
Default                        : Yes
Forced                         : No
Text #1
ID                             : 3
Format                         : ASS
Codec ID                       : S_TEXT/ASS
Codec ID/Info                  : Advanced Sub Station Alpha
Duration                       : 23 min 31 s
Bit rate                       : 103 b/s
Frame rate                     : 0.209 FPS
Count of elements              : 295
Compression mode               : Lossless
Stream size                    : 17.9 KiB (0%)
Title                          : English
Language                       : English
Default                        : Yes
Forced                         : No
Menu
00:00:10.500                   : en:Opening Theme
00:02:40.660                   : en:Recap
00:03:11.942                   : en:Part A
00:16:17.186                   : en:Part B
00:23:15.687                   : en:Next Episode Preview

*I'm not completely ditching MeGUI because HandBrake crashes when I try to include chapter data. HandBrake has its own method, completely incompatible with the way I've done it for nearly two decades, which is a text file that MeGUI can accept even before encoding:

CHAPTER01=00:00:00.000
CHAPTER01NAME=1 - Cold Open
CHAPTER02=00:01:16.977
CHAPTER02NAME=2 - Title Sequence
CHAPTER03=00:02:47.017
CHAPTER03NAME=3 - Sponsors A
CHAPTER04=00:02:59.429
CHAPTER04NAME=4 - Act 1
CHAPTER05=00:09:29.969
CHAPTER05NAME=5 - Eyecatch A
CHAPTER06=00:09:37.994
CHAPTER06NAME=6 - Eyecatch B
CHAPTER07=00:09:43.900
CHAPTER07NAME=7 - Act 2
CHAPTER08=00:21:27.153
CHAPTER08NAME=8 - Credits
CHAPTER09=00:22:58.377
CHAPTER09NAME=9 - Post-Credits
CHAPTER10=00:23:59.438
CHAPTER10NAME=10 - Preview
CHAPTER11=00:24:14.436
CHAPTER11NAME=11 - Sponsors B

So after I let HandBrake encode, I run it through MeGUI again (One-Click > Advanced Config > Don't encode video) and it'll only take seconds for a lossless copy to be created, this time with chapter selection.

EDIT: Seems you can get away with lower bit rates if you have lower frame rates, according to AI-generated answers searching "does lower frame rate mean lower bit rate" in DuckDuckGo. I thought I heard almost the exact opposite a decade ago, but looking at those One Piece rips, the significant reduction in file size can't all be from CPU encoding, especially when there are so many audio tracks.