Endgame Vita & PSTV gaming

My interest in the newest game consoles is still zero, so I'm revisiting the Vita and PSTV. Storage is cheap and plentiful with SD2Vita adapters, but the dream of simply taking your memory card out of your Vita and continuing on the PSTV will have to remain a dream; the bubble trick of keeping similarly placed bubbles across the 10 pages using system icons to preserve icon placement across memory card swaps just never worked for me. That's fine; I didn't want to be greeted with the "rebuilding database" message with every power-on anyhow. 

So I'm just going to get a separate 512 GB SD card for my PSTV and mirror exactly what I have on my Vita. The one fly in the ointment is transferring save data (and I don't plan on keeping PlayStation Plus forever), so thanks to these threads I should be able to copy the save data (located in ux0:/user/00/savedata) directly to/from my hard drive, or between the Vita and PSTV directly through ad hoc transfer, no PC needed!

Which files to transfer over? Just sort by date in VitaShell and the latest updated save dates (i.e. your last played games) will appear right at the top. Don't forget to select multiple folders with Square!

A not inexpensive lesson in buying anime

(TLDR: Skip the Honey and Clover DVDs, but do get the Blu-rays.)

Got nostalgic for the last two fansubs I ever downloaded:

• Welcome to the NHK
• Honey and Clover

The budget DVD rerelease of Welcome to the NHK was cheap enough on Amazon, with the whole package coming in at six episodes per DVD and four DVDs. I have to wonder if the original releases were of better quality, but I'm not gonna do anything more about it.

The DVDs of Honey and Clover, however, were far too expensive on Amazon, so I hopped on eBay to check prices there. I saw the entire set for $30 so I had to get it. Then I felt bad because there were actually Blu-rays available, but naturally more expensive; the first half of the series alone was $40. So I thought I could at least be happy that I got the whole series for less than even that.

The DVDs arrived in great condition, and the "book" style packaging was quite attractive. Video quality was as good as you can expect from pre-HD sources. But the truly awful subtitles crushed any enjoyment I could have gotten from it. As this review and this forum post mention, if you hear can clearly hear the surname, you damn well better have that name in the subtitles instead of the given name! Not only is it confusing hearing one name and reading another, but relationships can change, and if and when characters become closer, they'll drop the surnames and call each other by their given names instead. So what what happens when given names were used all along? As a translator, you're boned. As a viewer, you're more confused than you have to be.

Not unrelated: I was almost going to blow a stupid amount of money for the rare, out-of-print physical English manga of Welcome to the NHK, but it's available digitally at both Comixology and Viz. Of course, had I known that it was on Viz from the beginning, I probably wouldn't have gotten it at Comixology first. While the reading experience is equally good on tablets, you want Viz for browser-based vertical monitor for single-page viewing; Comixology can't seem to do single-page viewing on manga other than the cover page. But if you want to view both pages at the same time on a TV, again with a browser, you do want Comixology because Viz enforces this stupid border at the top and bottom of the screen that you can't get rid of. Viz has the border in browser-based vertical monitor viewing, but that almost perfectly centers the image, making it even better than if you had hit the full screen button.

Welp, more money to splurge on the physical complete Japanese-language manga!

Fun with XStation

Couldn't wait for Voultar to send me my PlayStation back with an XStation so I bought a premodded console on eBay. Of course, having two XStation-modded SCPH-100x PlayStations was always the plan for link-cable goodness.

Things to document before I forget:

Updating a GameShark is possible with the XStation. You want to select the Enhancement Disc with Full Load, and then you'll go back to the GameShark menu where you can update. As an aside, the CD-based GameSharks, or at least the CDX, won't work on SCPH-100X. At least according to this old GameShark thread. (Web Archive threads of interest: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

The preferred SD card brand for the XStation is... up for debate. I've read to stay away from, and go for, Samsung cards. I'm not sure which of my games are streaming audio (does that mean just not Red Book audio?), but right now I'm using a 256 GB SanDisk SD card for the Switch, and everything seems to work well.

Rip your own games with ImgBurn in the BIN/CUE format, and not the ISO or CCD formats. This is for three reasons:

1. You'll run into audio problems if your rips are in a format other than BIN/CUE. In my Tekken 1 test, which I know for sure has Red Book audio, the music wouldn't play from the CCD rip, but the other Tekkens were fine... until I beat Tekken 3 and the end credits theme wouldn't play from the CCD rip either. So once I reripped the games, all the games worked fine, including from Tekken 3's Theater Mode where swapping discs from 3>1>2>3>1>2>3 works. 
2. Redump's rips are also in BIN/CUE. 
3. When converting your own PSN-purchased PS1 classics (this tutorial is great), the final result is also BIN/CUE (...among others, but you want BIN/CUE).

If you decide to rename your BIN/CUE rips after they were initially created (and you kinda have to if you converted a PSN PSone Classic), be sure to also open the CUE in Notepad and edit the name to match. I can't be bothered to explain my own naming logic, so here are some of the file names of my own rips:

• Bust A Move Dance & Rhythm Action [J]
• Bust A Move 2 Dance Tengoku Mix [J]
• Metal Gear Solid Integral (1 of 3) [J]
• Metal Gear Solid Integral (2 of 3) [J]
• Metal Gear Solid Integral (3 of 3) VR Disc [J]
• Resident Evil Director's Cut [U]
• Resident Evil 2 Preview [U]
• WipEout 3 Special Edition [E]

Always make sure the file name extensions of the BIN/CUE rips are in lowercase; otherwise you'll get an ugly ".BIN" after each of your games in the game list. Be sure to edit the CUE to reflect this as well.

Soundtrack-swapping in Ridge Racer works as well as it ever did (i.e. not very well); you get the same problem of songs starting anywhere they feel like it. It was originally done by simply opening the PlayStation lid during gameplay and swapping in any music CD. Now you rip the music CD like you would a PlayStation game and make the music CD the second disc of a multiswap. I'm not familiar enough with Monster Ranch, Vib-Ribbon or Internal Section to see if they perform any differently.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that loading a ripped music CD takes you to the original PlayStation music player, so owners of "audiophile" PlayStations don't lose anything.

Lastly, if you for whatever reason decide to change the video mode to PAL and find yourself unable to see the screen and unable to set it back to NTSC, get another SD card and prepare it for use with the XStation (format it and put the "00xstation" folder with loader.bin and update.bin). Start XStation with that SD card, hit Triangle to go to options, and save. Turn off the PlayStation and connect the SD card to your computer. Drag and drop config.txt to your desktop. Remove that SD card and insert your original XStation SD card (the one with your games) and replace the config.txt there with the new one. 

UPDATE: The new firmware update displays only 47 characters, now simply cutting the file name off;  no more ellipses. 

Superman & Lois

Can I just say how much I love this series?? Brought me back to the superhero shows after I left with the end of Arrow. I binged the first five episodes of S&L on HBO Max and now I'm catching it on TV live. I can't think of a single criticism. 

And can I also say how much I love this Lois?? She looks exactly how I would picture a real-life Lois. She's just as pretty as the animated Lois from Superman: the Animated Series and Justice League. What a beauty!!

TiVo blanking problems fixed?

 A couple months ago the TiVo Mini in the living room didn't like the old HDMI 1.x cable was using, so I had to switch to one of those newer, fancier 2.x cables. Apparently that fixed it, so I switched back to the old cable just to see if the problem would come back... and it did, and the 2.x cable is still used for the TiVo Mini. (UPDATE: I see the TiVo Mini's resolution was set to "auto" after the update, which meant 4K; no wonder the old cable wasn't working. Pretty sure TiVo used to max out at 1080i.)

Back in my room, I would notice random blackouts every 10 minutes or so. At first I thought it was the Tendak HDMI-to-VGA adapter, but then I switched to a monitor that had native HDMI and it happened there too. So after Google yielded no useful results about intermittent blackouts/blanking/blinking, I tried switching the resolution from 1080p to 720p, and that seems to have fixed things.

USB and RJ45 wiring for Brook Universal Fight Board

I'm in a joystick-building mood again and I found out very quickly that anything other than a proper Neutrik RJ45 connection sucks.

The problem: The Brook Universal Fight Board uses a USB Type-B connection, which obviously isn't RJ45. But a Brook UFB with headers also has the headers for another type of USB connection if you so desire.

The solution: Order a bag of Cat 6 RJ45 ethernet cables, verify the colors, and learn how to crimp Dupont connectors using this crimp tool and this tutorial. (This tutorial is for putting on the Neutrik)

According to Toodles (assuming RJ45 clip on bottom):

RJ45 pin 1 = black - ground (USB) = orange/white stripe (T568B RJ45)

RJ45 pin 5 = white - D- (USB) = blue/white stripe (T568B RJ45)

RJ45 pin 6 = green - D+ (USB) = green (T568B RJ45)

RJ45 pin 8 = red - VCC (USB) = brown (T568B RJ45)

So left to right on a Brook UFB is this: 

1. G (orange/white stripe)
2. D+ (green)
3. D- (blue/white stripe)
4. VCC (brown)

This means the wires you can safely cut/eliminate are:

• green/white stripe
• brown/white stripe
• blue
• orange

The alternative is to actually use the USB connection, cut the end of the cable, and crimp on an RJ45 to that. You would only need to cut (and not even strip) four wires, and this is indeed how you would make cables for other systems with a multi-console board. But I think using an RJ45 cable in the first place is easier, not to mention cheaper.

For reference: USB pinouts and wire colors

Asagiri Gen-isms

We're all watching Dr. Stone on Crunchyroll, right? Good.

Took me a while to realize these were just backwards Japanese words...

りむ

じま

ばいや

ごいす

どいひ