Ronnie James Dio.

I never followed him in my youth when he was still playing and making music. Of course, I heard his music it was played everywhere especially between 84-87.
And I even liked some of what I heard. But my tastes were more aggressive with bands like Slayer, Deicide etc…
My vinyl purchases have been limited for a while now. I look mostly for albums that are on the rare side or music I completely missed. Not all of my Vinyl is Heavy Metal my tastes do vary. That said Metal is my choice music genre has been since I was a kid and still is as I am turning into an old fart.
So, since I have some knowledge of Dio and his music, I have decided to add his albums to my Metal on Vinyl collection. Not because I have to, but I feel I missed the core of his music in my youth due to being young and seeing only what I wanted to in my tunnel vision days.
My first seek & deliver will be Dio’s first studio album Holy Diver “1983” and I will tread on to hopefully get all of his studio albums hopefully before I die or some unforeseen god like meteor crashes down on me or I fall in a sink hole while sleeping. If none of these happen, I shall seek & deliver Dio to my saint or Unholy Metal on Vinyl collection.
Let there be Holy Diver!

Keanu Reeves sainthood.

This in not a good or positive thing. They are doing this to ultimately destroy him if and when he crosses the wrong person in his business “Hollywood”.

We are all human all of us are falable. Its almost cruel in what they are doing to this man. How long can he hold this saint hood that the media painted him to be.

Everyone stumbles its what makes us human. That’s right even Keauna.

I don’t say this in a mean or envious way I am a Keanu fan of quite a few of his films from Bill and Ted to Matrix and many others.

How long can someone play the perfect man? No less play it 24/7 with no brakes or trailer time. Before it backfires on him and the media just happens to be there. They will utterly destroy him for nothing more than cheap ratings.

People.love success stories but they are savages for destructive behavior and the media know it.

Vinyl loved so deeply we all see mint diamonds.

Went through my phase of listening to NWoTM: New Wave of Thrash Metal. Bands like Bio-Cancer, Thrashback, Terrordome, early Ultra-Violence etc…

Of course, still looked out for the old skool stuff from the 80s or already owned from that time frame.
Anthrax, Slayer, old Metallica are no brainers these are in every Vinyl collection of those that enjoy the most extreme of music through out the decades.

Debut Albums like, Dark Angel Darkness Descends or ED-Evil Dead: Annihilation Of Civilization, Rigor Mortis – Rigor Mortis.
I have some of these in collection but the ones I do not have are hitting very high price points that is fair some are great albums but it’s keeping the albums tucked away and not listened to due to pricing.
See a whole lot of folks charging mint prices for Vinyl and covers that are in Fair -VG condition.
I get it I love my albums and see them as excellent as well but if your gonna sell em be fair and seriously look at your albums and price accordingly.

I get it all my albums are in mint condition no one can tell me different. But I also am not selling them. If I were I’d look at them and try to see what a interested buyer would see.
Seriously folks this isn;’t a mint record.

lost cover in mail

Playstation VR on Playstation 5

PSVR was made for the Playstation 4 but some VR games and standard games actually got a bump up if you had the Pro version of the PS4. Which I did not.
But since I was able to pick up the PSVR and the camera for $110 I couldn’t pass it up & I figured since I would be connecting the camera & VR Headset to the PS5 games I figured I would get the bump up since the 5 is much more powerful than the 4. But nope these little up tics and speed hacks were coded directly for the PS4 Pro will be useless on a PS5.
Good news is all the Playstation 4 VR games & standard games and VR headset as well as controllers and cameras all work flawlessly on the PS5 it was a cool purchase in my book.
And since I already had the Oculus Rift & The Quest/Meta 2 I wanted to see what the PS VR could do they after all had all the top tier 3rd party publishers making VR games just for the PSVR most of which will never see the light of day on PC or a dedicated headset like the Quest 2.

I have set out to purchase 3 games which will be out of the top10 best PSVR games reviewed by top game review sites. And I love Supermassive games so The Patient was getting in no matter what as well as Until Dawn: Blood Rush both games are related to the PS4 2015 game non-VR Until Dawn which was an awesome horror games plays like a movie and all of their games usually use real actors. Blood Rush is in the top10 not The Patient it’s a VR game that is a prequel to Until Dawn so it’s a top10 to me fuck the review sites on this one.

I did not have the move controllers for Blood Rush so had to wait until they arrived to play it. Scored them for $35 on Ebay and got Until Dawn Blood Rush for like $14 on Amazon, Paid $10 to download the Patient from the Playstation store.
The 3rdgame is still undecided.
For now this ends here I still don’t have Blood Rush or the move controllers or the 3rd game.
I’ll add more on how this PSVR pans out and if it was worth my $110.
What I could tell you right away is the VR headset is low resolution compared to even the original Oculus Rift no less the Quest 2 or other VR headsets.
And many games use the controller no real hand tracking like PC VR the Move adds it but many games don’t need them.
This is for sure the PSVR is a sit on your couch and get into VR while the PC versions and dedicated headsets are tracking head-hands and you can move around you need to in most games made for PC-VR.
I can’t say yet if the sit and play VR works I haven’t really done this yet.

And I did 3d print my own PSVR headset holder. Pretty cool right?!?…Right! RIGHT!!

Update: 07/02 Before Dawn: Blood Rush arrived so this is very cool.
Blood Rush trailer-Rush Of Blood

07/03: The guns for the Move controllers. I am cheese had to have the guns. lol
They are actually pretty small.

Thanks to the 4th of July I won’t be getting the Move controllers until Tuesday July 5th 😦 Very sad for me. No Rush of Blood for me.

3d Printing is a blast but also a lot of work

As the title suggests.
3d Printing is really cool especially when you repair something with a part you printed right at home.
And you can print all kinds of useful things I printed a pen holder for my desk and a few mods for my Arcade cabinets. Also printed gun add-ons & clips to hold link wires for my Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest 2. Printed up a new knob for my broken one in the car.
The cool stuff is printing character diorama’s this is where it gets challenging as hell but awesome once you get some experience under your belt.
If you choose to go the route of character printing you’ll need patience and some skill with painting because 3d printers at least affordable ones can only print 1 color at a time. The 3d printers that do offer multi-colors are a bit more expensive but can only do dual extruders 2 colors. There are industrial ones that can take in many colors from what I understand but normal folks like me can’t do “afford” that.

I personally like to use White PLA filament for figures and stuff like that. I use Overture filament.
For paint I use Acrylic water based paints.
I use 2 large 3d Printers The Creasee CS30 and the Sunlu/Jayo S8.

Won’t BS you if you want decent colored diorama’s you have to make sure you see and color in every detail you can no matter how small or how narrow it can get.
Like anything else it’s all practice the more you do it the better you will get.
If you plan on selling them on Etsy anything Disney or Marvel will sell.
Here are the ones I have printed and painted.

Bartman non-traditional my personally picked colors.

Jason Vorhees holding a bloody decapitated head.

Just thoughts

As I get older I realize how the people I kept around in my life was for my comfort easier to stick with what ya know.
It speaks to my absolute deep laziness and how I know I am better and could have done so much more with my life.
Not blaming the people I hung with just myself for picking the ones I did and settling because it was easier on me.
Jenn is really the only good decision I made.

Street Fighter II Fighting System Arcade Cabinet

Rough week for the Street Fighter II cabinet.

Blew out 2 Power Supplies. They were old and due to poor air circulation for the PSU it did them in.

So ordered a new PSU. Making a wind tunnel with the Printer if I can’t get the PSU close enough to the back of cabinet to grab air from a ported hole.

But added Street Fighter V arcade version Coins needed Also added King Of Fighters XV.

Still working hard at getting the arcade version of Virtua Fighter V up & running.

Was using Revision C now looking for Revision R the Esports version which from what I understand supports higher resolutions unlike Revisions B & C.
The Street Fighter II cabinet is PC based hardware where the Ms. Pac-Man is an arcade board unmodified except for me adding 6lb springs in controllers and a light up marquee and the Mortal Kombat II cabinet is Raspberry-Pi based complete modification with complete controller & button change outs.
Am cutting it close I ordered a Arcade Light gun that actually works with LCD panels the 1st of it’s kind.
Was on a pretty large back order dropped my order in back in early November of 21 was told I would get by January. Well. January has passed now I am looking at early to mid March. Should be made on the next batch dated for Feb 28th my batch # matches this date.
Was luck enough to get it in Black and wasn’t cheap so only ordered 1 should have just bit the bullet and ordered 2.

Early build w/light up marquee, generic controllers:

The Magic of it all 🙂 The Black Box is a Sub Woofer Not a PC. There is more in there now.

Completed cabinet w/LCD- changing Marquee & Sanwa controllers.

Cabinet Completed.
Adding a modular PSU should help quite a bit with wire management.
And 16gb of memory.

Daphne coin/player 1 button mapping

When I initially wrote about getting Daphne Emulator up and running with Dragon’s Lair II.
I left out setting or mapping the buttons specifically the Coin and Player 1 buttons which I left no real information or help for this.
Using the Keyboard for your Coin and player 1 buttons takes away from having the arcade cabinet experience.

I took a few days break from working on the cabinet. I basically setup hardware and started getting games in emulators which left some games not fully working or just half working the Daphne emulator was the 1 that seriously bothered me because I’d would use jstest /dev/input/js0 in PuTty on my desktop to see which buttons were mapped. I would then add the corresponding # to the Daphne dapinput.ini located from PC desktop network/retropie/configs/Daphne and the changes did not take even after restarting or shutting down the Arcade cabinet.

It is a easy fix.
1st install Notepad++ 8.1 release | Notepad++ (notepad-plus-plus.org)
This isn’t needed but will help keep you from making a mistake.
then go into the Daphne folder which is located from your desktop- network/retropie/configs/Daphne
Inside the Daphne folder open up the dapinput.ini with standard Windows notepad
Then go back to your already opened window into Daphne click back until your in the main directory which should have 4 folders bios, configs, roms, splash screens open up configs again this time open up the “all” folder instead of Daphne then open the folder retroarch.joypads folder.
Locate the name of your joypad or controller you are using and open that file with notepad++.
You’ll now have the all config open in notepad ++ and the Daphne controller .ini open with standard windows notepad as well. when you are in the all folder look for the name of your controller you want buttons mapped for.
Now look at the select button that is on your Notepad ++ and see what number Select is if it is an 8 then you would go into the Daphne standard notepad and add 1 to the number. Since it is listed as 8 then you would change the Coin button to 9.
Now go back into the notepad++ that is open
Select button is Coin button
Start Button is the player 1 button
Look for the start button in the notepad++ this is your player 1 button same thing as coin button if the number is 6 then you will go back to the notepad find the start 1 and add a 7 to it.
After you mapped these 2 buttons you can go ahead and close all your windows and make sure to save the note pad ini that you made the changes to.
Restart emulation station on your cabinet.
Your Coin & player 1 buttons should be mapped.
You should now no longer need to use the keyboard to select player one or add coins.

Up-Down-Left-Right and action buttons are already mapped so these you should leave alone.
Of course if these basic controls are not mapped then follow the same instructions to map all the other needed buttons and joystick or joysticks.

Good luck and GODSPEED!

Scanline /HDMI hardware installed

Very happy I added the scanline hardware. It beats the hell out of using software based scanlines they really do hit your CPU hard and with a Raspberry-Pi that isn’t what you want.

I did some wire management it’s not so easy when there is so much in a small space.
I have looked at others innards after the mod is complete and they don’t have all the hardware I have inside my cabinet.
These few pics are examples of other cabinets with less hardware. Their management isn’t all that great either.
But I have saw a few examples of excellent wire management. I just suck at it I guess.

Here are examples.

This one isn’t really all that bad. But they are also using bare a minimum setup here.

This one also has less hardware but absolute terrible management. That Pi just dangling is terrible. And I have seen much, much worse in video’s.

Then there is my mess I am far from saying that my wire management is something spectacular.

The Pi 4 with the switch for power on top of the HDMI splitter 1 signal to 2.

This is the scanline generator which I hung on inside cabinet on the wall it’s hung with velcro.

This is the audio amplifier which is above the scanline generator it is screwed into side of cabinet.
Switch in background is for light it’s super bright and doesn’t require anything more than 2-AA batteries.
Even with light shining directly in I still need that light on when I am working on it.

This is the
VSDISPLAY HD-MI DVI VGA Audio LCD Controller Board. The small board coming off of it is for the LCD panel to make changes to color/contrast/brightness and other standard settings.

I tried to take some pics of scanline generator at work to compare it to with and without scanlines.
Unfortunately I already put cabinet back together so I compared same game one is on the modded MKII cabinet w/ scanlines and the other is my Ms. Pac-Man arcade without scanlines.
. So I used the camera on my cell these are not nice images that were shot within the OS. But can still see the difference.

These pictures really don’t show the difference all that great but in person it’s a huge difference. The scanlines seriously clean up the games image quality quite a bit. These older games for arcade or consoles were made with scanlines considered.

Salvatore's Place

Just another lame ass blog.