Yaknowwhat, it's not by any means ready yet but I'm heading out the door in a minute so I'm just gonna post my #gameDad website and see if it holds up under the Fedi Hug, here ya go lol
Spouse and I have kinda settled into a nice routine where we listen to a podcast together immediately after putting sproglet to bed. We drink tea and listen to No Such Thing As A Fish. She knits and I play Rollercoaster Tycoon on my #gameDad. Sometimes we light some incense. This is our transitional time of shifting gears between work/parenting and doing our own thing for the rest of the evening. It's very cosy and nice.
Between the occasional playing with mucky/oily hands because I have the gameDad with me in the car, and simply putting so much time on the joysticks, I've pretty much completely worn them out. Fortunately this Anbernic RG353V uses bog-standard Nintendo Switch style joycon joysticks, so I've ordered a pair of replacements that should be here tomorrow.
So I guess expect a little disassembly thread in the next few days :)
It's 1am, I'm about to fall into exhausted sleep, but first an update on my #gameDad joystick swap, I'll tell y'all the whole sordid tale tomorrow but have these two highlights in the meantime:
Gulikit hall-effect joysticks are mockable clownshoes nonsense, people only think they're good because they're comparing them to broken Nintendo Switch joysticks and they only work at all because Nintendo made an excellent calibration system to try to squeak a few more months out of their crummy Switch joysticks.
Linux has two joystick APIs and it's not easy to find out which one your software is using, but the important part is that they both suck.
🐰 Gee Dan, wasn't the start of this thread all about doing happy little quick repair jobs so you could get back to doing your cosy nightly ritual which involves playing open source games on a tiny little handheld Linux computer with cute little joysticks
🦝 buddy lemme fckn tell you smth
So does this mean you can't replace worn-out sticks on the RG353V #gameDad with Gulikit hall-effect joysticks?
Answer 1: you shouldn't, because these hall-effect sticks suck. I meant it when I said people only thought they were good because they were comparing them to broken joysticks. The tolerances on these things are as wide open as that picture of the guy bent over with his I MEAN AS WIDE AS MY ARMS WHEN A FRIEND IS IN NEED KEEP IT WHOLESOME DAN
Answer 2: oh damn, you bought the sticks already, well YES, you CAN calibrate these things - but it'll be a pain in the arse bigger than that picture of the guy bent over with his I MEAN BIGGER THAN UH HELPING MY FRIEND FLIP OVER A POOL TABLE WHICH APPARENTLY IS A THING I'M DOING TONIGHT ALSO
Helping out a mate set up her #gameDad recently. She got to a page asking a question and prodded the buttons without reading. I went "Wait hang on what did that say," we never found out but it was Probably something about updating a list of ports? Who knows! Anyway it started up fine, but... like, twenty years ago I would've gone, like, "Mate what are you doing," but these days...
When every website you visit thrusts a thing in your face as you're scrolling and you know it's spam so you just hit the heck-off button without looking, never mind reading
When every game you play starts with a bunch of logo videos that you have to mash buttons to skip
When a new game throws some bollocks up about an EULA that nobody expects anyone to ever read
When every three days your computer goes "Hey can I just -" and you read it once and understand that it's asking you to install spyware and then every other time you hit the Remind Me In 3 Days button without thinking or even pausing
When every day you get an email that says "Important information about your account" and it's never important information
When 80% of your physical mail goes straight into the recycling bin without even being opened because, well, it's just recycling
...yeah. It's absolutely no surprise that our default first interaction with a machine is to mash buttons randomly until it stops banging on about whatever and gets on with doing what we bought it to do.
All y'all #gameDad owners with PortMaster installed, particularly players of Rollercoaster Tycoon / OpenRCT2, and especially those having problems trying to find a half-decent torrent, might be interested to know that Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 Triple Thrill Pack is up on sale at gog.com for like $2.50
Literally not worth the hassle of pirating haha, I got that in coins on my nightstand
Previously talked about playing The Settlers on my #gameDad and how jarring it is to notice that every single character is a tiny lil white dude, well lately I've been playing the Absolute Heck out of Rollercoaster Tycoon (in the form of OpenRCT2 via PortMaster, very cool, lets you play old (and not-so-old) PC games via #gameDad friendly controls) and huh yeah it's a thing here too
Cupid by @GumpyFunction is a delight. Fiendish sliding block puzzle with cute funny cartoon graphics and dogs. It's a Game Boy Color ROM so you can play it on anything, use an emulator, flash it to a cart and play it on a real console, emulate it on your phone, load it onto your #gameDad (best option IMHO) or even play it in the browser at https://gumpyfunction.itch.io/cupid, pay what you want, minimum $0.00
(if this gives you the oh-no-what-if-it's-actually-good anxiety you can pay $0.00 now (no login needed!) and then go back and buy it again for $something)
I don't know Gumpy Function and have never spoken to him before so I hope he doesn't mind me posting his game here
Got a sick cat so I've been cuddling him and playing @Samobee's "Princess Farmer" today and gotta say, the polish on this game is absolutely outta this world
(also gotta say pls port this thing to #gameDad so I can play it during not-sick-cat-contexts too :P)
I haven't played much on the #gameDad the past couple of weeks, because I was doing a horrible server migration for Improbable Island. And then I used the domain I was gonna use to make a Game Dad Website for a testing server, but now the migration's done, the test server's no longer required, I can take back that domain name and put it to good purpose:
A series of fairy dry essays on the life-altering properties of frivolously cheap emulation devices
I haven't seen a Game Dad post in a while... I've been doing a routine where I play a game/games for maybe 15 to 20 minutes before I go to sleep, which matches up well with my partner who plays iPad games before bed. I've found it to be a relaxing wind down before sleep, and much better than doom scrolling.
Been sitting here since the 7th obsessively refreshing the tracking for my #Anbernic#RG35XX. It landed in Illinois on the 7th. Then nothing since then, just says “delivered to our shipping partner, USPS awaiting receipt of item”
Then out of nowhere… bam, late today it arrived at a USPS facility in Minneapolis!
Been putting off buying the SD cards and HDMI cable until it moved out of Illinois, but I didn’t think it would jump to Minnesota without passing through Chicago first.