Words On Wednesday

I recently discovered a project that allows Nintendo 64 games to be recompiled and personally got The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask running on my Steam Deck natively. It is absolutely insane, and I think it could breathe new life into playing N64 games on modern hardware. Back in May, I came across a reddit post in the r/SteamDeck subreddit about Majora's Mask Recomp. The post mentioned mod support (for an N64 game???), so I was both puzzled and intrigued. I decided to do a little research. It turns out, there has been a project running over the past year or so that allows  the user to "recompile N64 binaries into C code that can be compiled for any platform." To flex the Computer Science degree a bit here, a binary (file) is a program that has been converted into the necessary 0s and 1s to run on a particular computer architecture. Computer architectures vary wildly between different processors and platforms, so a binary for one chipset is unlikely or even impossi...

I mentioned a while back in January 2024  how I really wanted a Steam Deck. It seemed like a dream come true for a traditionally console gamer wanting to dabble in PC gaming. I certainly couldn’t justify the cost of a desktop gaming rig or a higher end laptop, but the Steam Deck is closer in price to (or even cheaper than) consoles. Furthermore, it maintains that console simplicity with SteamOS where you just select a game from your library and install it. Everything about the Steam Deck seemed to be exactly what I wanted, it checked all the boxes. As with any big purchase that I’m considering, I did a deep dive. Buyer’s remorse is awful and I tend to be more able to avoid it by digging in and understanding the product before I buy it. If I realize it isn’t what I need or I don’t want it as bad as I thought, I can pull the ripcord and get out before I’ve spent any money. It isn’t fool-proof, but it’s pretty effective. I looked up reviews. I joined the subreddit. I asked friends wha...

“Castlevania: Curse of Darkness” is a 3D action RPG released on the PS2 and Xbox in 2005. Early 3D games in the Castlevania series existed in a very weird space; they were trying to blaze a trail from a traditionally 2D genre into a third dimension, but 3D models were still fairly low resolution and the controls were often clunky. As such, Curse of Darkness is cursed (pun intended) with this sort of video game adolescence, where earlier games excelled with 2D sprites and traditional mechanics, and later games did something similar but better. However, does that mean that Curse of Darkness offers nothing worth playing today? My experience with Curse of Darkness began soon after it released on PS2. At a time when rentals were expensive and demos only existed for popular titles on quarterly demo discs, you basically had to make a decision off pictures from magazines and familiarity with the series. I played and enjoyed Castlevania games in the past, so it was a reasonably safe bet. Althou...

I finally picked up a Raspberry Pi to play emulated games on, and I am tremendously satisfied with the purchase. Making the Decision The interest has been there for a while. Especially around the release of the  NES Classic Edition and  SNES Classic Edition , I really considered getting a Raspberry Pi, but I just elected not to. At the end of the day, I had other platforms that I could play emulated games on. My phone, my PSP, and my laptop could all technically do the same thing. Around December 2020, I started playing Super Mario World with my kids. To get it on my living room TV (the only logical place that you play video games as a family), I loaded it onto the laptop I use for my Plex server and ran an HDMI cable to the TV. It worked, but it was tremendously cumbersome. The laptop sits behind the TV, and the lid stays closed, so I launched the game by using Chrome Remote Desktop on my phone to control the laptop and start the emulator software. I had to do this every tim...

I spoke of how I had discovered StepMania back in November 2017 . I bought a PS2 to USB adapter online, and I had high hopes that it would allow me to play with my dance pad. Admittedly, I’m a little late on the followup, but I did finally try to use the USB adapter  with the game. Shipping from an obscure little company in China obviously takes a while, so I didn’t get in any hurry waiting for my package. It took a few weeks, but the adapter finally came in. I told myself I would try it out, but I sat it aside and didn’t get around to it for a while. And by “a while,” I mean about 5 months. Things came up, I forgot about the adapter, and I just never got back to it. Finally, in March 2018, a friend came up and asked if I had ever gotten to try it out. I obviously had not, but we decided to hook it up. I expected there would be some configuration, so I was prepared for some setup time. With a black belt in Google-fu, there are very few general tech issues that I can’t solve wit...