Flack

Turn on the Z64, then after it's completed "booting" then turn on your N64. A menu should appear on your television and you can load the games from there. I have a V64, a CD64, and a Z64. The Z64 was my first (bought it new) and it's still one of my favorites. The only hassle about it is keeping a zip drive around for transferring files back and forth.

During our recent Chicago vacation, I managed to break my digital camera. While the camera was in my front jeans pocket, I sat down and somehow managed to press the power button -- this then caused the lense to try and come out, which obviously it couldn't. This seemingly minor mistake managed to completely strip the lense's gears, causing the lense to stop protracting/retracting when you turned the camera on or off. I was able to manually coax the camera into working a couple days longer (enough time to snap some shots at my nephew Griffin's first birthday), but now it's dead dead. For the record this was a 5 megapixel Samsung digital camera. Susan and I bought matching ones for each other last year -- hers lasted about a month, mine made it nine months. As I've said before, broken electronics are always bittersweet. While it sucks when old electronics break, all it really means is I'm going to get NEW electronics -- yay! And so, off to Staples I went. I really want to take this opportunity to talk trash about the Staples in Yukon, Oklahoma. Every single time I go there, they don't have what I want in stock. Every. Single. Time. The last three trips I've gone to Staples was for blank CDs (which were on sale), a flat screen monitor (which was on sale), and a new digital camera. On all three trips I left empty handed. When I went to Staples to pick up blank CDs, the clerk told me, "just to go Office Depot, they match our sales ads." As a result of that bit of information, I bought the blank CDs, flat screen monitor, and yes, my new digital camera, all from Office Depot. They only mystery to this story is why I continue to go to Staples for anything. After this latest round, I doubt I will again in the future. So, off to Office Depot we went. The camera I picked out was Canon's A710 IS. It retails for $399, but has dropped to $299 and was on sale for $229. I bought the camera and came home to try it out. Unfortunately, I could not get the stinkin' thing to turn on! I flipped the batteries one way, then the other. Nothing. Even though it came with new batteries, I dug some more out of the junk drawer and tried those. Still, nothing. Finally I gave the whole thing to Susan and had her double check everything. She couldn't get it to turn on either! At that point we decided that something must be wrong with the camera, so we boxed everything back up and went back to Office Depot. OF COURSE they had no more in stock, so instead they gave us a refund. From there it was off to the next nearest Office Depot. Susan ran in while I stayed in the car with the kids; a few minutes later, she emerged with another Canon A710 IS! Funny thing is, when I opened the second one, the camera was in a sealed plastic bag. The first one wasn't. There was also a tag attached to the camera itself, a tag that was missing from the first one. I also noticed a plastic film that protects the LCD from scratches on the second camera that wasn't on the first. The first one had obviously been opened by someone else and, most likely, returned because it didn't work. I wonder how many people they plan on selling that same broken camera to?

Imagine, if you will, the following exchange in a high-level KFC board room meeting. "Sales are down -- there's no denying that fact. Some of you have speculated that our drop in profits has come from an increase in our customers' nutritional education. Less people are eating fried foods in general. Others of you suspect that the decrease has come from media reports about complaints from PETA, in how poorly we treat our chickens (before we kill them and cook them). But that is not the case. I am here to tell you today that our sales problem stems from the fact that we are ten feet too close to the road." At this point the overpaid tie-wearing board member, struggling to justify his job, displays a variety of PowerPoint slides (or maybe printed signs mounted on posterboard) showing how sales will increase if they were to move the building back 10'. The presentation consists of a dozen or so overhead views of the building with various arrows pointing in various directions. The presenter somehow convinces the group that not only is the building's location the source of their woes, but that moving the building is impossible, so the (currently functional) building needs to be torn down and rebuild 10' further away from the road. I don't know if that's how it really happened or not, but a year or two ago our local KFC restaurant, which was open and functioning as a restaurant, was torn down and rebuilt 10' away from where it originally stood. Not to be outdone, shortly afterwards Long John Silver's tore THEIR restaurant down, replacing it with a Long John Silver's/A&W Hotdog restaurant. Because, you know, it takes a lot of internal modifications to a restaurant to facilitate hotdog assembly. A couple of month's ago, the McDonalds in Mustang was torn down. They're building a new one right on top of the old one (I'm not even sure they're moving it ten feet). I'm reminded of this each time I walk into work. There, next to our building, is what's left of our old cafeteria. When the cafeteria was open, I used to eat there at least once a day, sometimes twice. Several years ago the cafeteria was closed. A few months ago, construction crews moved in to demolish the old cafeteria, and when that's finished, they're going to build (you guessed it) a new cafeteria on top of where the old cafeteria used to be. I think maybe this is where the old, "let's don't and say we did," saying came from.

While skimming Craig's List this morning, I ran across the following ad: I am moving and need to sell in two days. Come get it all for $39 in cash. 3 VCRs, 10 Commodore computers, 8 monitors, various printers, some games, Acer scanner, keyboards, cables, some computer books and magazines, floppy disks and floppy organizers, and more. Call John at ... Please do not leave recorded messages. Quicker than you can say "Commodork" I was on the phone with John, arranging to pick up the stuff at high noon. Of course the minute I hung up the phone, I remembered Susan had a dentist appointment today at noon. What to do? Fortunately I was able to coax (okay, swindle) Johnny into driving to pick up the stuff. I'm not sure either of us had any idea what was in store for us. After arriving at the seller's house, my first thought was ... wow, that's a lot of stuff. The list of items in the ad did not truly convey just how big the pile of hardware was going to be. My second thought was ... Susan's going to kill me. Money was exchanged, small talk was made, and then we got to loadin'. Johnny's truck, full o' stuff. Here's just some of the stuff in the bed. Susan is going to kill me dead. As advertised, tons of Commodore hardware. Some of the stuff is destined for the garbage, some of it will be given away to people who can use it, and some of it will probably live in my garage or gameroom for years to come.

We (the O'Hara Clan) arrived home Friday evening after a week-long vacation of visiting family in Chicago. Although the 800+ mile drive was long, the kids were great. Although Mason still doesn't have a firm grasp of time yet, he understood it well enough to ask, "how many hours are left," a few dozen times Friday. Mason and his grandpa's 32 train ride from Oklahoma City to Chicago went well. The connecting train from Ft. Worth to Chicago was over five hours late, but things worked out. Dad said the food on the train was excellent and the ride was great. We will have many great memories of this trip. Without telling a million stories, here are the highlights of our vacation. Sunday morning dinner at Joe's, Sunday afternoon birthday lunch at Uncle Buddy and Aunt Linda's, a trip to the Museum of Science and Industry with Patty, Dinner at Aurelio's Pizza, dinner at Uncle Joe's, visiting several parks, playing at Odyssey Fun World with the kids ... we did a lot this week! I took the liberty of combining Dad's pictures from the train ride and Uncle Joe's pictures from this past week in with my own, creating one big sooper mega picture album. It may take a minute or so for all the thumbnail pictures to load, but if you want to see pictures from our vacation, here they are. Chicago Vacation 2007 Photos

I just paid $100 off Craig's List for a used p4 2 ghz machine. $200's pretty high. Even those prices for monitors Rybags mentioned sounded high to me. I put $20 for my 19" monitor on Craig's List and haven't been able to get rid of it yet. I have close to a dozen old monitors out in my garage including three older (and heavy) 21" monitors that I can't seem to dump. I'll probably end up saving the 21" ones for MAME cabinets. What good are 14" and 15" ones?

On every road trip I go on, the "technology bar" seems to get raised. In the early 90's when Susan and I took our first trip together to Chicago, the only gadgets we had with us were a CB radio and a radar detector. In the mid-90's, I got my first laptop (a black and white 386 sx/16) that I began taking on the road with me. In 1998, Susan and I got our first cell phones -- that replaced the handfull of quarters we used to keep with us for "payphone emergencies." Likewise, the "change baggie" we always brought with us for Oklahoma's turnpikes was eventually replaced by an electronic Pikepass. In 2003, a GPS was added to our trip bag -- the oversized, paper-based Rand McNally atlas was officially retired. As my laptops have grown and advanced, wireless Internet was added a few years ago. For the first time, I was able to take my e-mail on the road with me. I had to rely on rest stops, coffee houses and (for the most part) unprotected wi-fi signnals for access, but it worked. Last year for the first time I had a cell phone with Internet access. The week I was in Chicago, I forwarded my e-mail addresses to my phone. Typing out responses was slow and tedious, but again, it worked. This year for the trip, Susan checked out a Sprint Air Card from work. It's a network card that uses the cell phone network for high speed Internet access. With it, you can access the Internet virtually anywhere; including from the passenger seat of your car, where I am typing and posting this from right now. While my wife navigates the Illinois highway system, I'm checking mail, reading forums and updating my blog. It all seems pretty cutting edge to me at the moment; of course, so did regular wireless Internet, my Palm Treo, and even that black and white laptop just a few years ago. I wonder what I will think of this experience when I look back a few years from now; will I be impressed at what I was able to do with technology, or will I laugh at how archaic it seems compared to whatever's available then.

Tomorrow Susan, Morgan and I hit the road for Chicago in our minivan, while Mason and Dad will embark upon their 30-hour train ride to the Windy City. Morgan, Susan and I should arrive in Chi-town late Saturday night, with Dad and Mase arriving around 2pm on Sunday. Both Susan and I have spent the majority of our evening preparing for the trip, albiet in different ways. While Susan scurries about packing things like clothes and and snacks for the children (myself included), my goal is to make sure we have enough DVDs, Gameboy games, audio CDs and electronic equipment to ensure that all parties will not have to suffer a moment of boredom along our respective journeys. Don Piano, along with our neices, will be housesitting for us once again. It always makes it easier to go away on vacation knowing someone will still hanging around the house; we just hope the written instructions for our alarm will be simple enough to follow ... So, as Susan finishes marking things off her checklist (Mason's ID? Check. Morgan's medicine? Check.) and I finish mine (Windows updates applied? Check. GPS firmware updated? Check.), we work on into the night, preparing for tomorrow's adventures to begin.

Right off the bat I would say the amount of games it comes with in immaterial because if it's a MAME machine you can put on whatever games you want. See if he will knock off a hundred bucks and take off half the ROMs, haha. If you don't have any parts on hand, then building a MAME cabinet can be very expensive -- you'll need to buy a cabinet, a monitor (or a way to interface with a monitor), some sort of control system, etc. If you don't have these things lying around then it can start getting expensive. I'd also ask, what did it look like? Did it have nice paint, a nice marquee, nice side art, etc? I have enough shit lying around in my garage that I could probably put a MAME cabinet together for free. A lot of the other guys around here could do the same thing, so to us, $400 is going to sound high (plus, like Chad said, it would be hard to gauge without knowing what exactly is inside). On the other hand, if you have no arcade or MAME related resources and do not have the skills and/or desire to build your own cabinet, I would say "well, time is money" and I wouldn't say that $400 is a terribly high amount of money, considering that if you were to buy everything from scratch you could easily spend $400 (and I've seen people spend double and triple that). These days $400 will get you 2-4 cheap cabs or possibly 1 classic -- so compared to that, it's not a bad deal. Then again, a PC stuck inside a Magic Sword cabinet ain't no classic ...

Thanks to a friend of mine who happened to be in the right place at the right time (thanks Ice), we are now the proud owners of a Nintendo Wii (pronounced "we"). For those not in the know, gameplay on the Wii focuses around the console's unique controller. Games are played by waving a handheld remote around in front of your television, pretty much ensuring that you're going to look like an idiot while playing (which makes watching people play the Wii almost as much fun as playing the Wii itself). The console supports four controllers but only comes with one, which meant a trip to Wal-Mart shortly after the machine arrived. And while the Nintendo Wii is the cheapest of the "current gen" consoles, it's still not cheap. The console itself runs $249 + tax (which is less than half the price of a PS3), with a second controller and a game adding another $100 to the total. The game that comes with the Wii, Wii Sports, includes five "mini" sports games that show off the system and the controllers. Mason and I played Tennis for almost an hour last night. Mason had to be constantly reminded to "back away from the television screen" and "quit swinging the controller wildly near other people's faces". He holds his own, though -- in our last game of the night, I squeaked out a victory of three games to two in a five game tennis set. In our head-to-head baseball game, I wasn't quite so lucky -- Mason won, with a score of 3-0. And, if all this "remote swinging" sounds kind of dangerous, it can be. Check out Wii Have A Problem, where damage from Wii's is recorded and can be sorted by people, televisions, lamps, ceiling fans, and more.

My wife put down the black and white checkered carpet and I haven't hard the heart to change it yet. Maybe someday -- of course that would involve moving everything out, and back in. There actually is rope lighting that runs all the way around the walls, right where the wall meets the sloped ceiling.

The book will be out this summer. If you want a DVD, check out Randy Fromme.

The only problem with turning the games in the middle sideways is if they are sideways and someone is playing them, you can no longer get down that aisle. If they are facing the middle, you can still play them and not block the aisle. One of the main reasons I put the games in the middle is because there are 3 support beams that run from floor to ceiling down the middle of the building (not my design, for sure). So the games in the middle kind of hide them; without those games there the first thing you think is, what are these big beams here for??

My initials were RPO so I used to always put PRO ... then I finally gave up and just started putting ROB. I liked how the other guy's initials were DIK. I think both of those guys must've visited every arcade in America.

Back when I was in fifth grade, our gifted class did a month-long study of clowns. I remember doing a book report on Emmett Kelly's biography, and even learning how to juggle. At the end of our clown class we had to perform in front of the school cafeteria during lunch time. And really, what better entertainment is there than dressing up a bunch of brainy, socially outcast nerds in bad clown makeup and forcing them to perform bad magic tricks and juggling acts in front of their peers as they eat lunch? I, however, stood out because I had an authentic clown wig. My Aunt Linda bought it for me. It was a giant red, white and blue afro. Among a sea of my badly costumed classmates, I at least looked the part. Those of you who have been reading my blog long enough should know two things by now; one, that I never throw anything away, and two, that the wig is going to make a comeback by the end of this entry. If you knew both of those things, add two points to your score. This week is "goofy" week at Mason's school -- you remember, weeks made up of "silly sock day" or "inside out shirt day". Monday was "pajama day" and today was "crazy hair day". Mason's hair is so short right now that there's not much that could be done with it. However, last night I remembered the wig, and after a bit of digging in boxes out in the garage, I found it. It's a bit thinner in spots than I remembered it being, but for being twenty plus years old, it's really not in bad shape. Mason proudly wore the wig to school today. I'll bet my Aunt Linda never would have imagined her nephew's kid would someday be wearing that thing to school.

You thought that was funny? I thought it was ass!

Thanks guys! I'm doing my best on fixing up a few of my machines. There's no worse bummer than having a friend come over, adding a credit and then having to say, "aw ... that one doesn't work right." A lot of them need little things, but it's all pretty simple stuff (new buttons or a little paint here and there). I hope to have everything up and running 100% by this summer.

The old me probably would have spent a weekend away from the family sitting on the couch, watching movies and wasting time on the computer. But as I get older, I'm finding better ways to use breaks like the one I got this weekend. Susan, Mason and Morgan (along with other members of Susan's family) drove out to the diamond dig again this weekend; I stayed behind. Yesterday I finished picking up the arcade. Jeff and his son Talon came over and spent some time hanging out. Jeff and I got one of my cabinets partially sanded down and got started stripping the parts off another cabinet, while Talon play tested quite a few of my games. This morning at Lowe's, I picked up a small workbench and some more shelves for the garage, which I've spent the past few hours assembling. I spent a little time last night over at dad's house, and I'm getting ready to go finish up my garage project. Essentially I've spent no time on the computer, telephone, or watching television. Occasionally, it's a nice break.

After doing some cleaning this weekend, I took some new pix of my backyard arcade.

Swapping JAMMA boards is one of the easiest things you can do when it comes to messing with arcade games. In fact, yesterday, I converted my Aerofighters cabinet to a multigame 48-in-1 cabinet in about 60 seconds. Here's what swapping JAMMA boards looks like. Here's my Aerofighters cabinet. The monitor is mounted vertically, which is exactly what I need for this project. Here is the 48-in-1 PCB. The board is on the right. I put some DVD cases on the left hand side of the picture for scale purposes. This board is small! Here's the back of my Aerofighters cabinet with the rear door removed. The monitor is at the top. On the bottom left is the power supply. The giant board to the right is Aerofighters. Here's a closer shot of the old board. At the top of the board is the JAMMA harness. It simply unplugs from the old board. For testing purposes, I've set the new board on top of the old one (I told you it was small!). Note how the harness plugs directly into the new board. That's the magic of JAMMA! Flip the game on, and like magic, the cabinet is now a new game! All that's left after this point is removing the old board and mounting the new board to the inside of the cabinet. That's a simple JAMMA swap!

After two days of reloading, restoring and reconfiguring, I'm glad to announce my return to the online world. If there were two lessons to be learned, they were "never experiment with encryption software without a good backup first," and "make sure you know what you're backing up." I've got a pretty wide backup net cast at this point. Not too long ago I added an additional 300 gig hard drive to my server, where the data from our laptops and workstations (yes, this is at home) get backed up to nightly. After a crash like I experienced this week, I was estatic to see just how much data I was able to restore, but slightly disappointed at what I had let slip through the cracks. For example, I've been backing up my My Documents folder (which is good -- things like the books I've written are stored there), but not my Program Files directory. About two months ago I installed a program that helps you keep track of your music and programs. I spent the better part of two weeks putting all my CDs into my laptop. Unfortunately, all that information resided in my Program Files directory. And now it's gone. Bummer. Lessons learned from this experience: - Separate your programs and your data. - Backup your data. - Verify your backups. - Don't install experimental encryption software without backing up your machine first (in retrospect, this one seems obvious). The other thing I lost is my e-mail directory, which includes my list of e-mail addresses. If you get a chance, drop me an e-mail at robohara (at) robohara (dot) com when you get a chance so I'll have your address on file again.

While trying something stupid on my laptop yesterday it seems I completely destroyed it. I'm working on restoring the data right now (I have a backup ... sort of), but until then I won't have access to e-mail (or a lot of other stuff). Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this adventure.

You're right about the repairs. I haven't had a lot of time to devote to the gameroom lately. This spring and summer I plan on getting everything back to 100%.

I'm going to be in Chicago the week of St. Patrick's Day and definitely plan on making a trip over to check this place out!