Othello is home from the vet, and as I type this he’s enthusiastically chowing down on some Fancy Feast - of which I have quite a bit that I never intended to feed anyone after the Great Wet Cat Food Scare of a year or two ago. All these cans o’ Fancy Feast came as little samplers packed in with cat litter. Right now, they seem to be hitting the spot just fine, which is exactly what we need; due to the same aforementioned Cat Food Scare, we switched off to a regionally-produced brand of dry food - i.e. something that didn’t come from the same mills as 90% of the commercial brands - which Othello now shows no interest in. He now happily chows down on canned food while the other two are locked away temporarily, which drives the kitty kids nuts. Especially when I put his food away and he happily struts back into the baby’s room to lay down on my bed, smelling like canned cat food…which the other two can’t find. Good to be king, eh? But it’s even better that he’s eating. Now let’s see you pack on some pounds, skinny boy.

Got an Avid drive cable in yesterday, so I was able to try out the new Avid drives I got from eBay - remember, the ones that came clanking against each other in a priority mail box with absolutely no packing material whatsoever except for one flimsy piece of bubble wrap between the drives? - and to my astonishment, one of them was not DOA. The other one’s media was so damaged that it couldn’t even get one minute into a low level format. Say it again with me: dumbass! I wouldn’t even be going to the ‘bay for these except that I’m dealing with a slightly older generation of Avid gear. I’d have to buy a completely new setup to get the generation of Avid that uses firewire for everything, and I can guarantee you that I wouldn’t be getting that one for under $425 and a trip to Illinois. (To date, despite a motherboard replacement, three new drives, and new drive cables - which are all kinds of not cheap - I still have yet to sink $1,000 into my Avid.)

Neat stuff comes out of though. I’ll be sending out the next round of PDF DVD orders today or tomorrow, including the first international order (!) and orders from folks who I have no idea who in the world they are. As much as I appreciate my circle of friends picking up copies, the whole “total strangers buying my little DVD that I made” thing is kind of exciting.

Speaking of video games, I finally got Daphne working last night, and played my first game of Astron Belt in ages. I wish I’d accomplished that before the PDF DVD went out the door. Ah well.

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Othello went to the vet this morning, and he’s still there undergoing blood tests. Apparently my quasi-diagnosis of him at least trying to keep water in his system was optomistic; they said he’s actually rather dehydrated. His back legs are practically skin and bone, even the hair is coming off. I’m not sure how I missed this happening, other than being preoccupied with Evan and with OEGE and the usual day-to-day stuff - I’d just cuddle my old cat when he came to me and I didn’t think anything of it, and then about a week ago I picked him up, noticed how skinny his hips seemed all of a sudden, and he had to weigh all of six or seven pounds. I hope this isn’t going to be a case of death by being taken for granted. Othello’s supposed to stick around with me and celebrate his 14th birthday this year. Oberon and Olivia have been moping without him here - either moping or full-bore spazzing around the house. Othello is sort of like the stabilizing adult influence among our little kitty herd (but hey, annoy him enough by batting his face or tail and he’ll throw down with the best of ‘em), so I worry about the other two cats too.

OVGE 2008 has been announced officially, so I can stop dropping vague hints. I really hope that some of the folks let down by CGE’s cancellation this year will check this show out - it’s really not a bad alternative for the collectors looking for good deals, and I have yet to go to an OVGE that wasn’t a lot of fun. Brian “icbrkr” Green is likely sitting this one out - i.e. “Warning! A giant battleship FATHERHOOD approaches!” - but you can bet that Flack and I will be there. Maybe we can even talk Ubik into busting out that Altair setup again. Of course I’ll have the PDF DVD with me, and I’m certain the CGE DVD set will be done by then too. (Sooner than that, in fact.)

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Well well well. A little bird has landed on my windowsill with news that a certain gaming gathering taking place in a certain major Oklahoma city between OKC and a certain Arkansas border is back on this year, maybe second-weekend-of-a-certain-August-ish-month. So it looks like anyone interested has another chance to pick up the PDF:DVD live and in person (but hey, by all means, don’t deprive yourself until then - you can get one here too).

Anything more specific than that, I don’t know, mainly because Obi caught and ate the bird. But it was a helpful bird. And tasty, or at least so I hear. Mark your calendars!

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The first batch of PDF DVD orders is out the door! Thanks to everyone who’s spending their stimulus checks with me. I hope you find the results stimulating. Wait, there’s got to be a better way to word that…

I’m waiting for the arrival of another new pair of Avid drive cables to test out a new (to me) pair of Avid drives that I just got. I’m a bit nervous about the drives in question because the fellow who sold them to me put both of them, with ABSOLUTELY NO PACKING MATERIAL, in a standard Priority Mail box and shipped them off. No “fragile” written on the box, no nothing. WTF!? It’s bad enough that, due to having a slightly older generation of Avid hardware than what’s in use now, I have to buy other people’s used drives. It’s even worse, however, when those other people turn out to be total freaking idiots.

Speaking of massive hard drives, the project to transfer my media files to the 1TB drive is more or less complete. I’m terribly terribly pleased with this drive thingie. It also passed the “breakout test” on Friday morning as a nasty storm blasted through - I got it shut down fairly quickly, and the plugs pulled. We didn’t have to take shelter or anything, but I also didn’t want it to get zapped by lightning. I could’ve very easily picked it up and walked off with it at that point.

I finally finished my official write-up on the Oklahoma City show; you can read that here. Rob also has his review posted here, with a bit on the afterparty here, which as usual I couldn’t stick around for long because I had to be back home the same night. If I’m ever well-rested for one of these shows, or I’m actually able to stick around for a while afterward, fear for your lives, for it is a sign of the apocalypse. Speaking of which, one thing I couldn’t find a place to mention in my review without it being a total non-sequitur was that, just as we were about to get on the interstate from Alma (which is kinda sorta more or less where we both live…near…), Kent and I saw a Delorean toodling down highway 71. No Mr. Fusion, just a Delorean. What makes it even funnier is that we both stared to see who was driving this thing through Alma of all places, and almost in unison we looked at each other and said “Wilford Brimley.”

Nothing else immediately spring into my sleep-deprived mind at the moment, so I suppose this concludes this core memory dump. Please check back later, I may have something coherent to say. (Though I’ll admit that the likelihood of that is very low.)

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Sorry I haven’t had a lot to say this weekend - Saturday I was either en route to, in, or returning home from Oklahoma City all day, and Sunday I proceeded to sleep in like a madman and then go feed horses (presumably also like a madman). I took the TVs and DVD player I used in OKC back to self-storage Sunday night, which marks an all-time record for me putting away all of my “expo wares” after getting home from a show. It was a decent show, pretty quiet, subdued and small though, and I strongly get the impression that while it being an on-school-premises event is a valuable backbone for it to have, that also hamstrung the promotion of it because everything from securing sponsors to putting up a web site (the latter of which never happened) had to be vetted by faculty. Putting it right around the end of the semester might not have helped in that regard either, since it meant that faculty was probably getting ready for, or grading, finals. Still, one lives and learns, and hopefully this show will make it to a second year. I sold about a dozen copies of the PDF DVD, a link to which I’m now contractually obliged to include in nearly every blog post or message board post I write, and not all of them went to Digital Press forum regulars, which was encouraging.

There were quite a few people who asked about it and didn’t buy it, and they were just as valuable as the folks who did fork over money: they gave me a very good idea of what to say on the actual ordering page, including clearing up a very frequent question, i.e. “Is this DVD the thing that’s showing on this TV screen, or is it emulators and ROMs?” I don’t want to denigrate any potential customers, but come on. I’m in a grey enough area with the commercials that are on there, but emulators and ROMs? That’d just be a suicidally stupid thing to sell on the internet. So into the disclaimer it went: yes, this DVD is what you saw on the screen - the timeline documentary thingie. Though three minor issues with it cropped up after I’d made the copies, in general, I’m very pleased with how the PDF DVD turned out. Maybe it’s a bit of an ego trip, but after watching that whole three-hour thing, and then the animated GreenhouseFX logo at the end with the music…that little logo animation just does not get old. Not for me anyway. Continue Reading »

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Editing is completed, DVD authoring is about 85% of the way there, and I expect to have that done around lunchtime Wednesday. Where you see “items” in the list below, basically that’s one game segment, one vintage commercial, one data screen (covering rarities, history notes, system introductions, etc.), or one “year intro” (similar to, but different from the year intros on the OVGE DVD - I had to do the graphical treatment frame-by-frame manually on these buggers!). Why all the chaptering within a given year? Simply put: so there can be a menu system that lets you jump to literally anything on the entire disc. Also, if you want to skip to the next game, just hit the chapter forward button on your DVD remote, and there you go. I hadn’t had to take a menu system into consideration for the previous OVGE version, simply because it was shown at my booth and wasn’t distributed in any way. I’ve gotten a little bit of an education in DVD authoring out of this project…

And now, without further adieu, the list. Continue Reading »

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Well, I bet you weren’t expecting to hear that. Next Saturday at the Oklahoma Electronic Gaming Expo in Oklahoma City, the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD will make its debut. Almost four hours of classic gaming history, footage, commercials, rarities and trivia on DVD for your viewing pleasure - and at a Low Low Price too. (For those who can’t make it to the show, I’ll figure something out afterward…just let me get the show out of the way first!)

I’m sure there are probably some folks wondering where the hell the Classic Gaming Expo DVDs are, and all I can say is: I’m still working on them. A lot of the PDF stuff was pre-produced a little over a year ago, and just needed to be edited into the proper order now. I’ll put it this way: it was much easier for me to finish the entire PDF DVD project within the month of April, in and around and on top of looking after the baby, doing housework, and doing other stuff (not to mention shutting down the whole shebang every time a bad storm rolls through, so the gear doesn’t get fried - which means approximately 2 days a week of downtime, than it has been to try to get the CGE DVDs done. We’re talking about a difference of several hours of material, and material where the sound has to be endlessly tweaked vs. material where the sound mix is already, for the most part, done.

I also wanted to get one project done, and done well, to re-energize myself for the home stretch of working on the CGE project. I’ve run into some epic sound issues (which had everything to do with the Riviera making no provisions for me or anyone else connected to the show to record sound direct from their little microphone mixing board for the keynotes - I know some people are bemoaning the fact that CGE isn’t going back to the Riv, but let me categorically state that I am not one of them). I’ve been working and reworking one segment of the CGE project for nearly a month in and of itself, just trying to get the sound to not suck. We’re talking about chopping up the sound and editing and tweaking it on the order of 30ths of a second. That’s some seriously tedious stuff, but when you’ve got speakers mumbling to begin with, or making no effort to even sit near the microphone, this is the kind of thing you find yourself up against, never mind your everyday sound editing like knocking down the sound level of the guy coughing in the front row right underneath the camera’s microphone. I’ll confess to you here and now that I’ve grown very discouraged with the CGE thing: I thought we’d have access to the sound board, and that would mean that this thing would be in the can by now. Instead, I’m hoping and praying that maybe CGE 2007 on DVD will be ready for you folks around the time that we would’ve been doing CGE 2008 if there was a show this year. Seriously, it should be done well before then, simply because having done the work on the PDF project has goosed my enthusiasm a bit.

For those who have seen the earlier incarnation of PDF at the Tulsa OVGE events, this one looks the same in many respects, but it’s vastly, vastly expanded - where the old one took all of about five minutes to blast through the video game achievements of the 1970s, this one takes nearly 40 minutes to get into the 1980s at all. There are twice as many game segments (including stand-alone dedicated consoles), more commercials than the original version, and more trivia bits, including iconic and unusual controllers, notes on vaporware products that were announced and then scrapped, and so on.

Even the PDF DVD has hit some technical snags, including a handful of items that went missing and had to be reconstructed from the original version, a major change in how I handled music for the project, and even new bits that had to be hand-animated from scratch. If you thought the old version was impressive, you better sit down for this one. Mainly because it’s twice as long, and you probably don’t want to be standing for that length of time.

For those feeling betrayed by the fact that this has gotten finished before the CGE DVDs: all I can say is, don’t feel that way. The PDF project has been in progress, at an even slower boil than the CGE project, for years. The announcement of the OKC show just gave me a little kick in the butt to put the other thing on pause for one month and crank this puppy out. Seeing how good the PDF project looks and sounds has renewed my enthusiasm for getting the CGE stuff done. As they say, stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you want to see some bits from the PDF DVD, here they are: Continue Reading »

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