itsmattkc

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What to do if you suddenly find yourself homeless

FOOD

Find your nearest food bank or mission, for food

grocery stores with free samples, bakeries + stores with day-old bread

different fast food outlets have cheaper food and will generally let you hang out for a while.

some dollar stores carry food like cans of beans or fruit

SHELTER

Sleeping at beaches during the day is a good way to avoid suspicion and harassment

sleep with your bag strapped to you, so someone can’t steal it

Some churches offer short term residence

Find your nearest homeless shelter

Look for places that are open to the public

A large dumpster near a wall can often be moved so that flipping up the lids creates an angled shelter to stay dry

HYGIENE

A membership to the YMCA is usually only 10$, which has a shower, and sometimes laundry machines and lockers.

Public libraries have bathrooms you can use

Dollar stores carry low-end soaps and deodorant etc.

Wet wipes are all purpose and a life saver

Local beaches, go for a quick swim

Some truck stops have showers you can pay for

Staying clean is the best way to prevent disease, and potentially get a job to get back on your feet

Pack 7 pairs of socks/undies, 2 outfits, and one hooded rain jacket

OTHER

first aid kit

 sunscreen

 a travel alarm clock or watch

 mylar emergency blanket

 a backpack is a must

 downgrade your cellphone to a pay as you go with top-up cards

 sleeping bag

 travel kit of toothbrush, hair brush/comb, mirror

 swiss army knife

 can opener

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Watch me revisit the Sonic game of my childhood...does it hold up as an adult? 🤔

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This damn thread!

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Check out my new vid on AoT! 😃

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Bertoldt Hoover

Bertoldt Mover

Bertoldt Groover

Bertoldt Vancouver

Bertoldt Heimlich Maneuver

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240p and S-Video with the Elgato Game Capture HD

The Elgato is great, it has support for pretty much everything. It has built in H.264 encoding so the end-user doesn’t have to deal with mountains of uncompressed video (and also to facilitate its USB 2.0 bandwidth), which for most situations is good. This encoding introduces about 2 seconds of lag, and to compensate, it outputs HDMI so you can play latency-free on another monitor/TV. This works better than I expected, considering an analog to digital conversion must happen somewhere in that chain, and for most purposes this works absolutely fine. However, retro consoles (such as the N64 and earlier) seem to mostly output 240p, and a lot of TVs/monitors don’t support 240p over HDMI... for some reason...

I happen to have an EasyCAP as well, which is a cheap eBay capture card that I’ve heard described as “I would only recommend this to my worst enemies”. I intended to use the EasyCAP to record N64 just because it’s latency free and most of the time produces adequate results. This time, however, trying to record a 240p NTSC signal resulted in a weird pinstripe issue.

I can’t blame it, it was probably constructed by a sad Chinese kid after a long day at kindergarten.

I only had this striping issue in 240p and NTSC. PAL 240p and 480i anything seemed fine, but my N64 is American and very few games ever ran at 480. Basically 240p is just The Worst™.

The EasyCAP, despite its many glaring flaws, was relatively latency free (still feels like a few frames of lag to be honest, but what can you do, the little Chinese kid had their lunch money stolen that day).

I ended up taking advantage of my N64 S-Video cable, pumping the composite into the EasyCAP and S-Video into the Elgato, so even though I was playing on a shit quality picture, the recording was pristine.

The Elgato doesn’t include an S-Video adapter for its multi-AV input by default. They try persuading you to buy one but I made one instead.

I split the Y (luminance) and C (chrominance) from the S-Video to two RCA plugs and plugged them into the included component adapter. The Y goes into the green and the C goes into the blue. Good luck!

Probably not coincidentally, the red plug can indeed be used for composite (which I’m pumping into the EasyCAP in my setup).

So that’s how you record S-Video on the Elgato Game Capture HD without buying the extra adapter.

The official solution for the 240p issue is to get a different TV/monitor that supports the 240p HDMI signal. Technically, this is a valid solution too - splitting the signal before the Elgato. Not a great solution though, and likely one that’ll necessitate buying extra bits, but if you don’t care about S-Video, a cheap Y-splitter seemed perfectly adequate (signal loss was minimal).

Additionally, many TVs have composite outputs, so you can plug your console into the TV and then plug the TV’s monitor out into the Elgato.

Game Grumps uses a powered S-Video splitter, which is almost definitely the best/simplest solution (though they say the splitter does reduce the quality a tad). Technically my solution has no quality loss, but it also wouldn’t work for every setup (mostly depends if you can get a cable like this for your console, and if the console outputs both at the same time like the N64 and PS1 do).

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yall whenever i open tumblr in public

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Bad News: Our boss locked the keys inside the building.

Good News: We didn’t have to wait around for a locksmith.

Bad News: My boss finds it very concerning that I know how to pick locks, and tried to unlock my Tragic Backstory™. I was too embarrassed to admit that the reason I learned was because, at thirteen, I figured that was the kind of skill that would impress cute girls.

Good News: A cute girl saw me do it.

Bad News: It was Maggie, and since she’s already seen me fall out of several trees, cry because I saw a fawn that was just too damn small, and knows I can ride a unicycle, she’ll never think I’m cool no matter what I do. It’s too late. She knows.

[itsmattkc]

Research Reports - Index

I try to heavily research the topics I cover in my YouTube series and decided to publish as much as I could here for others to use as reference. For the most part, these reports are not primary sources as I’m simply aggregating information I find. Where possible, I will include references that should be cited instead.

Night Trap

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nearly the end of april.. you know what that means 

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Night Trap Research Report

Historical Context

Night Trap was one of two full games (the other being Sewer Shark) developed for a project codenamed the Hasbro NEMO (Never Ever Mention Outside).

Hasbro thought Nintendo’s extremely successful NES would cannibalize their toy market and scouted for a video game project to compete.

The NEMO project began around 1986 and would have been released in 1989 under the name Hasbro Control-Vision, except it was cancelled two months before because executives thought its $299 price tag wouldn’t be competitive against the NES (which seems to have cost only $79 at the time).

They were probably right, but if I was Hasbro I wouldn’t have bothered and would have just made NES games instead.

The Control-Vision was envisioned as the first console capable of streaming video and would have used VHS tapes. The VHS tapes could hold several video streams running simultaneously alongside game code. The game code’s primary function would be to switch video streams. This console would have seen little use outside of FMV titles.

Sewer Shark cost $3 million and Night Trap cost $1.5 million. Both were shot in 1987 but were placed into storage for several years after the Control-Vision was cancelled. Tom Zito, main developer of the Control-Vision, founded Digital Pictures and purchased the video game rights from Hasbro so that they could be released on the then-new Sega CD.

The Turbografx-16 was actually the first console to utilize CD for video games. It was released in Japan in 1987 (known there as the PC-Engine) and America in 1989 where it failed to break the US market. It was technically capable of FMV, but was seldom used for such. It seems FMV was largely an American concept (Hollywood I suppose).

The Sega CD (known as Mega-CD outside of America) was the first console to popularize CD-based games in America, and therefore the first that would be viable for Digital Pictures’ backlog.

Tom Zito/Digital Pictures fervently believed in their FMV technology as the future of video gaming. There’s an interview with Tom Zito from October 1995 in Next Generation magazine issue #3 dated March 1995 that really demonstrates his viewpoint at the time (which would turn out to be dead wrong). Archive.org has a digital copy of this magazine which can be viewed here: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-003 (page 110 of the PDF).

Night Trap was released on October 15, 1992, five years after its filming. It in fact shares the same release date as Sewer Shark (and also the Make My Video series, though I don’t know when they were filmed).

Kickstarter

https://kickstarter.com/projects/1018579240/night-trap-revamped

In 2014, ex-Digital Pictures founders attempted to kickstart an HD re-release of Night Trap on modern consoles. They claim that Night Trap was shot on 35mm film, so it could quite easily be remastered to at least HD. Unfortunately the Kickstarter was poorly promoted and suffered several problems that made backers suspicious, so it was ultimately unsuccessful. 

Controversy

In 1993, Night Trap and Mortal Kombat (both games on Sega consoles; the SNES version of Mortal Kombat was heavily censored) were the center of a Congressional hearing concerning mature/violent content in video games. Most of the Night Trap controversy centered around “the bathroom scene” (roughly 13 minutes into the game) where Augers capture a character and kill her if you don’t intervene and save her. Senators appear to confuse her death as the game’s objective.

The concern was largely based on the fact that throughout the 80s, video games were predominantly played by children. Senators disregard the idea that by 1993, those children could be late teens or even adults, and also the fact that the average age of a Sega CD owner was 22.

Nintendo appears to use the controversy as an opportunity to disparage Sega and position themselves as the more family friendly of the two. A reporter claims that Nintendo was often the one providing media with footage of Night Trap. Nintendo would later allow Mortal Kombat 2 to be released on the SNES uncensored, so I guess it didn’t work but then again Sega barely exists anymore so who’s the real winner

Digital Pictures remains butthurt about this to this day, promising in their Kickstarter that their HD remake would never appear on a Nintendo console. Grow up guys, even Sega got over that.

References: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVnL484jbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFkJw_hVhyI

Disc Contents

For my video I wanted to insert the game’s plot cutscenes but had trouble finding them unaltered. There was an “all cutscenes” collection from 10 years ago on YouTube but they were low quality. There were several “movie edits” that processed the cutscenes for upscaling and cut them together to resemble a film more closely but I didn’t want to use those. I just wanted the game to speak for itself.

While I used a longplay for some clips, longplays of Night Trap don’t contain every cutscene because the nature of the game requires you to leave the plot to catch Augers, especially during a perfect playthrough. Rather than play the game several times to capture the plot, I chose to extract the cutscenes directly from the disc - made possible by an existing tool called SGA Conversion and Analysis Tool (SCAT). This has the added benefit of excluding the “miss” sound, which is played separately by the game (old Night Trap movie edits that captured from the game were forced to retain them prior to the release of this tool).

I used the 32X port of Night Trap to extract cutscenes from, but recorded the Sega CD port for gameplay footage because it’s by far the most recognizable version. It seems the 3DO port’s video is considered the highest quality (even higher than the DOS port), but also the frame rate is lower (3DO is 12fps, 32X is 15). The tool worked pretty flawlessly, and claims to work on all Digital Pictures games for all platforms. The tool transcodes to uncompressed RGB24 video and PCM audio which is good but a little overkill. Its interface is also pretty terrible, but the VB.NET source code is provided which is nice.

There were 119 SGA files that I needed to convert so I could edit them. SCAT featured no bulk import/export feature so I opted to modify the source code to include one. In actuality it probably would have been faster to just transcode each file individually, but hey if you ever need a project to bulk transcode SGA to AVI, it can be downloaded here: 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7tmoAnShDodYXJUU2xQTWVYc2s

As a random sidenote, it’s fascinating to see the video palette working in SCAT. The Sega CD could only support 64 colours on screen at a time, so every couple frames, the palette changes to better accommodate whatever’s on screen at that time. While the FMV produced by the console is infamously crude, there’s a tremendous amount of intelligence in getting it to look as good as it does.

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why are old people so obsessed with doing this

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