Anyway, that's all that I have to say for now. Please excuse the fact that I've deleted posts in the fairly recent past, but I'm feeling a lot better now than I felt then. I can't wait for Walgreens to open in half an hour. I barely ate yesterday, which was not by choice.

Maybe, someday, I'll get myself another CRT for a price that'll be even more inflated than I got the one that I currently have for. I have other things to focus on right now, though.

Anything from working with electronics to having a Samsung Odyssey 3D monitor with a mini-PC will become fair game. I'll even have space to write things down...because finding space for writing can be a struggle with that 21-inch monitor there.

In some relation to my previous thread of posts, I put my only CRT up for auction. I know that it's not a CRT unless it's a CRT™️, but I'm seriously space-limited. I could do so much more on the table in the middle of my apartment without that monitor there.

And this is why I haven't seen a movie in well over a decade...and why, to me, Mother 3 is the worst game I've ever completed from start to finish.

It's like...people get excited over the action in movies, so I did what they did! But then, those people let me know that there were themes in those movies that had to be thought about....and because I wasn't talking about, or thinking about, those themes, I was saying the wrong things.

I had a high school teacher my last year who wanted to teach existentialism, and I was feeling so frustrated by a lot of things then. He wrote me a note of apology because I was unable to stay in his class until the end of the year. He felt awful.

Seriously...nearing twenty years ago now, I tried to explain what I was reading online about the final boss fight in Mother 3 to a friend after I played through the fan translation. I was unable to get my words out because my mind was unable to process all that I read.

(First of five posts)

Tonight, I told my best friend quite a bit about my absolute disdain for Mother 3. I guess, that's why I prefer arcade games these days. I'm not one for philosophy, and even if a Sega light gun game has a story, it can't be gone very far with.

A used gold Wii Classic Controller Pro sealed in a bag from a video game store. The price on the sticker reads $34.99.

I also got the Daniel Craig Goldeneye controller in Asbury Park. I traded it in back in 2016, but I prefer it over the black Wii Classic Controller Pros because it has a matte finish on the back!

I followed a slew of new things on Reddit because I was getting frustrated just following the things I was very familiar with. I'm glad that I was able to get out yesterday and see the tulips at Holland Ridge Farms.

Until I'll be able to change things, I'll be getting an Uber allotment through my New Jersey state plan. So, I'll be able to get out of where I live more often! I currently rely on social media for mental stimulation, which comes with its obvious and apparent caveats.

Steven Korvin (@_skorvin_@oldbytes.space) Just thought that I'd give a little status update on myself since I haven't posted in a while. I'm doing well! In four weeks, I'll be halfway toward my master's degree. Also, I don't do romantic love. That's just a "me" thing, not an everyone thing. I know when I first joined here again, I said that I had a girlfriend. I've been able to get so stressed that I've been able to delude myself into thinking some zany things. That's under control right now, though. Still...I checked with free legal aid, and I can't work for another two years unless I want my student loans to enter reinstatement. That's a bummer. I wish that I could do more by myself and not rely on my mother so much. I also got in touch with free legal aid and my local state representative early this year due to the fact that the local board of social services was finding some totally legal and normal things that I did with money to be problematic. I would've ended up homeless if Medicaid hadn't been reapproved. Thus, I'm not going to do things with money that the system finds to be "funky" this year. Hell, I'd like to offload a Sony/Sun Microsystems GDM-5410 monitor for space reasons and use an OLED/RetroTINK-4K instead, but I don't think that I will. I got in touch with some local independent pinball/arcade repair people. Despite the fact that I'm going for a master's degree, "brain" stuff can really overwhelm me. The people who I contacted gave me some good advice! I'll be receiving Randy Fromm's Big Blue Book of Really Great Technical Information tomorrow. Randy Fromm used to teach in-person arcade repair courses. Oh, and I might try to network at the Pinball Expo soon! I think it might be pretty cool for me to work as a technician at one of the pinball companies just outside of Chicago. Of course, I really need to get hands-on to learn. I could buy an old machine...and I'll probably do it and post on Pinside/Arcade-Museum regarding my progress and assistance that I might need...but give it a day at a time! I don't know if I said it, but the issue that I was having with my SD card adapter on my Windows 98 PC was simply due to an improperly seated IDE cable. I began having the exact same issues with a CompactFlash card adapter. Also, I talked here some months ago about an Aureal Vortex 2 card that is barely outputting sound. I don't want to buy a new card. That'd be wasteful. I'm not yet at a point where I can do this myself, so a repair company in Connecticut, Logistics CT, assured me that all the capacitors had to be replaced...and that they've worked on a ton of those cards. I sold my Voodoo5 5500 to get to financial stability...and I do mean that, because all the silly things that I did financially over the past year and a half in stress are now leveling out, so maybe, I'll get myself an Nvidia TNT2 until I'll be able to afford another 3dfx card, which will be in a while. And that's all that I have to say this time!

So, I posted on Mastodon about how I've been doing lately (oldbytes.space/@_skorvin_/1...). It's all good things. I just bought two introductory electronics courses on Coursera, one introductory course from BITS Pilani, and another that fits after from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Well, I fished Sonic Megamix Mania as Sonic. I don't know if I missed a final boss because I missed all the emeralds. I apologize for getting the name of the composer who I recognized wrong. It's Woofle, not Woolie. This isn't Bubsy, and I was very tired today.

I posted something similar last week, but I quickly deleted it. I get overwhelmed and tired. I sold my RTX 5070 to make ends meet due to a problem that I created, so I've been playing Sonic Megamix Mania. I'm no Sonic hack/mod connoisseur, but I take it that Woolie of Freedom Planet did the music!

In preparation of the California (and now many other US states) law and its ramifications, I've installed the ProtonVPN extension in Firefox to, at least, be able to download Linux ISOs. Not the datahoarder definition of Linux ISOs. Actual Linux ISOs. I don't know if I'll be able to use them...

If you noticed tension and agitation from me recently, I apologize. I know I deleted an account here a few months ago, so there's that, too.

But the summary is that my Medicaid was approved for the upcoming year! I'm not going to be homeless! I'm just going to play it safer with money this year.

Another use case to that might be cataloguing custom home computer parts!

Also, I don't know if this is feature bloat, but I would definitely recommend adding audio devices! There are a lot of examples out there, but I have 3.5mm and MIDI out with my PCs in mind!

Capture devices are another idea!

@jonasrosland.bsky.social I would recommend allowing custom add-ons to custom consoles on retrogamecabling.com. That way, you can add your own flash carts, ODEs, MSDEXP, et cetera! Heck, custom add-ons might help me list out parts to PC builds!

Dang. This is impressive. Great work! In 2014, I drew this kind of stuff by hand and an IT professor said, "You'll shoot your eye out!" Since then, I've had Visio (Argh, matey!). Heck, my favorite dream is the kind where I'm working out a Visio diagram of this kind of stuff.

(8/8) Right now, my Diamond Monster Sound MX300 is essentially passthrough for my SideWinder Force Feedback stick.

Other than that, people reached out to me last night in my thread on the Arcade-Museum forums from last year, so I'm feeling encouraged by that!

(7/8) I won't be stuck using a wavetable synthesis daughterboard on a Diamond Monster Sound MX300 for that! Though I need a working Diamond Monster Sound MX300 first. I got one that doesn't produce sound. Then, I got one with scratchy audio and that produced a whirring sound. I returned that one.

(6/8) I'm going to get a Roland CM-32L, Roland SC-55, and Yamaha MU80 in time. Because I have the PCMIDI add-on on my MK1869 XTREME, I'd be able to use those MIDI modules within Windows mode. I'd like to play through the old Eidos port of Final Fantasy VII with the MIDI soundtrack.

(5/8) Windows 9x QuickInstall by oerg866 changes so much for me. I added an ALi M5271 USB 2.0/FireWire add-in card to not stress the motherboard USB ports. That card gives me substantially lower scores in 3DMark99 MAX, but I'll take it.

(4/8) It doesn't feel like the time in which I couldn't handle things was that long when it took me so long to finally be able to live on my own. As crazy as it was, I had several Orpheus II cards that I sold.

(3/8) I'm going to get a DreamBlaster X2GS-TE wavetable synthesis daughterboard for this card. I hope that add-ons can add WSS support or true OPL3 support. I'm aware that the Orpheus II supported WSS and had a Yamaha OPL3 chip on board, but like I said, I couldn't handle things for some time.

(2/8) See, MS-DOS mode was a mystery to me on my old Compaq Presario running Windows 95. I used it to run Warcraft II but didn't really understand it overall. Since moving into my apartment in 2019, it took some time for me to feel that my interests and hobbies weren't "wrong."

An MK1869 XTREME sound card with PCMIDI add-on by Keropi and Marmes on the VOGONS forums. The PCBs of the sound card and the add-on are red. Visible on the sound card itself is an unpopulated wavetable header and two soldered-on memory chips. Visible on the chip of the add-on is a big Zilog chip and DIP switches to control interrupt requests used by the add-on.

(1/8) Finally got my MK1869 XTREME from Edro in Portugal! The first thing I did was set up Theme Hospital with ESFM music. Well, it took time for me to figure a lot out again because I finally have a full Windows 98 build again. I was just abstaining from MS-DOS mode until I would receive this card.

Three plushies of Chirper, the Cities: Skylines mascot, on a table with an old computer under the table and a CRT monitor on the table in back of the plushies. The three plushies from left to right are, Birthday Chirper wearing a party hat, Captain Chirper wearing a captain's hat and holding a fishing rod, and Super Chirper wearing a cape.

@citiesskylines.paradoxinteractive.com @makeship.bsky.social Chirp face, chirp face, I love you. The gang's all here!

As far as limiting myself in stress goes, it's stuff like, "What can I do for a job?" I tend to think really narrowly when that happens and that's just never healthy for me. For example, I need a wide range of hobbies and interests. It doesn't work for me to just focus on one overall topic.