I never worked for an HVAC company. I learned to work on them through my neighbor, the apartments I maintained and YouTube. I got to use my neighbor's fancy smancy digital manifold for the first time. You can see my solder repair right over the center of the digital gauges.
I was so fucking stoked when I saw Turok, I was positive this absolutely could not miss. Hunting dinosaurs with sci-fi weapons? FUCK yes. Until I played it....and, yeah, I see how they could fuck that up. Still my favorite answer in a job interview: What's your dream job? Dinosaur hunter. Fuck yeah.
"What's your biggest weakness?" "Honesty." "I don't think honesty is a weakness." "I don't give a fuck what you think."
For the people who want a taste of old school gaming and don't mind a little tinkering, I highly recommend putting together a RetroPie setup. It's not very technical, it's a satisfying little project, and you can end up with something the size of a deck of cards with every NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, Playstation, etc. game on it that you can imagine. I put one together for my sister a few years ago for Christmas, and before I even gave it to her I had played it with probably a dozen other people, who were all so excited to get their asses kicked by The Lion King or whatever.
I am super experienced with retro pie. It doesn’t work with GameCube. And N64 is super hit or miss (mostly miss). It’s great for SNES, NES, Genesis, and really anything olde than that.
My mistake on GameCube, I could have sworn that was in there. For N64, I tried a few games and were all successful, and seemed even better on the new version of the Pi. I know the Pi 3 had some issues with certain games, do you know if the Pi 4 is better across the board, or was that just the few games I tried out?
Probably half the people who saw the RetroPie immediately said, "oh my God, The Lion King was so hard. Do you have it?" and immediately wanted to play it. They were all immediately re-acquainted with how fucking maddening that game was but there were no broken controllers and a lot of laughing, so I consider it a success.
A lot of games run. They just run badly. Lagging audio, bad textures, things like that. Apparently N64 emulation is bad on most computing platforms. If you really want to run N64 games prepare for a lot of time in digging through forums to find what settings need to be altered to get the most out of each game.
The N64 controller scheme is just so wonky and stupid to emulate and play with on anything other than an actual N64 controller. And at that point, you might as well just play N64.
Project64(Windows) and Mupen64Plus(Cross-platform) are solid N64 options. Dolphin is great for Gamecube and Wii. As for controllers: The Wiimote is bluetooth and works pretty much out of the box The Gamecube controller can be connected via USB using the Switch Gamecube Controller Adapter (it's also the easiest to mock with an XBox or other PC controller) The N64 controller can be connected via USB with an Adaptoid if you can get your hands on one (I bought one years ago and have hung onto it). There are also third party N64 controller clones with USB built in, but I don't know how well they work.
If you already have one, either of the officially licensed MiniNES or MiniSNES are easily modded so that you can add the entire library of NES and SNES games so that they run through the built in emulator. I was also able to add in every Genesis game built as well. Not sure about how it would work with any other systems besides those 3; however.
They work like shit. Even if the button mapping is nailed down, there is noticeable lag in response when pressed. I spent the better part of a Saturday trying to get it working correctly just so my wife could play Harvest Moon 64. I ended up just getting her Stardew Valley instead.
I still don't understand why modern controllers only have four buttons under the right thumb, when the Genesis and N64 demonstrated that you could handle 6.
N64 made poor use out of the L and R trigger buttons. Instead of making those work naturally like every subsequent console, they gave us the Z button.
the evolution from SNES->N64->Gamecube->Switch has been steady progress (two shoulders -> two shoulders + trigger -> two triggers + shoulder -> two triggers + two shoulders), but the right thumb buttons seems to have devolved from N64->Gamecube->Switch
Crazy to think there could be a divide in childhoods based on video game systems. I had a SNES as a kid but went straight PlayStation when that debuted. I’ve never had anything other brand system. I probably missed out most on missing Goldeneye. I’ve only played it maybe a dozen one off matches. Kids I knew would have marathon playing sleepovers. Then Halo which I played but never the story.
Goldeneye was THE bar pre-party video game holy grail of Gen-Xers. It’s was ridiculously fun and addictive, and caused incredible rage fights. It was the first one to perfect four-player at home.