XodiumLabs'...lab

For when it’s too long for a Bluesky post but not elaborate enough for a main blog post

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Day one at VCF West. Hoo boy I’m beat.

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Some photos from VCF West day zero.

Not exhaustive but yeah.

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If you're walking around with friends with 3ds consoles looking for streetpasses would you keep getting them from each other or would the console know who you already met that day? 🤔

So from my experience: if you’re diligent about clearing your queued up StreetPass pings I think it’s once per day? The person I was coexhibiting with last year had their 3DS too and I think I only got one ping per day off them.

You don’t get successive pings off one person until you go to your Plaza Gate and let them through, though. If you have someone waiting to be let in it won’t ping them a second time until you clear the queue.

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Another VCF post: if you’re going to VCF West this weekend and you own a 3DS, bring it on by! Myself and some friends will be looking to collect StreetPass pings!

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Hey you! Going to VCF West?

Curious about the PicoIDE? Maybe you ordered one and want to see what it’s going to be like? Maybe you’re still on the fence?

Thanks to polpo being awesome, he loaned me a PicoIDE Deluxe prerelease unit to show off at West! I usually feature BlueSCSI at my table but this year I unfortunately don’t really have a machine in the VCF fleet that can make use of one. (That said, my VCF neighbor and good friend will be doing a BlueSCSI thing with media recovery, so…)

But a PicoIDE? Oh my 98 box would love one. So here we are. The mounting hardware isn’t final (it’ll be injection molded, not 3D printed) but this should be a decent enough representation of the final product. And it plays Quake’s audio like a dream.

So yeah. Come on by and give it a spin. And if you have one, bring your 3DS! I and a few others will have ours on hand for Streetpass.

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As is my luck around my birthday (next month), this year the bad luck is striking my VCF machines, and I need them ready for West which is less than two weeks out. So you can imagine I am fucking panicking right now.

The least bad was the 98 Shuttle rolling over and dying. Ended up figuring out that the Radeon X800XL I run in that machine fell over to what I'm guessing is the AGP bridge chip overheating and breaking contact with the board. After a reflow and added heatsinks it came back to life, but I soon ran into another problem: One of the games we plan to play at VCF (Quake) was...fairly unstable on this card.

Not my first rodeo with stuff like this, but the main issue with the X800-series cards is that they weren't really intended to be used on a Win9x system. They got approximately ONE driver release: Catalyst 6.2. And that was a beta driver for 9x-based systems. So if that one driver doesn't work for you? Yeah, you're just boned if you want to stick with 98.

And Catalyst 6.2 did not want to get along with Quake, at all. Random crashes, usually upon either starting or exiting the game. WinQuake, DOSQuake, either or. Same issue. Other games run fine (with the exception of ClassiCube, which just dumps garbage at you almost as if your GPU is failing).

As much as I'd love to keep this thing a godbox, I had to make the executive decision to downgrade it for stability purposes and as such that meant getting the GeForce 6600 GT out. Which is far from a bad card. It's quite good, actually! But maaaan the X800 is such an awesome card. Sigh.

After getting drivers squared away the 98 build was thankfully stable and able to play Quake without issue.

Of course, things could never be that easy. Because when I turned my attention toward Satanicube, everything broke.

Satanicube has been running the same install for a while: Dual booting Mac OS 9.2.2 and 10.4.11 on separate partitions. I thought everything was going to be fine...until it crashed. Which is normal, it is running a 1.8GHz G4, after all. Some instability is to be expected. That poor Cube was never intended to be this powerful.

Where things took a dark turn was what happened when it restarted and did the requisite disk check that OS 9 does when a unsafe reboot happens.

ERROR: Disk First Aid found problems with your startup disk that it can't repair. Back up your disk now.

Why this struck terror into my heart was because I had been here before. This is a slow-moving corruption that just slowly but surely renders OS 9 unworkable as it eats through everything and thus far the only solution to stop it is to just...wipe everything and reinstall. And considering my OS 9 partition was pretty well dialed in, this meant I had to do a mountain of work to get it set back up again. Fuck.

And yes, I've tried DiskWarrior. Even it has no idea what to do. Let alone Disk First Aid in OS X. Per Doctor Cat...

So yeah. Clearly I had to do a full reinstall. And given that I felt OS X 10.4 was partially responsible here (I've had it clash with OS 9, especially with Spotlight), I thought it would be a good idea to step the OS X side down to something more appropriate for this machine, like 10.1 or 10.2.

Now, the OS X part of this went smoothly. Kind of. In the process of trying to boot from my (official) 10.1 disc, the Cube's optical drive decided to cash in its chips in such a way that it was holding the entire IDE bus hostage. Because it was trying to read a disc it was having trouble reading, and getting stuck in this loop. Worse yet, it refused to eject the disc.

So I got a spare optical drive (not sure where it came from but I'm happy to have it), took it apart, serviced it, and found that the rubber rollers had become completely detached from the smooth metal rod they're on. Pulling back the rubber and applying some CA glue to the smooth rod allowed the rubber rollers to stick again, and thankfully with that + a new belt, the optical drive now ejects as well as it did from the factory. Cool.

(And thankfully reads discs fine, too!)

I got everything put back together...and now the machine just straight up wasn't booting at all. Black screen, everything unresponsive. I suspected the RAM, and swapped that out...and it came back to life. But the RAM in it wasn't testing bad, so I just hosed the RAM slots down with contact cleaner and that seemed to fix it.

I swear. If it's not one thing with this machine...

I then tried to get Mac OS reinstalled and that was an adventure because the Cube would reject my 10.2 discs (had to use Firewire for this). Got OS 9 reinstalled too, went to fire up Quake 3...and black screen. The game was still running, I could hear it. But the monitor (a 17" Apple Studio Display) was blank. I knew it supported this resolution. WTF?

This...was a long rabbit hole I went down. In this particular instance I rebooted the Cube and...nothing. It was giving me the good old "where's my OS, human?" routine. Like the SSD was no longer there. Except it absolutely was! Booting it from my 10.2 FW drive showed the SSD was still being detected, it was just...rendered unbootable somehow.

Sigh.

Fine. I guess we get to do this the super cautious way. Reinstall EVERYTHING. Backups at EVERY TURN. I am losing my fucking mind.

Eventually, I got things back to where they were. And got backups across three different drives so if something goes wrong I am beyond covered. But I was still having the video issue, and I had no idea what was causing it.

I did eventually get something to happen, but it didn't look good.

I swear, if my GeForce 3 decided NOW was the time to cash in its chips, I was going to be apocalyptic. I mean, I know this is old hardware that could fall over at any second, but still.

I tried so many things. Another ADC monitor. Still happened. The only sign of hope was hooking a VGA monitor up and that worked, even when setting the video resolution as low as it could go. This was isolated to DVI/ADC, whatever it was.

As a last-ditch effort, I grabbed my eMac OS 9 disc, fired it up in Classic Mode (which thankfully worked!) and had it install OS 9, fresh, to a spare partition on one of my FW hard drives. I then took the extensions folder from that, deleted the multiprocessing folder (as you need to do if you're running a 7447a upgrade like I am) and just...swapped it in to the System Folder on my Cube's SSD.

A reboot later, and...hey! I can change resolutions without the whole system bugging out now! Great, the card isn't dead, this is software. Thank fuck.

What I suspect happened is when I installed Photoshop 4.0, it overwrote QuickTime with an ancient version that doesn't work on OS 9, which causes OS 9 some issues on the backend such that reinstalling QuickTime 6 doesn't fix. Probably shoulda used a newer version of Photoshop. But since QuickTime is so integrated to OS 9...if it gets hooped maybe it can cause these video issues. I dunno.

All I know is that the problem was fixed, and thankfully after installing more games and trying them all, the problem seemed to stay fixed. I rebooted into Jaguar, took another backup, restored that backup to make sure it worked, and all checks out.

Thank Jobs that's over.

Right?

Nah, it wouldn't be me if one more thing didn't go wrong.

I have a set of Harman Kardon Soundsticks (with a USB iSub) that I plan to show off, too. Up until now, they worked great...until the iSub stopped working.

Thankfully, this was simple. When turning/putting pressure on the sub's volume adjustment, the sub would come back. But the minute I let go? Dead. Great. Cold solder joints and a dirty potentiometer. I can do this.

Taking apart the iSub was mostly straightforward, screws are easy to spot. The rubber O-ring around the unit was a pain to get back on until I realized you need to seat the "dome" of the iSub on the base before sliding the O-ring into the crevice between the two halves.

I reflowed the joints, squirted a ton of contact cleaner into the pot and actuated it, and that brought it back. Wonderful. An easy fix amidst this mess I'm in.

With that, I really hope the nightmare is over and the rest is smooth sailing from here. Because I don't think I've had back to back to back failures like this prior to a VCF before.

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One of those things that irritates me--especially in this discourse surrounding digital games that's taken off as of late--is when, inevitably, talk about the PC going all digital comes up. Also inevitably, you'll get some dingus saying "it's no different on the PC, Valve has a monopoly!"

oh if I could reach through the screen and slap you

Usually these statements come from those that swear allegiance to Epic and the Epic Game Store, once you peel back the veneer a bit. Because, far as I know, I don't see the GOG faithful (or GMG faithful, or MS Store faithful, or...) going online to complain about this. It's usually, without fail, the EGS fanboys.

First off: Yeah, Valve does operate the leading storefront on the PC. But would I call it a monopoly? Not really, no. Monopoly--at least the spirit of the word--implies a company that would do some underhanded shit to maintain their lead and shut out competitors, and far as I know, Valve hasn't done this.

Y'know how Valve built their behemoth of a presence on PC? They did the work. Steam was reviled when it launched. Valve sunk effort in to turn Steam's reputation around. And when that happened? They didn't stop. Valve has sunk tons of effort into Linux gaming. Into things like SteamInput to make controller binding less of a headache.

At least right now, Valve has built their staggering lead on the PC by...being an example of a company that actually treats its customers well, by trying to be a net positive to the landscape rather than getting protective over their lead and doing everything they can to lock out anyone who would dare compete.

Surely, the way some of these fanboys evangelize Epic, they must do something like this, right?

Well, no. Epic didn't try to launch the EGS with goodwill, or by copying any of Valve's moves. They launched a substandard store (which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, just...eh) and attempted to force people into it by throwing tons of money around to convince studios to forego Steam and give the EGS timed exclusivity.

This notably affected pre-ordered games, which at the time of pre-ordering stated that you'd get a Steam key. Now, suddenly, you were getting an EGS key instead.

However, let's step back to that "substandard store" bit. I'm not going to meme here and harp on the lack of a shopping cart even though that's a valid complaint. No, for a while, the EGS lacked even basic email verification. This means I can either enter an email that doesn't actually exist and Epic wouldn't bother to check it, or I could enter someone else's email and Epic wouldn't bother to verify that I own it.

Keep in mind the EGS launched at the very end of 2018. How you screw this up in 2018 is something that has to be studied.

Back to "buying exclusivity to games", because there's more there: Epic would also buy up Psyonix and Mediatonic (known for Rocket League and Fall Guys, respectively) and then delist their games on Steam and force people into making "barebone" Epic accounts. Worse yet, this came with Epic killing Linux support for Rocket League, a game which ran perfectly fine on Linux prior to this.

(There's probably something to be said here for Epic's handling of Rocket League post-purchase but I'm not super clued into that.)

Given these things alone, I really feel like Epic is behaving more like a monopoly than Valve ever did. Rather than putting money into improving their store for the longest time, they just...kept sinking money into convincing publishers (mostly) to put their games on Epic only for a certain period of time.

For someone (specifically referring to Sweeney here) who wanted to "topple the Valve monopoly", dealing splash damage to other stores by locking in that exclusivity isn't very Cash Money of you, Tim. You act like you're for the gamers, but when it comes down to it, you only care about yourself.

He's also wholly incapable of reading the room, like when people were sick and tired of NFTs and were cheering on other storefronts either heavily regulating them, or banning them outright. Nope, Tim was like "hey, come on down, we will gladly look the other way!"

As such it's also no surprise that when it comes to AI garbage and how Valve is now mandating that games need to disclose their use of generative AI, he's mad about that too. Like, come on, man.

And yet, somehow, I'm supposed to root for this guy, his company, and his store which didn't try to bank any goodwill with anyone outside of giving away free games to try and entice people to walk in the door. EGS has not earned the reputation that Steam has, and even in 2026 there are still fanboys that absolutely seethe about this.

If you want the EGS to have the same reputation that Steam has, maybe EGS needs to be a net positive on the PC gaming market rather than eternally being that store that just throws free games around in hopes that you'll ignore all the bad shit they've done? Valve got where it is by genuinely being a great steward of the PC gaming community.

And it feels like Epic just doesn't care to even put in the bare minimum effort to follow in Valve's footsteps on that front.

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One of the things I like about having a local music library: I get to play it on old machines and just enjoy the whimsy that came with these older media players. I think Apple Music still has visualizers but they don’t come close to how awesome WMP9’s are.

It’s like a really complicated lava lamp.

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So yeah why not throw in a little nod to the Undertale/Deltarune fans this year at VCF. Not that you’d want to play it at a convention for any long period of time, but it’s just a “hey this runs on XP look” kinda thing.

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That’s one of those things that’ll just cause you a nice heart attack when you’re cycling through your VCF lineup and getting everything ready.

The 98 Shuttle wasn’t POSTing and after a bunch of back and forth I finally got an incredibly fucked up POST screen. Ended up determining that this Radeon X800XL had finally died (a second time!) and yeah. That was that. Or was it?

I wasn’t about to let this expensive-ass card ride off into the sunset so I gave it a proper reflow and cleanup, threw it back in, held my breath, and…it lives again!

I still plan on having a backup video card on hand for VCF, but I subjected this system to ten full hours of UT99 yesterday and it remained stable as can be for all of it, so hopefully that last reflow was all it needed.

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I swear to Odin if I hear "but PC gamers have embraced the all-digital future, why shouldn't consoles?" one more time...

Despite being similar, the two platforms are worlds apart. Unlike consoles, there are multiple digital storefronts. Steam, GOG, Microsoft Store, and yes, I suppose Epic counts (as much as they suck). On consoles that are digital only, you're locked to the console maker's storefront.

You are locked to whatever sales they have and whatever price they want to set, rather than what the used market settles at. If I couldn't buy physical games on my Switch 2, for example, I'd be locked into paying $60 for a several year old game rather than getting it at half that on the used market.

Yes, digital only on the PC still has the same issues it has on the console, specifically what with lending games to friends or buying used copies for cheap. But I'd like to think that due to the aforementioned competition and frequent sales offered by a lot of digital storefronts on PC (Epic giving away games, Steam steeply discounting stuff for their seasonal sales) that this hurts significantly less on PC than it would on consoles.

Plus, on PC, no one is stopping you from installing whatever game you want from wherever you got it. If you wished to sail the seven seas, no one is stopping you from doing so. Whereas on the consoles...those require jailbreaks to do that kind of stuff.

So yeah.

While the two are similar, they are not directly comparable, and what's good for the PC is not necessarily good for the console.

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I got this reply to me snarking about people whining about the Switch 2’s console price when, due to the landscape we live in now, the Switch 2’s competition is either significantly more expensive, or at best the same price (for a console you probably shouldn’t buy into anyway: the Xbox Series S).

I could spill a ton of pixels here but it really comes down to this: none of those other consoles were born into a period of economic turmoil like what we’re experiencing right now, where a cabal of slop-serving companies pay through the nose to lock out production of RAM/storage for anyone but themselves.

(And before this? We had tariffs fueling supply chain instability, which was a *wonderful* time.)

Also, the prices stated in that reply aren’t accounting for inflation, which has gone up significantly since some of the earlier consoles on that list. Running the OG Switch through an inflation calculator gives us $410.14, based on the $299 launch price. That’s not super far removed from the Switch 2’s launch price.

I fully believe if we were still in 2024 the Switch 2 would have launched at $399, a mere $50 over the OLED. Hell, maybe it would have even replaced the OLED model at its price point. But we aren’t living in 2024 anymore. The whole landscape is fucked, everyone is getting hit, and somehow despite it all Nintendo still has the cheapest console.

But yet, somehow, Nintendo bad because of this.

I don’t understand the rabid Nintendo haters.

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Getting the Satanicube out for VCF West testing. Makes for a really good lava lamp.

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Working on stress testing the 98 Shuttle for VCF West this year to make sure it doesn’t suffer a *thermal event* at the show. I think putting the CPU heatsink in push pull with an external fan has helped (the internal fan is still in there plugging away) has helped tremendously to pull heat out of the chassis. The video card (ATI X800XL) settles around 48-51c which is totally fine.

Also totally in love with the wallpaper I made a bit ago. Saw some clouds outside my house that looked very Win9x to my eyes…took a photo and did some photoshop and bam.

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Hey, you exhibit at VCF sometimes, right? What would your most elaborate exhibit look like, with unlimited resources and access to rare computers and the money for any and all details and decorations?

Ohhh. That’s actually something I haven’t thought about. Off the top of my head I’d love to do something with, say, fun but rare systems of the mid-00s. Maybe one of those systems you’d see in the magazines from system builders like Falcon. I remember being quite enamored with the many fun color options they had available! I’d love to exhibit one with a Gallatin P4 (the P4 Extreme Edition).

One of my personal grails (and system I’d love to exhibit) is an HP Blackbird 002. Such a beautiful system. Sad it’s so rare now.

But yeah. To answer the question I’d probably keep to the era I already tend to do exhibits for (late 90s to the late 00s) but just…do it with rare hardware that you can’t find anymore.

My dream blunt rotation for such an exhibit would probably be:

That Blackbird 002

A mid 00s Falcon Fragbox

A Dell M2010 (maybe joined by an Adamo 13)

One of those Shuttles that This Does Not Compute has. The one with the LCD on the front.

(I’d of course also put more effort into signage and stuff if I had unlimited resources, hah)

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As we near the 10th birthday (holy shit) of one of the most prized pieces of equipment I own (my Nikon D7200), I think I’ve come to a decision regarding its future:

I’m retiring it.

Okay, no, not really.

What I really mean here is that at least when it comes to public events where there are gatherings of people, I’m going to opt to just use my phone, or bring something smaller like my RX100M2. The D7200 will still see some use…for landscapes and things.

Why? For a simple reason: whenever I carry the D7200 around it really does feel like people see you in a different light, and not necessarily a good way. People stare at you like you’re holding a loaded gun. Staff at some establishments get uneasy and even ask you to leave. (This happened to me at a place that proudly proclaimed they wanted you to take pictures with your phone and share them on instagram!)

It’s hard to not notice this when you’re sitting down to process photos and all you see are people staring daggers at you. But the photos taken with my phone? Oh no one cares, it’s a big whatever.

Like, dude, I’m just a hobbyist. I’m not here for anyone else other than myself. The only thing I’m doing with these photos is putting them on Flickr. I’ve got zero professional interest here. But there’s no way for me to communicate that in the moment.

So yeah. I think given that the best option is to just not bring the big camera out to events, or to places where other people may get in the shot.

Further if there was ever an impetus to move over to a smaller, mirrorless camera, this would most definitely be it.

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So yeah. Ocarina of Time remake is real. I’ve heard some people groaning about it. And on one hand I get it because a lot of people consider it to be the greatest game of all time.

But me? I’m willing to give it a chance. Grezzo is probably behind this, and they also worked on the Link’s Awakening remake. A game whose original I hold very close to my heart as I played it through a very rough patch of my childhood and it kept me somewhat sane and distracted from The Horrors That Be.

If Grezzo had screwed up the remake I would never forgive them for it.

But they didn’t. Further, I think they paid good homage to it, even. Example: the 6th dungeon (the Face Shrine) is when you learn The Twist of the game, and the dungeon themes take a really dark turn befitting of said twist. The original music for the Face Shrine is my favorite track in the entire game, partially because of this.

So, what does Grezzo do, here? They give the theme a massive glow up and even incorporate *the original theme* into it. It’s so good. It reminds me of what Game Freak did with the Gen 3 remakes in Pokemon, and I loved it just as much there, too.

(There are other things Grezzo did awesomely. Manbo’s Mambo is another standout example.)

I could write more here, but I think my point is clear: given the excellent job Grezzo has done with Link’s Awakening (and the 3D remasters on 3DS, too), I’m willing to give them a chance to do right by OoT.

Again.