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Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

🦊 Nice TV stand, by the way do you happen to work in the coin-op industry
🦝 How did you know that
🦊 *eyeing up the shoe rack in the background also using 3/4" plywood to hold 2kg of shoes at a time* Lucky guess

Telly's in, no noticeable deflection on the telly shelf so we're good!

Now I guess I'll take the telly out again and sand this down and Polycrylic it

Home-built plywood TV stand containing a 27" CRT TV
28 comments
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Q: Why do the sides of the stand extend up along the sides of the telly, why not just stop when the telly's supported?

A: So I can have a shelf atop the telly to fill up with Various Junk

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

I don't wanna take it downstairs again FFS this thing has barely existed five minutes and I already resent the idea of moving it

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Might just run it outside and lacquer it

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

ugh nope can't lacquer it outside because of the baby robins

Dad robin feeding two baby robins in a nest on top of my speaker
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

I bought a new HVLP sprayer in like February when it was on sale and I had a lucky coupon, I said to the guy "Boy I can't wait til I can try this thing out in like May," bloody robins wait to hatch until I'm just about ready to spray some lacquer

🐣 Whatcha got there Dan?
🦝 Something that'll kill you dead as heck if you get so much as a whiff so instead of firing it up and trying it out I'm just gonna grumble about it on the internet

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Also this lad's back again

Bit of a special day today innit, hatchy robins, visiting fawn, it's all go in my yard today

A fawn lies in dappled sunlight beneath a tree
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

"Remembering when it's faun or fawn" is right up there with "How to spell parallel (or rather how to stop spelling it)" on my list of Language Things That Dan Has Made His Peace With Never Quite Grasping

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

So last time the fawn visited, it was gone by they time I picked the kid up. So I didn't tell her about it, didn't want her disappointed that she'd missed it.

This time, I clocked it were still there from the road, told her it was a special day and she had to be quiet and smooth and slow and not go any closer than me, and we went and saw the fawn.

THEN, we went and saw the baby robins.

THEN, while we were watching the robins, we heard movement, and there was the mum, up the hill, with the fawn around her feet.

"Wow," I whispered to her, "Quiet fawn, didn't hear him going up the hill."

So then we got our bikes down and took them past the original fawn FEDI THERE ARE TWO FAWNS

So last time the fawn visited, it was gone by they time I picked the kid up. So I didn't tell her about it, didn't want her disappointed that she'd missed it.

This time, I clocked it were still there from the road, told her it was a special day and she had to be quiet and smooth and slow and not go any closer than me, and we went and saw the fawn.

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

I've waxed furniture before, but I've never used wax as a finish, as in literally just rub it into freshly sanded wood.

Ain't no finish in the world that's gonna be fine with having a CRT TV rubbed all over it within a couple hours, it's gonna scratch up either way under the telly, so I went with wax because it's quick and not too fumey and I hadn't used it before so I was curious. Plus robins.

You literally just wax-on-wax-off, two coats because the wood just swallowed up the first one. It turned out pretty nice! Look how well it filled in this end grain!

I've waxed furniture before, but I've never used wax as a finish, as in literally just rub it into freshly sanded wood.

Ain't no finish in the world that's gonna be fine with having a CRT TV rubbed all over it within a couple hours, it's gonna scratch up either way under the telly, so I went with wax because it's quick and not too fumey and I hadn't used it before so I was curious. Plus robins.

Intersection of shiny plywood face and shiny plywood end grain
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Put a nice sheen on the top and all

different angle on cabinet top showing a nice satin sheen
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Folk are liking how good home depot plywood can look after rubbing with this wax, and I agree. That's what my wood normally looks like after three coats of poly, three hours apart. I'm liking this wax.

I bloody well should be, considering it costs FORTY FIVE DOLLARS A CAN

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

(to be fair to it though, I used maybe a twentieth of the can for the whole TV stand, so this'll last me bloody years)

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Here's the wax, for those asking. Made in Kent so imported here, so back home it's probably cheap as chips lol

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

*big Dad Wiring sigh*

Right, one component input on the telly, 3 HDMI's on the amp, one HDMI to component switcher, wanna split the sound off through the amp of course...

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Resi 2 time! But where's the PlayStation? And what's that lurking under there next to the amp?

TV is showing Resident Evil 2 title screen
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

It's the Game Dad!

This whole thing was secretly a #gameDad project!

Now I got video, I got sound, and if y'all will kindly recommend a decent Linux-compatible Bluetooth controller from your own personal firsthand experience, Project Big Dad will be complete :D

An Anbernic RG353V sits next to the amp, a Game Boy kinda thing with analogue sticks that I call the Game Dad
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

oh my god retroarch is just THE WORST

it was easier to set up multiple controllers for an emulator twenty years ago

when you got your ROMs on a CD-R off a tarpaulin on the pavement outside a bowling club in Manchester, because when the internet screamed EEEE-EEEE-EEEE-EEEE-BRLGHBLRRBGHLEGHREE for forty seconds it'd still take half an hour to download Ghouls and Ghosts, when you had to start MAME from DOS, using multiple controllers was easier because at least you didn't have to deal with the emulator trying to help

two decades later these retroarch lads have put Clippy in your controller and I've spent literally five hours trying to figure out what the hell retroarch is trying to do, but I'm no closer to figuring out how to tell it to stop

oh my god retroarch is just THE WORST

it was easier to set up multiple controllers for an emulator twenty years ago

when you got your ROMs on a CD-R off a tarpaulin on the pavement outside a bowling club in Manchester, because when the internet screamed EEEE-EEEE-EEEE-EEEE-BRLGHBLRRBGHLEGHREE for forty seconds it'd still take half an hour to download Ghouls and Ghosts, when you had to start MAME from DOS, using multiple controllers was easier because at least you didn't have to deal with the emulator trying to help

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Me, playing Raiden 2 quite happily until the MAME devs put more effort into emulating the copy protection, more perfectly emulating its ability to know it's a bootleg and crash, killing the game for years: 🦝 This is a retro-gaming elitism thing isn't it

Me, two decades later, trying to connect a controller: 🦝 This is a retro-gaming elitism thing isn't it

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

I work in coin-ops, I want my controls to break because a rat chewed through a wire or someone puked on it, I don't want it to break because the software got too complicated and tripped over its own arse

Like how is this hard it's 2024 for heck's sake, I thought we had joysticks pretty much sorted out in the 70's

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

When I was sixteen years old I took one of these drawer-style cassette racks and drilled holes in the top to accommodate an arcade joystick and ten buttons.

I took apart a PlayStation controller, sanded off the solder mask, and soldered wires directly to the copper traces, running from the PlayStation pad to my arcade stick's microswitches. Then I went to a computer market and bought a PlayStation to parallel adaptor and plugged this abomination into my printer port because I was still waiting for someone to invent USB, then spent a merry afternoon figuring out how to get DOS to see it, then get MAME to see it, then I enjoyed me some Sunset Riders.

THAT

was an EASIER CONTROLLER SETUP

than FUCKING RETROARCH

When I was sixteen years old I took one of these drawer-style cassette racks and drilled holes in the top to accommodate an arcade joystick and ten buttons.

I took apart a PlayStation controller, sanded off the solder mask, and soldered wires directly to the copper traces, running from the PlayStation pad to my arcade stick's microswitches. Then I went to a computer market and bought a PlayStation to parallel adaptor and plugged this abomination into my printer port because I was still waiting for...

cassette rack, a black ash box roughly the ideal size to make an arcade stick out of
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Hahaha, the pictures are still online!

Arcade joystick crudely made out of a cassette rack, a beige CRT and computer in the background
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Look at this crap, I only had access to the wiring through holes the size of cassette tapes

Still easier than RetroArch

the same crude joystick, but with its cassette drawers open so you can see the wiring stuffed inside
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

You see what I had to squeeze my hands into here, STILL EASIER THAN RETROARCH

A spaghetti wiring nightmare lurking in a tiny box like a spider shying away from the light
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Right, last night I FINALLY figured out how to use a bluetooth joypad under RetroArch, with the buttons in the right places, and without killing the built-in controller on the #gameDad.

I'll do a full write-up for gamedad.club later in the week, but as for the general gist, there's a bug in RetroArch where saving a controller profile associates your bindings with the wrong bit of hardware, so when you exit and reload, it loads the bindings for the Bluetooth controller onto the inbuilt controller, breaking both.

RetroArch has a database of controllers that it can, in theory, automatically set up properly; in practice, they're guesses, Clippy for your controller. To fix this problem, I had to erase all the guesses (KILL CLIPPY) and write my own .cfg files.

Sounds hard but honestly that was super easy, it worked pretty much just like 90's MAME or whatever, just press each button to get its code then copy it into the file, the part that took three nights of fiddling was *figuring out that Controller Clippy was the problem.*

Right, last night I FINALLY figured out how to use a bluetooth joypad under RetroArch, with the buttons in the right places, and without killing the built-in controller on the #gameDad.

I'll do a full write-up for gamedad.club later in the week, but as for the general gist, there's a bug in RetroArch where saving a controller profile associates your bindings with the wrong bit of hardware, so when you exit and reload, it loads the bindings for the Bluetooth controller onto the inbuilt controller,...

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

The phases of owning a #gameDad are curiosity, delight, finally getting over your awe and actually playing some games, fiddling, frustration, satisfaction, finally getting over the fiddling and actually playing some games, fiddling some more,

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

🐿 People who start the game
🦝 People who sniff around the options menu and then start the game

Broadly,
🐿 Straightforward people who want to get on with doing the thing they wanted to do in the first place.
🦝 FIDDLERS. They FIDDLE with things. They can't help it. Fiddling with the thing's settings or whatever is an integral part of their enjoyment of the thing.

People who get interested in Game Dads or retro emulation in general tend to be 🦝, because these machines are fiddly by nature, and kinda self-select for 🦝.

EVERYBODY ON THE FEDIVERSE IS 🦝. Fedi's filter bubble isn't its leftiness or its gen-x'ness, it's SCRAPYARD-FINGERED FIDDLERS.

By an overwhelming majority, most people are 🐿.

By an overwhelming majority, 🦝 find it hard to remember that most people are 🐿.

🐿 People who start the game
🦝 People who sniff around the options menu and then start the game

Broadly,
🐿 Straightforward people who want to get on with doing the thing they wanted to do in the first place.
🦝 FIDDLERS. They FIDDLE with things. They can't help it. Fiddling with the thing's settings or whatever is an integral part of their enjoyment of the thing.

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