Finally was able to sell the MAME Cabinet. I put it on Craig’s List for Portland at $950 and deleted and reposted $50-$75 cheaper every 3 or 4 days. I didn’t receive a single inquiry until it was posted at $500, then I received about 5. Someone from Eugene, OR picked it up today. After playing it for a few hours, I realized how much fun it once was, but my tolerance for classic games has really gone down. I think it was most fun as a work in progress rather than as an actual device to play. It’s sad that I spent ~$500 in early 2006 on the computer parts, the TV, the cabinet, and joystick and controls, and that’s just now what the device sold for.

Oh well, at least I have an empty corner in my game room now. Farewell MAME cabinet; although I had you for over 3 years, it felt like I hardly knew you…

Piracy has always been something that interests me. In the past I have been heavily involved with the piracy of software and games, simply because it’s accessible and I really didn’t have the money to play what all of my friends were playing. Or as it pertains to software, some basic utilities were egregiously expensive. As I grew up, got a job and had some spending money, piracy faded. I now run legit copies of all of my software and games, so much so that if I can’t get it and it’s reasonably priced, I will consciously use a free alternative that is lesser in quality (much of the time, but not always lesser in quality).

Jeff Atwood made a great claim which I wholly believe to be true:

In fact, the most effective anti-piracy software development strategy is the simplest one of all:

1. Have a great freaking product.
2. Charge a fair price for it.

I love how every year there are obligatory crappy game remake with graphics slightly tweaked, or one small feature updated to existing games, and the developers/published get so outraged because nobody wants to buy their games. Moreover, the fact that games have gone up to $60 or more is beyond ludicrous. I have purchased many games in the past, and I’ve found that the lower in price they become, the more likely I am to buy them. Case in point: Team Fortress 2 was $20 when it came out on Steam and I bought it, easily one of the most fun games I’ve played. Definitely worth the money.

And on virtual console games: I owned your game on the original NES/Genesis/Turbografx, why should I pay you money to play the same game with the same graphics on the new console?!? Samesies for Xbox Live Arcade. And on remakes for newer consoles (like every Final Fantasy pre 7 it seems, at least twice now), the game looks different, sure, but the story is exactly the same. Do. Not. Want.

As Vista is gaining popularity, I’ve found myself switching to using Linux more and more. I never bought Windows XP, it was gifted to me by the University of Portland, a perk for being an underpaid student employee I guess. Same goes for Microsoft Office 2003. Since the same luxury is not available to me, I guess I will not be buying Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Office 20XX ever. I will instead rely on Windows XP for gaming and Linux for workstation use, and OpenOffice. Photoshop has been a prime example of piracy because they offer software that everyone uses and is so overpriced that nobody but the professionals can afford it. I will be using Gimp from now on.

And if there is a game released on both console and PC, don’t make me buy it twice to play with all of my friends, especially when the game is 99% the same.

With regards to the console piracy, I have purchased more console games this past year than any year previous. There was a time when I was stoked about the availability of “free console games”, so much so that I would grab them from the “cloud of availability” even though I knew they were rubbish, I wouldn’t play them, I absolutely wouldn’t purchase them. I still remember burning through my 2 100-pack spindles of Dreamcast games, only to find that maybe 3 or 4 were not lame. Now I will only grab a game if it’s worthy to purchase, and evaluate it on quality and price. If it is worth it, I absolutely will.

So during some random typical use, Kessa broke the pedal on our new Rock Band drums. It straight up snapped in half. I had my father-in-law fix it, and he superglued and reinforced the pedal, and of course journaled his work which is cool. Apparently there are quite a few instances on the web of the pedal breaking, Pat says it’s because it’s poorly designed, it’s highly susceptible out of the box to break.

When I first received my new phone and reviewed the HTC Mogul, I found that the frequency that the device crashed was “pretty annoying”. Well I had loaded it up with lots of apps that ran in the background, some apps I didn’t need that uncleanly uninstalled (and has registry item missing messages), some items that turned on whenever a data connection was available, etc. The thing was a hog. I’m sure it consumed the full amount of RAM available on boot.

Eventually the device came to crash once a day or more. Then the phonepocalypse happened, while I was on a road trip with some buddies, the phone decided to not turn on at all. Soft reset after soft reset, it would get to the BIOS screen, then never proceed to the WM6.1 loading screen. I really thought that the device was fried. Fortunately, I hard reset the device (meaning erase all data and restore to factory defaults, and it was able to boot again. All was not lost. (All data especially wasn’t lost thanks to dashwire, man that app is rad for Windows Mobile devices.)

So I decided to give DCD’s trimmed mogul ROM a try. Following the instructions the entire install took less than an hour. All of the files that were required for the install are available from his repository of files, of course. From a software fully updated (from HTC.com) factory reset device, I installed NueSPL 3.47 by putting it on my MicroSD card and running it. I then ran “dcd_titan_3.3.4.exe” from my computer with Mogul attached via USB. It took care of the rest. Once the install process finished, I installed “dcd Sprint Carrier 20081020.cab” from my MicroSD card by putting it on there, installing it, then going to Settings => Connections => Update PRI on the phone, which allowed it to provision the device to be on the Sprint network.

All is now well, it has been about a week without needing to do a software reset, and without crashing. I have been avoiding some obvious culprits as I previously noted:
* too much ram utilized (The trimmed rom really helps here.)
* not using the slide out keyboard (I found that this was causing the crash many times. No idea why.)
* letting the battery get too low (A fresh install really helps here.)

I noticed that the wifi still doesn’t work, so that is definitely a defect with this particular phone, not the model as a whole.

So in summary, for the low amount of RAM on the HTC Mogul, a slimmed down custom ROM is absolutely the way to go to make it stable.

Found a pretty good deal on a Lamar Cruiser 163cm Snowboard with M3 bindings and Airwalk size 14 boots (on flickr). Since I’m going snowboarding next week and I hate how pricey they are to rent, I figure that this will get some once-a-year use out of me for the rest of my life. Or then again, maybe I will use them next week, and never again.