Marching Cubes

Found Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, and Order of Ecclesia for DS for $20 each. Really good games trying new things while staying true to the franchise - but not sure how I feel about the shift in tone of the first one, the length of the second one, or the structure of the third one. Almost got the good endings in all of them, but the bosses just started to feel a little Soulsborne-y toward the end of each and I'm kinda ready to give up and move over to Samus Returns.

Did give-up on trying to find Dark Chambers (7800) and Line of Fire (SMS) in the wild, and just grabbed them off eBay. The former is pretty cool and the latter completes my SegaScope 3-D library.

Got good deals on Arms and Shin Megami Tensei V for Switch. Also ordered a refurbished first-party Joy-Con Grip directly from Nintendo because they don't seem to exist otherwise.

Replaced the hard drive in my Core 2 Quad; nothing much to back-up on there. Still really happy with that computer and EndeavourOS.

Oh, and Voxel DOOM is fantastic.

Lemmesee...

Not done Sonic Forces yet, but it's fine... I guess.

Injustice 2 is way better than Injustice.

Got a white OLED Switch as a gift; pretty sweet. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is lovely.

Got free passes to a local video game convention; saw a bunch of games I already own going for thousands of dollars more than I paid for them, but nothing I actually wanted... Or at least I wasn't gonna pay $600 for a better copy of Earthworm Jim Special Edition.

The SIO2SD thing for the 800XL is really cool. Played Elektra Glide, Pastfinder, The Pharaoh's Curse, Rescue on Fractalus, and Zybex - all totally rad; absolutely gives the C64 a run for its money.

My Core 2 Quad EndeavourOS PC died during an OS update... Looks like it was the hard drive physically failing.

Had to oil the fans on two of the i7 3820s I gave away, and replace one CPU - luckily had a matching spare.

Not Quite Hot Takes

So Sonic Forces is ridiculous, Colors Ultimate is still kinda broken, Origins is apparently disappointing, and Frontiers looks weird... I really thought Colors, Generations, Lost World and Mania were great overall steps in the right direction; sad to see the franchise go off the rails yet again.

Resident Evil 7 maybe should've wrapped-up after chapter 4... But then I guess it wouldn't honour the series' tradition of jumping the shark after nailing a strong and unique opening. Also, the RTX update looks awful and it seems to break (or at least reduce the quality of) HDR. Meh. I'll play 8 whenever it's $20.

Finished Echo and it didn't trigger the endgame achievement, so that sucks and I'm not doing it again; still a gorgeous audiovisual experience though, intriguing narrative, and intense gameplay... Just a little a rough around the edges. Seriously underappreciated.

Diablo Immortal is fine. Don't spend money on it, and do play it on mobile.

Also, finally tried Antstream - free tier is decent, challenges are interesting, video quality is kinda bad, selection is alright but nothing spectacular.

Unnecessary

Found one of these for $35 CAD at a thrift store - missing the lumbar pillow and there's some wear, but MSRP is ~$585 CAD and the cheapest one in my area is an open-box discount for $405... I'll make do :)

Also found an Atari 800 XL for $170 CAD on eBay. Was sold as-is, looked kinda grimy, and it powered-on - but was otherwise untested... Judging by the photos, was an NTSC model and came with a good PSU variant. Figured it was worth the risk given current prices; great-looking paperweight at worst. Turns-out it looks way better in person and works flawlessly - seller also threw-in a peripheral cable! Something was rattling around inside - turned-out to be a loose screw, washer, and grounding wire; easy fix. So now I'm looking for cartridges and probably one of these.

Still chipping away...

Sonic Lost World falls apart about halfway through; still looks great, genuinely catchy music, writing holds-up... But the world/level/boss design and mechanics just get messier as you progress. Still don't hate it though.

Injustice is kinda boring.

SNK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy is not as awful as I expected it to be.

Diablo Immortal feels crowded - in terms of world, quests, players, field of view... It's a decent time-sink, but it's nothing special.

Death Stranding is waaay more engaging than I expected. Kinda glad I took so long to get to it, too - looks incredible at 240Hz in HDR.

Another One

Found another DX-NRUTER in a bag of old stuff at my parents' house. Dunno if I should leave it stock or put DD-WRT on it... I've read that Wi-Fi encryption and MAC filtering don't work on it when it's a repeater because of the Broadcom drivers. Bleh.

Got both EA3500 routers working as secure repeaters by following this guide.

Don't understand the hate for Sonic Lost World; did it just release too closely to Super Mario Galaxy? I think it's one of the best-looking and best-written Sonic games; the Genesis games are still the pinnacle for me, Adventure/Heroes haven't aged well, 2006 is broken in so many ways, Secret Rings/Black Knight were surprisingly good, Unleashed is fine albeit ridiculous, Colors is totally solid, Generations was a revelation, and Lost World is genuinely innovative. Oh, and Team Sonic Racing is kind of a slog.

Revisiting Injustice 1 & 2 after MK11; decent.

Trivial

DD-WRT totally unlocks 1300Mbps Wi-Fi on the EA6300V1. Neat.

DIR-859 doesn't compare to the Archer A7 in the larger/obstructed space.

Dusted-off the DX-NRUTER - had forgotten that I broke the Wi-Fi radio when I last flashed it with DD-WRT. Looks like it only works with dd-wrt.v24-13577_NEWD-2_std-nokaid.bin from 2010. Tried a number of DD-WRT releases with no luck - none of the dd-wrt.v24_ releases support the radio, and all of the dd-wrt.v24-48884_NEWD-2_K2.6_ releases bricked it - thank goodness for TFTP. Decided to give it a shot as a repeater, and it worked fine until I enabled any Wi-Fi security on the repeater... I think I'm just over it now.

I had way more fun with Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate than I expected to after XL. The story mode still doesn't compare to 2011's and Kronika is uninspiring, but the new Krypt is a major upgrade over XL's and the character customisation is unreasonably deep. Had way more fun grinding towers to unlock more of the Krypt so I could further customise my characters... Until the grind got ridiculous; I need something like 7500 souls to progress now, and that just turned me right off the whole endeavour. Finding Reptile was a really nice nod to the 1995 movie though :) Reinstalled XL afterward, avoiding the story mode, and really appreciated the towers and the Krypt a lot more this time.

Got a little scared for a minute there...

DD-WRT on the EA6300V1 because OpenWrt suggests that they're effectively a non-option and I can't find any info on how Tomato compares to the closed-source aspects of DD-WRT. It's been years since I've really messed around with any of them, and I'm not quite up-to-speed on all of this - so I went with what seemed like the safest bet. Ended-up following this guide, but with the latest DD-WRT as the final step - pretty convoluted, but it worked! I couldn't get 5GHz speeds over 400Mbps at first, but it just turned-out that DD-WRT's "Auto" channel setting is maybe not good. Did a site survey, moved things over to a less-crowded part of the spectrum, and now everything looks happy. Next test is with the Archer T9E to see if an EA6300V1 really can reach AC1600 speeds.

Checked-out another thrift store today, found a Sony BDP-S1700, a DIR-868L, another DIR-822, and an Acer tower with a Core 2 Quad, 3GB of RAM, and a GTX 650... The tower was the most expensive item at $15 CDN. Neat projects, but I left them for someone else.

Because I'm bored...

Archer A7

• AC1750
• 3 x 5 dBi
• 28 dBm
• USB 2.0
• Single-Core

DIR-859

• AC1750
• 3 x 2 dBi
• 20 dBm
• No USB
• Single-Core

 EA6400

• AC1600
• 2 x 4 dBi + 3 x 5 dBi (internal)
• 24 dBm
• USB 3.0
• Dual-Core

Unless I'm misunderstanding how my devices are reporting link speeds, I don't think I have anything that really takes advantage of the 300~450Mbps or 1300Mbps Wi-Fi speeds.

Found-out that while USB 3.0 seems to make a significant difference in NAS performance, the only stock options are SMB 1.0 or FTP - neither of which is particularly secure.

I have no idea if the dual-core BCM4708 in the EA6400 performs any better than the single-core QCA9563 in the other two.

I'm not super-familiar with antennas, but it looks like the DIR-859 would be best for an open area with no obstructions, the EA6400 is more directional but also has more antennas and beamforming, and the Archer A7 is a bit of a brute-force approach.

So of the two places I'm deploying to, I think it makes sense to have the Archer A7 in the larger home with the most obstructions, and then the EA6400 in the smaller open area where more devices will be accessing it at once.

Finally, install DD-WRT on the EA6300V1 (no OpenWrt because Broadcom, apparently) to effectively make it another EA6400, and there's my backup. Test the DIR-859 in the larger/obstructed space for science before giving it away, and... Yeah, that's the ticket!

Flannel Zebra Jammies

Two more:

D-Link DIR-859: AC1750, Gigabit Ethernet, no USB ($7)

Linksys EA6400: AC1600, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 ($7)

...Replaced my EA6300 with the EA6400 because why not, and gonna keep the DIR-859 as a backup. Giving away the EA6300, DIR-822, two EA3500s, and a Dynex DX-NRUTER.

Oh! Turns-out the EA6300 I've had for almost a decade is an EA6300V1, which is an EA6400 with EA6300 firmware. Huh.

Pretty-much wrapped-up Forza Horizon 4 and Mortal Kombat 11 - completing a few odds-and-ends in each (LEGO® Speed Champions and the new Krypt are really fun) but the big takeaway is that I am now officially spoiled by pseudo-HDR and VRR up to 240Hz.

Also tried Sonic Lost World again - on Windows this time, and it's kinda pretty good.

Mildly Disappointed

One dead pixel and one dead green subpixel on the AW2721D; Dell won't authorise an exchange for less than six, but at least they're not really noticeable... Let's see if any more crop-up over the next three years. The bleed from the local dimming zones is, however, quite noticeable unless you tweak application brightness along with the display's "Dark Stabilizer" and "Variable Backlight" settings. Despite all of that though, it's a very impressive monitor for the price. I've put a Dell U2311H next to it, and it's night-and-day.

The AC1750 Archer A7 and the AC1900 Archer T9E occasionally reach transfer speeds in excess of 1Gbps, but much more consistently achieve speeds only nominally better than AC1200 despite being less than ten feet away from each other in the same room. Oh well.

Finally, can confirm that the BDP-S560 only does photos over DLNA. It's not like I was really gonna use it for anything other than playing old Blu-ray discs - nor did I expect it to be able to decode any modern video formats - but it would've been a cool feature!

Features

Went back to the thrift store for fun, and this time I snagged a TP-Link Archer A7 AC1750 router for $7! Found-out when I got home that it had OpenWrt installed and an admin password had been set :\ Took me a minute to figure-out that I had to press the the "WPS/Wi-Fi On/Off" button to get it to boot into failsafe mode, but then it was simple enough to SSH in and soft-reset it. Next I was hoping to get it back to stock (I may have bricked it once or twice in the process) and TP-Link's vaguely-documented TFTP recovery solution is a nice feature - though that took a few tries before I figured-out that the Ethernet controller on my Lenovo just didn't seem to be compatible, and then that the Ethernet on my desktop was too slow to transfer a 16MB firmware file within the set window before the router would just continue to boot normally. Luckily, my partner's HP laptop worked great! Unfortunately, none of the TP-Link firmware files took, so it's currently on the latest OpenWrt release.

Now I'm comparing the three 802.11ac routers I have, trying to decide which should go where...

TP-Link Archer A7: AC1750, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0

Linksys EA6300: AC1200, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0

D-Link DIR-822: AC1200, 10/100 Ethernet, no USB

...But since I'm almost never transferring anything over my local networks, I'm not serving any kind of NAS, and my Internet connection will always be the bottleneck, I don't really see any real advantage to any of them anywhere. Maybe the Archer A7 goes wherever the Archer T9E goes? Whichever has the best DLNA implementation goes wherever the Blu-ray player goes?

Timely

AW2721D went on-sale for 37%-off in Canada today and Dell's offering an additional 10% off monitors, so $792 instead of $1400. Nice.

Native Linux gaming with modern distros on old hardware is... Fine.

Gave-up on Shadow of Mordor since it was never gonna run great on this GPU and my setup isn't officially supported anyway. The latest update to Inscryption looks for Inscryption.x86 but the included file is Inscryption.x86_64 - copying and renaming works. Borderlands 2 was next (never quite finished all of the DLC) and it worked flawlessly.

Unrelated, but recently helped a pal with their rural Internet access - fiber is coming and they're just out of range for LTE, so he's stuck on 10Mbps down/1Mbps up/700ms satellite in the meantime... Oof. They are on a waitlist for Starlink as well, which I learned has less latency because low-orbit satellites. Huh.

Underserved market or calculated gap?

What I want: A sub-$1000, 27~32", QHD+, DisplayHDR 600, adaptive-sync, 120Hz+ monitor.

What I can find: A sub-$1000 (in the US), 27", QHD+, DisplayHDR 600, adaptive-sync, 120Hz+ monitor - that costs $1400 in Canada, with the stupidest design ever or a reasonably-priced one with a much more subtle design that only comes curved.

Everything else remotely comparable is $1000...

Boom

Bought the Best of Boomer Shooters Bundle. Hedon is clearly made with love and runs well on Linux, but it's kinda rough. Project Warlock is great. DUSK is really good. Amid Evil feels way more grounded and focused than the trailers suggested, but is ultimately getting kinda boring as I progress. Ion Fury is good. Haven't gotten to Dread Templar, HROT, or Hellbound. Haven't used the ULTRAKILL coupon, but did use the Prodeus one and it absolutely lived-up to the hype; stellar game, and I can't wait for more.

More New-Linux-on-Old-Hardware Gaming

• BIT.TRIP Runner 2 - Beta fixes common audio issue, but seems to require a GNOME theme; didn't care enough to troubleshoot beyond that. Uninstalled
  
• DUSK - Works great, really slick game; better than it looks in the trailers.
• Inscryption - Beta works really well.
  
• Penumbra - So far, so good.
  
• Quadrilateral Cowboy - Runs fine; haven't dug-in yet.
  
• Serious Sam 3: BFE - Either runs like shit or looks like shit despite exceeding recommended specs; barely playable either way, which is disappointing because it's a good game. Uninstalled.
  
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor - Doesn't work. Various recommended fixes out there that seem to apply to a number of Feral Interactive Linux ports; most involve defining lib folders (either via launch options, symlinks, manual copies, compatibility releases, etc...) for specific package versions, but none worked reliably on EndeavourOS and most affected users seem to have turned to Proton. There's a 3GB beta update that I'm gonna try before giving up on it.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown - ...And this time, Feral nailed it!
  

Thirfty

Thrift store finds:

• TP-Link Archer T9E AC1900 PCIe card ($7)
• D-Link DIR-822 AC1200 Router ($8)
  
• 10/100 Ethernet ports though? Really?
• Sony BDP-S560 Wi-Fi DLNA 1080p Blu-ray Player ($15)

Gonna upgrade a bunch of stuff at my parents' house :)

Seeing what it can do...

 So the final build is:

• Core 2 Quad Q9450
• EVGA 132-CK-NF79
• 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM (dual channel)
• 1GB Radeon HD 5850
• 320GB 7200RPM SATA HDD
• EndeavourOS

...Removed jack2, added Remmina+RDP and Steam, and that's about it.

Steam works much better here than it did with the 8800 GTS, and I really wanted to see what it could do - so I installed some heavier games with native Linux support that would take advantage of the 5850. Started with Bound by Flame, but it wouldn't display anything; tried Painkiller: Hell & Damnation next, and it would crash after the splash screen; then I started troubleshooting and it turns-out both are apparently awful Linux ports that don't really work - so I played it safe and went with Portal, which ran great at 1080p w/max settings. Looking at what I haven't really played in my library, I'm thinking the Penumbra trilogy and Shadow of Mordor are the way to go. Next experiments might be to see what can be done with Proton on a GPU that doesn't support Vulkan, and how well Electron-based GeForce Now implementations work here; but the takeaway from all of this is that the C2D+3870 and C2Q+5850 make for solid Linux desktop computers with decent gaming options. Not sure I'd throw any real content creation tasks at them, but pretty happy with the results for spare parts and a free, modern OS.

For fun, I installed both the original Black Edition and the Hell & Damnation remake of Painkiller on Windows and... What the hell? The remake is awful! Why were reviewers so forgiving of that unnecessary trash, especially when the original holds-up so well!? Anyway...

Forza Horizon 4 Ultimate Edition and Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate were both on really good sales, so I splurged. Forza's nice, but the Ultimate Edition bonuses immediately gave me enough "influence" to just skip three of the four introductory seasons... Kinda wish I'd gotten to play more of those. Otherwise, this was the fastest I've earned an F40 in any game, my upgraded orange-on-white '73 Carrera RS is probably the closest I'll ever get to driving a Singer, and call me cliché but I love my Sport Quattro S1. Haven't touched Fortune Island or the LEGO stuff yet. As good as this all is, however, I think I'm ready for a new Need for Speed game.

MK11 is boring; I think the series peaked in 2011.

Traded-in a bunch of old/random/scratched/free PS2, PS3, Wii, and Vita games for Metroid: Samus Returns, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and a Wii MotionPlus... Though to be fair, one of the trade-ins was a sealed copy of Demon's Souls for PS3 that I got for free years ago and never opened :)

Bogus

Rad isn't fun. It looks great, combat feels alright, it's all random enough to keep exploration interesting, and the mutation mechanic is neat... But the first two worlds just aren't engaging enough after a while to justify the grind and the game is surprisingly unoptimised on PC. It feels like the initial character-building would've been considerably more enjoyable if more was carried-over between runs, but instead I just got bored after a few days of repetition and the whole game felt like more and more of a slog with each death. I only paid ~$7 for it and it was fun for a few hours, but I honestly just gave-up and uninstalled it... And then re-installed it because it got under my skin and I still want to see more. Looking through old reviews and Double Fine's Discord, I see I'm not alone in my experience :\