the16bitgamer

Before I deep dive into my option about a game. I just want to preface that while some people believe that we should be forced into whichever house the sorting hat puts us in. We all can choose which house we feel we belong in. Like Harry in the first book, and in the movies and in this game So please keep this in mind since we are talking about a game here.

I've been playing the Harry Potter games since the PS1 and absolutely love the Zelda inspired games for the system and the RPG's for the GameBoy Color. PS1 Hagrid an all. When the games moved to the PS2 they were better, but never felt as polished and often times felt short. Where I lost interest was the DS game for Goblet of Fire and the Trophy folder games on PS3. I saw my sister play them, but even she just sticks with the early PS1 and 2 games.

So while I've not played them in a while I can say I've seen Hogwarts from when consoles could first render it. To when it could render it well.

I know I've been in the future for a while now. But the little kid inside of me never realized it until I was walking from Hogwarts Castle into Hogsmeade and I looked back upon Hogwarts castle. I was breath taking and beautiful. A sight I'd never thought I would ever see in my life, outside of recreations in theme parks or fan videos.

And I think that's a perfect way to describe this game, it is absolutely beautiful. Details are everywhere and a lot of attention was given to everything you will look at. Whether it's Hogwarts or Hogsmeade, a Dragon Fighting Tent or the Forbidden Forest. The game is a visual feast especially for long time fans of the series.

However to get to that point, you'd need to get through some of the more... unpolished aspects of the game. Combat.

Now combat in Hogwarts Legacy isn't bad, but I wouldn't call it good. Works well enough for the job it's suppose to do. But for the uninitiated, especially if you don't know what a Dark Souls is. It can be a challenge. Combat is effectively color coated spell attacks, dogging and parrying. Combo each and you have a fun system. Problem is, when every game was just mash buttons to win and you have many many non-gamers struggle to get past the tutorial. Myself included (even with my gamer cred). I eventually learned, but the reward wasn't satisfying. More enemies all looking similar with very little in the ways of weaknesses. By the second trial I just turned the difficulty down to easy and left it there for the rest of the game. Honestly it's probably the most fun when you set it to story only mode.

Since where the game wants you to be in the most is in the exportation of the open world... barf. Open World in video games is a fun idea. But for a story driven game like this... I just gets in the way. Don't get me wrong it's neat, but not a game where you are a student at school... which is where you are suppose to spend your time. Not in each and every hamlet around the castle and beyond.

And your reward for exploration... rare items and gear. I get it, but this isn't what I was hoping for in a Harry Potter game. I want a linear story, and that's here, but where I spend time at the school and maybe sneak out from time to time. Not all the time. Actually I don't think I've been to classes since the beginning of the year.

Honestly where Hogwarts Legacy could've improved was if it looked in the past, and borrow from it's contemporaries.

I am imagining a RPG style game, like the GBC harry potter games, with items purchased from a shop and all that. But with the Persona social aspects. Keep combat the way it is for those who like it, but toning down the difficulty doesn't need to ruin the parts of the experience. I think it would work and I'd probably buy it, and if no one makes it, I would... when I have time to make games again.

In hind sight though, despite there being potential to be a better game. What is here isn't bad. In contrast with previous games, this is the best Harry Potter game I've played. There's lots to do and to see. And while I am not a fan of the combat, I wont say that it's bad. Overall I do hope Avalanche games has another opportunity to make a new game, and WB Games lets them spread their wings.

If this was the web of old, this would just be a blog post. But for those who don't want to delve into my mad ramblings here is the TL:DR.

I attempted to revive 3 laptops. An Asus Transformer Book T100HAN, an Acer Aspire 3860, and a Dell Latitude ~~D380~~ D830.

The Acer was the quintessential definition of a crap top, and while it would install Linux, WiFi drivers weren't installed by default on any distro, and it was very unstable.

The Dell fared better and everything worked out of the box, however couldn't run games... well. And I mean Rollercoaster Tycoon.

The Asus would've worked, if it had more storage an a standard chipset. Missing feature was the least of this things problems.

LR

With the end of Windows 10 near, and everyone trying to find a solution I thought it would be fun too see if the many claims which people put out about Linux, from being faster, and allowing you to keep using your old machines for longer. Held any water.

I have 3 ancient laptops which I keep around as legacy machines (or as a Teleprompter). A Dell Latitude ~~D380~~ D830, apparently released at around 2008, it's a Dual Core Intel 64bit machine with integrated NVidia Graphics, with Windows XP 32 bit installed on it for some bizarre reason, plus Microsoft Office. I've upgraded it to 4GB of RAM and on paper was the best to convert to Linux, as other ~~D380~~ D830 owners have upgraded it to Windows 10 with apparent success.

The Acer Aspire 3680 was my in laws old machine, and was terrible when it was new, has better build quality than Chrome books of today, but it's still terrible now. It's a Single Core Intel CPU and iGPU, and a whopping 2GB of RAM. No it's not because I cheeped out. I have more RAM. But the motherboard won't support more than 2GB. It's amazing it runs Windows Vista at all. Let alone Windows 7 which I put on it later since I hate vista. Funny enough I tried to turn this laptop into a Chromebook in 2015/16 with I want to say ElementryOS, so I knew it could run some version of Linux.

Then Finally I have my trusty $15 Teleprompter. The Asus Transformer Book T100HAN. This was when everyone wanted iPad and Microsoft through, hey why not use Windows instead. The Intel Processor is shockingly power efficient and not a slouch, it's just unfortunate that it has only 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage soldered down. Boo.

Installing Linux

I wanted to run Linux Mint (my goto Linux), or Ubuntu. However it appears my ambitions were a bit too much. For fun I tried Manjaro on the Acer, and it ran as slow as you'd expect. I think it crashed out before it made it to the home screen.

I tried Fedora on the Asus to only have the installer crash outright. Though the same thing happened with Ubuntu on the Asus and when I tried to install it on my Acer it actually worked, so perhaps the Asus has more problem then it appeared. Regardless, the only distros which worked reliably was stripped down Ubuntu or Debian. I had good luck with Lubuntu and Q4OS so I went with those.

The Dell fared the best out of all 3 machines. It installed without issues and as a shocking bonus could connect to 5GHz WiFi... who knew. Using Linux on the machine though wasn't faster and was slower than Windows XP. However for a dual core with an integrated nvidia graphics drivers running stock, I can hardly blame Linux or the machine for it running poorly. Honestly the Dual Core was what killed this thing. It's not that it didn't work. It only worked in bursts. The minute you tried to do any multitasking like installing a file or running a game, it chugs. Windows XP wasn't just smoother to run on the machine, but games ran better on it.

The Acer.... yeah there's no point in even pretending that it was any good. Even with Lubuntu that poor single core couldn't keep up with anything. Plus the WiFi drivers required me to plug it into my route and install the 43b firmware to get it to work. Let along enabling other features in to get graphics to work. 2GB of RAM even with an additional 2GB in swap isn't enough to run Linux, and when I attempted to run games, it died. However when I tried to run FreeCAD it worked well. Not perfectly, but well enough I'd call it usable if your designs are simple. Then when I put 7 back on it, it ran so much faster and better.

Finally the Asus, this was the worse. Not because it was a tablet. though I've now acquired the skill of reading sideways text since by default position is Portrait Left. No no no. The reason it was the worse, was because if was just a bit better, not much just a bit. It would've been better than Windows 10. If it had 4GB of RAM rather than 2GB, it could've installed Ubuntu or Linux Mint with ease. If it had more storage I could've done more with it rather than try to fiddle with my home folder to mount to a 128GB microSD card. And if it used a standard chipset for Bluetooth and other things, then it could've really worked well. Extremely well as the new OS for my Teleprompter. Windows 10 ran like a pig on it, and if I updated it even once what little space I had on it would be gone. But as it is, I had to do registry hacks since I needed bluetooth on it since I was using it as a Teleprompter and I needed bluetooth for my remote.

So what did I learn. Old laptops sucks. Windows use to be very efficient. XP and 7 has held up very well after all these years. And most importantly Linux isn't a one size fits all solution (nor was it ever promised to be). On the right hardware, it might make your machine run a little better since it's not trying to install Co-pilot. But if your hardware is old enough, not even Linux can save it. I am sure if I really wanted to revive these machines I can delve deeper, maybe run Puppy Linux or Alpine on it or something. But I wasn't trying to see if it was possible to run Linux, I wanted to see if it was easy to install, setup and use Linux on old hardware to keep it going. And the answer I got from this is no.

Pre-ordered Shantae Risky Revolution last year, finally came in today. (Loving it so far). But I'd like to upload the MD5 Checksum so that emulators can validate it.

Where should I upload the files to?

So I've been planning this upgrade for a while but wanted to wait for the right price.

Before my upgrade I had a i3 12100F and a RTX 3050 8GB. It was a decent rig, and good enough all but the latest games at 1080p. However I do video editing and wanted to get more RAM on my GPU and more core would help with some games and workloads.

So I waited for the right parts at the right price. My first good luck came in the form of a $170 discount on a i7 12700KF. I paid $270.08 CAD with tax and shipping. For single threaded workload (read FreeCAD) it didn't do much but for games it was a smoother experience and so far nothing has ever maxed out the CPU outside of Shader Caching.

But the upgrade I was keeping an eye out for was the GPU. 8GB of VRAM is just enough for what am doing. However I really wanted 16GB. I was aiming for the RX7600 XT, however $450-$500CAD for it was too much for me to stomach. With no real used options I tried looking for a RTX 3060 12GB. For the same price and no performance difference it's not a good choice new... but used it's frequently $350CAD. However I got it in my head I wanted it for $300CAD. I kept seeing it creep down to $330-$320CAD, and was tempted. But I held since it wasn't an urgent upgrade. Then I found it, a Zotac 3060 12GB for $288.27CAD with tax and shipping. Scooped it up immediately and it finally arrived today.

My upgrade total was $558.35, and the result was actually pretty nice. From a quick comparison from running some games and video renders before and after the upgrade. For games I saw +20FPS improvements in modern games and for games getting 200FPS I saw my GPU utilization drop from 100% to 70%.

For video editing it's very interesting. My render times dropped by 20-30 seconds depending on the video and number of effects. However after reviewing my hardware utilization, it seems like the software may be bottle necking me more than the GPU. Or maybe it's a RAM issue.

Regardless I am very please with this upgrade, epically the price for this upgrade. Outside of more RAM, I don't think I'll be doing anything else with it for a long while now.

The video goes over Derick’s 2 year obsession with trying to get Faceball 2000 to work with 16 player multiplayer.

In short it works. But the video is well worth the watch as it goes in detail on why it hasn’t happened before.

So I got a ~~floppy~~ flippy drive for my GameCube and I wanna have the SD card accessible.

But instead of hacking off the original I thought it would be fun to design my own.

So far I got it to fit well enough. However some dimensions needs adjustments before I start final prints.

The Model is on Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6979927

and Printables: https://www.printables.com/model/1230465-gamecube-flippydrive-bracket-plus-space-for-micro

The original bracket didn't have the clearance I needed for my MicroSD Card extender so I modeled a new one based on the 3D Printed part I got with my FlippyDrive.

Currently remaking the GameCube IO Panel as well. Hoping when I am done I can add a clean spot for the Micro SD Card.

TL:DR HST is dropping from 15% to 14% in Nova Scotia

Was a fun weekend project.