The Week In A Bad Education Towers #48

Hello you! Another busy week of work, but now a week off to celebrate the youngest's birthday which is where I expect all the rain has come from so apologies for that.

Saw Meg 2: The Trench yesterday because come on why not. The first The Meg was essentially Staham versus Giant Shark which it just about followed through on. Clearly, we all wanted a bit more of that so here we go: more sharks, the same number of Stathams and directed by Ben Wheatley.

Yes, that Ben Wheatley. Director of Kill List and A Field in England and High Rise. That guy.

I mean, can you really tell that its one of his films? Probably not, its just a big dumb Statham film so what more do you need? There is a plot, something about miners exploiting the ocean and Statham going about and punching people and fish and random objects. The film itself seems to get tired of its own plot towards the end and just throws it hands up in the air going "well, I don't know either".

And that works to its credit, because that last 30 minutes or so rescues everything and is probably the best last 30 minutes of any film this summer. Honestly, it just throws everything in there and then blow it up, then blows something else up just to create something for Statham to ramp a jet ski off.

Meg 3, please.

Firmly bedding into Life With Steam Deck and its brilliant, especially with all the emulators now installed. I would throughouly recommend this guide as a good way to work through getting them installed which is way easier than you'd think.

And, as I said before, the fact that it plays pretty much anything you fancy throwing at it is brilliant. This did show a couple of issues with my previous emulation setup, which essentially boils down to a woeful lack of storage. The hard drive I was using for ROM storage was only a 128gb drive as it came, I think, out of my Sony laptop from like 20 years ago. Thats probably enough to store pre-32bit CD based games but woefully short for anything past that. Also, the only SD card I had spare to install the emulators on was 64gb which is, yet again, woefully small. Again, its fine for your 16bit and before stuff but anything else it isn't.

Luckily, I remembered that my broken MacBook (not this one, the other one) had a 400gb SSD drive in it, so thats now the basis for the ROM storage with folders that are slowly being filled up. Again, this is probably not enough if you want to have all the PS2 games (seriously, there are so many of those things) but should allow for a decent curated collection that can move onto a 1tb or bigger drive when the price is right. Same for the SD card, it needs like a 512gb to really hold a good spread of games.

The next job I want to do, which will probably need to wait till that bigger SD card shows up, is have a go at getting some PS3 games running on it which may need a bit more sorting out. But, hey, at least its possible.

So thats great, and playing regular Steam games is just as fun as well. I did try capturing footage on it with my Elgato which ended up working after a bit of finagling to get the audio sorted out. This turned out not to be a hardware issue, more of a "Phil set up loads of filters on the audio to get the auto ducking to work and forgot to turn them off" issue which ended up getting resolved. What did work straight away was the Genki ShadowCast HDMI capture thing that I picked up ages ago. It needed a USB-C to HDMI adapter, then that into the capture thing then the USB-C cable out of that into the laptop and all done. Would be better when I get a dock (again price is right yadda yadda) as that the Deck can charge and have HDMI out as well.

In short, its brilliant.

The fair is in town, because its after my birthday so whats when it always turns up. I used to love the fair, because there would be 3 or 4 huts or sheds or containers or whatever they were full of arcade cabinets. I remember playing Star Wars in the sit down cab there, seeing Out Run for the first time, throwing my first fireball there. Beautiful days.

Days which are, of course, long gone. These days its full of redemption machines, a few gamblers and maybe a ropey Fast and The Furious cab. But this year?

Nothing. Not even an air hockey table.

Honestly.

One new video this week:

Was worried that thumbnail might land me in trouble but all seems okay so far. And thats currently it for scheduled videos, thanks to the aforementioned Steam Deck capturing I've got some video captured, I just need to get the scrips written and audio captured and yeah might miss next week.

Unless I manage to film fixing Scott’s Joy Cons that I want to do. We'll see!

And thats an actual whole newsletter done. How about that?

Anyways, bye!