May 1st, 2021

Hey all, Alan here! I've been away renovating the site. I hope it looks good!

Back in December, I got a DAO pop'n music controller and I had issues with the buttons almost immediately. I bought new Samducksa buttons and installation was alright for the most part. They're way quieter and don't stick anymore. They're not Sanwas, so it's not that arcade perfect, but I have never seen a pop'n music machine in person so I don't think I should care.

I made a lot of mistakes...

Remember that Xbox 360 I got a while ago? It did not come with a power supply. I finally got one at a flea market. I plugged it in and turned it on... Red ring of death! The 3 lights come together! I was kinda bummed but, to be honest, I expected it.

I leave the room it was setup in, forgetting to turn it off. I come back to retrieve a few RCA cables and noticed it was on. I turn it back off, and just to be extra sure, turned it on. I expected the RROD to come back, but then... It started to search for controllers!

Yeah, it just started to work... It's odd. Once I got past the startup screen, the dashboard loaded in, and this dash is not the latest version I can tell you that.

This Xbox still had one of the old dashboards! 2.0.8955.0 to be exact. That dashboard was released in October 2009, you were still able to play the OG Xbox games online then! It appears that the Goodwill I got it from did not erase any data that was stored on the hard drive either. It still has the previous owner's Xbox Live account and some game demos and a few purchased Xbox Live Arcade titles.

I checked the previous owner's stats on their saved Xbox Live data. They last played Madden NFL '08 on it on Feburary 7th, 2010. A whole decade ago! For reference, the console was manufactered in July 17th, 2007.

If I were to be extremely honest, I'm not updating this Xbox. I'm pretty nostalgic for this dashboard and I don't care about having Xbox Live or anything like that. It's not like I expect this thing to stay alive... If it was easy to fix itself, it would be just as easy to break itself, wouldn't it?

I tried out a game on it and it froze. A restart later and it was showing the red lights again. How unfortunate. I did the diagnostics thing where you press the sync and eject button at the same time and it'll give you an error code using the red lights. It gave me an error code of 0102 which means that one of the chips had broke.

Thinking about it... what would I play on an Xbox 360 anyways? I think I don't care anymore.

I bought an SD2SP2 board off of Amazon. It's a microSD card port that connects to the serial port 2 connector on the bottom of some GameCubes. The serial port 2 was only used for development consoles, but it was intact in early GameCubes, as later systems removed the port. If you pair it with Swiss, it makes for a good game tester.

Not that much to it!

It works fine with the games I threw at it. I tried Chibi-Robo! and Paper Mario, they work perfectly! If you have an entrypoint to Swiss and the serial port is in your console, I highly recommend it.

I got carried away playing Chibi-Robo on it, it's a fantastic game. I played through it three times now! There's the story and there's several other side-stories too. It's a huge shame how there's only one other game in the franchise that plays like the GameCube version, and it's a Japanese exclusive! If you really like puzzle platformers, I extremely recommend it.

I recently started work on an internet radio station. It's ran using Icecast2 and Liquidsoap using an extremely basic script. I've been hovering over the idea of a small internet radio station, but usually I hit a roadblock while making one and just stop working on it. I looked at Liquidsoap and got scared knowing that I'm supposed to code the behavior myself, but I managed to make something up in a couple of hours.

I would love to try getting this online, but I don't have the money or bandwidth to go through with it. I'm limited to 1.2TB per month, which streaming music to only 5 people for a whole month is roughly 200GB. I've been pretty close to my limit these past few months, so I don't think I would be able to host it. I tried looking into a VPS and stuff, but I'm just so lost on how to progress with this.

It's sort of lame how I'm unable to do anything with this since I've been trying to get a radio station active for almost a year now, but that's just how a lot of things go.

That's it for now! Things seem to be looking up now, stay strong!