New Stuff

I don't have many games for my Game Boy Advance, so I've been on the lookout for some good titles to add to my collection.

After completing Wolfenstein 3-D for the SNES, I started looking into the SNES port of Doom.  However, I didn't like that version's lack of a save feature or even a password system.  That's just ridiculous when Wolfenstein at least had a password feature.  Also, I read that there are certain glitches in the game that prevent you from getting 100%.

So I passed up on that idea, but I didn't give up on Doom entirely.  I just decided to go with another port: the Game Boy Advance one.  I also picked up the sequel.  Both games have save features.  Hooray!

I got both games off eBay for an affordable amount.  They weren't sealed like some of my other purchases from last year, but they were complete and in fairly good condition.  I hear that the Doom II in particular can be hard to find.  There's no SNES version of that game, so I had to go with the GBA version if I wanted it on a Nintendo system.

I'm hoping to upload the first Doom soon.  Maybe in the coming months.

I don't think anybody really noticed, but I also got a new capture card for the Wii U.  The Elgato HD60.  After Youtube upgraded to 60 fps in October, there was no way I was going to waste money on a 1080p30 capture card like the Hauppauge HD PVR 2 or the prior version of the Elgato.  I would just end up being stuck with 720p60, which the Hauppauge HD PVR can already do.

Luckily though, I didn't have to spend money on this thing at all.  It was a Christmas gift.

I already uploaded some Mario Kart 8 footage and it definitely looks better than my 720p60 Hauppauge captures I was uploading before.

However, this thing doesn't work with my other systems.  I can't feed old systems into the Elgato by routing them through the DVD recorder's HDMI port because that just throws on HDCP protection and blocks the signal.  And I'm not wasting money on component to HDMI converters for the GameCube and Wii when there's absolutely no quality upgrade involved.

Besides, the entire point of my channel is to show what the games look like on the actual hardware without modifications (save for deinterlacing where necessary.  But HDTVs deinterlace footage anyway, so if you play all your old games on an HDTV, my footage will look just like that.).

Some people might point out that I'm upconverting 240p footage to 480i with a DVD recorder so I can record the signal, but the truth is that it's not a true upconversion.  The reason is that 240p always displays at a 480 resolution with half of the lines blank.  The DVD recorder doesn't change that.  It just standardizes the refresh rate so that the capture card can read it as an NTSC signal.

So this will be my new Wii U capture device, but everything else will still be recorded with the Hauppauge.  Both capture cards are high quality, so I have no complaints.