greg – Greg's Stuff 'n Things

2026-01-13

More screenshot photos of retro games at Taito’s Hey game center in Akihabara, Tokyo

2026-01-112026-01-11

Super neat-o Capcom and Namco B-Side Label merchandise at Yamashiroya in Ueno

B-Side Label stickers can be found in stores like Loft and Village Vanguard. When visiting Yamashiroya in Ueno, I found these great Capcom stickers by B-Side Label.

There were a lot of Namco B-Side Label stickers too!

Yeah, that’s a lot of stickers. They had some pin badges too. Check these out:

They had this other stuff, too. Brand new Famicom cartridges of Rockman, Pac-Man, and others. They looked like they’d been recently re-manufactured.

2026-01-022026-01-02

Happy New Year 2026! Also, I hate Amazon Prime.

It’s 2026, a new year which will certainly be filled with Leftist and Islamic violence for sure. Let’s celebrate.

We drove to the in-laws’ place Saturday. They live in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, and it takes at least 4 hours to get here. We had lunch at a restaurant and did some shopping, so it took us closer to 6 hours. On Monday the 29th, I thought it might be nice to finally buy the Macross DYRL 4k/bluray which came out nearly a year ago. I also decided to get the Wings of Honneamise/Royal Space Force movie on bluray. (If you haven’t seen this anime, you really need to as it is a stellar movie that was underappreciated for its time.)

I was using a free trial for Amazon Prime. I signed up for a free trial when I bought a calendar for my daughter for Christmas, which turned out to actually not be free shipping. I thought, “hey, at least we can watch some movies for free through Prime.” Well, if by “free” it means “400 yen,” then yes. Very few shows are actually free on there. I sometimes begrudgingly rent movies on Prime because the local video store thinks that it can compete with online services by reducing the number of titles they have available. (Make that make sense, please!) On Christmas night, I rented the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Jingle All the Way” for only 100 yen since it was a discount Christmas rental. I’d never seen that movie before, and I once worked with a guy who was an extra in that movie. So we watched that, and then “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” with David Bowie. A movie about atrocities in a Japanese POW camp is certainly not a festive Christmas movie, but it was a movie I wanted to see nevertheless. Oh, and I was able to see some episodes of Spy Family for free.

As my Prime free 30-day trial was coming to a close, I decided to use Prime to buy some crap. So I got those two anime bluray movies, and I bought a plastic model of the ship from the Raiden II video game. I bought these on Monday. Prime promises next day delivery, but they weren’t scheduled to arrive until Wednesday. Well, whatever. I just wanted to watch those movies to bring in the new year. So Wednesday morning comes along and the update from Amazon says that it was “out for delivery.” Oh gosh, neat. Can’t wait. Then it says that there was a failure to deliver. I looked at the details and the claim is that the address is incomplete. But it’s the same address that my mom-in-law uses to order and she has a Prime account herself. But that’s what the claim was: the delivery was cancelled because the address was incomplete. The message said, “The delivery company is holding your package because the address is incorrect or incomplete.” OK… HOW? My mom-in-law has stuff deliverer to this house all the time.

I tried to reschedule the delivery, but I was unable to reschedule for later in the day. Which means no Macross on New Years Eve. CRAP. And since the 1st was a holiday, I wasn’t able to schedule the delivery until today, the 2nd. I updated the delivery info by re-entering the address so that there would be no mistakes. Then around 10am, the delivery status was updated once again with, “The delivery company is holding your package because the address is incorrect or incomplete.”

So here is the problem: this incompetent driver can give us the runaround day after day like this and with me somehow unable to reschedule a delivery the same day in perpetuity like this, but we will drive back home tomorrow and do not have time for this nonsense. If the delivery was being handled by Kuroneko Yamato, Sagawa, or even the post office, then I could contact them and even drive to their location to pick up the package in-person since this driver is such an incompetent moron. But shipping was fulfilled through Amazon, which means they have one of those independent contractors doing the delivery instead of a professional. They make it pretty hard to find this information, but I finally found where I could have an Amazon rep call me. So I talked with him and said that while I am angry, I understand that it’s not his fault. I ended up just cancelling the order and I told him that this half-assed driver who doesn’t know how to do his own job needs to be reprimanded.

I told him to just cancel the order and I told him that I’ve already cancelled my Prime membership. That order was close to 20,000 yen, cancelled because of the incompetence of that half-assed driver. Now Amazon has to ship the stuff back to where it came because of that lazy imbecile. We’re going back home tomorrow, and I know that if I had rescheduled it for tomorrow morning, we’d just get the same run-around waste of time. Nonsense.

For the feedback for the customer service I received today, this was my response:

この注文はヤバイでした。凄い不満です。僕は群馬県に住んでいますが、今週長野県の家族の家で滞在しています。アマゾンのカスタマーサービスの人は大丈夫でしたけど、この長野県の駒ヶ根市のドライバーは凄いへっぽこです。月曜日に注文しましたから、火曜日に届くはずでした。僕たちは水曜日に一日中家にいました。

「お届け先住所が正しくないか、完全に記載されていないため、荷物は配送業者によって保留されています。」これは馬鹿な言い訳です！いつもと同じ住所を使いました。水曜日と今日、このドライバーは配達やりませんでした。もう一回再配達頼んだら、再びこの言い訳言うだと思います。明日、群馬県に帰る予定です。こいう中途半端な言い訳見たくないんです！時間もったいないよ！水曜日にこの商品がほしかったです。永遠まで何回も同じ言い訳は許しません。

このドライバーは中途半端です。この人は自分の仕事が出来なかったら、ちゃんと叱ってほしいです。こいう馬鹿なひとを許しません！あいつのせいで、この2万円ぐらいの注文をキャンセルしました。プライムもキャンセルして良かったです。ヨドバシカメラでこの商品を再注文つもりです。

Translation:

This order was terrible. I’m extremely dissatisfied. I live in Gunma Prefecture but am staying with family in Nagano Prefecture this week. The Amazon customer service person was fine, but this driver in Komagane, Nagano Prefecture, is a complete idiot. I ordered on Monday and it was supposed to arrive on Tuesday. We were home all day on Wednesday.

“The delivery company is holding your package because the address is incorrect or incomplete.” This is a stupid excuse! I used the same address as always. The driver didn’t deliver on Wednesday or today. If I try again, I’m sure they’ll make this excuse again. I’m heading back to Gunma Prefecture tomorrow. I don’t want to see these half-assed excuses! It’s a waste of time! I wanted this item on Wednesday. I won’t tolerate the same excuse over and over again.

This driver is half-assed. I want him to be properly reprimanded for not doing his job. I won’t tolerate this idiot! Because of him, I canceled this order worth about 20,000 yen. I’m glad I canceled Prime as well. I plan to reorder these items from Yodobashi Camera.

So I looked up the same items on Rakuten and found them there. I had over 1500 points saved up, so even though these items were slightly more expensive, I ended up saving money. Free shipping and all that. Suck an egg, Amazon!

2025-12-252025-12-29

Hacking my Nintendo Super Famicom Mini with Hakchi

My Christmas Eve was spent hacking my Super Famicom Mini console. Unlike my Megadrive Mini, I didn’t really play my SFC Mini’s default game lineup because I found them a bit boring. Not only do I prefer Sonic over Mario, but there are no shmups for the SFC Mini!

Using a program called Haxchi, the process is similar to how I hacked my MD Mini. Load the program, switch the SFC Mini on, and while pressing the reset button, plug in the USB cable and wait for it to recognize the unit.

These mini consoles are essentially Linux boxes, right? So why the hell do I have to risk contracting digital monkey pox by having to swap my hard drive out for my Win10 hard drive? I’d think that it would be very easy for them to release versions of this software for Linux, but unfortunately I am stuck having to use Win10. Gay. I read that someone had gotten Hakchi to work via Wine on Arch and Manjaro, but I couldn’t get it to work with Mint. Oh well.

So here is how you add games. When you add a game, it defaults to box covers from North America/Europe, so I had to look up Japanese SFC box scans on Gamefaqs to keep things uniform. I mostly loaded the unit with Japanese SFC games rather than English SNES games, however there are some games I was surprised that there was no Japanese port, such as Sunset Riders. There was no Japanese ROM for this game, nor could I find any SFC box art for it.

After synchronizing the additions to the unit, it’s done! As you can see, I didn’t even come close to filling up the hard drive. I didn’t think to try adding any fan-translated games, since Project Lunar on my MD Mini didn’t manage to do this for me when I tried.

The Hakchi logo now appears when booting up.

So now the game menu has this folder icon. Selecting this brings up another layer of games, the ones which I added.

Here are more games I added! Sonic Wings, Darius Twin, Tetris Battle Gaiden, and Doremi Fantasy.

With one more layer, selecting this folder icon will bring up a third set of games. Or the icon to the right will bring me back one level.

And here is the third layer, with Sailor Moon, Macross, and Assault Suits Valken among many other games.

Kiki Kaikai (Pocky & Rocky) and Hyper Iria.

Final Fight 2 and Wild Guns.

SHMUPS! R-Type, III, Gradius III, and Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie. While the MD Mini came with some great shmups, the SFC Mini came with none. Well, now mine is now full of great shmups at last.

2025-12-24

These ’80s Christmas AI images are incredible

Notice their pajamas and the donuts and walkie talkies on the tree!

Uncanny!

2025-12-232025-12-25

Taito’s Arkanoid II: Revenge of DoH was the very first computer game I ever bought

Arkanoid II: Revenge of Doh for MS-DOS, Taito/Nova Logic (1987)
When Dad bought the family our first computer, a 286 AT computer back in the summer of ’89, I bought a simplistic, 2-button analogue computer joystick. It came loaded with a bunch of crappy shareware games, most of which used colored ASCII characters. But the first real game I bought for that computer was Arkanoid II: The Revenge of Doh for MS-DOS. It came on a big 5.25″ floppy disk, yeah!

A:\>arkanoid.exe was the command that ran it. I’d switch to the A: floppy drive and type “arkanoid” to run the game.

I had to calibrate the joystick every time I played the game, going from the top right position, click the button, go to the bottom left position, click the button, and then center and click again. That analogue joystick provided decent control for this game, which of course used a knob in the arcades to control. Later we bought a mouse for our computer, but for some reason the paddle in the game didn’t move as fluidly as it did with the joystick for some reason.

Arkanoid II was ported to MS-DOS by Nova Logic and it let you customize your own levels. Later when I got a Thunderboard (Soundblaster clone) to upgrade the sound, I ended up playing it to death all over again to experience the game with proper sound.

Another Taito game I bought for MS-DOS was Qix. I somehow do not remember ever encountering Qix in the arcades as a kid, and I would have loved playing it since it sort of reminds me of Tron.

One year for Christmas I also got Sky Shark, the famous Toaplan shmup distributed by Taito, also ported to DOS. The cover art for this game (as well as the NES version) prominently featured Flying Tigers-inspired artwork of a P-40 Warhawk attacking battleships, and Mom knew I was really into the Flying Tigers at that time. However, that didn’t survive for long because I had once left it in the disk drive by accident. When Dad booted the computer he realized a disk was in the drive, and mindlessly he took it out while the floppy was reading the disk, which ruined the data on the game. The other Taito games I had were Operation Wolf (which worked great with a 2-button mouse) and Rambo III, which was a sort of Metal Gear-inspired stealth-focused game.

2025-12-22

Mini 3D-printed Minmay from Macross complete

My friend Gary sent me this small, 3D-printed Minmay figure a few years ago. I’ve slowly worked on it since then. The UN Spacy logo is from a set of Macross decals I bought on eBay years back, some of which I’d used on my 1:100 Imai Armored Valk I finished earlier this year. The pattern on her dress is from leftover decals from a Haku Rinpha resin kit from Hasegawa Eggplane Girls series.

She is VERY small, so zooming in with my camera like this is exposing the flaws I cannot see with my naked eyes. Her eyes turned out better than I thought they would. The sides where her torso joins her waist does not fit together like I’d hoped it would, but it fits very well in the back.

As for the Buck Rogers Starfighter visible in these pictures, my friend Blake had sent me this. He asked if I wanted one and I asked if he could print one in roughly a 1:144 scale version to make it essentially like a Bandai Mecha Collection-sized kit. I scanned the decals from the Monogram kit and shrunk them down to size to fit this small kit.