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Sega pajamas at Shimamura

Since I’ve shown lots of cool Sega swag from Shimamura stores, I thought I’d share these images I found on my Flickr account. I bought the Saturn pajamas, but I wish I had gone into debt and bought the Megadrive and Dreamcast pajamas too. Drat.

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Alien pixel animations

I found these on Pinterest. I always preferred Capcom’s Aliens vs. Predator arcade game over Konami’s Aliens game. I played the Konami game in the arcades on occasion, but it never impressed me much. I’ve lately come to appreciate it more recently via Final Burn Alpha on RetroPie.

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Princess Crown for the Sega Saturn is getting an English translation patch!

Oh my freaking gosh. CD Romance has released an ENGLISH-PATCHED image of Princess Crown for the Sega Saturn! I bought this game nearly 20 years ago. About 10 years ago I played up to the point where I slayed the dragon, but didn’t get further than that as I lost track of it. Now it is in ENGLISH! With my Japanese level, I was able to make sense of the game, but I didn’t catch the part of how Gradriel’s older sister is ill (which would explain why she was crowned queen instead of her sister).I don’t care for the font choice, but this is super-duper neat-o!

This game is the predecessor to Vanillaware’s Odin Sphere. I like how you can have the little girl pick up the kitty instead of the book.

I don’t care for the font choice, but this is super-duper neat-o!

It’s not a proper 1.0 version yet. Some text is still in Japanese, such as the labels to the doors. This will make it difficult for those who can’t read the moon runes. Plus it has some wonky text issues. Still, this is GREAT!

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Sega Megadrive T-shirt from Shimamura

By creating an account on Mercari, I’ve expanded my ability to buy neat crap. Something I missed out on at Shimamura is this neat Megadrive T-shirt. This shirt is brand new and still has the tag attached! The front breast has the MD logo, the 3-button controller, and under that it says “16-BIT.”

This neat little tag is on the sleeve.

This is on the back. Neat!

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New Nadia desktop wallpaper Linux Mint October 2024, plus Mint 22 install woes

Here is my newest desktop wallpaper, and it’s Nadia with a beautiful sunset. I was running Mint Mate 20 Ulyssa, and my 1TB SSD hard disk was maxing out. In august I bought a 2TB HD, and in September I installed Mint Mate 22 Wilma. It wasn’t a smooth experience like version 20 was. The first problem I had was when I plugged the old 1TB drive in and tried copying my files directly from there. Upon reboot, it wouldn’t even boot up and was scrolling text. I re-installed Wilma. Then updating the Nvidia driver caused the computer to freeze up. I had to get help on the Linux Mint Forums and learned how to modify the boot kernel. After that, it was fine. However what remains is apparently the USB device manager might not function properly.

I’ve done three fresh installs of Retropie on Linux Mint Mate 22 and each time the controller input is screwed up. I am using a Logitech F310 USB gamepad, which is pretty standard. Retropie on Mint 22 is flawed. Controller problems.

  1. When accessing the in-game menu by pressing the hot key (to take a screenshot, save state, etc), the joypad locks up. I have to press select for it to work again. When returning to the game, the joypad is again locked up and I cannot play the game. I must press select again to regain control.
  2. When accessing Retropie-Setup from within the RetroPie GUI, joypad input ceases to work. Not even the arrow keys can be used. The workaround for this is to run the setup.sh via terminal and the controller works. Just not when accessed through RetroPie itself.

For this third time, I did not copy over any config files and I did the controller setup for my joypad from scratch. I thought perhaps that there might have been a problem by just copying the entirety of the ./opt/retropie folder and all of its subfolders, but this is not the case. I did a full uninstall, then a reinstall. The problem remains.

I am wondering if it is a problem with Mint 22 itself. I had zero problems installing and using RetroPie on Mint 19 and 20. However, with Mint 22 I’ve noticed that at least with Space Invaders Extreme on Steam, the game does not recognize my controller at all, regardless of which version of the Linux Proton compatibility tool I am using.

I’ve been advocating people switching to Linux for years now, but this latest version is making me hesitant. My experiences with installing Mint 19 Tricia and Mint 20 Ulyssa were smooth, but Mint 22 Wilma has given me some headaches. Posting my problems online, I was told by others who are disappointed with 22 Wilma’s USB capabilities. One guy said he has some external hard drives that 22 won’t recognize. Another said that his Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo is wonky, and replacing this with a generic wireless set did not solve the problem. I do hope that these issues will be addressed soon. I would not have known what to do with my Nvidia driver without the help of the Mint forum. I was told that my GPU is old, but it’s from 2017 so it can’t be that old.

For now, Steam is fine, more or less. Retropie is fine until I have to bring up the menu. Having to press the select button though, it makes me hesitant to plug in my Saturn controllers, since they do not have a select button.

EDIT 10/27: I ran an update over the weekend and the first issue with RetroPie freezing after calling up the menu is now fixed.

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Han Solo sofubi figure kit by Kaiyodo

I was actually looking for Kaiyodo’s R2-D2 sofubi kit when I found this. These kits are 1:6 scale, making Artoo twice as big as Bandai’s 1:12 scale kit. Plus it’s hollow inside, making it perfect for lighting. I found Artoo for a decent price on YAJ, but the seller said that he couldn’t verify the contents. Then I noticed that Artoo’s main barrel body was not in the photograph. Good thing I noticed that before bidding! There was another one listed on YAJ, but it was actually a link to Yahoo Flea Market and the seller would only accept PayPay. PayPay is a form of digital money (somewhat like PayPal), but the only way to have a PayPay account is to have a smartphone. It’s bad enough that some places only provide coupons to smartphone users or the only way to make an appointment at the tax office is via Line on a smartphone, but between payments only attainable through a smartphone and the totalitarian push for “vaccine passports” on one’s phone, it’s easy for anyone with pattern recognition ability to see how we’re being herded towards the Mark of the Beast. It makes me sick.

Seeing that Artoo kit only available through PayPay was my motivation for getting a Mercari account, as I mentioned in my previous post. There I can find that kit listed and I can pay cash at a convenience store for Mercari purchases.

Anyhow, while I did not get an Artoo sofubi, I did see this figure of Han Solo, and it was only like 3,200 yen! The detail is exquisite. The previous owner had already cut off the excess vinyl and fit the arms onto the torso. Look at how well-sculpted it is! This is definitely Harrison Ford’s face.

His head looks big because I am up close with my camera. There is also a Princess Leia kit, but her head looks too big. I can’t tell if it is sculpted like that, or if it is just the way it was photographed (like how I inadvertently made Han’s face too big in my picture). Like Han, Leia is dressed in her white gown from A New Hope. Unfortunately, she isn’t holding her laser pistol in that kit. This Han kit includes his blaster molded in black resin. So cool.

Of course, I’ll paint this with V-Color paints. I think I’ll get the Artoo sofubi kit next month since I’ve got a bunch of crap to pay for and I’ve already paid too much on model kits this month.

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Nautilus submarine model kit by Bandai

Recently I signed up for a Mercari account. It’s an online fleamarket. Often you can find stuff cheaper there than on YAJ, and a greater variety of smaller items. Lots of neat Sega stuff and whatnot. I’ve sometimes asked my wife to get stuff for me through her account and I’d pay for the items at the convenience store, but I decided to create my own account.

Although I bought the newer 1:1000 scale Nautilus model by Kotobukiya, I wanted to build the old 1:700 scale Bandai kit and give it another go. It is OOP and goes for a bit on YAJ, but I found it cheaply on Mercari (about half of what it goes for on YAJ). I built this when I still lived in America, and it was the first fully-airbrushed kit I ever built. This time, I want to drill lots of holes and use clear UV resin to try to light it. This Bandai kit is from the ’90s, back before they made all of their models snap kits. While this Bandai kit does not have as great of detail as the smaller Kotobukiya Nautilus, since it is not a snap fit model , I believe it has more hollow sections. I think I can drill out the window portals and replace them with Wave H-Eyes lenses, as well as casting the captain’s quarters on top in clear resin to light it up. That would be neat.

I made a page for my old build on my model gallery I stopped updating about 10 years ago here. It comes with a small 1:20 scale Nadia figure, and it was the first figure I ever painted.