Gaming and I go WAY back, all the way to Atari and Nintendo. I have so many games from my childhood that I still play and one of my biggest complaints with emulators is their lack of a quality user experience. For example, why don't emulators maintain a database which can retrieve game reviews and descriptions from web sources as well as allow you to rate games and add notes? Of all the emulators I tried UberNES, was the closest to offering this functionality. Unfortunately, of the games I tried only a few had descriptions, box-art, or screenshots.

So I decided to create an application I call, NES-Loader which adds all this meta data from an online scraper. You can see from the screenshots below, the application interface. The application starts up and all the games are listed with details like the developer, the year it was released, its genre and whether it is a "recommended" title or not. This is really helpful for sorting the list by genre (e.g. I only want toplay shooter games today) or the developer (such as Konami).

You can see below the NSIS installer which I used to package everything up into a single installer so I can install everything I need on any of my machines with just a few clicks.

DOWNLOAD - Retro-Gaming-XLoaders-1.2-FINAL.torrent (238.45 kb)

So following my RRoD experience a few weeks ago I have been testing other avenues for gaming such as PC gaming. I have been playing console games since I was a toddler clutching onto my Atari 2600 paddle and I just can't get the hang of a mouse and keyboard to play games with. I have a Quad-Core Alienware desktop pc that I use for work that I decided to try. Even though the Games For Windows platform is suppossed to support the X360 controller out of the box, it doesn't. I was pissed after loosing more than an hour trying to get Call Of Duty: World At War to work with the controller; it doesn't. Insterad I investigated anther avenue that works with every PC game. 

Steps To Get The Wireless X360 Controller to Work for All PC Games (not just Games For Windows)

1. Get the XBOX360 Accessories Kit Wireless Gaming Receiver
2. Download Vista Compatible Drivers For the Accessories Kit
3. Synch the Controller to the receiver
4. Download & install the Pinnacle Game Profiler
5. Download the pre-configured game profile for your game so you don't need to map the buttons manually to keys

For my case, there wasn't a World at War profile yet so I used the Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare profile and it works great. I'm amazed at how fantastic PC games look at 1680x1050 resolution! Wow. 

I have defied the odds for so long considering that I had an original launch XBOX360 console from 2005 that was still working perfectly and has been used exhaustively this entire time (about 20 hours per week). Last week I started to experience a strange problem while playing Dead Space. In the middle of the 7th level when I entered a certain corridor the screen went jumbled and all the colors appeared malformed. After rebooting several times and getting the same result each time I put in a Fallout 3 and after the opening cinematic the screen went black. The lights were still green and everything looked like it was working except there was no visual. After the next reboot, Red Ring of Death. Since then I have allowed the system to sit several hours and it will boot up but after 5 minutes or so it will go black and RRoD after any reboots.

It looks to be a heat issue and I'm pretty certain I could hack at it for a few days and resolve the heat issues, if the components aren't burnt up. I decided to set it aside for the time being and dust off the Playstation 3 and use that instead for a few months until I decide whether or not to bother repairing the X360. 

I happen to come across this site the other day; mygamercard.net which allows you to link to a dynamic image generator that creates an accurate gamercard for you to display on the web. It's really an interesting idea that you can put your gamer card anywhere on the web and others can see what you're playing. The virtual and physical worlds seem to collide more and more these days as technology improves.