Fair, and maybe I’m stepping in it a bit, but thought a post about a 4-switch Vader 2600 might attract a lively crowd.

I wouldn’t presume to have even 20% of the 2600 games that bring something different and good to the table, it’s just (to misquote Samuel Johnson), for so many of them the good parts are not different and the different parts are not good.

And again, that’s completely apart from a personal nostalgia (god knows I indulge in that) or to propose that they’re simply not fun in a binary sense. If I’m 12 and I get 2600 Venture I enjoy the hell out of it, but if I’m a middle aged man in 2024, at the bare minimum I’m going for this.

So, real talk? Most 2600 games are rough, and barring personal nostalgia, there’s little reason to play most of them in the age of emulation, especially arcade conversions, which sometimes nail the gameplay (but often don’t), and generally have to perform acts of violence on the visuals to make them work with the system and the business realities around their development (i.e. staffing, timeline, budget for ROM chips, etc.).

Some worthwhile ones that come to mind:

• Combat (multiplayer only)
• Warlords (multiplayer only)
• Pitfall
• River Raid
• Pitfall II
• Space Invaders
• The Empire Strikes Back

It’s not that so many more weren’t fun, or even still aren’t in isolation, but it’s like we’re all the rich fat kid from Pee-Wee’s big adventure and have access to every single game on every single system, at least up until the end of the 90s. There’s no reason to play the nice port of Berzerk that looks like it does, or play the flickery Pac-Man mess, or even (I’ll say it) fight with the groundbreaking but still primitive and abstracted gameplay of Adventure.

Just FYI, this is what I did. Maybe I’ll change it later, but it fit the vibe for a big dumb button on a computer keyboard perfectly.

If that $200 is for the barebones kit, then the QK100 would be right up your alley. It’s an1800/96% style but leaves a full-size numpad zero. It also has a ton of options, including a wired hotswap PCB and choice of FR4 or PC plates, among others.

Budget and preferred layout will play into this a lot, but generally these days it’s not too hard to find wired-only and hot-swap. Anything else you can tell us?

You don’t?!?!?

No current keyboards with a knob (next one, though…). That said, my goofy little Class D amp has a wide flat volume knob mounted on the top instead of the front, so yes, OP, I know the feeling.

At this point, the only way you get anything made for theaters is to find a nostalgic brand to tie it to. This will probably suck, because Speck and Gordon peaked with Blades of Glory, but conceptually I have no problem with a pioneer-themed action comedy, and it barely matters that they dusted off Oregon Trail to do it.

Recent experience has shown that you should be careful if the property you’re working on has extensive lore and loud fans, but I’m somewhat sympathetic to creatives who just want to get a project funded and are willing to glom onto to an existing property to do it.

Even Nintendo starts with a cease and desist. Get that rom out there, and nobody will give a shit how shady the site or discord they download it from is. :-)

Neat little pair of packages. Seems a bit pricy to me, but I don’t think I’m the intended market. I wonder what the Pi Pico on the JAMMA module is for.

Good thinking. I dual boot. Maybe just to be safe I should also have it run an elevated privilege command prompt and run del C:\Windows as well.

Yes. I’ll set up the Fn key and right Alt key to be spacebars as well, unless I’m holding them down. It ends up working well, I get extra keys, and I don’t have to deal with fiddly stabilizer assemblies for long keys. A few other keys are also shortened or split into two.

I kinda liked the concept vehicle, but the production version managed to make just pile terrible little changes on top of one another until it came out looking like a bigger Pontiac Aztek that someone forgot to paint. It’s lumpy and quite ugly in a way I was only half-expecting.

They’re probably claiming the entire truck as a business expense because of the wrap. Therefore, they’re able to basically buy it with untaxed money, saving whatever their effective business tax rate is on the $100k or whatever. Of course, stuff like that is usually a bit of light tax fraud, because many small business owners just want a big expensive truck, but putting advertising on the car you drive for personal use doesn’t make every mile a business mile. You can deduct the wrap itself, and if you are diligent you can deduct a reasonable and justifiable amount based on the advertising value and actual business use, but especially for shop owners, this is just tacky business owners hoping they don’t get audited.

Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz are the closest things available in the US now.

Menu just does what menu always has, pulls up the equivalent of the right-click menu with a single press. I guess I could repurpose it for Copilot, LOL.

I like to make these boards with short keys both to pack more buttons in, and so none of them need stabilizer assemblies, which add complexity and have to be “just so” to work without negatively affecting sound or feel. I’ve also discovered “Hold-Tap” functionality, which I’m using on the bottom row. The two mini-space bars, plus Function and Right Alt are all spacebars if you tap them, but the Fn and RAlt do their labeled job if I hold them down. Even just making them all a touch bigger than normal (i.e. “1.25 units”) is good enough to keep me from hitting more than one at a time.

This is the kind of low hanging fruit I’m after. Why do two Enter keys when THREE Enter keys is 50% more?!?!!

The yellow part is actually stacked on top of an identical laser-cut plate that’s painted black. I need two for the right height, and I could change without too much work, but the yellow one felt more fun for this board, which is entirely unnecessary and verging on meme territory.