I'm off to a slow, but steady start to my NESdrive construction plan. I spent some free time on Thursday morning checking out the emulators that would work with the NES Controller drivers I got from junkmachine.com. After doing some reading, and playing with a few different emulators, I have decided to use NEStron. It seems to work nicely with XP, and since our MP3 jukebox is running XP Server, it should be the best fit.

I've found most every NES Game I knew existed while poking around Google, but at work, Russ said he had a CD full at home he'd bring me. With software issues figured out, it's time to move on to construction. Last night I dismantled my poor, defenseless Nintendo to remove it's button panel (w/ LED) and controller ports (pictures coming soon).

I'm going to try to pick up a DB25 Crimp-Type connector and tear a female power connector out of my OLD case in Vero when I go home for the birthday this weekend. I need to get some more info before I know how I'm going to use the power/reset buttons, but Amy and I agree that having them start and shut down the emulator would be AWESOME!

My secondhand Nintendo just decided to take a dump a couple weeks back. Amy and I were pretty bummed because Tetris on Xbox just doesn't compare to Dr. Mario, and I was starting to miss playing my occasional game of Sky Shark. So we spent a while trying to diagnose it. She picked up a compatible power supply from work to see if the old one with two electrical tape lumps was the culprit, but we had no luck.

Now this may seem like a mundane waste of time to some of you, but to those who grew up in the age of Mario, MegaMan, and Mike Tyson I present to you my latest project: I want to construct a NESDrive! I've built a few computers in my life, but I'm not much of a custom hardware kind of guy. I don't get too excited about casemods and overclocking, but the thought of plugging Nintendo controllers into my MP3 server box at home (which is located conveniently next to our entertainment center), and pressing the Nintendo Power button to start up an emulator really got me excited.

This may be a slow-burner as I've been pretty swamped at work. Amy and I have our weekends booked for the next month or so, but I will post any progress I make on this new project right here. If anybody happens to read this that has done this before, or has any suggestions, please post your comments.

Just when I thought my days of working late into the night on projects I had procrastinated on were over, I get a rude awakening. I was in the office on Tuesday from 9am until 12:30 at night. Somehow, a million things came up at once and I wasn't able to START my demo for RTS until about 6:30pm... and we had our proposal meeting at 10am the next morning. I'll never say that I don't enjoy my job, but I definitely can't say it's an easy one.

I haven't had time to post lately - mainly because Amy and I have been dealing with the rigors of the auto insurance world. Amy was rear-ended last week (yes, a week after we replaced the transmission) and we've been on a rollercoaster ride of stress and turmoil ever since.

Luckily everybody was ok, but even though it was a minor accident for which Amy was not at fault, the other party's insurance is being a major pain. We had gotten an estimate before the claims adjuster came, so we were confident that it would be fixed. But the claims adjuster for Mercury insurance went WAY over the estimate (big surprise to us) and wanted to total our poor happy Honda. At this point Amy and I decided that this would be feasible...over our cold, dead bodies.

So, we talked to our insurance company (State Farm) and they are going to take our deductible, fix the car, and pay us back from the claim they make against Mercury. Lesson's learned from this fiasco: STAY FAR, FAR AWAY FROM MERCURY AUTO INSRANCE, State Farm has really great customer service, and never, never get rear-ended.