I’m not gonna lie, the month of August was a roller coaster in many ways, and though I was hoping to have three projects wrapped up by now, only one ended up being completed. However, it did get topped off in the best way possible in that I got to spend the weekend with fellow modders, Gman, Shank and Jackson. We did a nearly 10hr long live stream and it was great to see how these guys have taken console modding to the next level.
The BitBuilt Competition
It was with great sadness that on August 23rd, I was not able to have my contest entry “The eNVega64” completed by the deadline. Though I gave it my best effort, I had a few hardware issues that couldn’t be resolved (my custom controller and charger board specifically) on my own. The issues have since been identified and are in the process of being fixed, but I’m still going to need to track down a flex cable for the Ultra VGA board to avoid having to hand wire to the RCP chip on the N64 mother board. I had also screwed up the cart cover quite a bit because of the mounting tabs not being equal height when they were printed, so I’m redoing that in it’s entirety as well.
THE GoldeN64
Just prior to missing the competition deadline, I was met with another failure that took the wind out of my sails in the first place. This was a commission I had been working on since February and although I know now I would have run into the same issues as I did with the eNVega with the controller board and charger board, just before I was about to close it up, the paint on the enclosure began to crack and split underneath the clear coat! I had never seen this before and the bitch was the case had been finished for nearly 3 weeks prior and over night decided to break down.
Long story short, with how far this system was into production, it was decided that I was just going to start over from scratch with this one for the customer, and flip this one once complete as-is and with fewer features just so I could get some money back to buy the parts needed again to restart this project. The goal was to have it finished off last weekend at the meet-up in Boston on live stream, but that’s when the controller issue made itself apparent and it didn’t end up happening.
Once the components get back to me though, I’ll get back on finishing this up and slap it up on eBay for a mercy sale.
Example of cracks and splits and it’s since gotten worse.
THE BITBUILT MEET-UP – BOSTON EDITION
But, as I said, to top it all off, I had a great time meeting with old modding friends Gman and Shank and getting to meet Jackson for the first time. These kids have taken modding to levels that I could never understand and it was awesome to hang out with them for the weekend. We live streamed for nearly 10hrs Saturday into Monday morning and though I didn’t get my project done, progress was made across the board. The stream was unfortunately taken down though due to copyright of the music we were listening too in the background. Kinda bullshit about that, but Warner Brothers Music certainly cares more about music sales than actual enjoyment with friends and that apparently music is only meant to be heard by the individual who paid for it….yeah….anyway.
What’s really cool though is that Gman lives so close now and that offers up the chances for more meet-ups between us. I dunno if I’ll ever be on the same level, but it’s cool knowing I’ve been a part of it!
I should hopefully have more updates as the projects finish up, and hopefully next month my Form 3 will finally be inhouse after being delayed again. I ordered it in June and now not expected to see it till mid October. But I get it, they make a good product and it’s new. Had the same thing happen to me with my Prusa MK2S a couple years ago, but it was worth the wait.
Downing's Basement 