Paul 00:00 Listen

Good evening, Drew. How the hell are ya?

Drew 00:02 Listen

Hi, Paul. Hi, Paul. Um boy, I hope I don't say something that gets me fired tonight.

Paul 00:09 Listen

Oh boy.

Drew 00:11 Listen

Yeah. Work is hard, you know. How are you?

Paul 00:21 Listen

I'm I'm still alive. Uh-huh. I saw yeah, making a guest appearance. Yep.

Drew 00:27 Listen

Yeah. He is uh he is full of beans tonight. He He has he has a lot on his mind, don't you buddy?

Paul 00:34 Listen

I get that. I get that. Yeah, no, it's uh yeah. Oh yeah. Hey buddy is

Drew 00:40 Listen

Why don't you go lay down? Dad dad's busy All right. Bye.

Paul 00:46 Listen

Bye.

Drew 00:47 Listen

Yeah.

Paul 00:47 Listen

Oh yeah.

Drew 00:48 Listen

Anyway.

Paul 00:49 Listen

Just work is stressful at the moment, but that's okay. That's okay. Uh Yeah

Drew 00:56 Listen

Yeah I I'm I'm in I'm in the exact same boat. I'm in the exact same boat.

Paul 01:00 Listen

Okay. Yeah. Oh

Drew 01:03 Listen

All right.

Paul 01:03 Listen

So when we last left our hero ,

Drew 01:08 Listen

Hero

Paul 01:10 Listen

He was about to spend a lot of money to build a flight sim rig. I see a bunch of stuff behind you. What's going on there, Drew?

Drew 01:24 Listen

Alright. So let's let's let's talk about it. Okay. And one day aliens are going to find the remains of our civilization. They will find burned out cities, they will find our bones and our monuments. And our our stuff. And I firmly believe that digital data will survive the apocalypse. And these aliens will find a way to take our data and view it. And eventually they will stumble upon this podcast episode. With a video of a giant chair full of controls behind me.

Paul 02:11 Listen

There's a lot going on there. Yeah.

Drew 02:12 Listen

It's a lot. There's there is there is a lot going on there Ta -da!

Paul 02:20 Listen

We're primarily an audio podcast, but I recommend just go to YouTube for this one. Check the check this one out. Check this one out.

Drew 02:25 Listen

I'm gonna I'm gonna send you some pictures because I was I was actually gonna like What I thought about doing, but again, we're an audio podcast. I thought about actually taking the podcast from over there. Because what I could have done is I could put on the Steam frame and use virtual desktop. Mm-hmm

Paul 02:43 Listen

Oh but yeah. Okay. Yeah. And

Drew 02:45 Listen

got a microphone on it and the whole thing. But it would have sounded like shit.

Paul 02:48 Listen

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Drew 02:49 Listen

Okay. So If you go one episode back, required listening to fully appreciate what we're about to talk about is going to require you to go back at least to the show notes of the previous show and look at the list of things in the show notes about what I was going to buy. Okay. So this is the finished product.

Paul 03:12 Listen

Okay. Okay.

Drew 03:13 Listen

This all arrived Last week.

Paul 03:17 Listen

Okay.

Drew 03:18 Listen

So after we recorded last time, I decided, you know what? I'm gonna live a little bit. I'm gonna order all this stuff. And I placed the order with SimLab for the chair. So the chair, the gray chair, the frame, and all of these support items is what came with the chair.

Paul 03:38 Listen

Okay.

Drew 03:39 Listen

And then the electronics, all the buttons, the screens, which you can't see, but I'll send you a better picture of. The panels that are over there, because there's a couple panels off to the side that is on like some extension poles over there. All of that showed up later in the week. Alright, so I want to break this down into three acts. The first act is going to be building the chair. The second act is going to be wiring up and losing my absolute shit over the cable management involved in having One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, plus three more. Twelve. cables that you have to manage. And I don't know if it's coming through, but I've done about as I'm going about as good as I'm going to do routing the cables along the frame.

Paul 04:38 Listen

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Drew 04:39 Listen

Okay. Then I want to talk about how I didn't want to put it in this room.

Paul 04:46 Listen

Okay, I that that I I thought that was the case, but I didn't want to say anything. I don't want to make things worse. Okay.

Drew 04:54 Listen

You're not making anything worse.

Paul 04:55 Listen

Okay, okay.

Drew 04:56 Listen

You're you're not making anything worse.

Paul 04:58 Listen

That wasn't where it was supposed to go.

Drew 04:59 Listen

That wasn't where it was supposed to go. It was supposed to go out there where I had more room.

Paul 05:04 Listen

Uh-huh. It was gonna be your secret shame, not your public shame.

Drew 05:07 Listen

Right. the shame that my wife cries herself to sleep about. Right. And I I I have to be honest, fully assembled, it does occupy a corner of my office. But it's not completely outrageous.

Paul 05:23 Listen

It's not as big as I thought it was gonna be.

Drew 05:25 Listen

No, no, it's not.

Paul 05:27 Listen

Title.

Drew 05:28 Listen

Title. Title. Or I'm sure that's where they don't want it to go. Either one of those works. We'll come back to that. Okay. So the chair showed up in Three boxes. The first was the huge box that has the chair. Now the chair itself is very comfortable. Very comfortable. It does come with a cover if you don't want to put if you want to keep like dust off it and things like that. And and it's what isn't visible here is that chair is fully adjustable. And by fully adjustable I mean it has recline. And it and it's on tracks underneath the frame, so you can slide it forward and back. Pretty pretty nice. I did not expect that So it it came in it came in the three boxes. The the main box was the chair and the subframe, which is like the little legs that are underneath it. Then there was a box specifically for this instrument panel in the front. And then there was a separate frame for the panel off to I guess that would be m my right, your left right now. And it's really nice because again, the webcam doesn't do it justice, but the frame itself is completely modular. Everything you see that is silver slides into different T joints or different joints that just have a really simple set screw like Allen Wrench. kind of configuration so I can adjust the the width of the controls, I can adjust the depth of the controls. Down here on the floor where the rudder pedals are, there's an arm that can extend forward and back if I want it to go out further or lower, whatever. Very very very very nice. It did not take long to build. It was a lot of boxes. And the other nice thing about it is I have a very specific throttle. I have a very specific flight stick. There are there are different plates that go on those arms that accommodate different things. So if I decide to upgrade or change any of that. One, I probably already have the plate because the base chair ships with probably the most compatible ones. But if I do go for something more niche, I could order plates and they're like 30 bucks. So after about, I don't know, maybe three hours of futzing around, I had the chair built. And also what you can't see is, you know, I guess the closest thing to describe it is You know how razor scooters have those wheels that are like gel, but they're kind of hard plastic. You know what I mean?

Paul 08:16 Listen

Yeah, yeah

Drew 08:18 Listen

On the back of the chair are wheels.

Paul 08:20 Listen

So you can kind of lift it up and wheel.

Drew 08:22 Listen

You can lift the front of it up and wheel it in. And when I get to the part of the story about why it's in here. All I had to do was take off the arm on the left side of the chair because it sticks out a little further because of that panel, and I was able to wheel the whole thing through my door. So actually pretty maneuverable. Not that heavy because this is all aluminum.

Paul 08:45 Listen

Nice.

Drew 08:45 Listen

Or mo I guess mostly aluminum. I think some of the other frame is steel, but the arms that are silver are aluminum, so it saves a little bit of weight And you'll also see that there are numerous adjustment knobs, which again are just tension to where it isn't a set screw like the mainframe. It basically has those things you loosen and you can slide it up and down and then re-tighten it. So you can really get yourself in there exactly how you want to be to use it. Okay. So then a few days later all the electronics showed up. And That was a whole lot of Chinese, man.

Paul 09:27 Listen

Yeah. Okay.

Drew 09:28 Listen

It was a whole lot of Chinese. Now I didn't pay any tariffs because it's shipped from a US warehouse. But when I got all the boxes, they were all individually wrapped with seals and a lot of Chinese lettering on them.

Paul 09:41 Listen

Yeah.

Drew 09:43 Listen

And when I ordered my chair, I ordered the the equipment that I could mount it directly to the frame, which is what you're seeing here. doing that. I kept all that and it came with all the required screws and mounting hardware and all that stuff. You know, there was a lot of pissing around, uh, mostly just because everything came in major pieces. And when I'm when I send you the pictures, you'll be able to see it more. But the the three quadrants that are actually monitors, they're legit like computer monitors. That's how they're recognized by your computer. those have uh a panel that you screw onto it that adds buttons all the way around it. So I had to put that together and then screw all of that to the frame and then run separate power cords for the buttons and then a power cord for the monitor connect a power cord for the monitor connection and then a USB cable that actually acts as the monitor connection. So each one of those panels has three wires coming off of it.

Paul 10:54 Listen

Wow. Okay.

Drew 10:55 Listen

Yeah. So getting all that wired up, getting it all connected, getting all that stuff ready to go. All right, that's act one.

Paul 11:04 Listen

Okay.

Drew 11:05 Listen

Let's go to act two. And

Paul 11:08 Listen

cable management.

Drew 11:09 Listen

Cable management. So the only thing they give you for cable management are Velcro ties.

Paul 11:18 Listen

Well, at least they gave you something.

Drew 11:20 Listen

Yeah. There really isn't anywhere else to put anything. It's not like these poles have caps on them.

Paul 11:29 Listen

So you could like possibly run the cables through?

Drew 11:32 Listen

Conceivably you would think so, but the answer is no.

Paul 11:35 Listen

Oh okay.

Drew 11:42 Listen

And for the main instrument panel, there's a lot of wires. They're not going to go in there gracefully. They're not going to go in there gracefully. What I ultimately, and and and for reasons we'll get into later. I have a power strip also here. I have two USB hubs.

Paul 12:01 Listen

Get it.

Drew 12:02 Listen

Yep. And for a while I also had another device that is no longer in the setup, again, for reasons we'll get into later. So after several days of figuring out the best way to do this What's that noise?

Paul 12:19 Listen

Uh there's a lot going on in the Baylor household right now. That is the little song my oven makes.

Drew 12:25 Listen

Okay, alright. All right. Okay. Alright. I wanted to make sure it wasn't something in my house.

Paul 12:32 Listen

No, no, no. That my my stove likes to sing a little song when it's all when it's all nice, toasty, warm.

Drew 12:37 Listen

Okay. Meanwhile, Vito is Expressing his opinions upstairs. I apologize.

Paul 12:42 Listen

That's okay.

Drew 12:44 Listen

Ultimately what I ended up doing is uh shout out to 3M command strips because they're amazing. So on the back of the chair at the very very back I put down some command strips and I essentially command stripped a surge protector on the back of it.

Paul 12:59 Listen

Okay. So

Drew 13:01 Listen

everything that needs a plug goes back there. All the wires come down the mainframe from the main instrument cluster. That's also where it meets the wire for the rudder. Then you have the wire that comes from the left side, which is just the stick. That's a single wire. Over on the other side, you have the cable for the throttle, and then you have the cable for the What is essentially the landing gear cluster? So there's two wires that come off of that side. Everything meets in the middle. And I have a 3D printer. I found a really nice cable box. That I can use to sort of coil the cables up and then tuck some of that in there so then it goes into a cable box so it doesn't look so cluttered. Then it comes out of that And then there's another one behind it again that handles some of like the USB power cords, the USB extension cord, the power cord for the surge protector, all of that's back there. I really feel that is the limit of my capabilities to make that look acceptable. Hey Vito. Are you back? Okay. You're back. You wanna you wanna you wanna be on the podcast?

Paul 14:12 Listen

Hey buddy.

Drew 14:13 Listen

Yeah, I know you're barking. It's okay though. It's okay though. Okay, so that was like the cable management nightmare Now let's talk about why it's in here.

Paul 14:26 Listen

Yeah, why is it in there, Drew?

Drew 14:28 Listen

Okay. So prior to purchasing everything, I did a little research. Now my computer is in my office. I measured and it is approximately 20 feet, give or take, to where I wanted the chair out in my main basement. They really don't make reliable USB 3. 0 or 3. 2 cables that are that long.

Paul 14:58 Listen

Okay.

Drew 14:59 Listen

So you have to find other ways to extend that data communication to that distance.

Paul 15:06 Listen

And I remember one of the things we looked at last episode was basically USB over Ethernet.

Drew 15:12 Listen

That's correct. So I pulled the trigger on that.

Paul 15:16 Listen

Okay.

Drew 15:16 Listen

And I'll put the link in the show notes. So

Paul 15:20 Listen

is that the device that is no longer with us?

Drew 15:22 Listen

That is the device that is no longer with us. So here's what happened. As I previously mentioned, each one of these things on the chair is a USB connection.

Paul 15:34 Listen

Right.

Drew 15:34 Listen

Every single one. Doubly so for the monitors, because yes, you can power the monitor with one USB connection. But as we will learn in this story, USB hubs can only power so much. Especially when uh especially when you're like powering a whole bunch of other stuff with a powered USB hub.

Paul 16:01 Listen

Okay. Okay. So you you exceeded those limits, I'm guessing. Yeah.

Drew 16:06 Listen

So I after everything was put together, I hooked up this device. Now for those of you that didn't do your homework or didn't listen to this. What this what this little device does is it connects to your computer with a USB-C cable. From there You plug in a cat 5, cat 6, cat 11, whatever the fuck we're up to now in Ethernet spec. And you run the cable to where you want it to go. Then on the other end, there is a very similar box. And on that box are five things. The first thing is DC input for power So you have to you each each end of this is powered. The main box that plugs into your computer is just powered over USB. The remote box has its own power cord.

Paul 16:57 Listen

Makes sense.

Drew 16:59 Listen

Then there are three USB ports on what I guess is the back that are also powered, but then there is a higher powered USB port on the front. So there are four USB ports provided by this device. Alright, so the promise is That it supports USB 3. 0 and USB 3. 2 Gen 1 with up to 5 gigs of data transfer. That should be more than enough bandwidth that I need.

Paul 17:32 Listen

Seems like it.

Drew 17:33 Listen

All right, so I plug all that in and just as a test I plugged in a USB hub to it because the documentation says, hey, you can use this with a USB hub. Plug in the USB hub and I start plugging in devices. So I plug in a couple of the panels, I plug in a couple of um You know, the controls or whatever. And everything is just rapidly turning off and on. So

Paul 18:00 Listen

not good.

Drew 18:01 Listen

Not great. Not great. So I start doing the thing that I do as an IT professional. I start troubleshooting.

Paul 18:07 Listen

Troubleshooting. Yeah. Do you have a faulty device that's pulling too much power? All the like what's the yeah, what's the what's going on? Yeah.

Drew 18:14 Listen

Yep. So I Went on to Beesbo's place and I ordered a couple different powered USB hubs. I thought clearly I'm gonna need multiple powered USB hubs to support all this. So I have I I essentially got three powered USB hubs, plug them into discrete ports on this device that acts as the extender for my computer. Plugged in power to them, and I started plugging in devices. And I got to a point where I got everything to light up except one thing. And it didn't matter what I did, I could not get the throttle to stay lit up. Didn't matter what I did. Now, what I also noticed was if I started disconnecting enough things. It would work. So I thought

Paul 19:02 Listen

you still figure it's probably a power issue. There's not enough power for it to

Drew 19:06 Listen

I thought that. But then I started thinking Is there some sort of incompatibility with this USB hub or this device or the device and the hub or the device the hub and the controller that I'm trying to use? So I disconnected everything but that and it worked. So I'm like really at my wit's end and did a little more research. Essentially These devices only support so much USB bandwidth at once. Even though it gives you that high rate,

Paul 19:43 Listen

you only

Drew 19:44 Listen

get And no I if I was connecting a f a couple devices, fine. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten devices. three of which are monitors. And I even tried because in the documentation for the monitors, it says like, hey, if you don't have enough power on your USB, whatever. There is actually a USB-C connection on the back that you can plug into just for power. No data, just power. I even tried that. I I bought an anchor Charger essentially that has three USB-C ports on it, and that's what's actually powering the monitors independently. Still no dice. Could not get it to work. So I was like, well shit, is this not gonna work at all? Did I break something? Is something not working right? And it was at that point that I was like, well, fuck it. I'm just gonna wheel it into my room.

Paul 20:48 Listen

And roll out the USB over either.

Drew 20:50 Listen

Roll out the USB thing. So I have a six-foot USB A male to female. Plug that into one of the better USB ports, like a USB 3. 2 or 3. 1 port on the back of my computer. I'm still using two hubs, one powered, one not.

Paul 21:11 Listen

Okay.

Drew 21:11 Listen

And it it works flawlessly. Huh. Well,

Paul 21:15 Listen

works flawlessly. I mean , it works, but I'm glad I'm I'm Sad that the USB over Ethernet didn't work. That would have been my first like that's exactly where my brain went when you have this problem is like, well, USB over Ethernet. Right. That's what that's for.

Drew 21:29 Listen

And look, it's it's troubleshooting one oh one. You just start taking things out of it until it gets until you f until you solve the problem And what I had done before I even did that, but I got impatient, is I started thinking, well, do I need multiple of these devices to support what I want to do? Maybe that's what I need. And Maybe there'll be a point in my in my life where I come back and revisit that if I ever move or I need to do something. But I will say that I did also buy this, but this is getting returned. This is the same thing. Except it's just USB 2. 0.

Paul 22:04 Listen

Oh. Oh yeah, it's much, much cheaper. Yeah.

Drew 22:07 Listen

Much cheaper. It's USB 2. 0. I don't even think it's powered on both on one of the ends. But the idea would be this is what I would plug kind of the things that don't really require that much power. You know?

Paul 22:21 Listen

Okay. So you could have one for the one that really requires USB three and then all the other peripherals can go USB two.

Drew 22:28 Listen

Right. Splitting out maybe just enough that I could get past that bandwidth issue to make it work. So again, this is kind of where it is right now. I'm sort of done fucking around. I want to enjoy it. So it's where it needs to be for now. But in the future, I think that's probably what has to happen. Now, the last thing I want to mention is all of this requires software.

Paul 22:54 Listen

Oh boy. How did Yeah, uh okay. So a lot of these devices came from China. So how what's the software situation like there, Drew?

Drew 23:05 Listen

Oh, okay. So there

Paul 23:07 Listen

you have things you regret installing on your computer running?

Drew 23:11 Listen

Maybe. You

Paul 23:14 Listen

might have Bitcoin for the People's Republic of China.

Drew 23:18 Listen

So the the main application that you use is this thing called Simap Pro. Now credit where credit's due. I will say that the software is awful. I didn't know people actually use Times New Roman in UIs.

Paul 23:37 Listen

It's a choice.

Drew 23:38 Listen

It's it's a choice, but it's called Simap Pro. I'll put a link in in the show notes. You'll you'll never install this. You'll you'll you'll need you'll never install this. And what this thing does is number one, it it actually so so it so here's here's the dirty little secret about how all this works. Most of this stuff is just a USB controller that has inputs. It's not remapping keys. They it's kind of like a joystick. It it shows up in Windows as a joystick. with discrete buttons, if it has twisty knobs, they have access they have accesses and things like that. Okay. Now if all I was doing was just having something that has buttons, I probably wouldn't need this. But a lot of these things in here, let me send you a picture because it's not just about the it's not just about that. It is also about state. So I'm gonna send you some pictures now.

Paul 24:44 Listen

I will do my best to make these pictures available as podcast art, chapter art. For the dear listener. Okay, here we go. Dang. Okay, that's a whoo, that's a lot of uh

Drew 25:02 Listen

So that the first the first picture I sent you is a good example of this, okay? Ignore the ignore the monitors for a second that show things, okay. That that I that instrument panel that has that dot matrix display that shows that data, that is simultaneously what is shown in the sim.

Paul 25:19 Listen

Okay.

Drew 25:20 Listen

So in the game when you're flying the F-16, that panel is kind of crucial because you input commands to the jet with that. Okay. So not only do all of those buttons do something when I press them in the game, it changes the display of it in the game and it also feeds back to this and updates the display on the device. And that's all accomplished via software and scripting. So there so on the actual simulator side, there is an extensible mod like language for lack of a better term. I think it's mostly Lua that this hooks into. So when you install the software And you hook up one of these devices, it's basically writing scripts to the game folder that are then picked up by the software so it knows

Paul 26:12 Listen

to communicate with the equipment you have.

Drew 26:14 Listen

Exactly. And the monitors are another one because if I like if I'm playing the game on my computer, it knows like this is the monitor to play on, this is the total uh X and Y dimensions. But when all these monitors are plugged in, you need to basically arrange them in Windows so that you know monitor one is your main display and then monitors two, three, and four are these little mini displays. And again, through scripting, you're basically telling the simulation, hey, there's another monitor over here. Here's where it is physically in the XY plane of my desktop. Draw this screen on that. So all of that is being handled by this software. Alright. And the same thing goes for the second picture I sent you. The first picture was the F-16, the second picture is the F-A-18. And on the FA18, you'll notice there's a different panel on the front. Depending on what mode you're in, that little dot matrix display on the right shows different I mean, they're not words, they're abbreviations, acronyms, things like that. And, you know, you could you could press buttons and it shows up on the little digital display and and all that other stuff. So that so the software not only handles all of that, but it also saves you a lot of time because it will basically pre-configure all of these buttons for the aircraft you're flying. So it again, if you're looking at that picture, you'll see around every monitor there are basically 16 buttons around every display. All of those are are different buttons. All of them get programmed differently for each monitor. That would take me hours to map that by hand, right?

Paul 28:03 Listen

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Drew 28:09 Listen

And the knobs are all s essentially sliders that do different things. So the access the accesses are all configures. Oh Paul. Paul, there's some there's some pretty there's some pretty clicky some of the knobs are clicky, some of the knobs are twist, and some of the knobs are twisty cli And some of the knobs you can press. And the switches. The switch the switches are all mechanical. The switches are all mechanical. Some of them some of them have gates. Some of them it's like you can't just flip it up and down. You gotta yank, lift, and then set.

Paul 28:49 Listen

Oh, because it's okay.

Drew 28:51 Listen

Yeah, because you don't want to accidentally flip one, you know, drop a bomb on somebody, right?

Paul 28:55 Listen

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it turns out. Frowned upon. Generally found upon.

Drew 29:00 Listen

Generally frowned upon. It's never a war crime the first time. Um Yeah. Yeah, it's good. And what's and again, because I bought the more expensive one Really, the only difference between the two pictures is in the first picture, that panel that has the gray buttons, when I want to fly the other jet, and actually I could probably do this on camera. You could probably should be able to see this. This is on a hinge, so all I do is just flip this up.

Paul 29:29 Listen

Look at that, it flippies up. Then you're on then you're doing the other one.

Drew 29:33 Listen

Then I'm doing the other one and then this goes back down

Paul 29:35 Listen

It's nice. It's nice.

Drew 29:37 Listen

Yeah, and and and again, credit where credit's due. All the hardware that came with this, really good. Really good. Not chintzy. Not chintzy at all. Like there's none of this feels cheap, which is what I was kind of worried about. None of it feels cheap. There's very little like I mean there's plastic, but there's very little flimsy plastic. Now, I did put a screenshot in the show notes of some of the hilarious translations.

Paul 30:01 Listen

I saw that. Yes, yes.

Drew 30:03 Listen

Yeah. Do not use excessive force. Like some of them, some of them they do warn you, like, hey, in the jet, this would be a pull and twist. You can't do that with this or you're gonna break it.

Paul 30:16 Listen

Okay. Okay.

Drew 30:16 Listen

Right.

Paul 30:17 Listen

Yeah.

Drew 30:17 Listen

Right. Same thing for some of the tail hooks and things like that. Like, they're like, listen, don't like Gorilla it, you know? Show a little class.

Paul 30:25 Listen

Okay. Okay. Okay. I c I respect that. I respect that.

Drew 30:28 Listen

Yeah. So there was a there was a little fucking around with controls. There was a little bit of time doing things like that, but Uh all in all, everything looks good. Now the only footnote to this is after setting everything up, and again, if you go back to the pictures I sent you. It it doesn't look too bad in the first picture, but in the second picture, wow, what is going on with my phone? In the second picture The monitors look kind of dim.

Paul 30:56 Listen

They do look kind of dim, but yeah, especially that one on the left there.

Drew 30:59 Listen

Yeah. That's not a problem with the monitors. That is actually a bug with the simulator. So again, doing a little bit of research, and this is it, this is a utility that's been around for a while. It's called Reshade.

Paul 31:14 Listen

Okay.

Drew 31:14 Listen

And I put a link in the show notes to it. Essentially what it does, it is it hooks into your game and gives you access to more shaders for you to use in your game. So if you want to make your game brighter, more contrast, more color depth. You can install this and it hooks into things. Long story short, after you have your monitor set up the way you want. You install this, you it and I f I've basically followed a guide online that did all this, and it's like set this value to this, set this value to that. Then what you do is you take a screenshot. And when you take the screenshot It's your whole desktop, including the monitors that make up the displays. So then what you do is you take that screenshot and you go to paint. And and you basically draw a white box over the actual game part and that applies a mask to the reshade. So it's so then so then it's like remedial Photoshop 101 for my Photoshop nerds out there. So now when I turn the effect on, it doesn't affect the game, but it does make the monitors brighter. Oh

Paul 32:23 Listen

okay, that's clever solution. Okay.

Drew 32:25 Listen

Yeah, except Windows Smart Controls like this DLL is ah All right, all right, mom, whatever. So, how does it feel to fly? It feels great. I've been you I've been I've been using the steam frame. And I've been it's been good. It's been good. Uh the steam frame is very light and again if you're looking at my chair I have a power cable that sort of comes through one of the holes in the chair. That's where the power cord goes to the steam frame. So again, cable management. That's what I live for. And uh it's good. I did buy a wireless headset to use that has a microphone on it that kind of lives on there too. It's it's super cheap. I only really use it for that. And um Yeah, I mean it's been a journey. It's taken me my wife gave me a lot of shit because she's like, have you actually played anything in it yet? Or have you just been messing with your cables and figuring things out? But I have done a few flights And uh yeah, being able to just press buttons without having to reach for a mouse or something has been Kind of game changing. It it it's really been worth it. I really enjoy it. And people are probably wondering, like, why would you spend the extra money on the monitors if you're playing in VR? Here's the thing. When you're playing in VR, I would love to tell you that you can't see out from around like the frame of the VR headset. You can.

Paul 33:54 Listen

Yeah.

Drew 33:54 Listen

So rather than constantly looking up and down with my headset, I can just kind of take a peek down and see the same thing I would do if I actually tilted my head down.

Paul 34:03 Listen

Okay. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah.

Drew 34:06 Listen

Yeah.

Paul 34:06 Listen

Yeah. Cool.

Drew 34:08 Listen

Uh so I know that I just spent a hell of a lot of time geeking out about that stuff, but uh it's working really well. It's working really well.

Paul 34:16 Listen

I'm glad. I'm glad it yeah, I'm glad it's working out for you. Yeah. Excellent.

Drew 34:20 Listen

Yeah All right, I want to shut up for a while.

Paul 34:22 Listen

That's okay. I mean I s I I just wanted to let you know that I did roll credits on control resident.

Drew 34:31 Listen

Okay. Don't spoil it for me.

Paul 34:34 Listen

You haven't played it yet. I'm not gonna spoil it. Uh the story, the s the the story, the story is So well done. There is. In fact, I would go out of your way to avoid any kind of spoilers.

Drew 34:52 Listen

Okay.

Paul 34:53 Listen

The The some of the last pieces and it what it does at the end is j I it It's absolutely just it's it it'll do something you would you definitely did not expect to happen. But looking back on it, I'm like, oh yeah, I can see how they're They're setting this up. It did

Drew 35:14 Listen

by the way. Sorry. Vito loves to steal the cable ties. So I have to keep an eye on him. Sorry. Okay. So anyway, it does things you don't expect. Sorry.

Paul 35:22 Listen

Yeah. Yeah. Uh if you love the lore of control, if you love reading all the little the little things and getting like environmental storytelling, it's done extremely well. If you liked control, you will love the story of control resonant. I I am I I know I know who I am, Drew. I am not the best video game player player in the world. I generally avoid games like, you know, the typically the the you know Elden Ring and games like that. I I know I I know my skill level. I know what I enjoy. The game gets too hard at the end. Flat out. At least for me. It's it is it was too difficult. After a while, I really had like I I made a decision at some point. I'm like, I just want to see the story. I just cranked all of the accessibility stuff up to just take it easy on me and uh got through it And this is even after like each patch they've done has some kind of like, yeah, we made this part easier. We made this part easier. I think it's still, at least for me. It is too hard. I get it remedy. You don't want to add a difficulty setting. I think you need to do it. I think you just need to do it like just get some preset or I don't know. I mean you do have a lot of accessibility controls. You can increase your damage, decrease the amount of damage you take. Uh, you know, you can make some of the the puzzly aspects a little bit easier if you need to do that as well. Uh it it just got it got It got it got too hard for me and but at least the game gave me the tools that I could adjust things and and get through it and and enjoy the story. Uh I'm thinking I may you can do like a new game plus uh after that. I'm not sure. I may just start over from the beginning and and try to play it and try to get good. Now that I've seen the story, I can maybe bang my head against some things and and and and do it and pick up some of the little side quest things that I know that I missed. Uh but it's it's real good so far. Even with the difficulty spike at the end, I think it's still so far my game of the year. So

Drew 37:31 Listen

Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's on my list to play. As you can see, I've been busy.

Paul 37:36 Listen

Yeah, you yeah, you have the priorities. Yep.

Drew 37:38 Listen

Yeah. So it is it is on my list to play. I I will I am it's absolutely on my list. There's a I need to get through a couple other things and then as the year starts to slow down and we get closer to the holidays and I have more time, I will I will probably tackle tack tackle more of that type of stuff.

Paul 37:54 Listen

And when you finish it, we'll do a spoilerly cast and we'll talk about it. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Drew 37:59 Listen

Yeah. I I you know, it's funny. I'm so ambitious with my game library. I actually downloaded control intending to play it. Oh

Paul 38:07 Listen

,

Drew 38:08 Listen

I forget it. And it's just sitting, it's it's on my monitor right now, just in my steam list, just marking me. Like, I'm on your hard drive. Like

Paul 38:16 Listen

Yeah, it's yeah, it's The Yeah, it's it's the I it does have some issues. Like I think Depending on how you play the game and what order you do things, you can make things unnecessarily hard for yourself. You just can. Like, there's some there's some movement abilities you really kind of need to focus on first to get things going. And and those can be kind of hard to find a little bit. And like Certain enemies you need to have certain abilities. And and there it does kind of telegraph pretty well, like, hey, you know, like these things are resilient to fire. And oh hey, people keep talking about this giant fire creature that you should go kill. Maybe those are related. But

Drew 39:11 Listen

got

Paul 39:11 Listen

it. Yeah.

Drew 39:12 Listen

Got it.

Paul 39:12 Listen

It's good. It's good. It's The yeah, but it just it mm-hmm the difficulty spike at the end was just too much for me. But still, still I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the story, the the gameplay, it's all it's all good. The the Dylan and the board is one of my favorite, just absolute favorite things. And like just just like Audio-wise, okay, so the fast travel system in this game is you find these weird doors, and they're just like door frames out there, and as you unlock them, you can use the doors to travel around. Uh, the first time you do it, the board goes like, we do it again. And uh Uh there's this mechanic where it's like basically if you like it's every enemy's got two health bars, a regular health bar and like a stagger bar. And if you stagger them, then you can do like a execution kill And uh every time after you do that, the board basically makes a noise like, hell yeah.

Drew 40:20 Listen

But in their but in their weird language and noise. Okay.

Paul 40:24 Listen

Every time they're like, mmm, get it.

Drew 40:28 Listen

Does it actually subtitle it?

Paul 40:29 Listen

Uh no, it doesn't. Yeah, like it's like we again. Yeah, you just but you but you can tell just it's the it's the board and they're like, mmm, get after it. Yeah.

Drew 40:42 Listen

Okay. Very fun. Very fun. Alright. I you're making me want to play it even more.

Paul 40:46 Listen

There the board is plays a bigger role in this game than it does in control, I think. Yeah.

Drew 40:52 Listen

Okay.

Paul 40:54 Listen

All right, it's yeah, it's weird. Anywho, anywho, let's talk about it.

Drew 40:56 Listen

Yeah, no, I'm I'm glad. So last topic for the night, because you and I are both exasperated. So have you been following all this PS5 hacking?

Paul 41:04 Listen

I have. I'm Uh yeah, so uh you have two links in here and they're really set the stage too. Yeah.

Drew 41:13 Listen

Talk about why this is happening.

Paul 41:15 Listen

Well, I may I think people are just generally mad at PlayStation Sony because they decided that they had a strategy where they were gonna bring like their single player story-driven games to PC a few years after the PlayStation release. And then they're like, you know what? We're not gonna do it. Yeah.

Drew 41:36 Listen

That's true, but I don't think that's the main reason.

Paul 41:39 Listen

What's the main reason?

Drew 41:40 Listen

People were very mad about physical discs

Paul 41:42 Listen

Oh yes, that too. That too. So Tony. And like right now, like you can't like PlayStation Pros, you just can't fucking find them.

Drew 41:52 Listen

Right. Uh yeah. So part of this is Sony's like, we don't want to make physical disks anymore. Everything's gonna be a download, everything's gonna be a license, and As we've seen, like one day you just might not be able to play a game that you paid for. So People are like, okay, well fine, Sony. If per if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't theft. That's the common rallying cry. So thanks to what I assume is mostly AI You have some teams out there right now that are basically decompiling and reverse engineering not just the Sony OS. But the Sony hardware. They have basically taken the Sony GPUs And made it so that they could fully emulate them. And now they're working on the rest of the components. I think last time I checked, the project's like 90% complete or something.

Paul 42:54 Listen

Yeah, and they have some uh I've been following this because basically like looks like you have to acquire the ISO in some way, shape, or form, whether that's legally or doing it in a disc or finding it on the internet. And then it looks like you run it through this tool, which kind of ports it, and they have like a Windows version and a Linux version. So it kind of takes all of the assets and the executables and makes a uh a native executable that you can run.

Drew 43:20 Listen

Yep.

Paul 43:21 Listen

I know really they're kind of following the same inspiration of things like Proton where they're not trying to do emulation, they're basically just trying to do translation.

Drew 43:30 Listen

Right.

Paul 43:30 Listen

Computers are fast enough now that that's really not that much overhead. And while I they don't have like any of the triple A titles playable yet, some of the indie stuff, while it's not perfectly like they're not always hitting like frame for frame, but like things are becoming playable

Drew 43:48 Listen

Yeah.

Paul 43:49 Listen

Like some of the some of the lighter weight games. And that's just freaking amazing.

Drew 43:55 Listen

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. And and they're also jailbreaking PS5s.

Paul 44:01 Listen

Yes, that's another yeah, another group of teams or yeah. I think you can uh all the way through the mo like it's not the most recent update, but all through all the way through the January update. you can you know put in a uh I think it's still like a disk based hack where like a re or you I get yeah but you can you can hack your PS5 and install emulators and bypass like you know copyright protection but I think I think most of people like look we can run emulators on the PS5 and yeah it's they're they're really coming along with that stuff. It's and I don't think I remember I know this cycle's weird because like everything's I think just gonna stick around a little bit longer because Everything is awful, but this feels really early in the PlayStation 5 life cycle to start having these kinds of things out there. And that's really exciting. Yeah.

Drew 44:56 Listen

Yeah. Yeah. I it it's definitely interesting just because, you know, I mean, thanks to you, I do have access to a PS5.

Paul 45:04 Listen

You do.

Drew 45:05 Listen

But uh I'm a big fan of emulation. I mean I I play a lot of games emulated and you know I I really enjoy PS2 games and GameCube games and I felt like it took us so long to get to a place where hardware was able to reliably do that just because of the sheer computational translation or whatever has to happen to really render the games the way that that original hardware did. And now we've just made this I I guess thanks AI like a generational leap to where we're taking native stuff and just

Paul 45:40 Listen

Yeah.

Drew 45:41 Listen

Running it.

Paul 45:42 Listen

Mm-hmm.

Drew 45:42 Listen

You're not really even really using an emulator, like you said.

Paul 45:49 Listen

taking the original binaries and rewriting them to run on your m machine and that's just that's that's freaking cool is what it is. Now granted Sony 's but there's probably gonna be lawsuits and lawyers involved and shit like that and I hope I hope the project doesn't get s like lawyered up into oblivion. But

Drew 46:06 Listen

I mean, look, I'm sure that people will continue to

Paul 46:10 Listen

Well, yeah. I just look at like

Drew 46:13 Listen

I mean Nintendo is the poster child of

Paul 46:16 Listen

the the current landscape of Switch, the original Switch emulation. It's like, okay, yep. Like they they get rid of this one, but someone's got the source code and they do a fork and they change one letter of the name and then that's the one you grab for a while and then they get sued out of oblivion then it just pops up again or like you can still find them on the internet

Drew 46:35 Listen

It really is. It really is sort of like a a fool's errand to try to completely shut it down. But the but the specter of it being there sometimes can be enough to

Paul 46:44 Listen

make people not do it. Yeah. Yeah. Uh s you know, I I I have um I have very complicated feelings when it comes to like copyright law and what I when I what I feel comfortable. emulating and and getting versus what I can't. So I'm not sure that this is something that I would do today. Of course I don't have uh anything nearly powerful enough to run that. Uh but I d I still think it's very interesting. I'm a big believer in g video game preservation. I think that's like

Drew 47:22 Listen

That's my thing. That's my thing because there's a There's an entire catalog of Xbox 360 games that I would love to play. And I think Microsoft knows that and they're sort of like leaning into it and trying to bring that stuff back to modern Xbox.

Paul 47:34 Listen

They are. They are. Yeah. Yeah. Microsoft does a pretty good there's still a lot of original Xbox titles you can play on the Series X and stuff.

Drew 47:41 Listen

Yeah, but they're not they're they're only doing that because they're not making anything new. So

Paul 47:44 Listen

well, yeah, Microsoft has their own problems. Yeah, but Project Helix is gonna save everything. Or something. Yeah.

Drew 47:52 Listen

Yeah, we'll see.

Paul 47:53 Listen

So but uh yeah I From a pure purely intellectual and video game preservation aspect, I think this is really cool. Very cool. Yeah.

Drew 48:08 Listen

Cool. That's all I had, buddy.

Paul 48:11 Listen

I think yeah, you know what? We're at like 50 minutes. I think I think this is it. I think this is it.

Drew 48:16 Listen

Yeah, I'm exhausted.

Paul 48:17 Listen

Yeah. Uh doing their best. com. You can find all the show notes. I'll try all the photos that Drew sent me up on the website as well. And hey, thanks for listening.