I decided to accompany the track of the week (which by this time should be called the Tack of the whenever I get around to it) with a little bit about the song chosen. This weeks track is a cover by the talented Mr. Ted Leo. It’s actually a cover of a Kelly Clarkson song which was pretty popular when it was released, and I am sure you have all heard it. He does such a fantastic job with the song. He managed to incorporate Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Maps into it at the end, and the transition is fairly seamless. This track surfaced somewhere around my junior or senior year of high school and I remember humming the tune around the hallways and being asked, “Are you humming Kelly Clarkson?” To which instead of going through my long spiel on how it was covered and all, I simply bowed my head and said, “Yes.” Anyway, great tack, download!
This entry is going up a little later than I would have liked to to go up, but I guess late is better than never, right? This past spring break I made some projects for myself to try to hone some skills that I plan on utilizing for my career later in life. Not only that, but some of them were fairly practical. One such project was modifying my American NES to play audio from enhanced Japanese Famicom carts. I had a previous post explaining the whole thing. Here’s a Cliffs Notes of the whole thing. In Japan, on the Famicom (NES, but Japanese), there was an extra pin that allowed developers to make their own enhancement chips to mix into the audio. This was not put into the NES when it came to America because there were much stricter policies for publishing games and it only allowed for the use of a handful of chips to be used.
Step one for the whole thing to work is to acquire a Famicom to NES converter, and a game that used a sound enhancement chip. Luckily, I had both of these already so now I just had to figured out how the whole thing worked. To my unsurprised I found that this modification was already done many times and pretty detailed information was already given on it.
The process included taking the audio out pin from the adapter and passing it through a 100k ohm resistor and a 4.7 μF capacitor then to the R9 resistor on the NES main board. The resistor and capacitor help with the volume in the mixing because without them the extra audio channels added in would be too loud and we wouldn’t hear any of the default audio channels.
Let’s get this party started.
Top of the NES board
Wire soldered to R9 (labeled on the top of the board)
Wire Soldered to pin 16 of the adapter cart
I wanted to make sure it worked before I soldered it on a board
You can see the finished board by the power button
While I was in there I was wondering if there were any other mods I could do. I found out by just knocking out pin 4 of the infamous “lock-out chip” I could disable it. Technically you are supposed to connect pin 4 to ground, but almost everything I read said that leaving it floating is fine. This chip was supposed to keep any old company from making games without going through Nintendo (greedy bastards!). Of course many companies found a workaround for the chip, most famously Tengen. Tengen actually finagled the information from the US Copyright Office and reverse engineered a solution. They were sued outright. Why would I care about disabling the lock-out chip? Well, if you are an NES gamer and remember back to when the thing used to reset constantly and you would have to take the cart out and blow on it and stick it back in. That is the lock-out chips doing. If the pin that loaded the data to tell the lockout chip, “Hey, I’m legit, let me play.” didn’t connect the game wouldn’t load. If you were a kid who grew up on this, you absolutely know what I am talking about.
Here is the death of the lock-out chip.
The finished product.
Here is a video of the proof. VRCVII audio coming out of the NES. Success!
I want to modify it to use a 3.5mm plug and input, but I will save that for another time.
I have a couple more projects I have been working on and will post them shortly.
I heard about this film called The Great Happiness Space from a blog I follow and was intrigued by the concept. It was a documentary on the “host clubs” that litter parts of Japan. The concept of these are that women come in an pay for time with a host of their choice. The ultimate goal of these places is not to provide sex, but to provide companionship. For reference the female reverse exists as well. It might seem a little strange here, on the other side of the planet, to pay just to hang out with someone. That’s not to say that nothing more ever happens, it’s just not the service that is advertised. Anyway a history lesson on host clubs is not the focus of this post, nor the documentary; a little background was needed though.
The documentary is kind of a taxi cab confessions of one of the clubs in Osaka called Rakkyo . The spotlight is usually shined upon the clubs owner Issei. The sheer dichotomy of this man’s personality is beyond mind boggling. The rest of the time is split between many of the club’s frequenters. They try the best they can to explain their justifications for spending almost all their free time within the establishment.
I really had no idea what I was stepping into when I started watching. I didn’t read a whole lot about it and hadn’t heard of it until about a week ago. The synopsis was fairly vague, just a general outline really. What was supposed to be a documentary on host clubs turned out to be more focused upon human frailty and the constant need for validation. It’s really a sobering film.
I found myself at many junctures with my jaw open at the absurdity of some of the amounts of money that were thrown around. Some hosts would make upwards of $50,000 per month! When interviewing some girls about how much they would spend there it averaged about $1000 per night with some girls going up to $5000 in one evening! The most amazing thing is that no one throwing these numbers around did so with any thought or even shame for wasting all that money.
The documentary starts to pull away from the pack when the girls and the hosts start talking about what they are actually selling/buying. The hosts openly admit that they are selling dreams, fake love. They lie to these girls faces and tell them exactly what they want to hear. Many of them say they have so many clients that people become easy to read and they can shape and mold their personality to fit the person’s needs. They often times get girls who fall in love with them, even propose at times. That’s what keeps them coming back. They fall helplessly in love and try ensnare the hosts as their own. The hosts go on to explain some strategies for getting out of talks like that and to give them hope so they come back. That all sounds pretty terrible, extremely terrible really. The hosts should be run out of town for what they are peddling! But wait, what do the girls think?
The clients, when interviewed, seemed to be pretty aware of the situation. They are in love with guys who are paid to take them to an imaginary world. They still fool themselves into thinking that something may happen down the line. The real kicker comes when you find out how they finance their extravagant expenditures. I won’t tell you that, but I am sure you can guess. It really turns into a vicious cycle.
As sorry as I felt for these people watching it, the theory of the whole thing is extremely easy to relate to. People are not made to be completely independent, we are social creatures and require interaction. We all need to be validated now and again. The problem is that the host clubs only provide a temporary relief from that feeling; it’s only a band-aid on the underlying problem. Watching it you could tell that everyone at the clubs were wearing masks; alone in the crowd.
As depressing as it was, it was enlightening and at the very least entertaining. Go pick it up!
