Five years of N64 Squid

Wow, it’s been five years already? Time sure flies.

Each year so far has seen some new section is added to the website, but this year it’s a little bit different. I’ve been going through a few changes in my personal life which made it a bit difficult to post last year. I bought a house in July so between moving and remodeling, my N64 and PC were out of commission for a few months.

On top of that, part of the work on the new house was to set up the game station which finally got solved after about 2-3 months. The new TV I ordered was broken (it had a ‘dead pixel’ blob in the middle of the screen, especially noticeable when it’s black:

Getting it returned and refunded took me from December to February. Afterwards I got a larger model which actually works properly.

Then I went ahead and bought cable after cable, a couple of TV stands and I’m happy with the results.

Here’s a little closeup gallery of what I got set up here up on the top:

And on the bottom shelf:

I love my Nintendo 64 now that I’ve got it just the way I want it to be. Before, I was using a Pikachu N64 hooked up to a Composite -> HDMI upscaler, which you can see in my earlier videos. Now I got it set up with N64 HDMI from Retroactive.be and installed by Oldskoolconsoles so the image is as pixel-perfect as it can be before it disintegrates into analogue goo.

You also probably noticed the N64 has been hydro-dipped (by Vital Hydrographic) to give it a carbon fibre sort of feel with red accents.

I even got the joystick changed to an aftermarket Gamecube-style one. It’s great for most games except first person shooters.

The good news

Since taking that break, I’ve tried to keep a weekly post schedule, and have so far succeeded since November last year. Dedicated followers might have noticed that the pattern is alternating between news and N64 homebrew, so hopefully someday I’ll be able to cover all the homebrew games and demos, at least the ones from the 90’s. Though I must admit that I do need to put more effort into putting fanart on the site more often, I just tend to forget. Oops.

That’s all for now, I just want to let you all know what’s been going on for the past several months and share with you the beauty that is my new setup.