Twin Docking Station

Posted on March 11, 2022 by Viljami

I made a great purchase. Or so it seems right now. I bought a charging station for my Xbox Series S controller. I ordered also another gamepad and it will be delivered later.

So this is Kyzars Twin Docking Station. It came with two chargeable 850 mAh batteries. You must connect the docking station to Series S through a cable. Docking station charges controllers even when Xbox is powered off.

Batteries support both Xbox Series S or X and Xbox One. The package comes with a cover for both controllers and also for both types of controllers (Series S/X and One). I previously had a long three meter cable for my gamepad. I guess I am going to give wireless controllers another try.

I remember not being pleased with wireless controllers as I got my PS4 way back in 2014. The battery was drained out of charge quickly. Then I decided that I have to buy a long cable for every controller I am going to use. This way of thinking might now change.

Using single use AA batteries worked somewhat comfortable. Only disturbing matter was that you actually used these batteries for only one time and then just threw them away. That doesn’t sound good at all thinking about the environment and things like that. I hope that these new batteries that came with this docking station last for a pleasent amount of time. I will have to try and test this as I get more deeper into using this device.

I have to mention that the docking station was very cheap. It cost only 25 euros. If you think that a pack of ten AA batteries costs a bit over 5 euros this seems to be a good price. You will get also four lids that you have to change to your controller that enables charging of the controller.

I connected the charging station to the back of my Series S. It seems to be the best way to connect these devices. I didn’t throw away my three meter controller cable. I hope I don’t have to use it anymore. I will have to play around with these batteries and see if they really keep their charge. I hope they keep their charge for at least three hours. That would be enough to satisfy me.

Something New in PlayStation 1 Emulators – DuckStation

Posted on August 22, 2021January 11, 2022 by Viljami

I keep my eye on YouTube. I watch videos there. Gaming is one of the topics that I am most interested in. It doesn’t come as a surprise that there are countless videos about Xbox Series S. I found a very interesting information from one specific video that introduced a way to play PlayStation 1 games on your new Xbox.

This is possible through a new retro game emulator called DuckStation. I am not going to go to all the details of how playing PSX games this way is actually possible. After all it is possible. You have to enter to Xbox Series S in a “developer” mode. Then you will have to install DuckStation and tweak the settings. Of course you need also the BIOS and roms of all the games you are going to play.

DuckStation is a very powerful emulator application. You can enhance your graphics a lot and it is promised that you can play old PS1 games with a 4K resolution. Why would you want to use your new Xbox for this? Maybe it is because it has a limited hard disk space or maybe you just haven’t found the most interesting games for this new console. What ever the reason for you to be interested in DuckStation is it can provide you an experience on retro gaming once again with all your classic PS1 games. DuckStation is also available for Android and Linux and Windows.

I am not so interested in this way of using my new console for retro gaming. I prefer to play my emulated PS1 games on a PC. There are many reasons. One is that you can choose to use Dual Shock 4 controller through DS4Windows. I prefer to use my controller this way instead of using the new Xbox game pad. Playing PS1 games with Xbox’s controller? That’s definitely a no from me. When considering it this would be a good way to expand your collection of games a bit. Maybe you can play Xbox with a different controller somehow?

You can find more information about DuckStation from the link below:

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/DuckStation

Best PS3 games that I have played

Posted on March 28, 2020January 11, 2022 by Viljami

In this post I bring to your attention best PS3 games that I have played. So this is my personal list. It doesn’t have anything to do with reviews that you find inside some blogs or websites. Also it doesn’t necessarily include your favourites so remember to comment your thoughts after reading this post.

Gran Turismo 5

There was also GT6 released on PS3 but that game I haven’t to this day played. What we have here is very good driving game. Though if you consider this game compared to other Gran Turismo games it might be a slight dissappontment. I enjoyed this game and played the career mode.

Dirt 3

If you think about best rally game for PS3 you can’t deny that this is one of the best or maybe even the best. While not exactly being simulation of real driving this was slightly easier to get into and you could play it with a gamepad instead of driving wheel.

Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3

There was many CoD games released on PS3 but this comes up as best of them. If you are familiar with Call Of Duty series this won’t be a disappointment. The game sets on modern times when in first games, at least CoD one to three, action takes place in second world war. I found playing was satisfying and I wasn’t disgusted with soldiers tehcnology. I’m bringing this up as I was actually a bit disgusted while playing Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare later on my PS4.

FFXIII

This was one of the first games I bought for PS3 back in the days. Didn’t so much in to this, but certainly a quality role playing game. If you have time to play it as is common in Final Fantasy games that it takes more than 40 hours to complete and this is one of the longest FF games ever released.

F3AR

Nice first person shooter with some horror included. Different than CoD and might be a little bit harder to complete. Great game althought.

GTA IV

Best GTA for PS3 in my opinion. GTA V was also good one but I think it’s best played on a system that is more powerful than PS3.

Elder Scrolls Oblivion

Nice RPG for PS3 with first person camera angle.

What to expect from PS5?

Posted on March 26, 2020January 11, 2022 by Viljami

Sony is releasing their next gaming console, PS5, some day later this year. It contains very fast SSD hard drive that has capacity of 825 GB. Although this is much more than PS4 had when it was released this brings to mind that you may havet to upgrade the hard drive to install more games.

When PS4 was released it had 500 GB of hard disk space. Many users upgraded their disks to for example 2 TB which makes it four times bigger. If you install games that take 50 GB space each you have room for ten games. So after upgrading you have space for 40 games. There will probably be also external hard drives available to purchase.

How powerful is this device going to be? For optical media it has a newer before seen format, in gaming, that is Ultra HD Blu-ray and one disc has more capacity than one PS4s Blu-ray. CPU included is 8-core AMD Zen 2 with variable frequency. PS5 has 16 GB of GDDR6 SDRAM and Custom AMD RDNA 2 as a graphics processing unit. It is clear that you could build more powerful personal computer but PS5s price is still not yet certain.

What about games? Will PS5 have games that are not released on any other competing gaming platforms? These PS5 games are already confirmed: The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Watch Dogs: Legion, Gods and Monsters, Rainbow Six Quarantine, Outriders and Godfall (which is the first game released on PS5).

We are waiting and already there has been a decrease in sales of PS4 and Xbox One systems as people are saving their money to the next generation of gaming consoles. Also backwards compatibility will include most of PS4 games. We are not going to see PS5 to support earlier consoles games which is a little bit sad.

My gaming consoles

Posted on March 5, 2020January 11, 2022 by Viljami

PlayStation Classic

I bought my PS Classic for 40 €. The price was so low that I figured I should buy it. This device flopped very sadly. It had only 20 games. Gamepad included has too short cable and it doesn’t have analog sticks. Games included were not so special though it had FFVII and Metal Gear Solid. If you consider buying this think seriously about modding it and don’t pay too much. The price was originally 120 euros.

Retro Trio HD+

This is cool gaming console. It combines NES, SNES and Mega Drive. What that means is that you can play all cartridges that you buy from gaming stores or you might have kept them for a long time. Retro Trios price was 110 € so I think it’s cheap. It also gives HDMI output so the graphics aren’t too messy. If you want play with older retro type television I don’t recommend this. In this case you should get original systems.

PS3

I didn’t really buy this one. It was a gift to my then-girl-friend-now-my-wife. It was expensive as new but now you can pick one, I think, for under 100 euros depending on games or controllers that are included. It has a hard drive. Depended on model the size of hard drive varies. There was also some kind of backward compatibility with PS2 and PS1 games which depends a lot about the spesific model of PS3. So yep, there were multiple models, for example Slim Model and so on.

PSOne

My first true console that brought us the experience of 3D graphics. I bought this one from flea market for as low as 15 euros. It didn’t have controller with it so that effects to the price of course. PS2 controllers are compatible with it so I just played with my PS2 gamepads. It requires memory card so I had to buy one for about 10 euros. Memory cards work with PS2 but PS2 memory cards don’t work with PS1. This is a smaller version of PS1. Very cool product I would say and definitely retro.

Xbox 360

I bought this one from a friend who sold it to me as she didn’t play so much and also her gaming console was becoming old. She hasn’t bought a new console. Not yet at least. I have maybe 30 games for this and I have mainly picked them up from flea markets and gaming shops. I invested 70 euros in this one. I first thought I would play and get all Xbox 360 only games so first games I played and also completed were Alan Wake and Halo 3. I also have Gears Of War, Mass Effect, Fable, Halo, Halo wars and so on. This system has backwards compatibility on some original Xbox games but not all. The list can be found Googling.

PS4

I bought my PS4 as my birthday present in 2014. That was also a moment I turned 30 years old. It cost me about 500 euros and I had Tomb Raider with it. So the game and console summed to this amount of euros. I didn’t really like this one so much. It had no backwards compatibiltity, I didn’t like so many of games that were released to it. It was a bit of a disapponitment. It had some good games. Games I played most were NBA2K14, Dirt Rally and Diablo 3. When companies like Sony keep coming up with new devices every six years or so I am currently thinking not buying fifth PlayStation but don’t you just follow me. Make that decision yourself.

Personal computer was my first gaming device. It will always be there. I might play old retro games or the most new one. Provides large collection of controllers so you can pick your favourite USB gamepad. Easiest one to modify also if you want to upgrade your hardware or software. Much love to PC.

broken

– original Xbox

Yeah, so I broke my Xbox. I’m not going to buy a new used one to replace it. I now just have a large collection of games that aren’t supported on Xbox 360. So they lay now inside my dungeon and in my closet buried there. I’m not planing to sell them. Maybe some day we see Xbox Classic?

– PS2

This is sad one. It started to malfuction so I opened it up carefully. I tried to clean it. Finally I decided to try to fix it by replacing its optical drive. That didn’t go well as I had a wrong replacement part. So I just screwed back some screws and now it’s in condition that it starts up but you cannot boot a disc. So it’s useless. Maybe I buy a new used one or wait for PS2 Classsics release if there is one coming to us ever.

Intensive Gaming Diary

Tag: station