Well THIS oughta be good for my productivity…

After this whole kerfuffle, along with even more added kerfuffles in coming to find that I can’t even mount the new TV in the bedroom like I want to because the studs aren’t centered in the wall like they need to be, so there isn’t enough room … I finally decided that I needed a little stress relief, and as I had at least gotten the new TV setup and working on the dresser to the point where the old TV is no longer needed, I ended up going ahead with my master plan to move it back into my office so that I can play video games on it while I’m supposed to be working!

8)

It’s funny the nostalgia that I have with this TV because the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how much of my teenage and adult gaming was done on it – mostly when I lived up in Michigan, but also for about a year here in Florida before I relinquished it to being a bedroom TV after I got my new big screen. It fact, I do believe that this was actually considered “a big screen” back in the days when tube televisions were all the rage!

31″ glorious, albeit extraordinarily heavy inches … I think I got it as a Christmas gift from my Mom one year when it was on sale for Black Friday. The thing has got to be at least 15 years old – I can’t remember if I got it before or after I graduated, but I figure that I must’ve played all of my older PS2 games on it (The Simpsons Road Rage, GTA3, Vice City), not to mention I’ve always had my classic consoles hooked up to the beast, too.

So that’s what I did tonight – after lugging this monster across the house and thankfully not throwing out my back in the process, I dug around in the garage until I found my old SNES and low and behold, it still works! Well, it took power supply #2, but it still works! 

Ideally I would’ve loved to play the regular NES right off the bat, but that’s not going to happen for a while – it looks like the thing is actually still all tore apart from the last time it didn’t want to work anymore, so I might have to play around with it for a while to see what’s up with that first. I guess I did decide that I don’t want to pick up a top loader after all, as apparently despite fixing the connection issue, instead now it has bars in the video display which are pretty annoying, so instead I’m going to see what I can do with some of the latest repair tips that I’ve found and go from there.

Apparently I also need to clean my SNES because the plastic is this disgusting yellow that I learned has something to do with the fire retardant chemicals in the plastic that they used, but I think I have some options for that, too, so I’m sure new posts will magically appear as I begin to experiment with those a bit…

But in the meantime, I’ve spent the last 3 hours alternating between writing and playing Super Mario World, and it’s been a whole lot of fun, and I hope that I can alternate appropriately in the future so that having some of my favorite games at my fingertips can be a good motivator rather than a distractor.

I made it as far as the Butter Bridge before calling it a night tonight, which is pretty impressive in my book! I remember when Super Mario World first came out with the launch of the SNES back in 1991 – Super Mario Bros 3 had blown us away not too long prior, and yet this newest version introduced Yoshi and save points and secret levels … I actually recall getting in trouble playing this game at Walmart – I’d only been playing for, like, two minutes and there was somebody behind me, and a sales guy came by and told me, “If you don’t let other people play, I’m going to turn it off.”

It kinda makes me curious if the save batteries in any of these things actually still work! I kinda doubt it, and I don’t feel like taking the risk with them at this point, but it seems like the last time I fired this thing up years ago, I was surprised with what I found, so who knows?!

Nonetheless, I think it goes without saying… stress relief – achieved.