Gameroom Update – semi mushroom cloud edition – May 31st / June 1st 2013

Gameroom – update. Okay something had to be done. There was a big tangle of wires behind the consoles and the ergonomics just weren’t there. I need easy gameplay, easy grabbing, easy streaming without me getting a shitload of new hardware. So first I removed the telly to see what what mess it actually is behind there…

Then I detached all retro and current gen consoles from their connections. Power cords and everything so I had more or less a blank canvas to start laying down the foundations of something solid with gameplay, grabbing and streaming in mind…

Finally figured out how I wanted things to hook up and function. That’s in theory. On the Analog SD side all the consoles are on RGB scart leads/s-video too so that should work great. All was hooked up – only the power strips and the wall warts…

Boom. Managed to accidentally use the power supply from the composite video switch on the Hauppage PVR and it just went. Hauppage is fried, beyond redemption. Opened it up with the right power supply connected and chips that are supposed to get hot don’t get hot and there is no fuse or any other device that may have taken the surge… It’s going tot the recycle bin…

A replacement for the now dead Hauppage PVR? The AVerMedia – C875 Live Gamer Portable seems to be a good contender. It’s portable and even has a stand alone function on SD cards. It should also work on my laptop (Mac) and PC even. The PC in my gameroom has only one PCI-e slot that houses the graphics-card so no internal card for me.