Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2023-04-25

Hi, folks, this is Shane Armin row and you’re in the passenger seat with me it’s passenger seat radio. It is, was it Tuesday, April 25 2023. And we are chilling at lunchtime in my hot tub in my backyard. Welcome to the show. Well, had a couple of interesting things to talk about. So I figured why not. I’m just sitting back here looking at news. And let’s do a show. Why not. So I do believe Earlier, I spoke about trying to order the Nightrider 40th anniversary DVD, or I’m sorry, Blu ray collection, this collection from Germany. And I had three different occasions where I tried to have it shipped to me, and it was not delivered. It was shipped backwards to Germany. And I finally just gave up and said, Screw it, I’m not going to worry about it. I’ve got my refund, and just call it a day. Well, I keep running into videos on YouTube about people talking about it and how great it is. So I thought all right, one more time. So what had happened was somehow they got my zip code wrong. Now I know what you’re thinking, well, if they got your zip code wrong, that’s on you, buddy. I don’t think so. Because I use a form filler, right? I use LastPass. And LastPass has my shipping information. And I can just, you know, click a little icon and boom, it fills it all in. And it’s right in the Password Manager. But somehow, they had one digit off on my zip code. And instead of like the postman making an attempt based on the city or whatever, the second that DHL or whoever it was got a hold of it stateside, they must have typed it into computer or something and it said Nope, that doesn’t exist. And they just immediately shut Candide back to Germany. So I did, I did one more time I did an order. And this time I had entered all of my information, didn’t use the the password filler. And I finally got it, I finally got my 40th anniversary box night writer blu ray set from turbine in Germany. And I’m very excited about it, you guys know, I’m going to do an unboxing you know, I’m going to gush on it on YouTube, we’re going to talk about it. But I haven’t even cracked the seal yet. Because I want to unbox on camera because it is loaded with stuff. And I want to be just as surprised as everybody else is opening the box and seeing everything for the first time. I mean, I know kind of what’s in there. But I know what’s in there. But you know, it might be fun to have a reaction for the first time. So that’s sitting in my queue ready to go for a video and an unboxing and probably subsequent ripping of which is going to be a lot of ripping these this is back remember folks when TV seasons ran 26 episodes, not eight episodes, right. So so that means I’ve got four seasons that 24 to 26 episodes a season that that’d be a lot of Nightrider to read. So that’ll be that’ll be up and coming. And the other thing that showed up yesterday in fact, is my new wave toys replicate Space Ace mini cabinet. Yes, it came my Dragon’s Lair now gets a brother to sit next to him on my shelf. So of course I’m going to do unboxing I’m going to do video I’m going to I’m going to test its emulation prowess. I’m going to do HDMI out controller testing the whole bit in law beyond my Monroe world YouTube channel shortly but my my devoted passenger see radio subjects we’ll get some details a little bit early, because you’re listening to this show. So the cabinet I ordered the conversion cabinet version because that’s the one I always played. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen a dedicated space as they did make them but I don’t think I ever saw one. Every space that I ever played was a Dragon’s Lair conversion cabinet. And so the nice thing about New Wave toys is they understand that that sort of thing happens and they offered both they offered a standalone dedicated Space Ace cabinet version and then they offered the Dragon’s Lair conversion cabinet version, which is what I got. And it’s great light up marquee screens beautiful it doesn’t have that weird CRT nonsense on it like missile can Man did. It has three little light up buttons for your different difficulty levels, the coin, the coin mechanisms light up, right? It’s got HDMI out to you two USB ports for playing doubles right remotely. What else can I tell you USB C input for charging. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, it’s got a full blown scoreboard on the back, right? They weren’t just right, they even did the simulated speaker look. And it’s great. Many it’s got the replica, laser disc player, little replicated disc, it’s, you know, it Listen, it’s a, it’s a full blown package. So I did play it just for a little bit. I played it through like, half of Cadet level. And you know how it is, for me, I’m looking for accuracy, I’m looking for the timing windows to be right. Because like Dragon’s Lair, I play Space Ace a lot based on sound. And so, I mean, honestly, for the most part, I could probably play Space Ace and Dragon Slayer blindfolded, and work simply off of audible cues. And obviously, if the timing windows are wrong, or the move, the move windows are wrong, you know, it doesn’t work anymore, and you feel like you’re playing the Japanese roms of punch out instead of the US roms of punch out. None of your patterns work, none of your stuff seems to be working. So what else can I tell you this is based on the F two rom set, I believe it’s F two, I get that in Dragon’s Lair confused. It’s based on the common Space Ace rom said there was in most of the arcade machines. Now I know that they created a secondary set of roms that did actually make it to the arcade. And there was big for home use where you can sort of play spaces as it was intended. Because apparently, the arcade release scenes don’t make any sense. But it will make sense if you play it in this, you know, this alternate mode. Well, this does not have any alternate modes. It doesn’t have an arcade versus home version. There’s no way to watch it play itself, right. I know a lot of people are used to buying these Dragon’s Lair trilogy collections. And there’s always a watch it all the way through. So you don’t have to actually play it, just watch it. None of that exists. For options you you can output the sound either to HDMI, right, it’s a full size HDMI plug. No cable comes with that. It does come with a charging cable though. But no, you know, no adapters. So you need to be able to plug it into something to charge it. But should be no big deal. I’m going to almost everybody has that stuff laying around. But yeah, so you can output the audio either. So if you plug in HDMI, it doesn’t take away the screen that’s on the cabinet. But it echoes it to HDMI. And so you can elect whether or not to have the HDMI output, get the volume, right, or you can output it to the replicate itself. So while you might do that is that apparently you can buy a little tiny screen to put on top of spaces and plug in an HDMI cable, and it will mirror what’s playing on the little screen. And this was very, very commonplace. Back in the old days when it came out in the arcade. There were so many people crowded around the machine, that the bystander the guys walking by couldn’t see the game at all. And so in order to, you know, continue to promote the game, the arcade owners would take a TV and put it on top of the Dragon’s Lair Space Ace machine and run a video signal up to it so that people could stand back away from the machine and didn’t have to crowd around and watch the game being played. I saw that personally. On multiple occasions. Of course, as the laser disc fad wore out, they you know, that sort of stopped becoming the regular deal. But when Dragon’s Lair was in its heyday in Space Ace, I’ll tell you what that TV on top was, was, you know, just an astrology hit. And so that’s why these things have I think HDMI out so if you want to buy the little TV that they offer, you put it on top, I should probably buy one just to share between Dragon’s Lair and spaces. But yeah, that way if you’re sending it to like a capture card or a TV, you can output the audio to the TV along with the signal. Or you could in this case if you had a visual but non audible replication of the screen, you can leave the sound on the replicate itself. You can have unlimited lives three fiber unlimited live As you can change the screen brightness, certainly what else there was you can do screen blanking. So sorry, I’m here. So one of the interesting byproducts of the laser disc arcade game was when the stream of video was broken, let’s say you’re changing levels or you die, and it has to play a death scene, the laser discs would have to seek to a new spot on the disk to play, you know, the next level, or to show you a death scene. And then it would show you you know, bore laughing at you and then it would send you either back to the scene or move you ahead in the scene or whatever, depending on the difficulty level. So during those times when the laser would seek, it would blank the screen at the arcade. So if you’ve ever played an original, not one of these remastered, 20th, anniversaries or anything like that, if you ever played on an original laser disc driven arcade cabinet of Dragon’s Lair space, as you may remember seeing these flickering black screens, and typically speaking, the black flicker meant you were dead, right, you made the wrong move. And that’s how you knew you made the wrong move. Because the Screenland black is the laserdisc sought out the death animation. So the second you hit the button in the screen goes by doing damage, and then it will show your death and both laughing at you, etc. So yeah, so you can either have that on or off, right because these are digital files there’s no optical media and your to seek. But if you want to simulate those laser discs seeks for a more authentic experience, then there you go. You can do that as one of the options. As for quality, listen, it looks great on the little screen. But you can really see the compression of the video when you output to say 10 ADP. It’s listen it’s not grotesque. But you know, you can tell this was, you know, for ad pulled off of a laserdisc. In fact, you can even see like there’s a set of laser disc rips going around that have been used for Daphne emulation forever. Right. And if you downloaded from anywhere a full copy of Daphne, either on like some sort of a Raspberry Pi set or something like that. You’re probably getting the exact same laser disc dumps that are found here on this arcade cabinet. Now. There’s there’s two sides of that coin right. The first side is it’s authentic. Right? You’re not playing some matted 16 by nine widescreen upscaled it wasn’t monkeyed with it was dumped, and probably was. I don’t know it was probably compressed down a little bit more than often than a straight rip from the laserdisc because it looks a little bit more compressed. But there was no matting, there was no pan and scan. There was no you know, letter barring or anything like that. So you what you’re seeing is exactly what you would have played in the arcade game, grainy video and on again, on that little tiny screen, you’re not going to see it but you output to HDMI, outside of that little tiny TV on top, then you’re probably going to notice, hey, wow, this, this literally looks worse than any other version of space I’ve ever played. And that’s because, you know, every other version of space as you’ve probably played, has been upscaled, tweaked, cleaned, processed, you know, AI monkeyed with and this is not. And so yeah, you’re getting the authentic, you know, four by three LaserDisc experience, and that’s, like I said, could be good. Could be bad, depending on how you look at it. But the controls, you know, listen, these new New Wave toys, these replicate things are fantastic. They look great that if there’s attention to detail, they even give you some knobs to swap because a lot of times in the arcades with a conversion kit, they would put a different joystick knob on top. So while it would normally be read for Dragon Slayer, a lot of them change it to black for spaces. And so they give you four different color toppers for your joystick. They give you a you know, a nice replica of the Space Ace poster. They give you a Daphne sticker fake tokens, a little fake LaserDisc. You know, listen, it’s a quality production. It just took bloody forever to get here. largely I think thanks to COVID things too. You know, China relations and Labor’s stuff, hard to say. But I think it’s been at least a year off to go back and look at my email as to when I ordered Spacebase. But it’s been a really frickin long time. And I’m really glad to finally have it in hand, and I’m going to be very excited to share it with all of you. So, those are the two non Steenbeck things that I’ve got coming up. I know like, god dammit, he’s you can talk about anything with steam deck, Jesus. But yeah, so those two are coming up to satiate your retro gaming in retro TV needs. I’m trying to think of that. I thought I had one other non Steenbeck related video, but I was working on I guess I don’t I thought I did try to think I tried to think but not. Let’s see anything else going on? I’m not really I haven’t been really watching anything new. I’ve been mainly watching. You know, binge throwing, binging through a bunch of favorite shows, right? I just did Banshee. What did I do before Banshee I did something else before Banshee. Now I’m going through Sons of Anarchy again. I mean, listen, I know I like these shows. I know. I’m going to enjoy them. I don’t have to pay quite as much attention to them. I did try White Lotus. on somebody. Here’s recommendation, actually. And I just I don’t think it’s going to quite work out. I kind of dig the concept of it. It’s almost it’s not like a fantasy island thing. But the idea of running a resort and having to deal with boatloads of crazy customers is probably a cool idea. But the problem is, is none of the storylines are particularly interesting. You know, like when on fantasy island. There were two things about fantasy island that you watched Fantasy Island for one that you hope one of your favorite guest stars would be on there, right? You were hoping either either as a pervy guy you were always hoping for some hottie like you know Charlene Tilton or Jacqueline Smith, or, you know, you were always hoping for a particular hottie to show up. Or you were hoping for your favorite actor from a show that was just canceled showing up on fantasy island. And then you stuck around for the more I don’t know, creepy, supernatural, funky sort of fantasies, right. There was always there was always the dumb fantasies, right? As I’m sure as women, you know, women would probably like it about rekindling an old you know, the the love of your life that died in the car crash. You want to spend just one more night with him if you could? Who Yeah, okay, so they had those kinds of fantasies, too. But there was like every other episode of Fantasy Island, there was something cool. Like one guy wanted telekinesis and another guy, you know, wanted some sort of superpower or whatever. And, you know, work always came through, but it was always a monkey’s paw thing. You know, if you ever did anything, you know, that broke the rules, or that seemed skeevy the monkey’s paw effect would come back and bite you in the ass. And, you know, not everybody got off a fantasy island alive, which was kind of cool. You know, this was on it, like 11 o’clock at night on Saturdays or something nine or 10? I’m sorry, 10 or 11. I know Love Boat and Fantasy Island. Were a twofer. Back when they were on the air. And I think it was nine o’clock for love button. 10 o’clock for fantasy other than the 11 o’clock news. And then you would wait. You would watch the news for half hour until Saturday Night Live came on at 1130. That was my Saturday nights far too often. And I know that sounds sad. But listen, you pay me for honesty over here. So that’s what I mean. That’s that that was a cool premise, right? Because you can have a completely different show every week. And you know, you didn’t have to worry about spinning out these long storylines. Unfortunately, with white lotus, you know, you’ve got I’m trying to remember how many storylines there was there was going at one point but none of them none of them are all that interesting. You know, you got Steve Zhan and his family with what’s her name Connie? Britton, right boy was she just she was a beauty when she time is cruel to women. I feel bad for I feel bad for all women. Because of Time, time is a cruel mistress. But that whole thing. I mean, her daughter and her friend are somewhat interesting because they’re a pain in the asses and they’re little bitches and they’re scheming and, you know, drugging and doing ASMR shit. I mean, they’re at least somewhat interesting. And then the girls poor brother is the complete tard he has nothing. He’s got nothing going on. Um, you know, and Steve’s on finds I’m gonna give you some minor spoilers here, Steve’s on finds out that his dad was homosexual and he doesn’t know how to deal with it. But and I’m just like, God, you know, I gotta get out of this. The other story that’s going on that I remember is rich guy, hot wife. And he’s basically a dick. She wants to have a career she wants to, you know, continue her clickbait news articles, but she’s like, super attractive. I don’t remember the actresses name, but I find her super attractive. And so I mean, so you’re saying about, okay, I’ll stick around for the hot chick, right? I mean, that’s, that’s the pervy nail thing to do. But even so it’s like, okay, so repressed wife meet successful business woman who’s Connie Britton, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, Pat, God, you know, there’s got to be an interesting story in one of these threads. The last one is stiffeners mom, who also is had a date with death for a while, apparently, poor woman she doesn’t. I don’t remember her being super attractive as Stiffler as mom either, but from American Pie, by the way, for those of you who are under the age of 40. But anyway, so she’s got a storyline where her life’s miserable. She’s suffering and in pain all the time. And so she gets like a massage from this woman at the hotel, staff person. And she’s like, Oh, you have healed me. I want to, I want to finance you in your own healing massage thing and you’re sitting on dude, can we have one interesting storyline here? The only thing that’s really interesting is the nonsense going on behind the scenes, right? So you got your standard three storylines. And sometimes they intertwine but most of the time they don’t. And that’s that was a fantasy island to write. You know, you saw them all get off the plane. You saw him get back on the plane, but every other minute of the show. They were off doing their own thing doing their own fantasy. I don’t know why I want to I want to compare this to fantasy island, but I shouldn’t because it’s not. But anyway, so you’ve got basically a corrupt staff. Right? You got the guy running the place. He’s a complete skeeve you think he pretty much? No, he’s a druggie. You’ve got he got a couple of interesting staff people that are working within but you know, that’s not enough to carry the show. I mean, there’s not enough salacious crap going on to make it really interesting. Now, maybe this is one of these shows where you have to watch like three seasons before it gets interesting. I don’t know. Or maybe it the payoff is at the end of the season, right? Like severance. Severance was another show. They lasted way too long to finally get to the payoff at the end. Maybe that’s what white lotus says. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. But that was the last thing that I kind of tried to do something new, you know, get a get some some fresh blood under the belt, but it’s not working out. I did I am trying. I mean, I’ll probably still get another episode or two, but I don’t know. I’m gonna have to get out of it, I think. Let’s see. So yeah, man, you know what, I gotta gush about Banshee for just another minute. If you’re not watching Banshee, or you’ve never seen Banshee, listen, it’s an older show. So it’s done. It has it has a definitive ending. It’s not lost, you know. And it’s short, this the seasons are short, they’re like eight or 10 episodes, something like that. They’re very, very short. So you can bust through all fours. I think it’s four seasons, you bust through all the episodes really fairly quickly. But listen, they don’t make shows like this anymore. Tons of violence, tons of gore, tons of sex, nudity, profanity, you know, grown up shit. It’s really hard to find grown up shit now, because it’s all sanitized. Everything has to be a Disney plus. Spectacular. You know, it has to it has to fit a mold of you know, slapstick superheroes, shit. It’s really hard to find grown up entertainment. That’s of any good, you know, quality caliber. I mean, listen, I know I could go watch some French in the film, about a woman estranged from her husband, who meets the gentleman called blah, blah, blah. Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay, there’s some stuff out there. That’s not It’s not sanitized Disney stuff. But it’s really really hard to try to find this stuff anymore. But anyway, so if you long for the old days, where they weren’t under the finger of the Mouse House, or, you know, Warner Brothers. Yeah, go back and check it out. It was on Cinemax, which of course, you know, it was Cinemax, back when there wasn’t Cinemax and it wasn’t absorbed. But like Spartacus, right, that was another one. I want has recently Spartacus you know these are these are grown up shows sopranos right like sopranos Six Feet Under. They’re all grown up shows and it’s it’s hard to find grownup shows these days they aren’t sanitized in you know whatever. Anyway, Banshee it’s got the Get Stars home lander from the boys right the boys is a grown up show but when we get the next season dammit come on anything that’s good gets put on hiatus for a year and a half let’s go but Banshee all the episodes are available you can get them now. Watch the whole series you’re gonna love it. Trust me if anything sounds interesting. Violence sex Gore, nudity, profanity adult content then you’re gonna be downright love and use and Banshee but the kids to bed. Right? You don’t want the kids watching this. And Cinemax. It wasn’t Cinemax after hours but it was still Cinemax. It’s not softcore porn folks. It’s just it’s just a grown up show when you forget about these from time to time. Forget what’s available. All right, I got to go and get a quick shower and get my butt to a meeting at 12 o’clock. So I’m going to bid you adieu. This is Shane R Monroe passenger seat radio. We will see you next time. Take care everybody. Bye