General Arcade & Retro Chat' Special Championship Edition

Haha, the oul 'Ooh it would be a good idea to store all of my cables in this one box so they're together' decision backfiring. 😁

could be shipping through the global shipping program which i think does the import duties but odd that it wasnt mentioned ,surely the breakdown mentions it somewhere ?it is a **** move that you are not seeing the real total if that is the case . Is that ebay.ie or uk ? i am convinced ive' seen different prices on both for the same thing !but cant prove it 😂

I'm convinced the .ie site is the equivalent of windows xp these days or fifa on the switch !😁

Honestly no mention of it. The only thing I can see is the shipping is listed as "free expedited shipping", which POSSIBLY means it's going through the GSP and therefore subject to VAT collection at point of sale? No idea, but not very consumer friendly if so.

Yeah the global shipping programme can throw you off when the price is suddenly mad expensive but that includes everything so there's no surprises on arrival. Anything I've gotten from the US and any more expensive items from the UK have had it. Something I got recently had the price and international shipping shown as normal and only when I went to the checkout the increased price was there by surprise. I've definitely seen eBay separately point out how much customs might be on listings but that might be non-GSP items?

That's exactly what happened to me. It really just looked like the original price and the discount wasn't being applied

There will be a run on NES consoles from teachers trying to make learning Irish more 'fun' :D

There be (2) more!

I don't know who's worse, Nvidia or Android, but they made a right mess of some basic networking features of the Shield.

I felt like playing a game or two today while not in the living room, so said I'd point Retroarch on one of my Shields to my Unraid share that houses all of the roms I've legitimately dumped. "How hard can it be" I asked. Well, it certainly wasn't as simple as it should be.

First step was to mount the server in the shield settings. Found the relevant section in the Shield settings, and, nope, nothing. No Server shows up (it's on the network, pc can find it, Emby finds it, my phone finds it....but the Shield doesn't.) A great start.

After much cumbersome faffing around with the Shields ad-riddled operating system and it's remote, I discovered I had to turn on Netbios support in Unraids smb settings. Not a feature I'm entirely comfortable with, as its an smb1 feature, a not entirely secure protocol. Anyway, I'll leave it on for now for the sake of finishing this out.

Shield then finds the server. Next, using a file browser (x-plorer), I must edit the Retroarch.cfg file to point to the emulation share instead of the default location....quite an easy task one might think? Nope. Editing the file throws you down to the very end of the file (a huge config file) where I've to manually search for the correct string to edit. Eventually I find it, I move the cursor to the correct location, click the remote to bring up the keyboard, and bang, back to the very end of the file with the keyboard now on screen. Repeat, same result. Painful, absolutely painful.

So a less direct way to edit the file, is to log into the Shield with my pc and do it that way. Enable the share settings, and try to find the shield on the network using the pc. Nope, not there. Go back to the shield and note it's IP address, then type that in directly and log in from there. Find the file, and use notepad++ to edit it (a less than 10 second job with software that actually functions.)

So back on the Shield now, and start up Retroarch. Seems to be finding the roms anyway which is good, I browse and launch a game. Works fine once the controller is hooked up.

However, when the controller is hooked up, the remote now only partially functions (no Back button works, and the OK button doesn't work.) I have to force close the game, despite having both a controller AND the Shield remote connected.

This isn't something I'll use in this state, so I restart the Server and the Shield just to see if that fixes the glitchy controls. Once they restart, no games available. It seems the Server credentials aren't cached or stored, and you've to remount the share after every reboot. I tend to use complex passwords, so that ain't happening every time I want to play a game.

So after 90 mins or so, I shake my head, and un-do everything. Retroarch uninstalled, x-plorer uninstalled, Server settings restored to disable netbios, and Shield network and share settings restored to how they were.

So yeah, the Nvidia Shield, all the SMB functionality of a V-Tech Teach n Type. It's 2023 lads, jesus....

Yeah I still keep up to date with it all, it's great entertainment. It's crazy all the facts and evidence against him and he still won't admit to cheating. Perfectpacman.com is a good read if you have a lot of time to spare!

Your Wii U booting a game isn't fully indicative that it's OK strangely enough. My launch model only shows a problem if I go to initiate a NAND dump. It boots games fine too. I think depending on what part of the NAND is corrupted, it'll show errors doing different things.

Go and get the NAND dumped ASAP. You can do it through the browser without having to install cfw or anything. At least then you've a backup.