Hardware

Steam Deck vs the Asus ROG Ally: Pros and Cons

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The Steam Deck is finally getting some interesting competition! Asus is coming out with their own PC Gaming Handheld for their Republic Of Gamers line, and it actually looks pretty interesting!

It boasts a Full HD 1080p 120hz display, whereas the Steam Deck is 1280x800p 60hz. It’s a little bit thinner, the analog joysticks look more similar to the Nintendo Switch in terms of placement and it has a small bit of RGB going on for it! It’s also missing the trackpads and two back buttons, meaning that if you were to choose between the two PC’s you’d have to choose between Screen Res and Refresh Rate, or buttons and more customization.

As much as I like the more updated screen I like the Steam Deck for its customization, the track-pads make for great touch menus, and in FPS games I tend to favor the right trackpad, although I am learning how to play with the right stick with the gyro enabled. Still, it’s nice to see other variations being made!

It’ll be interesting to see what the cost will be at launch.

Happy Birthday, Steam Deck!

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I’ve only had my Steam Deck for about half a year now, but it’s been daily driver status since the day it arrived back in August! In case you happen to be in the market for a handheld PC, here is a list of regularly played games on Deck:

  • Abyss Odyssey
  • Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night
  • Commander Keen (Complete Pack)
  • Cloudpunk
  • Crash Bandicoot: N.Sane Trilogy
  • Dust: An Elysian Tail
  • Freedom Planet 2
  • Horizon Zero Dawn
  • ICEY
  • Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series
  • Okami
  • Outland
  • Overload
  • Portal Reloaded
  • Shantae: Half Genie Hero
  • Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed
  • Spyro Reignited Trilogy
  • Super Tux
  • Trine
  • Yakuza 0

I seem to have a better time playing Metroidvanias when I’m on the go, and it also handles most of the 3D games I throw at it – even modern ones! My back has gotten tired of lugging a gaming laptop around for daily commutes. It’s easier to just pick it up and play whatever you want in the palm of your hand with just a button press, and in some cases it even doubles as an effective hand warmer and social shield from asshats.

I’ve been wanting a handheld gaming system for years, and the nice part is that I don’t have to rebuy any games. I can even download them directly from my desktop!

Overall: I give the Steam Deck 9 Sub Sandwiches out of 10!

Back at it!

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Tonight I rightfully returned to Source Filmmaker under my Manjaro install, with my primary focus being how well does the program run on my new swank GPU. After a few good hours I can say that the results are in, and the answer is awesome! My Vega64 ran SFM alright for the most part, but if you imported too many models or particles into the world it would lag when dragging your cameras, even when splitting clips into smaller ones. So far I haven’t experienced that with the 6800XT, even with the same stage setups I’ve created! If this continues to perform as such I’ll only really need to go into Windows to do the export (and possibly for After Effects work if I can’t get it to work under Wine/Proton), and even then I don’t always have to depending on the scene (lighting sometimes looks better under Windows or vice versa depending on the map and the materials being used).

I mostly spent the entire session doing mouth movements and some animation tweaking. I am shrinking the audio as I go; removing any long gaps in between.I’ll continue on it some more tomorrow after I get off work and do my usual stuff. Who knows, if I get far enough along that I can post something different I might provide an update tomorrow! 😛

My Wacom Works Out Of The Box Under Linux!

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I got that creative itch recently to revisit drawing, and I also wanted to see how easy it was to get it running under Manjaro. So today I killed two birds with one stone, and surprisingly it’s quite a lot easier to setup compared to Windows. The drivers were installed by default, and it was practically working right from the get go! The only “difficult” thing I really had to do was configure it to run on one monitor with an easy shell script:

Now I can shitscribble to my hearts content! I played around under Krita for a bit, just doing different doodles and playing with different brush settings. I’m waaaay out of practice, my drawing hand is kinda shaky, and it gets tired after about an hour. I really need to build up my drawing muscles again. 😛 I’ve been meaning to get back into drawing, but the time was never there. That’s the problem with having too many hobbies, but hey! you’re never bored.

I Basically Have A New Desktop Now

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I’ve been busy getting my system put back together. Finally have the 3900x installed onto the new motherboard (ASRock x570 Taichi). Now I’m rocking two NVMe drives, two SSD’s and six 7200rpm server grade mechanical drives. I still have some things to refine under Windows 10, but I’m pretty much all setup under Linux (Manjaro this time).

Should have everything back up to 100% by tomorrow!

What I’ve learned about the Elgato HD60 Pro

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elgato2

The Elgato HD60 Pro has been a bit of a learning curve. One of the reasons I haven’t been posting lately is due to my desire to get the best stream/recording combo up and running, and believe me when I say there have been some bugs that needed a good thwarting.

One issue I ran into prevented me from recording if I had flashback mode disabled. At first I thought it had to do with how I had the Elgato plugged into my GPU, when the entire time it was actually my audio.

xfi

I have a Creative XFi sound card with a ton of plugin options, and I noticed the software seemed a bit confused when it came to establishing which port was ok and what wasn’t. So I disabled everything but what I intended to use and all of a sudden the program started to let me record.

However my worries weren’t laid to rest as I encountered yet another bug was discovered while recording. The audio would have frequent skips throughout the final mp4 as though there was a buffering problem. After more intense experimentation I found a solution, record the game audio separately from the video. This gives me three different files:

  • The Mp4 file
  • Commentary Audio (if needed)
  • Game Audio

For some reason recording separately vs mixed streams outputs a better quality result. Which I’m ok with since I can just compile the footage in premiere anyway as well as tweak each audio file to my liking if needed.

However…

After about 18 to 20 minutes in the video will suddenly have video/audio latency issues that cannot be fixed. So what I have to do is record in increments of about 15 minutes to play it safe, which honestly isn’t that big of a deal to me. In FRAPS and even in OBS I’ve always stopped and started to make shorter files as an old habit. If I have to continue this practice I don’t see a reason to rage.

Now onto streaming. Twitch has been rather fickle, but that’s before I even bought the card. YouTube on the other hand has been really seamless, whatever I throw at it will stick. I streamed Dead Island while recording a local copy with zero framerate loss. The only problem I had was when I went to stop and start recording the game capture HD program didn’t want to behave, but that seemed to be related to Dead Island from what I can tell, as I tried to interact with other applications on my 2nd monitor and it outright refused until I brought up my task manager (revealing an adorable Stewie Kitten on live stream to my audience of 1).

I think I finally have it figured out enough to get started on proper recording again. If things continue to go smoothly I’ll do a YouTube video review of the hardware and address on the issues I’ve had to lick, on the chance that someone might be in a similar position with audio issues.