Hello! Gonna start posting a thing each weekend as a means of getting me off my arse to write something for you lovely people — and also to keep you up to date on what's going on.

You may have already read on the YouTube community tab, but I'm tweaking the monthly schedule a bit from this coming week. Retro Select is going to take a break for a bit, because although it provides a nice bit of flexibility, it's not being watched by as many people as I hoped it would — particularly the stuff that I hoped would do a bit better, like some of the overlooked/underappreciated more "recent retro" stuff.

So basically rather than worrying about that too much, I'm just going to give it a break for a while and prioritise the stuff that seems to be the main reason people are sticking around, which is the Atari, Commodore and Evercade stuff! I'll still keep Retro Select on the back burner for an occasional one-off when I feel like it, but it will no longer be a regular feature. As such, that means the new monthly schedule will look like this:

Week 1: Atari A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)
Week 2: C64 A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)
Week 3: Atari ST A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)
Week 4: Amiga A to Z (Wed), Evercade A to Z (Fri)

The reason for bumping up the number of Evercade A to Z episodes and making them weekly is that there is now so much stuff available for that platform and I really want to get through it. I realise at this point I'm never going to "catch up" with the rate of cartridge releases (probably, anyway) but it would be nice to make some slightly quicker progress.

That and, in effect, the Evercade A to Z series will be fulfilling much of the same function as Retro Select: showing off assorted retro games from a variety of platforms, albeit with a hard cut-off at the PS1 era due to what the Evercade can comfortably handle.

With the C64 cart for Evercade launching later in the year, also, there will doubtless be some crossover between Evercade A to Z and C64 A to Z, but where there is overlap I'll be covering the games again; it's worth seeing how they play on Evercade without a keyboard vs. how they play using emulation on a computer or a clone system like the C64 Maxi.

Anyway, here's what you can expect for next week's videos:

Galactic Chase for Atari 8-bit: a Galaxian clone that a lot of people think is better than Atari's official port of Galaxian to ROM cartridge. I haven't played this game since I was a kid, but I remember my family being quite fond of it, so looking forward to revisiting it.

Hardcore 4×4 for Evercade from the Gremlin cart: an off-road racing game that was originally released on PS1. The Gremlin cart is quite interesting in that a lot of people's first reaction to it is kind of "meh", but when they get into the games on it, they find themselves having a lot of fun. I've not spent a lot of time with Hardcore 4×4 so far but I have enjoyed what I played so far — so making a vid seems like an ideal opportunity to dive a little deeper.

Anyway. Hope you're all having a good weekend and aren't melting too much in the heat. Ta-ta for now!

Hello everyone! Haven't written for a while so thought I'd check in. Hope you're all doing well and aren't melting too much in the summer heat. It's hot enough in our house for butter to melt onto bread without applying any additional heat, so that's nice. (No it isn't.)

Picked up an Anbernic Win600 device the other day. You can read my detailed impressions over on Rice Digital. So far I'm impressed with it; it seems like a nicely capable device, albeit not really up to anything too modern and/or intensive. I'm both disappointed and relieved that Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate Definitive Edition doesn't run well on it, otherwise I could potentially have a real problem on my hands. It's already bad enough that HoloCure works great on it.

The device is, of course, great for retro gaming, and as suggested by a few people I've installed Batocera (a retro gaming-centric OS) onto a USB stick, allowing me to dual-boot the device into either Windows or Batocera depending on what I want to do. Running Batocera essentially makes it run like a dedicated EmulationStation-based retro gaming handheld, while in Windows it's just a handheld PC.

I did try SteamOS for a bit and was reasonably impressed — particularly with how far WINE has come since I tried it 10+ years ago on Mac — but ultimately determined that, for what I want to use the device for (visual novels, among other things) it was just making work for myself, and sticking with Windows was probably the optimal solution.

I might upgrade the internal storage and/or RAM at some point, but at present I'm rocking the base model and it works absolutely fine for my purposes. I'm looking forward to spending some more time with it in the long term.

A revamp

I think I'm probably going to revamp this Patreon page completely to focus it more on my video work. While I do very much welcome the continued support of MoeGamer — particularly as, even while I'm not writing there much, it still has annual server costs — I do continually feel a little bad about not updating much over there any more.

I mean, I'm pretty certain this is just a "me" thing to worry about, but I also want to be transparent about the specific work people are supporting by signing up to this Patreon.

Yes, Patreon donations do go towards keeping MoeGamer up and running — and even if I'm not actively writing on there thanks to my day job at Rice Digital, I want to keep the site live as a resource that people can refer to at any time — but my primary active "passion project" work right now is on my retro gaming YouTube stuff.

So with that in mind, I think I'm going to rewrite my Patreon page to focus on that side of things. So if you see some major changes on that front in the next few days, that's why!

Obviously I'd prefer everyone who has supported me for a long time to stick around regardless of what I'm doing, but I also completely understand if you feel my focus has changed and it's something different to what you signed up to support. I am grateful for your support up until this point, and hope you'll consider continuing.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that this is coming. I've been agonising over it for a long time and I think it's probably for the best at this point!

That's all for now. Thanks as always for your support!