My current hobby of playing decades old console video games through emulation is contingent upon some rather old PCs continuing to work as if they were new.\u00a0 When I think about how my newest and main emulation PC is seven years old now, and how its backup is eleven years old, I realize that things like computer parts just don’t last forever.<\/p>\n
So eventually I’ll have to buckle down and buy a new emulation PC.\u00a0 But I can forestall this as long as I take proper care of my hardware.\u00a0 There is no need for me to upgrade right now, especially since I can’t work due to the migraine associated vertigo I suffer from.\u00a0 (This is also what’s keeping me from my current set of video game reviews, in case you’re wondering.)<\/p>\n
I can look forward to the wonders of emulating the Nintendo Game Cube and the Sony PSP when I eventually do get a new PC, but that will have to wait until I’m working again.\u00a0 In the meantime, I just wanted to rant about how I managed to “save” a hard drive I thought was dead.<\/p>\n
Back in 2011, my music editing and (at the time) gaming computer suffered a really nasty crash.\u00a0 The motherboard had some capacitors go on it and at the very same time, the hard drive crashed.\u00a0 I suspect that the first event somehow caused the second.\u00a0 I probably ranted about this on this blog when it happened.\u00a0 I remember my Windows XP installation had gotten all fucked up, and it wanted me to activate Windows, thinking that it had now been installed on a RAID configuration of some sort.<\/p>\n
Well, I bought a hard drive enclosure so that I could try to rescue some of the music I had edited from the hard drive.\u00a0 I was unsuccessful, and I lost a bunch.\u00a0 It turns out it wasn’t much of a loss because my editing methods since then have improved greatly and I would have re-done all that stuff anyway.<\/p>\n
But after I replaced that computer (the last Dell I will ever<\/strong> fucking buy), I put the dead hard drive and enclosure in storage and forgot about them.\u00a0 Until recently.<\/p>\n Now, I have an external hard drive hooked up to my emulation PC that gives me access to my collection of ripped PlayStation 1 discs, my Sega CD games, and my TurboGrafx-CD games.\u00a0 Like a bolt out of the blue, I just suddenly remembered that I had a drawer full of old hard drives and an enclosure, and I decided to see if I could make use of any of them.<\/p>\n It turns out that I could use about half of that 500GB hard drive, and that takes care of my needs comfortably.\u00a0 Even nicer is that the “backup” emulation PC that I leave it connected to has a firewire port, and I can use that instead of having it take up one of the relatively few USB ports that thing has.<\/p>\n It’s not much to celebrate, but it’s better than having these items collect dust.\u00a0 And I think it’s good to see a hard drive I thought was ruined serve at least some purpose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My current hobby of playing decades old console video games through emulation is contingent upon some rather old PCs continuing to work as if they were new.\u00a0 When I think about how my newest and main emulation PC is seven years old now, and how its backup is eleven years old, I realize that things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7830"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7832,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7830\/revisions\/7832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}