Day 249

Today I worked on the marquee.  I could have had it done professionally by a website that specialized in this sort of thing, but I was looking at least $30 for the size I needed.

I tried the local Kinko's, but I was looking at about $22 to get it done. But for now, I was still working on keeping my expenses low.

After leaving Kinko's, I went to the library to pick up a DVD I'd ordered on their website and I decided to ask the reference desk if they did color prints.  They said yes, so I grabbed a computer, dropped my flash drive in and opened the graphic image in MS Publisher (yes I know, but it was the only program they had that could print banners).

So after fiddling with the sizing a bit, I sent it to the color laser printer, paid my $2.25 and took my pages home. I had to stretch the image across 3 sheets of paper, so I knew I'd be doing some arts and crafts for this thing.

So I got home, took the remaining plexiglass I had from the bezel, cut and fitted it. Then I cropped and pasted the three pages together and attached that to the back of the marquee sheet and settled it in place and attached the metal bar to hold it up.

Not bad. You can see the seams between the pages, but I don't mind it. Maybe later if I find twenty bucks floating around I'll get it redone, but for now I'm quite pleased with it.






I've been fussing with the Hyperlaunch program to get all of the emulators to exit properly and I almost messed it up completely. My joystick can be reprogrammed to represent any key on the keyboard, so I tried to set up one of the keys to represent the Escape key and did the rest of the buttons as they were before.

It worked out all right, but there was a problem. For some reason there was about a 1 second hesitation between pressing a button and having the action executed. That's no good for video games. The response should be instantaneous. So I set it back to the factory default and left it there.

So I'm back to learning the script code for Hyperlaunch to get all the emulators to work. It's going to be tedious, but as soon as I get the whole thing working, the hard drive is going to be backed up and stored on DVD's in case something catastrophic happens.