Saxxon and I have continued collecting the necessary hardware to stream retro consoles on Twitch, but have focused on the Nintendo Switch and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe lately, given its release last Friday. Within 24 hours of the beginning of our first stream, Saxxon and I completed about 9 hours of races, with Mr. Bond joining us for the first 5.5. In preparing for the streams, I determined that the H264 software encoder would no longer suffice, and that NVENC and using OBS Studio 64-bit would be the best option moving forward. Because of that shift away from 32-bit that we'd done for audio VST support, we decided to install our pro audio VSTs on our gaming PC to handle the delay, EQ, and compression necessary to get everything sounding good. The streams on Friday and Saturday showed off our new setup, and I think things looked (and sounded!) quite good.
On the retro front - we finally have our XRGB Mini Framemeister! After many frustrated hours, we finally got the SNES to play nicely with it, and with the Framemeister outputting both 1080p60 video and digital audio through our receiver to both our OLED TV and our Elgato HD60 Pro capture card. The Sunday before yesterday, at about 2am, I was finally able to get a Super Mario World stream out to the masses, with impeccably terrible gameplay. The stream was so terrible that I began crying from being so awful at the game after not having played for years - out of laughter, not sadness. If you desire seeing me break down from lack of sleep and skill, definitely check out the VOD!
We will soon be ordering the proper cabling so that we can use both the Framemeister and our Sony PVM-14M2U CRT display, along with RGB cabling for a Sega Genesis model 2 that we recently obtained. I'll feel more comfortable practicing retro games on a lagless display and look very forward to getting everything in place! I've also been in contact with sellers for 20" and 25" model PVMs; this hobby is both expensive and addictive, but the image quality of classic games on RGB-capable CRTs are fantastic! While the Framemeister DOES make things look stellar on the OLED, nothing beats the real, classic display with the highest-quality RGB output these old consoles can provide.
I will continue to stream as often as possible, with the hope of getting an invitation to become a Twitch Affiliate. Saxxon has mentioned wanting to start his own channel to stream Commodore 64 games and speedruns, so that might be in the pipeline!
If anyone has suggestions for games to stream, leave a comment!
Love and lava cookies,
Tormod