Recent content on maerk.xyz
It has been a long time since the last real post. Not just in this little “recent obsessions” series of posts, but on the site in general. I feel like I don’t have much to say anymore. I used to constantly try to come up with things worth posting about, and experiences would spark inspiration for posts regularly. There’s no sense in trying to pinpoint exactly where my lack…

 
 Reply to this post via email. 

Since Summer will be here soon, I really wanted to get the NAOMI working again. 
 Like I said in the last post, it went from ERROR 31 (Game not acceptable by main board) to just not booting at all. After some troubleshooting with a friend, we got it to boot again by removing the plastic case from the netDIMM, just like Ken suggested. Still, every attempt at loading a game resulted in ERROR 31.…
“Dead or Alive 6 Last Round” was announced on Feb 12th, alongside the announcement that a new DOA (fighting) game is in the works. Wow! Big day for pervert retards like me. I knew that DOA 6 was (and still is) mostly disliked, but I figured now would be a good time to redownload it and give it another try since I never really gave it a fair shot before. I am not the only one that had…
I nearly forgot about the third year anniversary of this site. Happy Valentine’s Day. Some highlights from the past year include… 
 
 Many more stickers being designed 
 The creation of the JAMMS zine 
 Revamps of key pages like the shop, high scores, and gallery 
 A microblog (only visible on desktops) 
 
 Looking Back 
 I feel like the site has been…

 Relevant audio. God, what a fucking banger. 
 
 Reply to this post via email.
I recently purchased a Brother Scan N Cut machine so I could finally print my own stickers. A reason why I put off getting one for so long is because I assumed this machine was much more Cricut-like than it actually is. The more I learned about Cricut machines, the more I was sure that they were not for me. When I saw that you can get a Disney themed Scan N Cut loaded with Disney patterns, my…
MAGfest is finally here. There is a chance that you are reading this post because of a sticker I left on an arcade machine. I am writing this on my phone, so please excuse typos and general laziness. I will update this throughout the weekend and add relevant links when I’m not stuck with my phone. 
 Thursday 
 My girlfriend and I dressed up as Tina and Bass from Dead or Alive,…
I’m writing this to take a break from drawing. Open that link with caution. All of my recent drawings have been kind of aimless, which makes me feel like I should be working on a project (or like, actually study). The next issue of the zine is in the works, but I have to do the centerfold drawing last. If I finished it now, I won’t like it by the time the zine is ready for print.…
I’ve been working on a zine for a while now, and the first issue is now available. 
 It’s called JAMMS because all of the content “is my jam.” JAMS on JAMMA. Yeah, you get it. 
 I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not perfect, but I learned a lot, and I look forward to the improvements I can make for the next issue. 
 
 Before this, I had never put an…
In the last post, I wrote about how I ruined my new PGM set up by pressing the “test” button on my Astro City power supply in an attempt to switch the game to free play. I thought that maybe I had only screwed up the DOJ game cart, since the motherboard would boot when there was no cart inserted. I got an Espgaluda cart to help narrow down the problem. Nope. Still just a black screen…

 
 I burned a lot of film trying to get a photo of the CRT. The Hitomi one is the best I got, but her skin is still comically blown out. Maybe I’ll figure it out after five more duds. It’s good to know that raising the exposure allows for nice photos of the garage without the flash. 
 
 Reply to this post via email.
I had the brilliant idea to hook the NAOMI up to the Versus City yesterday, since Virtua Tennis is one of the few games that supports the winner lamps and billboards. It took a little effort to get the game up and running, mostly because I forgot how to netboot a game from my laptop. 
 
 It turns out I’m missing a wiring harness, so the billboard can’t communicate with the game…
I’ve been playing a lot of Cosmic Smash recently. The bass-heavy music featured in that game makes my blown out, crackling speakers impossible to ignore. I have heard that replacing Blast City speakers is a pain, so getting into that has been on my “worry about it later” list since day one. I realized that I could skip the hassle of replacing the speakers by using external…
What started with me wanting to try Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate quickly snowballed into getting two Xboxes and every Xbox DOA game. You like the title of this post? I couldn’t think of anything better. 
 The Beginning 
 I was reading a thread about how great DOA used to be. There was a lot of talk about DOA 2 Ultimate specifically, and I saw that 1U and 2U are pretty cheap on eBay. The…
Tetris Kiwamemichi 
 I had written some stuff about this game for a “review” in the “reviews” section in 2023. It was pretty much finished, all I needed to do was add screenshots. That never happened, because I never felt inspired to open Flycast for screenshots. The reviews section is pretty much dead, I’m going to poach most of what I wrote and for the review…
I have done absolutely nothing to the Astro City since the last post. It’s crazy to think I’ve had the machine for around a year. It has become an essential part of the garage, and it feels like I’ve had it forever. 
 The MiSTercade is great, but I hunger for more CAVE shmups. I tried some others via ShmupMAME back when I wrote an older “Recent Obsessions” post ,…

 I have been having a really hard time with this camera. I set the focus, but every picture is blurry. This one was a complete accident. I moved after taking a photo with the exposure up. I think it turned out cooler than any of the intentional photos from that night. 
 
 Reply to this post via email.
I recently bought a Blast City monitor bezel from a guy on Arcade Projects, When I saw it, I thought “I could do something cool with that.” 
 
 I’m still not sure what I want to do with it yet. My other bezel has a CvS2 movestrip across the top, some stickers and a bunch of square Instax photos. The CvS2 movestrip is mostly just for show. Every character is packed into…

 
 Reply to this post via email.

 
 Reply to this post via email.
It’s time for another one. These posts are some of my favorites to write. 
 Dead or Alive (still) 
 I already gushed about how much I like Dead or Alive , but that post was very surface level. I’m not being hard on myself, that’s just how it is when you first pick up a game. My knowledge of the game 3 months later is still pretty surface level, but at least now I…
I’m a little late. February 14th was the actual 2-year anniversary of maerk.xyz. Some highlights from the past year include… 
 
 The introduction of Naomi, the new mascot. 
 A page for the high scores set on my machines. This was the best addition. 
 Naomi/maerk.xyz stickers finally being printed (and distributed.) 
 The homepage becoming a bit more interesting…
The first Dead or Alive game I played was DOA4 on the Xbox 360 when I was 8 years old. I think it gave me brain damage. I guess it’s no surprise that the mascot of this site looks like she would fit right in with the cast of DOA. Anyway, about 15 years later I tried playing DOA2 because it was free and easy to emulate. I liked it a lot, but I mostly just did random shit. I didn’t just…
On Saturday I invited friends over to play some games. The first guy who arrived pointed out the nearby transformer that was on fire. When the power finally went out, a couple guys realized their cars were trapped in due to the gigantic cranes being used to repair the transformer. That was the cue to bring out the generator. 
 
 I thought the whole situation was really crazy, but everyone…
It’s a slow day at work, so it’s the perfect time to write another one of these. 
 More Shmups 
 I’ve been swapping between a bunch of shmups. It’s only fair that I mention them all. I’ll go in order of play time. 
 Espgaluda 
 
 I was sold on Espgaluda as soon as I saw the bullet cancelling mechanic. Gigantic chunks of gold filling the screen…
There’s not much to say here, but this tiny change has made a huge difference so I wanted to post about it. The Versus City fans are extremely loud. They’ve been loud since day one , and the solution was simply unplugging them. The fans up top are only for keeping the winner lamps cool, but since I’m not running a game that uses the lamps, there is no reason to have them running.
I’m a little late making this post. A few months ago, I got another MiSTercade because I missed playing horizontal games. Since I knew I’d be switching between the MiSTercade and the Naomi pretty often, I wanted to make the process as easy as possible. I had a coworker cut me this board, then I mounted the Naomi to it. 
 
 I don’t intend on sliding the whole Naomi out…
I daydream about being home and drawing (or doing anything creative on the computer) all the time. It is partially because I feel like this while at work. Below are some doodles from a conference I was at. My goal was to finish a drawing of the current speaker + a Naomi doodle before the next speaker began. 
 
 The desire to draw is also sparked when talking to anyone about creative…
There isn’t much to this post. I just really like playing Stepmania on my computer. To be more more specific, I play a fork of Stepmania called ITG Mania. 
 I talked about Stepmania before in my first “ Recent Obsessions ” post. At the time I didn’t realize it was going to hook me so hard. When I was writing the second post in the series, the current game obsession was…
I saw this tweet (on 4chan, classic) and it got me thinking about how much time I spend connected to the internet in some way. 
 
 It’s a lot of time. Not including the time spent sitting at my desktop, I pretty much always have my cell phone nearby. I don’t use social media, but that doesn’t stop me from unlocking my phone as soon as I get into an empty elevator at work,…
This is my fourth attempt at writing something about shmups. My original plan was to grind shmups for 6 months, logging how I felt about the games and my skill level, assuming I’d have cool and interesting things to say about the learning process or some shit. If I was lucky, I’d even get a 1cc during month 6 to wrap it all in a bow. 6 months later, I have a lot to reflect on. Most of…
I found this blog post through indieblog.page . Read that before reading this. 
 He says that a never ending ocean of AI slop that you can’t trust is a good thing for the web, but I still think it’s bad. The kind of guy that refers to AI generated content as “slop” is the kind of guy that never trusted it to begin with. I am that kind of guy. I also know how to ignore…
The right speaker on the player 2 side hasn’t worked since I got this cab. Back when I was still trying to figure out why the buttons didn’t work , I noticed a wire hanging from the non-functional speaker not hooked up to anything. Since I regularly have had more important things to worry about, I ignored it. Recently I have been inspired to clean this thing up again, so I figured…
Some time has passed since the last one , so here’s the next info dump on the bullshit I’ve been into. 
 Anteater 
 Fuck this game. Of all the games played on my Astro City, I think this is the most annoying one. Annoying, but extremely addicting. If I’m watching someone else play it is impossible to not call next. This game is ugly as shit, the sound effects are jarring,…
This has been in the works for over 6 months. Many scrapped designs and one mascot swap later, the first maerk.xyz stickers are ready to be slapped wherever I am legally able to do so. 
 I’ll keep this post brief. To see more pictures or to get some for yourself, check out the shop. 
 
 
 Reply to this post via email.

 😵💫 
	 
 I don't know what happened to the images in this post. I think I deleted them by accident. Sorry!
 
 

 This cab arrived in great shape, so I haven’t had to do much since getting it. This post is a quick summary of the things I’ve done so far. Welcome to the first Astro City Log post, by the way. I came up with a new outfit for Naomi, and I…
In my last post about the Naomi, I mentioned that there was something up with the Raspberry Pi that loaded the games onto the NetDIMM. I never really figured out what the problem was. I won’t get into details, but after a few failed attempts to fix it, I decided to just use my laptop for loading games. In that post, I also said this: 
 “The easier it is to switch games, the more my…
More specifically, it’s a New Astro City. If you didn’t know, the Astro City, New Astro City, and Astro City 2 are all very similar to each other. 
 
 Anyway, I am like 99% sure this will be the last arcade machine I buy for a long time. Maybe the last one ever. The vision for my garage from very early on has been: 
 
 Versus City for fighting games 
 Blast City for…

 Cannon Spike is a shoot em up/beat em up hybrid. A beatemshmup, if you will. You probably could’ve guessed this, but I originally tried this game because Cammy is a playable character. She scoots around on roller skates and has a gun. You can even use her blue “Killer Bee” outfit, maerk.xyz style. 
 
 Obviously I had to try this game. The first time I played it I…

 🌸 
	 
 This post was written for the Lainchan Spring Festival.
 
 

 I briefly mentioned my new Instax camera in my last post but I’ll go into more detail here. 
 A few years ago my girlfriend got a free Fujifilm Instax 8 and for a while I was a hater. I didn’t see the point of taking a tiny film photo if she was just going to take a picture of…
I will usually get hooked on one game and play only that game for weeks. Usually I end up dropping it for no reason. Third Strike is the exception. I play Third Strike very often regardless of whatever else I’m putting time into. Anyway, the game I’ve been playing a lot recently is StepMania. 
 StepMania 
 It’s Dance Dance Revolution on the computer. I don’t know…
Cammy has been the “mascot” of my website before it was even called maerk.xyz. I had the idea to make Cammy stickers with a QR code that would bring you here, then stick them wherever I am legally allowed. Since my drawing skills aren’t so great, I considered commissioning someone to draw the Cammy sticker for me. I decided to just do it myself since it feels more authentic to…
I think I have more hours in Minecraft than any other game. I enjoyed single player, but as soon as I figured out how to run my own server, almost all of my time with the game was spent on multiplayer. I can think of many “eras” that are only interesting to me and my group of friends, but what I think might actually be interesting is the life cycle of these worlds and how I’m not…
It has been a year since my first blog post. I’d say it’s been a good year. My 10 year old self making a Kirby fansite on webs.com would be very happy. 
 Looking back 
 The layout hasn’t evolved much, but I don’t want to change things up just for the sake of change. At some point I created a light theme, but I don’t like it very much. I always use dark themes,…
Before I get into the good stuff, I’ll fill you in on the little things that have happened since putting in the new monitor. 
 The Monitor 
 When mashing the sticks or even just opening and closing the control panel, the monitor would freak out. This is an old video. You can tell by the frozen CvS2. 
 
 
 There should have been a video here but your browser does not…
Sorry. It’s yet another blog post on a personal website about how social media is bad. If you are reading this in an RSS reader, this post isn’t for you. I’m pretty certain that you already hate social media services, and have already read a dozen blog posts similar to this one that were probably written much better. So really, RSS homies can stop reading. I’m not writing…
After many months of me bitching, Mister Addons AKA Porkshop Express AKA Mister MiSTercade sent me a new MiSTercade. What a homie. He did not need to do that for me since he already checked my first one out and found no issues. I truly have no idea what was up with my old one, but I know that this new one works fine. I am so happy. This is my first W in a long time. I am gonna play so many…
I have multiple documents on my computer saved in a variety of file formats that are all essentially the same thing. Me talking about how my Smash friends should play fighting games. I don’t think I’ve ever showed any of them anything that I’ve written, but that’s because I’m probably annoying enough verbally. They don’t need me handing out literature like a…

 IT’S BROKEN AAAAAAAAAAA 
 
 😇 
	 
 It's working now. I sent it out to ShootTheCore for repair, and he fixed it no problem. I didn't want to make a whole follow-up post about it because it's not like I actually did anything. 
 
 

This is what I was greeted with when I first turned it on. For a while I couldn’t get it to load a game, but after…