# game room (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 2 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover game room. Page: Feed: --- ## [Game room photos and 40-minute video tour](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/08/game-room-photos-and-40-minute-video.html) _2026-08-10 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ I just took a new set of photos of my game room and filmed a video in which I showed off the stuff that I have on display and how my setup works. I figured this is a good place to share it? The photo album: https://imgur.com/a/pSWPNJO The video: https://youtu.be/YzJcCMXp0e8?si=JDAdbbX6vq19ykeC By the way, this blog is not dead despite the fact that I haven't posted in quite a long time now. I've… ## [Use AI to Help You Create the Fantasy Football League Winning Team Name](https://nothans.com/use-ai-to-help-you-create-the-fantasy-football-league-winning-team-name) _2026-08-08 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ Draft season is here again, and your team still needs a name that beats Team Smith. I first wrote on how to use ChatGPT for fantasy football team names back in 2023, then enhanced it with a custom GPT in 2024. Since then the AI tools have gotten better and the method has gotten simpler, so this is the updated version for the 2026 season. The templates below still work in any of the major AI… ## [Live Preview of HTML Files in Visual Studio Code](https://nothans.com/live-preview-of-html-files-in-visual-studio-code) _2026-08-05 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ This post started as a TIL : I was building a little arcade game called Shoot , opened the index.html and the Web Audio API refused to load a single sound because of CORS. (A shooter with no shooting sounds is mostly just pointing.) The fix was a local development server, and the tool I found was the Live Server extension for Visual Studio Code. That problem I had hasn t changed, but the best… ## [Dungeon Crawler Carl Pinball at Gen Con… with Matt Dinniman](https://nothans.com/dungeon-crawler-carl-pinball-at-gen-con-with-matt-dinniman) _2026-07-31 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ There s a new pinball machine. It is a Dungeon Crawler Carl-themed pinball machine from Multimorphic . This pinball machine was announced a few days ago and had a surprise reveal at Gen Con. I have been attending Gen Con for over 20 years and have watched it grow 10x in size and stretch into all things you could geek out on. 90k people come to Indianapolis, IN, and spend four days gaming, talking… ## [Pinball: A Quest for Mastery](https://nothans.com/pinball-a-quest-for-mastery) _2026-07-29 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ First, I need to say I love the pinball community. It is a community, and all kinds are there. Since I relocated to New England, Pinball has been my source of creativity and drive, a way to find friends, a place to have randos over to the house, a place to go to a warehouse filled with old pinball machines, and a way to be around people who love this game. On my journey, I met Tasker Smith. Right… ## [Atari Superman Pinball Wall Art Project](https://nothans.com/atari-superman-pinball-wall-art-project) _2026-07-25 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ My family was spending the day at the Electromagnetic Pinball Museum in Pawtucket, RI, and stumbled across an Atari Pinball Machine. Yes, Atari made pinball machines for a brief, unsuccessful spell. Atari launched the career of the most prolific pinball game designer, Steve Ritchie . Steve is still designing pinball machines 50 years later, with his most recent game, Sonic the Hedgehog from Jersey… ## [CABLE 82: Turn a Raspberry Pi and an Old CRT Into a 1982 Cable Bulletin Board Channel](https://nothans.com/cable-82-turn-a-raspberry-pi-and-an-old-crt-into-a-1982-cable-bulletin-board-channel) _2026-07-23 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ Before feeds, your town had a channel. You might know the one if you watched MTV when it first came on cable. A flat blue screen, chunky white text, the time and the temperature in the corner. The Lions Club pancake breakfast. A birthday wish for someone named STEVE. Little League signups at the rec center. Headlines crawling along the bottom while a Muzak version of a song you almost recognized… ## [Layout your Game Room without Moving 300-pound Machines Around](https://nothans.com/layout-your-game-room-without-moving-300-pound-machines-around) _2026-07-05 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ A pinball machine weighs about 300 pounds. Arcade cabinets heavy. I am always looking to maximize my bonus room space and dream. I built a quick-and-dirty web app to lay out your game room. Add games, rotate, resize, add clearance, add customized blocks. Iterate. What I made It s called Gameroom Designer . It lays out your game room to scale, right in the browser. You set your room s real… ## [Collection essentials #614: Kirby: Canvas Curse (DS)](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/07/collection-essentials-614-kirby-canvas.html) _2026-07-03 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ In the DS’s first year, it really needed games that really took advantage of the touch screen in creative ways in order to convince customers that the extra screen wasn’t just a silly gimmick. Kirby: Canvas Curse (or Power Paintbrush for the non-Americans in the audience) was one of those games. Kirby had already established a solid formula up to this point, 2D platformers with recurring gameplay… ## [Abode 101: A Practical Project to Learn the Open Knowledge Format (OKF)](https://nothans.com/abode-101-a-practical-project-to-learn-the-open-knowledge-format-okf) _2026-06-28 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ Google OKF for Your House I was standing in the hardware store holding a dead coin cell, squinting at it, trying to remember if the Lutron dimmer in my hallway takes a CR2032 or one of the other fourteen round silver batteries that all look exactly the same. So I guessed. I bought two of the wrong one. Classic. Here is the thing about a house. You slowly learn a thousand tiny facts about it. The… ## [Marketplace for AI-Powered Professionals (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/9AAVYeEqksi9) _2026-06-28 · **Sponsored**_ Find professionals who use ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude to deliver work faster. ## [Collection essentials #612 & #613: Jump Superstars (DS) & Jump Ultimate Stars (DS)](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/06/collection-essentials-612-613-jump.html) _2026-06-20 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ If you’re not an anime fan, the name “Shonen Jump” may not mean anything to you…but there’s no denying that you’ve seen and felt its cultural influence. Basically, Shonen Jump is an extremely popular manga/comic book publication in Japan that began in the late 1960s and still exists to this day. Some of the most famous anime of all-time (including Dragon Ball, One Piece and Naruto) got their start… ## [Create the “Best Agent Skill” with SkillOpt from Microsoft Research](https://nothans.com/create-the-best-agent-skill-with-skillopt-from-microsoft-research) _2026-06-19 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ For two years the move was simple: pick a better model. Then the models got good, and stayed good, and the gaps between them got boring. So the interesting lever is the other thing you hand the agent now. The skill file. Microsoft Research just shipped a tool called SkillOpt that takes that idea literally. SkillOpt is a text-space optimizer that trains reusable natural-language skills for frozen… ## [Collection essentials #611: Irozuki Tingle no Koi no Balloon Trip / Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love (DS)](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/06/collection-essentials-611-irozuki.html) _2026-06-13 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ I actually wrote a full-length review for this game on gamefaqs.com when I played through it back in 2020. Because of that review, this post might be a bit shorter than normal since I pretty much said what I have to say about the game in that review. You can read it here . Tingle’s Balloon Trip of Love certainly looks like a follow-up to Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, with similar logos and the same… ## [Collection essentials #610: Ghost Trick (DS)](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/06/collection-essentials-610-ghost-trick-ds.html) _2026-06-09 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ I already talked not long ago about the greatness of the Ace Attorney series. After creating the original Ace Attorney trilogy, the creator of the series wanted to work on a different kind of project. This new game would still be very story-driven and all about mystery like Ace Attorney, but the gameplay would be entirely different, feeling much more like a video game than something akin to an… ## [What I Learned from Garry Tan and gstack](https://nothans.com/what-i-learned-from-garry-tan-and-gstack) _2026-06-06 · Hans Scharler · About Things | A Hans Scharler Blog_ Garry Tan, the guy who runs Y Combinator, just open-sourced a toolkit called gstack . It runs on top of Claude Code and turns it into a virtual engineering team. Twenty-three specialized skills, eight power tools, each one playing a role you d normally have to hire for. A CEO that rethinks your product. An engineering manager that locks down the architecture. A designer that catches AI slop. A QA… ## [Collection essentials #609: Freshly-Picked: Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland (DS)](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/06/collection-essentials-609-freshly.html) _2026-06-06 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ Here we have one of the oddest Legend of Zelda spinoffs out there. Tingle debuted as a character in the Nintendo 64 hit The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, as a quirky map salesman who floats with a balloon that Link must pop in order to bring him down to earth to do business. Rather than keep him as a one-off Majora’s Mask character, he started appearing in more Zelda games in different forms,… ## [Collection essentials #607-#608: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (DS) and Fire Emblem: Fire Emblem: Shin Monshou no Nazo - Hikari to Kage no Eiyuu (DS)](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/05/collection-essentials-607-608-fire.html) _2026-05-26 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ After the success of Fire Emblem on the Game Boy Advance, it was to be expected that we’d get more Fire Emblem on the popular new DS. But instead of sequels, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems decided to go the route of remakes. They started by remaking the very first game in the series, the one that basically introduced the strategy RPG genre as we know it. One motivation for doing so was that the… ## [Collection essentials #606: Final Fantasy III (DS)](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/05/collection-essentials-606-final-fantasy.html) _2026-05-04 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ This is a remake of Final Fantasy III on the Famicom (Japanese NES), which I’ve already written about. You can read my past post here . In the late ‘90s, when Final Fantasy was more popular than it had ever been, Square got into the habit of porting or remaking the earlier games in the series to various platforms. It started with the three SNES titles getting ported to PlayStation. Then, a… ## [Collection essentials #605: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS)](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/04/collection-essentials-605-castlevania.html) _2026-04-27 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ The 2000s was the time when we got the most “Metroidvania” entries in the Castlevania series by far. The three of them on the Game Boy Advance over the span of just a few years saw enough commercial and critical success to keep the trend going into the Nintendo DS era. For their first DS Castlevania, Konami decided to give us a direct sequel to the last one on GBA, Aria of Sorrow. A more… ## [From any door to your door (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/kMxEK0vi6RlT) _2026-04-27 · **Sponsored**_ Book rides, errands, deliveries, groceries and home help in one app ## [Collection essentials #604: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (DS)](https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2026/04/collection-essentials-604-advance-wars.html) _2026-04-21 · Samurai Sam · Sam's video game collection essentials_ The first Advance Wars on DS had changed things up more than Advance Wars 2 had. But there were some that perhaps felt it was a bit too similar to the previous entries. And it seems that Intelligent Systems may have had those players in mind when they came up with the next entry, Days of Ruin, which does keep most of the same basic gameplay elements intact but otherwise is quite a departure in…