Public Service Pronouncement

Don't let this happen to you!
(image by Gus Allen for Atari)
(the good one, not Infogrames wearing its
skinned carcass as a coat)

I'm loathe to link to anything written by Brian Ashcraft, the little jerk who banned me from Kotaku years ago, but this is nevertheless important enough to put that slight behind me for a few minutes. Do you have a PSP? Open the back and check the battery. If it's starting to do its best Jiffy Pop imitation, chuck it and get a replacement. Not only will the battery not work in that condition, bad, bad things could happen to your system if you let it continue to expand. At the very least, the door on the back will warp from trying to hold in the swelling power source. At the very worst, the battery could burst open, soaking your PSP's internals in corrosive acid. Trust me, you don't want that... replacements aren't cheap, especially with the pandemic inflating classic game prices.

Amusingly, this recently happened to my 3DS... after getting irritated with the system not holding a charge, I opened the back panel and discovered that the battery was plumping up faster than William Shatner at a Star Trek convention buffet. Let that be a warning to you... regardless of the manufacturer, age isn't kind to rechargeable batteries. (Or William Shatner.)

This whole week has been a learning experience for me. After having no end of trouble running Batocera on the PC I rescued from a yard sale, I learned that you can't run the software from just any flash drive. Neither the Verbatim I bought from Staples (for way too much money) nor the Memorex I had lying around were up to snuff. However, the Sandisk Cruzer I had previously reserved for my Xiaomi worked beautifully, running games and transferring files with ease. Thanks to the Batocera Linux Twitter for the suggestion.

By the way, did you know even an aging Core2Duo can run games for turn of the century consoles like the Dreamcast and GameCube? I do now! I ought to discuss my experiences with the quirky Atomiswave library, but alas, that will have to wait for a future blog entry...