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OK. So let’s talk about what we’re really excited about today. I am giving away the very first project that I ever made on The Geek Pub! That is right. I am giving away the water balloon cannon. I don’t know why I am giving it away. It’s very sentimental to me. It’s the first project I made; three years ago! But! I am going to give it away! If you want a chance to win this you only have to do one thing. Go onto Facebook or Twitter. Share any video that you like that I made. Any one of my videos. It doesn’t matter what it is. Share it and use the hashtag #TheGeekPub. And then send an email, just send me an email to mike@thegeekpub.com with a link to where you shared it. Now make sure you shared it publicly, because if you don’t share it publicly I can’t see it. So make sure you don’t have it set to private when you share it. But I will randomly select somebody. It will be completely random. And we will give this away. I will ship it to you for free. And you guys enjoy it. And maybe you’ll shoot a video of yourself using it once you get it. I’m really excited to give this away and a little bit sad at the same time.
OK. So I want to talk to you about the project that I am working on right now. I am building an old school arcade game. So I am talking about an old school arcade cabinet. Like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, all of that. I’m going to be using a software called MAME. A lot of you are probably familiar with that, and it runs on a PC. But I do want it to be very very old school as far as how it operates. So I am going to make sure that it has a coin drawer. That’s what you can see here. You’ll be able to put quarters in to play it. It will have a bypass as well. I’ve got all of the old school buttons and joystick. One player. Two player. All of that stuff already setup. This is just a little prototype that I built as a proof-of-concept before I actually build the cabinet. I’m not sure if this is going to be my next video or if its going to be the video after that. But I look forward to this coming up.
So The iBookGuy is going to come by. He’s going to build an arcade at the same time that I do. He’s going to have a little bit different take on it. So his arcade is going to be a little bit cheaper, probably a little bit more inexpensive to build. So basically he’s going to take some off the shelf components and convert them so where as I am going to buy a keyboard controller, he’s going to scrap on old keyboard for example and use that as a controller. So it ought to be a really interesting difference. So I invite you guys to come buy and watch both of those videos on both channels. I’ll put links below when those videos pop up.
So originally we were both going to build upright cabinets. His cabinet was going to be kind of thin and small and very modernized I think and mine was going to be a cocktail table. I really like the idea of an old school cocktail table video game. You know, the kind that lays flat and then has joysticks on both sides because you could, or we could have that in our game room and we could play Pac-Man and have a beer or whatever sitting on top of the cocktail table. But after looking at it and thinking about it its not going to be as simple as I thought it was going to be, especially if you want to play other games besides the real basics like Pac-Man, Galaga, Pitfall, and those types of games. But anything that requires more that one button, two buttons is going to be extremely difficult because there is just not enough room. So I may make it bigger, you know, I may vary it away from old school and not do it like that. Make it a little bit my own. I don’t know we’ll see. I’m really struggling with that right now. I may just go ahead and build an upright cocktail (I’m sorry) an upright cabinet like you’d normally see at the arcade. So more to come on that. I think you guys will really like it. I’m also going to use a piece of software to run it on the front-end. I’m not sure what that’s going to be. It may be HyperSpin or it may be this thing right here which is called Maximus Arcade. It’s really just stupid simple. It’s just a menu with a list of games you go down. You pick the game you like. You hit one of the buttons and the game starts loading. So I am not sure on that yet. HyperSpin is a lot more interactive, but its also a lot more complicated and it’s a lot more buggy. So we’ll see on that.
OK. So in addition to MAME. I’m also going to do Nintendo, and maybe Commodore 64, Atari 2600, and probably some of the old school video games machines that you could use at your house. So home arcades. And the cool thing is this HyperSpin software. It will allow you to select between all of the different emulators. So you can wind up here with MAME, in this case I’ve got Nintendo up here. You can switch again and have Commodore 64. You select a button and it show you the games that are available on that particular platform. Then you just select the game and it loads it up. So I will probably have a whole bunch. Maybe even PS1, PS2. I’m not sure. But a whole bunch of emulators available on my console. So I am pretty excited about this project.
I get asked a lot what my upcoming videos are and how I pick them. And honestly, I don’t like to tell you guys what my upcoming videos are because if I tell you someone else will go make the video before I can do it. So I am going to go ahead and tell you a few of them because I think they are complicated enough that others won’t bother. But I have been wanting for a long time to build an old school R2D2 from Star Wars. And I want to make this thing where it has a computer inside it and its remote control so that you can drive it around and make it do things. Automate stuff. Make it beep on command and those types of things. So I really want to do that. I think that is going to make it into the project line up for this year. We’ll see. I’ve done some research on it. I’ve got some pretty good ideas for this that I think will make it very unique. You could also do this with a Dalek. A lot of people have asked me if I would make a Dalek, but a Dalek is pretty big and I don’t really have a place to put it after I am finished with it. So I think I will probably not do the Dalek. However, I really, really, really wanted to do a TARDIS. I wanted to build a full size TARDIS for the back-yard to put out at holidays for something like Halloween and stuff. However, Steve Ramsey beat me to that, and built a really nice one. I just don’t think I can compete with that video. Or I could make that video again, but I wouldn’t really add anything that you guys haven’t already seen. You know, it doesn’t add anything to the Internet community. So I probably won’t build a full size TARDIS unfortunately. I just don’t see that there’s a need for yet another TARDIS build out there on YouTube. So I probably won’t do that, unfortunately.
So I have some other things lined up that I want to do this year. My son and I both want to build an electric guitar. And I am talking about a real guitar. One that you can actually play. Plug it into an amp and go to town. So I’ve got some people who have given me some advice who are professional guitar makers on how to make one. So we will probably do that sometime later this year. I personally don’t play guitar, but my son does so he will probably play something for you. Along those same lines I want to build a modern skateboard. So we built an old school skateboard in one of our videos a couple of years ago and now I want to build a modern skateboard. One that has plies in it. And the reason why is that that video, that old school skateboard video, was probably one of the most popular videos that I ever made. It got lots of comments. It got lots of views. And the comments were funny because the people who got and the people who understood it really wrote some very nice comments for me but there’s a lot of comments from 12 year olds who (I think they were 12 years old anyway because of they way they talk) but there’s a lot of comments from 12 year old kids saying “Hey, you know you didn’t make this right! That’s not what an old school skateboard is!” Unfortunately I don’t think they actually know what an old school skateboard is because they were born in 2000 and to them the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s don’t exist. And so they don’t have a clue what an old school skateboard actually is. So I want to make a modern version though. I want to use plies. I want to make a forming machine. Not a forming machine. A forming mold to put them in and show you guys how a modern skateboard is built. I think that would be a really fun video.
Alright. So the last thing I want to do is talk about some viewer comments. So I will put these on the screen for you guys to read. So. This one pops up from time to time. I’m just going to go ahead and address it, but this is from Maria, I believe it is Engstrom. I hope I pronounced that right. She says “I must ask. Are you related to The iBookGuy? you sound very alike, look alike and you have very similar body language. Also, cool video!” So Maria, Yes. The iBookGuy and I, my name is Mike, his name is David are brothers. We’ve been brothers since we were born. Well at least since he was born. He’s the younger brother. We are very, both very offended that you think we look anything alike or that we sound anything alike because I know that I am way better looking than him. So. Pretty offended by that. Next question, or next comment. This is from JuriePie and he says “Yeah” This was on the plantation shutter video that I posted last week. “Yeah this was pretty boring.. No dry ice?! No explosions ?! No shooting?! Sorry but i liked the content from a year ago more”. Well JuriePie I am really sorry to hear that. I can only make so many shooting and exploding videos. And I’ve always had about a 60/40 split. Sixty percent building stuff, and forty percent shooting and exploding stuff. But there’s also another problem that you might not be aware of and that is YouTube likes to make my videos that have shooting and exploding stuff in them age-restricted so that other people can’t watch them unless they are 18 years old and it also means that I can’t monetize that video. Which means I spend hours and hours and hours making videos about let’s say smoke bombs which is a video that got age restricted. I spent hours and hours and hours making that video and I don’t get any reward for making it because it gets age restricted and then I can’t monetize it. So it’s really tricky for me whether or not I can make too many of those videos. Alright so we’ll move on to the next one. And this is on the same day right after JuriePie commented and its from Shad Wood and he said “I got to say, I’ve been a big fan of yours and I am stoked to not only watch your videos, but do some of these projects myself. Keep up the good work and thank you for the awesome video.” So I am really glad, sometimes you know comments come, they’re negative and then you get a great one right behind it. And that makes it worth it. Every time I get one of those comments it just makes me want to make another video. So I really appreciate that Shad. Thank you so much.
Well that’s it for today. I hope you guys like this format. I’m not going to do it that often. But I do want to take some time every now and then. Especially when its going to be a while between videos. Like this arcade is going to take a while. Probably a couple of weeks to build. So I may not have it out for a while but I like to make sure you guys are updated and we talk to each other. And with that said I am going to finish off my Blue Moon and I will see you in the next video.
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