So.
I feel weird assuming that people are going to take interest in the minutia of my life that keep me excited, but I have a story.
Something like. . . 12 years ago? I was wanting a good way to stream DS games. You’re thinking “Sojaro, you’re bullshitting me, no one was thinking about streaming games from real hardware 12 years ago.”
I am not lying, and I was trying to figure this out.
Back in the days of Justin.tv and Ustream, I occasionally streamed games using what an audio-engineer friend of mine described as ‘a mess of cables that absolutely should never work’. I captured composite video from a console through two Zazzle AV devices that were probably designed for viewing images from a digital camera, then I convinced Windows that it was a webcam, and captured the video using the beta screen capture application that eventually became Xsplit.
The streams from these days are long lost in the ether of the internet, but I’m rather glad they are as I sometimes cringe out of my skin thinking about them.
I would love to talk about the hardware later—it’s not the feature of this story. The point here is that back then, I really wanted to stream DS games, and they’ve kind of been my holy grail for a long time. I know that DS emulation is good now, and that 3DS capture devices are here and fully functional. But I really wanted to capture DS video.
The goal, at the time, was that I wanted to stream the full of the first four generations of Pokémon. And now, I guess I can?
This is a lot of faff to say “a much younger me had a goal that involved getting tools that barely existed at the time to do a thing no one really understood how to do well.”
And I guess, today, I can do it. It’s not perfect quality, it’s only one screen, and the DS I’m using at the moment is incredibly busted up.
But, at the end of the day, I am capturing live video out of a Nintendo DS. It works, it’s playable in real time, and most importantly: it’s mine.