<\/td><\/tr>\n1) The “console keyboard” is just a plain old wireless keyboard. The receiver is tucked behind the wall of consoles where it can be plugged into either the PS3 or Xbox as needed.
\n2) The “switch” is a simple little A\/V selector, similar to this one<\/a>.
\n3) Sorry about the open curtain, which creates the unwanted light-bloom effect. We’ve been living in this pure white void for a few years now, because the property values are crazy low. Downside: The back yard is an endless expanse of white light without form or substance, which makes it hard to play baseball.
\n4) The green vessel in the middle is my now-standard dispenser for brain fuel<\/a>.
\n5) Yes, that is a mini-fridge on the right. I hasten to add that it contains only water bottles and not food. Having food that close would lead to there being a lot more Shamus around here.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>
\nAll of the consoles feed into the switch, which in turn feeds into my TV Tuner card, which lets me play in window on my PC. A TV tuner card is – as the name suggests – a card with some standard television inputs on it. You plug your console, cable TV, antenna, DVD player, VCR, or what-have-you into the card, then run the accompanying program and the resulting signal ends up in a window on the desktop. Or you can go fullscreen if you’re into the whole “immersion” thing. (And speaking of plugging in a DVD player: I’m always worried that on some level the problems I have are the result of some half-assed DRM getting in the way. Recording the footage of your Grand Theft Auto IV jumps is indistinguishable from pirating DVDs from a technological standpoint. It’s all the same connectors, the only difference is the nature of the data.)<\/p>\n
Many people made suggestions along the lines of getting another monitor just for the consoles or somesuch, but remember that the entire point of my setup is so that I can do clean screengrabs of console games in order to supply my webcomic<\/a>. Plugging the console directly into a television or monitor would surely improve the picture quality, at the expense of defeating the entire purpose of the setup. I don’t care how nice the TV is, taking pictures of a screen using a digital camera is never going to work. <\/p>\n The most common question from readers is, “What TV Tuner card do you use?” I’m afraid my answer wouldn’t be very useful to you, since:<\/p>\n So if you’re really interested in this exciting world of playing a console game piped through your PC, I can’t really advise you on what to get. But I can<\/strong> give you a heads up on some of the drawbacks. I can’t lead you to victory, but I can let you know what it will feel like to lose.<\/p>\n Lag<\/span> <\/p>\n Visual Distortion<\/span> <\/p>\n\n
<\/td><\/tr>The white dot moves back and forth along the curving path. The object is to hit a button to make it stop within the green region.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>I’ve only recently discovered that there is a small degree of visual lag. I have been attributing my quick time event headaches to my declining reflexes, but it turns out that the TV tuner card is also a contributing factor. The various mini-games in Fable 2 provided fairly conclusive proof of this. The more difficult ones have a moving white dot that takes about one second to move along its path, and I have to hit the button while the dot is about 1\/3 to 1\/4 of the path away from its target. Making a very rough guess, I’d say I’m dealing with somewhere between 150 and 250 milliseconds of lag. That’s short enough to be hard to detect in normal circumstances, but long enough to make twitch situations a great deal more challenging. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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