zeroordie881

The switch from Windows to Linux is one I made a little while ago myself. I run Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS all tricked out with Compiz effects and Conky. It's just as fast when I boot it up now as it was when I installed it a couple months ago. The biggest trade-off with running Linux is probably that game support on Linux isn't quite there yet. We are in the middle of the transition where developers are starting to finally push their games to the platform. Other than that pretty much whatever you do on Windows can be done on Linux. A few perks is the operating system is far more secure than Windows. You don't need any antivirus software or optimization tools like CCleaner. It's a bit hard to grasp at first tho once you get the hang of using the terminal managing the system is much faster than on Windows. If you're not a big gamer or don't play games at all I honestly don't see any reason for running Windows unless you have to for proprietary software. As Windows software will not work on Linux. This is where the free and open source alternatives step in.
 
Netflix has ran on Linux for a while now, where have you been. 

I've been dual booting Linux since about 2004 on all of my desktops. If you're just browsing the internet or are able to use the open source alternatives for stuff its great.. You will run into issues getting things like Netflix and Amazon Prime video streaming working. It can be done bit it isn't always straight forward to get these things working in Linux yet. I always kept an install of Windows on my machine for gaming and for Netflix though.

Figured you guys might appreciate this. For newer games I much prefer PC gaming, but I grew up playing the SNES and I have a ton of nostalgia for it. For a few reasons I wasn't able to keep my SNES or games from when I was younger. About a year and a half ago I started watching speed runs of Super Metroid and it made me want to start playing that game again since it was and still is one of my all time favorite games. I tried a ton of different emulators and none of them felt right, they all felt laggy and numb. Bought a SNES and it played amazing but looked like crap so I decided to do some research to see what could be done. Through some reading I found that an RGB modded SNES Mini hooked up via SCART(had to get a SCART to HDMI converter so I could actually use it) yielded the best video output, so thats what I did.
 
On to the pictures!
Got the RGB amplifier off of ebay for something like $6 shipped. Soldered it onto the SNES following the tutorial on retrorgb's site.

 

 
While I had it apart I wired up an LED as well since the SNES Mini's don't have them by default.
 
Decided to paint my SNES white to see how well it looked. Was pretty happy with the results.

 
Mine, once it was complete! I own a few games now, but buying the carts themselves gets really expensive. Decided to try a flash cart, which works well and keeps the wear and tear off of my actual carts.

 
 
A friend of mine really liked how mine turned out and asked me to put one together for him as well. Decided to go a different route with the paint. I thought about sanding the texture down so it would be more of a mirror finish, ended up deciding against it in the end though. 
 

 

 
 
Final thoughts, if you're playing a game thats really twitchy or sensitive to input lag, you'll want to get one of the fancy expensive upscalers. I've tried an XRGB2+ and a Framemeister. Both work amazingly well, and have very very minimal input lag. I've also tried a $50 SCART to HDMI converter and if you tweak the settings it works decent, though it still induces a lot more input lag than either of the expensive ones I've tried. Also, the $50 one didn't give scan lines, which is a surprisingly nice touch when playing on a 50" TV.

Its not so bad if you have a lot of different things you get to work on. Its only been pretty recent that I've been getting bored with Java. I have had the chance to work on online banking software, interfacing with cash dispensers, building a loyalty system that handles several thousand transactions an hour, forecasting software for estimating and alerting on when fuel tanks at gas stations are going to run out based on previous sales, and dealing with an api that does satellite communication with truck drivers in the past few years. Using one language across a lot of different types of projects is a bit less stressful than one project with lots of languages I've found. 

Its not so bad if you have a lot of different things you get to work on. Its only been pretty recent that I've been getting bored with Java. I have had the chance to work on online banking software, interfacing with cash dispensers, building a loyalty system that handles several thousand transactions an hour, forecasting software for estimating and alerting on when fuel tanks at gas stations are going to run out based on previous sales, and dealing with an api that does satellite communication with truck drivers in the past few years. Using one language across a lot of different types of projects is a bit less stressful than one project with lots of languages I've found.