Lately I’ve been thinking how much I value my mental sanity. Even after I left Gentoo, I was working all day and then developing during the evening and night.. this worked fine for a while, but I started feeling tired, mostly because I either work or develop without wanting to stop a bit.
As I haven’t found anything yet I’m able to do away from the monitors, I decided to think of alternative solutions… and then looking at an old backup of mine, I remembered I used to play Pokémon and Yu-gi-oh games with VisualBoyAdvance to pass my time… I also passed the night of two days ago playing all night long to one of the ROM I had there…
This started to make me think “How much am I open to pay for my mental sanity?”; when I played with the ROMs, I was a broke high school student, now I have a job and I can pay for what I want to play, so I looked up the price of the Nintendo DS and the availability of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh games for that platform… yes, I was ready to pay more than that price to get my stress relieved.
Today I was able to go to the shop, and buy the Nintendo DS (first series, not the new Lite, it was cheaper, and really I don’t think that something smaller would have been practical to me.. I’m not a fan of microscopic electronic.
Unfortunately I didn’t find the games I hoped to find: the Yu-Gi-Oh games were all missing beside one based on Dice Monsters which is not really something I liked, although it wasn’t really that bad, so I bought instead Pokémon Sapphire (which i didn’t play before) for GBA, which turned out to be a good idea as I don’t really want to leave the GBA cartridge slot open, and it can be closed only by inserting a GBA game. Next month there should be a new YuGiOh game so I’ll probably buy that one (unless someone’s going to send me the one I put in my wishlist that doesn’t seem to be available in Italy); in the mean time I can relax with Pokémon and Super Mario Kart (that was sold together with the DS unit).
I have to say, it impressed me quite a bit, I was never a fan of portable games, but this is probably going to take some of my time… which in turn will make me a bit less available after I’m done with my daily job.. but will also make me quite more relaxed, and this is something I really need in this moment.
And yes, for who’s wondering, I’ve added ALSA 1.0.14_rc3 to my overlay; Steve (beandog) will commit it in main tree as soon as he finds time, there are two profiles changes that has to be done too, but he knows all the specifics.
Feel free to test it from my overlay if you wish, and report the failures to me someway, I’ll look them up.