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>Side note the most common problem for the PS support queue was PlayStations not reading disks properly.

I laughed when I read the following quote from Andy Gavin's blog, now I'm crying after seeing yours.

"Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”

>The fix was to turn the machine on its side or even upside down to get the CD closer to the laser.

Was this the precedent for marketing the PS2 vertically?

Afaik putting PSX on a side fixed the issue of worn out plastic slider/sled. Early laser beds were plastic and would wear leading to slop and misalignment, later ones were die cast. People used to shim worn out sled with razor blades/other thin metal pieces.

> Post windows 95 they still had some bargain flight sims that seemed popular.

The golden era of flight/space sim !

I miss my wing commander(s) (don't you dare mention/reply Star-Citizen !)

I think I played/broken through 2 crappy-cheap joysticks via the whole series. That perfect point in time (when you were young enough not to pay taxes, but old enough to get a soundblaster-card-kit with free wingcommander games)

IIRC this particular issue was with one of the Jane’s Combat Simulator games. ;-)

janes !! Damn that bring back memories

Someone needs to port these to the Quest 2. VR, for flight sims, is pretty awesome, assuming you can stomach it.

absolutely ! Im assuming 40year old me that can afford vr doesnt have the same stomach as 16 year old me :)

It just takes time. For me it was a few weeks, with longer and longer sessions each time. I’m someone who gets sick from spinning in circles a few times, so if you can stomach that, probably less.

Car sims took the longest. There’s just too much hard wired in there.

Wing Commander series, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, Falcon 3.0, X-Wing series, Descent 1 & 2. Thrustmaster flight stick and throttle. Good times, good times.

I never really mastered flying the F-16 in Falcon 3.0, but I at least got to the point where I could take off and land OK. The mission planner for custom missions was very sophisticated too.

For Descent, I had also tried out the Logitech Cyberman 2 controller:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/the-weird-and-wonderful-world...

In theory, it is ideal for flying your spacecraft in Descent, allowing you to move or turn in any direction in a a sort of intuitive fashion. However, it wasn't that satisfying in practice.

I also had at one point a steering controller that resembled a RC car controller. That worked a lot better for me than racing wheels that were much more common.

Pairing that with the original ReVolt RC racing car game (don't buy the ripoff version that was just released to Steam!) and you're talking many hours of fun.

Forgot to mention. Dammn that music of wingcommander

> turn the machine on its side or even upside down to get the CD closer to the laser

I'm confused by this, doesn't that seem backwards? If it was sitting normally wouldn't it naturally be helped by gravity to be as close to the laser as the mechanism would allow? Upside down, gravity would be pulling it away from the laser. Right?

The laser is on a mechanism that moves in and out from the center to the rim of the disk. You can see a picture here: https://gametrog.com/playstation-1-one-information-specs-ver...

I don't have a Playstation myself on hand, but from memory, these mounts usually had a certain amount of play in them - if you touched it, you could press it a bit lower, for instance. Whereas the clamp that grabs the disk on toploaders tended to make a very secure connection. So it's probably not bringing the disk closer to the laser, it's bringing the laser closer to the disc.