Death of an Old TV = New HDTV Here I Come!!!

So i was playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl on my old 42" Sony RPTV on Friday night when it finally kicked the bucket. This TV has been on the verge of dying for the last 2 years I've had it in my apartment when i took it from my parents' house where it's been in use since 1993.

It was a good sized TV for and great for its time, but something was screwy with the video projector as it would start to make a high pitched squeal after watching for several minutes. You could turn off the TV for a couple of seconds it might go away, but it always came back especially when the screen was very white. You didn't hear it as much when it was darker. On top of the squealing, the picture would sometimes flicker until there was a red ghost image of whatever we were watching appeared. Again, you could turn off the TV and turn it on and it would go away only to haunt us again another day.

I've had problems with this TV before. Had it repaired maybe twice in its lifetime at my parents' house. I knew it wasn't worth it to get it repaired again so i've been looking to get an HDTV for the past couple of months. Funny how it died because i was playing with my gf on the couch and she said "Do you smell something burning??" and i replied, "Yea... maybe its coming from outside" to which then 30 seconds later, the TV made a popping noise and shut off indefinitely. R.I.P. Sony TV....

Soooooo.... the need for a new TV came quicker than I thought and i've been doing HDTV research for a little while now but hadn't found the one i wanted yet. Price was definitely an issue as i didn't want to spend more than $1500. Ideally a 46"-50" would be my 1st preference as 42" wide screen looked a bit small to me and anything bigger than 50" was too big for my living room. As far as the LCD vs Plasma debate, i liked the way LCDs worked in any room lighting, but Plasmas generally looked brighter yet had that glare issue. I also heard that you could only tell the difference of 1080p resolution over 720p if you had an HDTV over 50" so i didn't mind getting a lower priced 720p TV.

Anyways, we went to Costco on Saturday for some stuff and I browsed some of the HDTVs there. Nothing really caught my eye, although i could really see the difference between some of the low brand Vizios vs the better Toshibas or Sonys. We had some time to kill so we went to our local Best Buy to check out some more HDTVs that we could compare side by side in person. Checking out the massive wall of TVs organized by size, we hit the 46" to 50" section where we saw a decent deal on a 50" Samsung T5054 Plasma at 720p for $1299. Kinda had everything i wanted at a decent price so i asked the sales guy if they had any in stock and they said it was sold out and discontinued.

Sad times until my gf then asked the guy if we could buy the display one and to my surprise he said "Sure. That'll be $999." My gf and I looked at each other and then went to check out the TV again for any blemishes or scratches. It looked pretty clean so we made our final decision and bought the TV. A couple of downers were that it didn't come with a base stand so we had to find a way to mount it or buy a new stand. Then there was the issue that it was used on display for the past year, on for 12 hours a day everyday so we decided to get a 4 year warranty on it. Everything was all set to go, until 15 minutes later when they took it off the wall and while trying to take off the store brackets, they got the bolt stuck in the back of the TV and stripped the screw slot making it impossible to get the bracket off without breaking the TV back or taking it apart. The sales guy barely apologized and sent us to Customer Service to get a refund. It was the last one in the store and we were out of luck.

We left the store empty handed and a little depressed that we missed out on getting our 50" plasma for 1K... but then we remembered there was another Best Buy 2 miles away! We drove there quickly rushed to the TV section where we saw the exact same Samsung T5054 50" Plasma in even better condition than the 1st one we saw. The sales guy there said they were out of stock and we proceeded to ask if we could buy the display one. We told them the story of the other Best Buy, showed them the receipt of our returned TV to speed things up and VIOLA!! We successfully got it down and into our car heading to its new home. On top of the new TV, this Best Buy had the TV stand with swinging mount that we wanted in stock so we purchased that as well to mount our new TV onto. My gf also went a little shopping crazy and bought a new 160 gig Ipod classic to put on the new credit account she opened, all which has no interest for 2 years.

Say hello to my little friend:

So i did my research on actually getting the HDTV, but I've lacked the time to do any real follow up about all the other HD crap i now need to actually see anything in High Definition. I don't have any component or HDMI cables. I don't have a digital cable box with any HD outputs. I don't have an upconvert DVD or an HD/Bluray player. So basically i'm just watching plain crappy TV and playing my Wii on a huge ass screen.

I've been thinking of getting this new Samsung Upconvert DVD player to tide me over until I can afford a PS3 or an HD-DVD player. Looks slick and it matches my new display very well.

Anyways, time to do some more research on all the other stuff i have to get now. This should be fun...

Modded Wii's + Original Super Smash Bros Brawl = Big Trouble

I've been super hyped about the release of Super Smash Bros Brawl as many fans have been ever since the Wii first came out. The next gen Smash game had been delayed for several months, but the day had finally come with the official US release this past weekend on March 9th. I had been fortunate enough to find a small game shop that had copies of SSBB a week earlier and picked mine up at retail 2 days before the release date. Hehe... i thought it was slick that on the receipt, they didn't have the title of the game on there because they were selling it early.

Anyways, I thought I was all pimp that I bypassed preordering and waiting in line at GameStop just to pick up a copy , but I ran into a snafu when I found out my copy of Brawl didn't work!

I had brought my Wii to work originally for an event I was hosting and picked up SSBB during my lunch break. When I hooked up the system and tried the game, my Wii didn't recognize the game but it could read all my other games. I had no clue what the heck was going on and I didn't get a chance to research what might be the problem until I got home. There were several possible reasons I could think of that the game didn't work. 1: I got my Wii modded with WiiKey chip to play burned games so my Wii could have been screwed up and not working right 2: My copy of SSBB was defective 3. i needed to run and update on my Wii since i heard you needed an update before you could play it.

So as soon as i got home, I set up my Wii and ran an update from the settings menu and popped in my copy of SSBB. Got this message: "Unable to read the disc" So theory of Wii update failed. I couldn't check my copy of SSBB on another Wii since I didn't have access to one, so i did some online research and came across this article about Japanese gamers having issues with their Wii's being defective with dirty lenses and that Nintendo Japan was repairing them for free. The main issue here is that SSBB is the 1st Wii game to come out on a Dual Layer DVD disc since the game is so massive. Dirty lenses were said to be sensitive and some could not read this game whereas it could read any previously released game.

Nintendo to Clean Japanese Wiis Over Smash Bros. Errors: Company Sites Dirt as Cause of Error

Since the US version hadn't been released yet, there was very little info on the web about SSBB not working on US machines. I hoped this wasn't the cause of the issue, cause I knew i'd be royally screwed if this happened with the US release since my Wii was modded and voided my warranty. My initial hope was to go to Best Buy and buy a DVD player Lens cleaner which i did for $18 and try to manually clean my Wii lens. Complete failure as i ended with the same disc read error and wasted $18 too. I gave up for the night and went to bed sad and depressed.

The next day, i was able to test my copy of SSBB on a friend's Wii that was unmodded and it worked perfectly, so i had figured out it was most likely due to the fact that i had a modchip that i was unable to bask in the joys of smashing my beloved nintendo characters. I called and blamed Ricky for convincing me to mod my Wii in the 1st place and was really considering ripping out my modchip or even buying a new Wii. Well, Ricky informed me that the WiiKey modchip has firmware updates that i didn't know about that allowed us to play some of the newer games like Super Mario Galaxy. Since i've been ignorant about my modded Wii since i got it back, i didn't even know there were updates so i had a ray of hope.

Didn't have time to play around that night so i let another day pass before i could try getting my SSBB to work on my Wii. By this time, the game had been officially released and there was a LOT more people posting on forums and other websites that they were in the same boat as me and couldn't get their SSBB to work on their WiiKey modded Wii's. Some people had posted about installing a Switch on their Wii's in order to turn on/off their WiiKeys in order to play original games like SSBB. Kinda like this:

See that big red button?? that's the on/off switch for the WiiKey Modchip. Pretty slick huh? I was actually considering trying to do this, but my lack of soldering skills and the potential to completely destroy my Wii came to mind as well. I finally read of a another potentially hazardous solution that didn't involve opening up my Wii and would allow me to play my original copy of SSBB. It is actually quite a simple and effective tactic, but not 100% proven to work and could possibly screw up your Wii and/or your WiiKey modchip. Basically this method will corrupt your WiiKey and disable it which will revert your Wii back to an unmodded state and allow you to play SSBB with no problems. In theory it works like the switch, except in order to turn off your WiiKey and restore it back to working condition, you'll need 2 things.

1: Firmware Update for your WiiKey-Click here to find access a page that has all the different firmware updates for the WiiKey. Download the correct firmware/updates for your Wii by regoin. Padded or original will work fine.

2: WiiKey Recovery Disc -Click here to download the recovery disc you need to restore the WiiKey when you want it to work again.

Burn both of these .iso files to a good quality DVD-r (i used TDK for mine) All you need is the firmware update disc to corrupt your WiiKey and the Recovery Disc to make it work again. Remember that this method is potentially dangerous and could seriously screw up your Wii and WiiKey. I'd only recommend this to desperate WiiKey modded Wii owners that really really want to play SSBB and are too lazy and incompetent to install a switch which is probably just me.

Step 1: Turn on your Wii and put in the Firmware Update Disc. (I used the Padded Update v1.9b -USA)

Step 2: Disc should load up as a Gamecube game and run Firmware update

Step 3: Follow instructions and run the 1st test update all the way through to 100%

Step 4: It should now ask you to run the actual Firmware Update. Begin the update and when the progress bar reaches 70% pull the power cord out of the back of your Wii (Sounds crazy... right?) Remember, this is during the step that says "Do not turn off the power during update!"

Step 5: Wait a couple of second and plug your power cord back in. Turn on your Wii and let it get to the Wii Menu. If it doesn't recognize the Firmware Update Disc anymore, then you have successfully corrupted your WiiKey

Step 6: Eject the Firmware Update Disc and put in your copy of Original Super Smash Bros Brawl and play away!!!!

This worked for me the very 1st time i tried it and i'm super stoked that i finally am able to play SSBB. I haven't actually tried to recover my WiiKey yet, but here are the steps to recover your WiiKey when you want to run burned games again.

Step 1: Turn on your Wii and put in the WiiKey Recovery Disk

Step 2: Push "reset" on your Wii and wait for 5 minutes

Step 3: Power down your Wii completely by pushing the "power" button until it goes red and then turn it back on

Step 4: Your WiiKey should now be restored and test it by playing a back-up or burned game

Since i don't play many burned games, i'll probably leave my WiiKey corrupted for awhile so i can Smash my nights away unlocking all the characters and playing the SubSpace Emissary adventure mode. There is one weird side effect that i've noticed so far though. Although i can still play regular Wii games now, my console does a weird Eject thing where when i push the 'eject' button, it pops out the game, sucks it back in, and then spits it out completely. And actually, it does this for whenever you try to insert a game on the Wii menu so i can no longer change games on the regular menu. Not a big deal as with any old school console, all i have to do is turn off the Wii, and when i turn it on again, i put in the new game and it loads up just fine. So basically i just have to turn off the Wii in between each new game i want to play. Maybe if it bothers me later, i'll try to find a remedy but right now i'm too happy and satisfied playing SSBB. Hopefully the WiiKey team will soon release a new firmware update that will fix the issue so i won't have to keep corrupting my WiiKey.

So to review... only if you're desperate and need to play SSBB like me and you have WiiKey modded Wii, follow this tutorial so you can start smashing in no time at all. Just remember that if you break your Wii, its not my fault!

Happy Birthday Caroline!!!!! I had a wonderful day with you and i hope you had a great one too..... here's to a magical day.....