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Personal Pratt Queens

Ace of Queens

After traveling around Vermont and Cape Cod, I returned to New York City and signed a lease on an apartment in Queens. I also found that Xi Jinping, Waylon Jennings and my son Roman all have the same birthday – June 15th, the zodiac of Gemini. So, Roman and I have started learning Chinese. Chinese is very similar to Kanji in Japanese; for example, the Kanji and Hanzi for water are both 水. This 水 symbol is also on the dials on the Japanese Submarines in one of my favorite Burt Lancaster movies, Run Silent Run Deep.

I have been talking to several card store owners in New York City about selling my deck of cards. Instead of calling the deck “The American Game” – I may switch the name to “Emblem Cards”. I was sad to leave Capitaland, yet I needed some space from my family. My New York family members have all been so disruptive to my graphic design work and my car mechanic/Art Conservation practice that a few hours of space as become preferable. I pray will be good for all of us. I have missed living in NYC, yet the city has changed a lot from when I lived here in 2010 and 2011. I liked living near my mother, yet Upstate New York makes one yearn for the city. I lasted about a year in Schenectady.

I have been missing my pet bunny rabbit, Mugs Bunny. Easter was always our special day. Yet, I found a famous rabbit sculpture by Jeff Koons in Manhattan, which took some of the pain away from our seperation. Stay tuned to the blog for more Queens and New York City updates. Ciao!

Categories
blog Sketchbook

Virgo de Irunbidea

Virgo de Irunbidea statue drawing from sketch book – April 2022, Spain
Photo of statue
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Uncategorized

Making a Nintendo 64 ( N64 ) Raspberry Pi Emulator with Roman

I recently got some new hats. The first has the Super Mario ghost character, Boo, on it. The second features Majora’s Mask from the N64 Zelda classic. My love for this classic Zelda game inspired me to create an N64 emulator with one of our raspberry pi boards and the RetroPie.

I was impressed with the over 50 game systems that RetroPie offers. I had ordered a set of Super Nintendo controllers and a set of N64 controllers that have usb ends instead of the original plugs.

We formatted an SD card with Etcher to put on RetroPie. Then we plugged everything into the raspberry pi and started to configure things. I am actually still having some problems with programming the joy stick 100%, yet everything else is working great with the original style controllers. After programming the controllers, we had to run some code to add a controller hot key for entering and exiting the emulator.

After everything was working, it was apparent that games still needed to be put onto the system. I was able to download several games for free online. When you download an old game file to put on an emulator, its called a ROM. I obtained the ROMs for Super Smash, Mario Party, both Zelda games and Banjo Kazooie just to get started.

The ROMs go onto a usb that is plugged into the raspberry pi. I am very glad I was able to finish this project and share all my old games I loved as kid with my son, Roman.

Categories
Art/Design Home Studio Personal

Pops

My dad flew in from Dallas on Friday to see Roman and I. Although we did have some fun going out drinking in the Vista on Friday, we also took Roman to the Edventure science museum for kids.

Also, we spent a large amount of his visit cleaning/reorganizing my pad. I will admit though that I am glad my art/design space doesn’t look like Francis Bacon’s painting studio anymore!

Francis Bacon's painting studio
Francis Bacon’s painting studio