February 13th, 2018:

	I was feeling a bit nostalgic last night, so once we put the kid 
to bed, I dragged out my Super Famicom for a round of Super Robot War 4.  
It gave me an excuse to try out my unbranded SNES-to-SCART and 
SCART-to-HDMI cables which, I must say, worked beautifully.  Clear picture 
with no blurring.

I was *really* into the console scene, from the mid-90s until rather 
recently, and am the proud owner of several still-functioning copier 
devices and other grey-market goodies.  Largely out of laziness, my 
current go-to device is my Super UFO Pro 8 SD, which uses an SD card for 
storage and can transfer to/from a Windows PC via USB.  It's vastly more 
efficient compared to my older floppy and/or parallel port based copiers, 
such as my Double Pro Fighters or Game Doctor 7.

But, back to Super Robot War 4.  I've been playing this game off-and-on 
since the mid 90s and finally made an effort to beat the game back in 
September (which I did thanks to twenty years of extensive notes).  When I 
went to start a new game, I found the first save slot on the cart was 
non-functional although, inexplicably, the second slot worked.  Not 
wanting to risk faulty SRAM, I dumped the cart to the Super UFO's SD card 
and played the game off the copier.

This time, I decided to have a little fun: I used Exterminator codes, aka 
Pro Action replay (PAR) codes to cheat a little.  I figured after twenty+ 
years of taking this game seriously, I'm going to take the piss out of 
it!  I used a save game editor called SDGundRAM to change my team's mecha 
from their original Gundams, Super Robots, etc to some of the more 
powerful boss mecha, gave myself virtually unlimited money, and upgraded 
the living crap out of each unit.

Yeah, I breezed through the first few maps rather quickly, but the novelty 
wore off after a while, and I found myself wanting to play the game 
without such a signifigant advantage.... so I turned the codes off and 
started the game from scratch.  I'm still playing the game recklessly, and 
levelling up all the weaker support/comic relief characters for my main 
attack squad.  It makes for a more balanced game, and a lot more fun than 
giving myself what is basically an infinite advantage.

Of course, I'm going to be absolutely screwed once I near the end of the 
game, but I'll deal with that when I gett there...