My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Tue Jan 5, 1999

Memory Cards.

Based on mail to Nick.

Sony Card? Oh. Does Sony make Cards for the PlayStation?

It does seem strange to recommend putting the cards in with the station powered on, because GT will eventually check for the presence of a card with no intervention needed on your part. I wonder what happens if it checks exactly when you are inserting the card? Of course maybe they don't recommend powering up with a CD in either. Gee I'm rambling again. I guess they would recommend 1) power up 2) insert cards 3) load CD.

I've bought four cards so far, but none of them are Sony's. I don't think there's any documentation with them. Just a bright green piece of paper with a picture of a cartoon wolf on it.

Of course I have had one load error and one save error so far. Both went away on a retry. I always do a save to each card, and have backups as well. I've also had apparent CD errors, twice after finishing a series , two other times after doing good qualification times for Autumn Ring in Sunday Cup. You can also lock the animation up temporarily, or worse, by holding down "rear view" for too long. The errors after finishing a series may be another bug, and I now always use "exit" to get to the Dealer map in order to "go race" and never "short cut" via the checkered flag in any of the other screens. But coincidentally with that I've tried to become good about shutting the station off for at least five minutes after a maximum of two hours. The manual expresses concerns that the users' health may suffer if they do not take a rest every hour or so, but I wonder if that's not a way to try and get users to avoid overheating problems with the PlayStation. I also made little feet out of a toilet roll to improve airflow underneath the PlayStation. Eventually, perhaps, I'll do something more permanent. They stopped it getting so hot, but have not prevented all strange errors.

I mentioned Canadian Tire Stores before. One neat feature of them is that if you pay with cash they give you a 3% discount in the form of "Canadian Tire Money"; genuine bank notes in denominations of 5, 10, 25, 50cents or one dollar, useable as cash at their store. So the $5.70 I got for buying the PlayStation plus one $10 memory card, together with most of the rest of my at-home "stash" was enough to buy a $10 memory card ($11.50 with tax). (And I still got back 30 cents more Canadian Tire money