Essential! I bought it from an older lady down the road months ago in anticipation of buying some retro consoles. I also have a PS2 phat on layaway at the pawnshop that I’ll be grabbing in the next month. It was suprisingly only $60. The cool thing too is there is a gaming shop downtown that sells retro games for pretty cheap. I spied Gran Turismo 4 down there for $8 (the only GT on PS1/2 that I never really got to play). Funny thing is, I’ve actually taken to preferring to watch stuff on the CRT with a DVD player versus using my laptop. I get DVDs from the library and with where the TV is positioned it’s more comfortable to watch from my bed. I don’t get great internet where I am too, so it’s often the only way to watch something. Definitely worth the $7 I payed for it :D

Haha, yeah. I even used to have a Mario shirt I loved that said “Down Since '85”. I completely spaced the connection until I bought the cart. Honestly, the earliest memories I have of gaming are of playing Super Mario Bros. over at the neighbors. My parents couldn’t afford to get me a console until I was 6, and the one they could afford was an Atari 2600 from the thrift store. The carts were something like 25 cents a piece though, so my mom got a crapload of them, I loved it, but was definitely jealous of my other friends who had Nintendos. On my seventh birthday though, they bought me a new SNES that came with Super Mario World, and to this day is the game I’ve beat the most times (I never did get any other games for that SNES since my parents couldn’t afford them).

The game you’re thinking of is Bangai-O Spirits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangai-O_Spirits. It was a DS sequel to Bangai-O on the Sega Dreamcast (another excellent, and imho the superior version). I had the DS version as well and it was a great game. If you ever get the chance (emu or native) I’d highly recommend playing the original on Dreamcast. Pure Arcade shmup goodness.

Call me crazy, but this is why I have been thinking about getting into hobbies where I can make my own tools. I like to journal, and have a fountain pen with ink, but it occurred to me that I could just make my own ink and paper. So much of what we do nowadays for enjoyment is via manufactured things. It’s an unfortunate by-product of a consumer society that even the hobbies that we partake in are themselves a consumptive act. That’s not to say that we should all forgo any kind of external products and just make everything ourselves, I too like a good book, piece of vinyl or comic like anyone else. But it is definitely something to consider the degree to which our lives revolve around some type of product consumption. I think that we’d all benefit from taking some time to consider finding hobbies that don’t rely on buying some type of product.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as well. I decided that I wanted to ditch using any cell carrier in favor of a VoIP provider. I made a post here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26192657.

The two recommendations that came up the most were voip.ms and jmp.chat. Both require at least $15 to get started but you can port your old number over to both services too. From there jmp.chat is $5 a month, which comes with unlimited texts and 120 min a month.

With voip.ms the call and messaging is subtracted from your balance at a predetermined rate (per min and per text) which I haven’t worked out the math on how much mileage $15 will get you initially.

From what I could see jmp.chat looked like it was the easier option to setup, with the Cheogram app for your phone and a Jabber app for the computer. Here’s a wiki entry detailing how to setup jmp.chat: https://kb.above.im/jmp-chat/

I settled on discontinuing my mint service and setting up jmp.chat on my phone and computer, and then supplementing the limited minutes via Signal for calling. Seems like a pretty good alternative to me. I still have a week left on my phone plan, and then I’ll be taking the plunge. I’d been using my phone less and less lately so it wont be too much of a shock, and I’ll save myself an extra $20/month going from the $25 mint plan to $5/month jmp.chat plan.

After looking around their website I found the info on SMS. I do like that it has a minimum pay of $5, both VoIP.ms and JMP require $15 to start. Although, I saw for SMS KeepCalling directs you to their app on the play store. I wonder if it is possible to use their SMS service with a third party app? I would like to avoid using apps from the Play Store if I can help it. Otherwise, it might be a viable option to try out with such a low barrier to entry. I’m still leaning JMP since it seems like the easiest to setup and use between mobile and desktop (MX Linux in my case, using the Gajim app).

Ah, that’s a clever way to circumvent minutes. Signal can only call other Signal users, right? So, if I wanted to call my mom, for instance, she’d need to get Signal? It’s been a sec since I used it.

Does KeepCalling have SMS included?

JMP did look like it was much more straightforward to setup than VoIP.ms. The configuration of VoIP.ms looked pretty bewildering from reading the wiki. My only concern with JMP was the minutes. From what I read it said it was unlimited text but only 120 min/month. Is that accurate?