Good news, the first MD arrived and it is fully functional. I'll start the modding tonight but I'm still missing the wires so need to get those before I can go any further...

Mega Drives are surprisingly resilient, in fact most old consoles are. They're kind of hard to break unless you dump water on them or toss them down the stairs. Usually ones that have stopped working just need a new capacitor or fuse. I'm yet to start as I'm still waiting on delivery of the donor MD's from eBay. I'm hoping at least one of them will be here by tomorrow, then it'll be a case of finding out whether it's a working device (both were listed as "untested" which tends to mean broken, although in the case of old consoles it often does just mean untested as the person may have found it in a cupboard/loft without any of the wires). As long as at least one of the donors is working then I'll hopefully be able to get to work by Wednesday. The actual mod shouldn't take longer than an hour to do, but since it's my first time doing anything like this I won't be rushing it!

It's pretty common for victories to have less debate than defeats. There's only so many ways you can say "glad we won, decent performance". I think it's great that almost everyone is in agreement that the defence looked much better, Travis/Johnson works well as a midfield unit and Gally had a solid performance on the wing.

I do wonder if Del would be perceived completely differently by our fans if he'd just been used as a centre back the entire time. We know he's at best a functional left back and at worst not very good at all, but so far every time he's played at CB he's been solid. Although interestingly it was at Bristol City where he was converted to left wing back: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/34936324 Ha, ha, ha....

Judging by their start to the season probably not, but we definitely played them at a good time when their confidence is obviously low and there are probably doubts over Woodgate within the squad due to his inexperience as a manager. The biggest positive of yesterday was keeping a clean sheet, something we desperately needed having shipped two goals a game so far. Problem is that unless we improve defensively we aren't going to just be able to rely on set-pieces. A clean sheet yesterday was nice but it isn't the norm. We have a habit of shipping goals so we are going to need to score a decent amount from open play. We did it last season so there's no reason we can't do it this season - but I think it's going to rely on the Graham/Dack link-up being strong again as we don't have many other goalscorers in the team. As long as Tony sticks with the Graham/Dack pairing I think we'll start scoring goals from open play, so I'm not too concerned yet. I'm more worried about our defence than our attack at present, although if we stick with Lenihan, Williams/Tosin & Cunningham at CB/LB I think we'll see improvements there too. Just have to pray that we get some luck on the injury front as losing any of those would be a big setback.

Well, they got away with Brentford so why not try again?

I've said before I'll accept Gallagher on RW as long as we play Graham up front with Dack behind him. It's a shame that we've spent £12m on strikers and 34 year old Danny Graham is still by far our best option up top, but it is what it is. Dack brought down for the penalty, Graham converts. That'll do. Gallagher playing well on the right today is great as it will hopefully mean he stays out there and DG remains in the centre. It's obviously a shame that it will likely be at the expense of Rothwell but what can you do at this point? I get the feeling Gallagher has to play and Downing has probably been brought in under the impression he's a first teamer too, so it looks like Rothwell will have to wait for an injury to happen before he gets a run in the team.

You have to beat the poor teams at home to have any chance of staying up, but I don't think many of us were predicting relegation this season. Progress will be better than 15th, not just staying up. Obviously good to get a win and a clean sheet today though.

Other than the penalty did we have a lot of other opportunities from open play? Curious as to how we fared creatively.

Sounds like we had a good first half, which is a bit worrying as we normally only perform for one half.

That's why you play Dack and Graham in the same team ?

#LittleSkip

Also Rothwell should be instructing his agent to get him out of here asap.

I privately believe that a condition of releasing the money for SG was that he had to play if fit. After last year's Brereton fiasco you couldn't really blame the owners for stipulating this.

We've seen Nyambe play competently at RB before in this division so we know he's capable. He can't have much confidence after being stuck behind Bennett for so long, though. He's backup to a player who isn't even a natural right back and isn't even very good in that position. He's going to be rusty from lack of first team action anyway, and having a poor game against Oldham isn't going to have helped his confidence. It's all irrelevent really though. Bennett has just been named captain/little skip, so there's no way he's going to be dropped, and the only position he can go is right back... therefore Bennett will almost certainly be at right back. If Lenihan and Tosin are both injured then Nyambe will likely be put into central defence, as we essentially have no other options, but if either are fit then he'll be on the bench again.

And would strengthen my belief that Tony is under orders to play him no matter what.

Which suggests we have no decent RBs at the club, or at least none in form. At this point we might be better off trying JRC there.

Fortunately for them it's League 1 so they still have a chance of getting some points. Could line up with eleven traffic cones and some games would still end 0-0.

Still strange wording to use though. If Mulgrew is on loan elsewhere then he's not "big skip", he's just an opposition player until he returns next season. The way Bennett worded it is like Mulgrew is out with an injury, not literally playing for a rival club. It's obviously a sign of respect from Bennett to Mulgrew which is fine in private, but not sure it's the right thing to say in public as it suggests we've let our main leader and captain leave and be replaced by a lesser person.

If it's a choice between Downing/Armstrong then I don't have a problem with Downing being selected as Armstrong is at best adequete in that position, but often ineffective. If Downing is keeping Rothwell out then that is a problem.

Wyatt has been the sole bright point of Raw for the past few months with his amazing Firefly Funhouse segments. I love what they're doing with it so far, and apparently the plan is to have Bray appear sporadically to increase the mystique, hence his non-appearance on Raw & Smackdown this week. I don't trust WWE creative to do this justice long-term, but it's been great so far. Wyatt's character desperately needed a refresh and this is an incredible way to do it without completely abandoning his previous character work. There are a lot of rumours that Finn is planning to take some time off soon, so it would make perfect sense for the Demon's first loss to be at the hands of the Fiend. It gives a massive credibility boost to Wyatt and sets up a return feud down the line if they want to go in that direction. You could easily have Wyatt win this feud by banishing Finn/the Demon, then have a final showdown at WrestleMania where the Demon exacts his revenge - as at the end of the day the good guys should go over. If done correctly it doesn't have to damage Bray at all, although WWE aren't exactly good at doing things correctly so I have my doubts as to whether they could.

If we're ignoring hearsay and conjecture then we can only go by what Mowbray and Waggot have told us - namely that the budget was roughly the same as last summer (circa £10m) and the Raya money was being added to the budget. So with SG's transfer being taken into account that would only be a net spend of £2m against a supposed transfer budget of £10m, leaving £8m. I'm not including wages in that purely because last year's £10m did not include wages either. We also had Mowbray telling us money was available in January and he chose not to spend it. He and Waggott have also always said that the owners are backing them 100% and releasing funds when asked for. So based off those comments we really have no choice but to lay the blame for our obvious squad imbalance at Mowbray's door, irrespective of the suspicions most of us have about how transfers really operate at Ewood.

So just as a heads up I've renamed the thread to "New Games/General Gaming" as it seems like most gaming related discussion goes here nowadays. I've decided I'm going to attempt to mod a Mega Drive to be multi-region. I've had a look at some tutorials and it doesn't seem too difficult. Nonetheless I've ordered a couple of cheap MD's off eBay as I don't want to potentially destroy my current working MD I & II models. The idea is to add a switch to the side of the MD to allow it to toggle between Japan/US/Europe. Typically PAL Mega Drive games run significantly slower than their US counterparts and also have black bars running across the top and bottom of the screen, purely due to the PAL 50hz signal and the fact games back then were not optimised properly for PAL (unless they were developed in Europe, then sometimes they were). The mod would have the Mega Drive running at 60hz instead which should improve a lot of games. I've got an Everdrive so have access to the US ROMs, many of which I can't currently run due to the region lock on my European Mega Drives. The other potential benefit of changing regions is, oddly enough, Master System games. The Mega Drive has all the components of a Master System inside it - the only reason you can't play Master System games on it directly is that the cartridge pins are different. There was a Master System sold in Japan which had a different sound chip, the FM chip, which gave richer sound to Master System games. Master Systems over here didn't have that chip, and whilst you can mod a Master System to add an FM chip, the Mega Drive already has those sound capabilities built in. If you have an Everdrive cart which supports FM sound emulation then changing the region to Japanese will enable any Master System games that have code for FM sound to produce it, rather than the standard PSG sound. The MD motherboard essentially contains all the elements to be whatever region you want. There are four jumpers which correspond to a language/region. If you disconnect the connections between the jumpers then the MD will still work, but default to 60hz NTSC (so your European MD basically becomes a US MD). Technically if you just wanted a US MD to play US ROMs from an Everdrive then this is all you'd have to do, as the region would be permanently changed to US. But there are some European & Japanese exclusive games so not an ideal fix. By soldering wires from the jumpers to a switch you can have the MD change between all regions.That is the plan. Well anyway, I've got a soldering kit, a multimeter and a couple of switches coming from Amazon tomorrow, so we'll see how this goes. I have no experience with this whatsoever but as I'm using cheap donor Mega Drives it won't necessarily matter if I fuck up. Both are listed as "untested" so it's possible neither will work, but one was listed as "used" so I can always send that back if it doesn't work. The other one was listed as "spares and repairs" so can't send that back, but it was only £9 so no big deal if it doesn't work. I can always look into working out why it's not working and potentially fix it anyway.

Makes it sound like Mulgrew's gone on a two week holiday to Menorca ffs, rather than been unceremoniously packed off to Wigan on the final day of the transfer window.

I think you're right in that most of the players aren't going to be actively playing with the mindset of "screw the manager, we're going to get him the sack", but if morale is low then we will certainly see poorer performances with a lot less confidence. I think we've already seen in the likes of Nyambe and Brereton that their confidence has been shattered by Mowbray's appalling management of both (imo) and even the likes of Travis and Rothwell seem to be losing their spark. It's a situation then can be at least temporarily resolved with victories, but the more we lose the worse it's going to get and the harder it is going to be to climb out of the pit.