Coming off the AI Maddeness Bye Week

I gave myself a few things to do during the bye week and I’m happy to report I got more than half of them done.

The most pressing issue to address was getting the emulated version of Madden 2001 running on Batocera to stop freezing mid-game. It’s been happening consistently and the best case scenario led to a delay of game penalty, the worst would mean a hard restart of the game all together (which meant losing data). This was not viable so I tried replacing the game rom (the cue and bin files), changing the emulation system (switching between Duck Station, Swan Station, ePSXe, etc.), re-configuring video settings, and more. After everything failed I decided to take the season’s save file and move it over to a RetroPie. So far that seems to have solved the issue, but it also means there’s still an issue with PS1 emulation on the Batocera.

Playstation bezel used for my Ai Maddeness game streams

After switching to RetroPie I was concerned about losing the Playstation bezel on the sides of the video, but I figured that out in OBS and thankfully the bezel images are freely available here. I’m currently using the night time PSX image. With that done, I’m now running my AI Maddeness weekly games though RetroPie, which will hopefully fix those annoying freeze issues.

Another thing I did this week, speaking of Playstation save files, is try to figure out if there’s a way to tap into the save data for Madden 2001 a bit more programmatically than taking tons of screenshots every week. According to Google’s AI overview, the Playstation save files (.SRM) are proprietary and encrypted, so it would have to be a bit of reverse engineering to decipher the code with a hex editor. The only person I know who talked about using a hex editor was Reclaim Hosting’s badass sysadmin Chris Blankenship, so I will be consulting the mighty oracle. Long story short, it may be possible (albeit Herculean and not worth it) to decipher the code and then write a script to pull the weekly stats off the SRM file directly. This is purely the realm of theoretical right now, but I do love the idea of cracking the Madden 2001 code 25 years later to release the Kraken!

That’s two things on the list I can cross off. In fact, I even squeezed in a third, namely playing some of the Week 5 games while my Jets rest up. I played against the Colts as the Bills to see if I could deliver Indianapolis there first loss—didn’t happen. It was a heart breaker that was lost in the last 14 seconds, you can read all about it on AI Sport Zone. In better news, I also played as the Jaguars against the Steelers and won 17-10, giving the Steelers their first loss while also doing a bit of recon in preparation for week 6’s match-up against the Jets.

The fourth and final task I got to was creating a couple of videos where I had ChatGPT take my game recap blog posts and turn them into a 90 second script that I had Dr. Oblivion read via the voice MBS trained more than a year ago in Elevenlabs. So Dr. Oblivion is now dabbling in sportscasting. I did two different takes, the first was Steelers vs Jaguars with a bit more serious tone using the royalty free track  “Epic Sport Trap” for background music—recommended by ChatGPT.

For the second video featuring the Colts vs. Bills, I had Dr. Oblivion coming off as a bit more humorous. It uses the royalty free song “Scheming Weasel” to underscores the almost comical nature of this mistake ridden game (once again recommended by ChatGPT). I was pretty impressed with the new Enhance feature in Elevenlabs that adds tags to help guide delivery. For example, in the script you can see the guided delivery in square brackets that tell the machine when to change emphasis and how:

Rob Johnson threw a pick on his second play, and Peyton Manning said, “[chuckles] hold my Gatorade” — tossing his own in the end zone. We were off to a hot mess of a start.

Then outta nowhere — 4th and 19, Johnson hits Moulds for 61 yards. [excited] Buffalo wakes up! Steve Christie boots a field goal to tie it at 10 with just 19 seconds left.

I found these audio deliveries pretty impressive, and I have to say it sounds less like Dr. Oblivion and more like a younger me, which I’ll take today 🙂

As for the things I didn’t do:

• Style the AI Maddeness, AI Sports Zone, and Gangus Green sites. I’ve been promising this for weeks, but is this the weekend I’ll truly lock-in? Nope.
• Create a separate official Jets site for team news, injury reports, comprehensive stats, etc. This will be a model for having a site for every team (aspirational I know), but if I come up with a solid template it would be easy enough with WPMS.
• Finally, testing out what it would be like to make an AI-generated podcast reflecting on previous week’s game and getting ready for the next week’s, the bye week may provide the perfect occasion to reflect on the Jets vs Steelers going into week 6.

I got to 4 of 7 tasks, so I’ll take that as a win given I was a busy Reclaimer this week. What’s more, I’m happy to report that AI Maddeness is the time suck that keeps on giving! I would write more, but I still need to knock out a post for Gangus Green and get out a couple of preview posts beyond the Jets vs Steelers given I plan on playing at least 3 games this week.