I'm nearly certain at this point that I'll be building a new computer sometime in the next month or so. It may take me a while to get all the parts just because I don't start getting paid for my new teaching job for another month here, but my old computer is starting to show its age and from what I've been able to tell from window-shopping online, I should be able to build quite a respectable system without breaking my bank account. Ironically enough, now the problems I've had accessing certain job Websites from the home computers here have spread over to my ability to access NewEgg, which really stinks, particularly as UT starts classes this coming Monday so now it will be much harder to get a computer at their labs in order to do my shopping there.
In addition to building a new computer for general use, I may also be looking at buying a cheap refurbished computer, likely from Tiger Direct, to build a system for the garage. I play my dance video games out in the garage because it's got a nice solid concrete base to play on (especially important for someone my size), and although I've amassed quite a collection of them, playing on my consoles is kind of limiting. Even after I modded one of my PS2s to play Japanese games and bought all the Japanese DDR releases (for PS2, anyway), there are still a number of arcade songs that I don't have access to. In addition, there likely won't ever be a home release of In the Groove 2 (cutting off an awful lot of songs for me), and the home releases of Pump It Up force you to use the game's packaged soft pad, and in addition to being unreliable, soft pads aren't that good for people as heavy as I am. Thankfully there's an open source game called StepMania that lets you basically mimic all of those games, along with any other rhythm-based games you can think of. Putting that on a PC in the garage would not only let me do all the things I already do with my console dance games, it opens up a world of fan-based songs and steps, and would allow me to create my own songs and steps. (It's not like the makers of dance games are knocking down Tori Amos' door in an effort to license some of her songs for their games.)
The thing is, I've been messing with Stepmania on Yggdrasil Mark I a lot lately, trying to figure out a suitable system for how I'd like to play in the garage in terms of the interface and scoring systems I'd like. Unfortunately, neither the current version nor the beta of the next version seem to want to operate that well for me, and I've gotten so frustrated with the whole experience that I may just give the whole idea up. I've posted for help on my LiveJournal, which due to its nature is seen by my dance game friends much more than the .org, and I haven't gotten any help there. I've Googled pretty much every error code Stepmania has spit out at me, and haven't found help there either. I realize that Stepmania is free and that I should expect to get what I pay for, but still, this is driving me batty and I've lost far too much time here messing around with it these past few days.