DarthMario95 wrote:
Someone else can weigh in on the ups and downs of the obsidian.
This is my queue !
Ah... The Obsidian ...
The obsidian where to start...
I use to have a lot of love for it, in fact out of the box its great. Lately I played with a C7 and a Spark Mini and I have to say both of those blow the Obsidian apart... but that is not hard because oftentimes Obsidian can do that to itself.
Pros*
Its customization options are fairly endless. Saberforum.com has a great list of user created and edited sound fonts. You basically plug in saber, open launcher (Ill touch on that in a min) and you can select/ drag and drop the fonts in the right places "Power Up, Power Down, multiple clashes, lock up effects etc.
It is fairly user friendly, it does not take a lot of time and the learning curve is short.
Cons*
Its cheap. That is the best way I can put it. It is not inexpensive it is simply cheap. They coat the thing in a black primer like rubber that hides all the shotty and quick solder.
I have spent hours tweaking and customizing my own custom font packages, swings, clashes etc and no matter how hard I try it is simply not accurate. Loops will loop when they are not suppose to, clashes wont happen with precision all the time but for the most part it is ok. I am a nut case when it comes to accurate sound parameters and I could not be happy with it.
I have 2 Obsidian equipped Sabers- one a Belicose with just the sound board and one with the Emerald Driver as well.
Obsidian / Emerald .... Oh boy.. So Emerald is a fantastic option in my opinion for those saber owners who just want a color changing stunt... Which is a very small minority. I love my DSI that is Emerald without sound because I can just make so many damn color options with the 4 channels and I truly adore that saber. My Obsidian / Emerald saber- Oh man... so messy in that hilt... It is basically two separate boards wired very "humorously" is the best way I can put it. When I opened up the free saber I got in a raffle, after just a few attempts at soldering and some basic repair work of another US model I realized just how bad the wiring/ mounting these things can have. I wish I took pictures, but at the time I was still in Ultrasabers FanBoy mode and I thought... "I bet they just missed this one" and so I cleaned it up a bit.
Hours of working with the calibration and actually fixing parts of the board that were .... not connected properly and mounting it with plenty of velcro, I had a decent saber.
Then there is the Ultrasaber Launcher...
I was at one time helping newbies with the Obsidian / Emerald / and US Launcher...
Extremely buggy on Windows 7 and up
It was designed strictly for Windows XP on earlier versions with a lot of errors / on Windows 8
No Apple Support
Linux runs it buggy unless you have an older version
It does have a great built in help screen