Project Capture Card for Nintendo Switch – A Success So Far!

Posted on July 15, 2025 by Aywren

Over the weekend, my capture card and AC adaptor for the Nintendo Switch arrived. As I noted in a previous post, my goal is to provide myself a second docking spot in my house, where I can play my Switch on my PC monitor when I want to.

The reason for this is pretty simple. I notice I don’t spend much time playing my Switch. This is because the bulk of my time is not spent sitting on my couch, but rather at my PC.

I’m often chatting with friends via voice or type chat, and to have the background sound of Switch music while in voice chat, or just needing to hop up and down to attend to the PC… well that totally distracts from my Switch gaming experience. And that means I almost never think to play my Switch.

The hope is that by streaming my Switch to my desktop monitor, I will pick it up more. And so far, this has been the case.

Setting up the capture card wasn’t too difficult. I learned that I don’t really need to output to my monitor, even though it has a second HDMI slot for just this sort of thing. Instead, I can stream to OBS Studio – which I think is what most folks who do Twitch streams do (?) Technically, this means I could stream my Switch gaming, but not being much of an on-video person, that’s not the goal for this.

I tend to play my PC games in windowed mode because I’m often hopping between different things happening on my computer even while gaming. If I want to pop open my web browser to check on something, for example, full screen gaming makes this more difficult. So, I was quite happy to see that OBS allows for windowed mode preview.

The biggest issue I had while setting this up was sound lag. In OBS, there was noticeable sound lag of 1-2 seconds which just… wasn’t enjoyable. I could have learned how to put up with it, but I decided to do some research on it instead.

What I found was this VERY helpful video, which solved all my problems. Turns out you just need to set up the USB sound through Windows and not OBS.

Once I had that fixed, I was gaming!

My first step was to choose a game I wanted to focus on. Because I’m pretty deep into it, and I’m not struggling to remember story, I chose to focus down Final Fantasy 1 Pixel Remaster… which I started playing over two years ago (sob).

I broke out my gaming journal, dedicated a page to FF1, and then set out to remember what was the task I was trying to do when I last left off. Once I figured that out, I wrote that as the step I needed to take in my journal.

I know this seems somewhat weird and work-like, but my second biggest issue with gaming lately has been that in playing so many long-term games, I simply forget what it was I was doing last and what I needed to do next. Or, in the case of games that have a vast, sprawling number of quests, I find it easy to become overwhelmed and lost, which leads me to putting the game down and never continuing… even if I was enjoying the game up until that point.

So, what I’ve been trying to do for the past few nights is spend a little time with FF1. I jot down notes about what the NPCs are telling me to do next. And as I accomplish tasks, I check them off.

For example, last night I finished up the Water Shrine. NPCs then told me about something strange behind the waterfall, and that I needed to take a language tablet to Dr. Unne. So, I jotted those things down in order to remember what I needed to do when I pick the game up next.

And while that seems ponderous, it’s actually a big help to me. My memory just isn’t what it used to be – something that I dislike extremely – though this also might be just because I’m trying to do too many things in any given day and my mind cannot possibly retain all the information about all the things. The last thing my brain wants to hold on to is taking a language tablet to Dr. Unne in FF1… so it promptly drops that info for something more important.

Therefore, in order for me to better remember, I’m writing stuff down. It’s actually a little fun to document this as I go along, too. Something I can look back on and remember – hey, yeah, I did play through FF1 and here’s what I did. Might even help if I decide to blog about some of this!

Do you ever feel the need for outside “support” in your gaming hobby? Does keeping a gaming journal sound like something that might be helpful to you? Or do you just have a memory of steel?

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