June 2012

Above are some photos of a Sega TeraDrive hard drive. When I wrote this in 2012 I was trying to work out exactly what the interface was. IDE? ESDI? XTA? Something else entirely? The connector has 44 pins and carries both data and power, but the pinout does not match... Continue reading

I’ve picked up a Voltron T-500S step-up and step-down voltage converter, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem particularly interested in working properly. You’d think a device with a simple on/off switch would be fairly difficult to get wrong. Apparently not! The converter has a selector for 120 V and 240 V... Continue reading

Wow! My mind has been racing at 1000 miles an hour. I can barely keep up with all the ideas for future mods. I have more tabs open than a Firefox enthusiast right now! This is basically the notebook beside my computer turned into a blog post. These are ideas... Continue reading

The Famicom AV mod is complete. The first video is a demonstration of how the composite-video modification works and why I wired it the way I did. Next is an overview of the completed modification inside the console. And finally, some Spelunker. What an enjoyable game it can be when... Continue reading

To kick things off here is a video of my faulty WDI-325Q. Listen to it grind! I’ll need to be sending that back to the place I bought it from, not much use to me in that state! Next up we have the mysterious Puzzle Construction software running on the... Continue reading

That’s right, it’s video time! I’ve finally got a hard drive installed and working in my Sega TeraDrive Model 3. It’s a Western Digital WDL-330P with a capacity of 30 MB, which matches the original storage specification rather nicely. I picked up several of these old drives, although not all... Continue reading

It worked and it worked! I can’t really complain about that. Picked up 3x IBM WDL-330P drives for the TeraDrive Model 3 of mine that didn’t have a hard drive and they all work well. The drives had 3, 8 and 12 bad sectors between them. Not too bad for... Continue reading

Some good news, and some more good news. It looks like I am going to have Thursday through Monday (inclusive!) off work. This means nothing but organising and sorting through my console collection. I have also received some boxed Japanese Saturn accessories, including a floppy drive, keyboard, mouse, modem and... Continue reading