July 2012

Before attempting anything particularly ambitious with the Amstrad Mega PC, I thought I’d practice removing a few chips from an old RAM board. I’ve been experimenting with a heat gun at around 320 degrees Celsius, and the first attempts were surprisingly successful. Once the solder softened, the little chips came... Continue reading

The time has come. We wish you a safe journey, AMD 386SX CPU. You have served us well. Armed with a heat gun and flux, work begins on my attempt to create a 50 MHz Amstrad Mega PC. That 50 MHz target needs a little explanation. The original Am386SX does... Continue reading

Got a bad feeling about your DC-in power socket on your Mega Drive 2? Well, here’s one that was giving me a bit of trouble. The power light would come on normally, but give the power cable a little movement and the whole thing would switch off. Move it back... Continue reading

The Mega Drive 32X. One small step for man. 50,000 polygons for mankind! Sega’s marketing claimed around 50,000 texture-mapped polygons per second. That figure is best treated as a theoretical marketing number rather than real-world game performance, but it certainly sounded impressive in the mid-‘90s. Nice rear. AV in, AV... Continue reading

A rather slow weekend. Most of it was spent looking through what I have and trying to decide what I am willing to part with. I cleaned out a Sega Mega Drive Arcade Power Stick ready to sell. Cleaned up pretty well! Next came a Mega Drive Arcade Power Stick... Continue reading

Before I attack anything particularly valuable, it seems like a good idea to learn how to desolder multi-pin ICs without destroying everything around them. I’ve got an old RAM board for practice and a heat gun, so let’s see how much trouble I can get myself into. The first experiment... Continue reading

You might remember this rather unhappy Japanese Sega Saturn from a little while back. The disc appears to spin backwards while the laser assembly goes completely berserk, and the motor sounds like it’s trying to escape from the CD deck. I bought the poor thing as faulty, and it certainly... Continue reading

Here’s my prized Nixie clock from Chronix, which I picked up a few months ago. I thought I’d throw a video online showing its slot-machine-style anti-cathode-poisoning routine. It rapidly cycles through the digits so the cathodes that don’t normally get much display time are periodically lit as well. It also... Continue reading

I do not think I could take apart another Mega Drive… at least not for a few days. I’ve gone ahead and taken some great quality pictures of the innards of five of my functioning Mega Drive Model 1s and two of my non-functioning Mega Drive Model 2s. I found... Continue reading