November 2012

Here’s an Amstrad PPC640D I picked up a little while ago. This was actually an accidental purchase because I was trying to explain to SuperNick (Nick) how eBay bidding worked. Naturally, I won the auction. Excellent demonstration! At least I’ve ended up with a rather interesting old portable computer to... Continue reading

This machine was originally earmarked to be stripped for parts. Then curiosity got the better of me, and I spent the next couple of days trying to get it back into a workable state. It’s a Wyse 2112-40 with a 12.5 MHz 80286, a 40 MB hard drive and an... Continue reading

Never give up on your dreams, they said! Well, here I am again with the troublesome NEC FD1157C 1.2 MB floppy drive. Cleaning it hasn’t exactly produced a miraculous recovery, and the computer is still throwing all sorts of errors whenever I try to read a disk. Not ready, sector... Continue reading

Here’s a quick demonstration of the Sega TeraDrive Model 2 running from an XTIDE card and a 4 GB Disk on Module. After all the other videos I’ve made on this subject, I thought I’d record something a little shorter so you don’t have to sit through eight hours of... Continue reading

With the XTIDE card working nicely in my Sega TeraDrive Model 2, I figured it was time to give the Model 3 a go as well. I’d copied the BIOS configuration across to my second XTIDE card, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when it started working. Still, I... Continue reading

A welcome break from all the TeraDrive posts I’ve been putting up over the past few days. I seem to have accumulated enough ISA and PCI cards to form a small army, although there’s one slight problem. I don’t think I’ve got enough computers to put them all in! Mind... Continue reading

Here are the XTIDE BIOS settings I’ve been using with the Sega TeraDrive. I thought I’d record a quick video going through the configuration, partly to help anyone else attempting the same thing and partly because I should probably make a record of it myself. Knowing my luck, I’ll eventually... Continue reading

Now that the Sega TeraDrive Model 2 can boot from my XTIDE card, it’s finally time to install Windows properly. I’ve spent far too much time squeezing stripped-down copies of Windows onto floppy disks and RAM drives, so having something resembling a real hard drive is a rather exciting development.... Continue reading

Victory! The Sega TeraDrive Model 2 can now boot from the XTIDE setup all the way to a DOS command prompt. It took a bit more fiddling than I’d hoped, but this is a fairly important little milestone. Sega sold the Model 2 with two 3.5-inch floppy drives and no... Continue reading

Well, I worked out how to flash the XTIDE card. I also worked out how to flash it incorrectly. XTIDECFG can program the EEPROM while it is installed on supported XTIDE hardware, but after my first attempt the card stopped detecting the Disk on Module entirely. Conveniently, I had ordered... Continue reading

Another 5.25-inch floppy drive, another adventure! This time I’ve got a Mitsumi Newtronics D509V3 1.2 MB drive that I picked up for a couple of dollars on eBay. It has a rather nice green activity LED on the front, but unfortunately it hasn’t been doing much in the way of... Continue reading

I’ve got another troublesome old floppy drive to play around with! This time it’s an NEC FD1157C 1.2 MB 5.25-inch drive that isn’t working properly. What better way to spend some time than pulling it apart and seeing whether we can get the thing reading disks again? After removing the... Continue reading

This was originally just a quick test to prove that the XTIDE card itself worked. I had been fighting with it in the Sega TeraDrive, so the IBM PS/2 Model 30 made a handy known-good 8086 test machine. The Model 30 is a lovely old IBM computer, and I thought... Continue reading

Received my new GQ-4X EEPROM programmer from Canada. It’s USB based, which saves me dragging out a computer with a parallel port every time I want to program something. Naturally I forgot the 16-bit adapter board, but there are plenty of other chips to experiment with in the meantime. I... Continue reading

Croissants for all! It’s Friday night, and instead of going out drinking or spending time with friends, I’m sitting here with a Gravis UltraSound MAX. Better known as GUS, or GUX as I’ve somehow come to know him. This particular card is a Rev 1.8, and I thought I’d give... Continue reading

Never a dull moment with the Amstrad Mega PC! I was getting ready to install MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 when the machine suddenly switched itself off. I tried turning it back on, but nothing happened. Fair enough, I thought, perhaps the power supply has decided to call... Continue reading

I’ve been trying to work out why the PC side of the Mega PC refuses to produce reliable AdLib sound. At first I assumed I simply had the wrong drivers. That was the first mistake. It was Saturday night, around 10:30 pm, and I was still trying to get sound... Continue reading

Here’s a little trick for anyone working on an Amstrad Mega PC who wants to run the PC side without having the Mega Drive ISA card installed. A few people have been asking how I manage to get video output with the Sega hardware removed, so I thought I’d record... Continue reading

Ever wonder what happens when you install one 256 KB VRAM SIMM and one 512 KB VRAM SIMM in an LC 475? I found a spare 68-pin 512 KB video RAM module while sorting through a pile of 72-pin RAM and couldn’t resist trying it alongside one of the existing... Continue reading

Another clue in the ongoing Mega Drive 32X video mystery! I was enjoying a little Mega-CD karaoke with some Shonen Knife when I noticed black flickering lines coming in from the side of the picture. Hang on a minute. That looks suspiciously familiar! The interesting thing is that the Mega-CD... Continue reading

As you can see, the Sega Mega-CD Karaoke Unit and the microphone I repaired earlier are both still working nicely. It is your lucky day, you have a mute button. My neighbours may have a different opinion! I’ve connected it to my Mega Drive Model 1, Mega-CD Model 1 and... Continue reading

Another little piece of TeraDrive preservation today. I’ve dumped the machine’s PC BIOS using DOS DEBUG.COM and uploaded the result to the File Server. On early PC-compatible systems, DEBUG can be used to copy BIOS code that is mapped into the processor’s real-mode address space. The exact procedure depends on... Continue reading

Another modification for the Sega Saturn, and this time we’re working with one of the early PAL Model 1 machines. This particular Saturn has the VA0-style CD-board arrangement, which makes it rather different from some of the later revisions I’ve been playing around with. I’d purchased a modchip from Rob... Continue reading

Voltage derating is particularly important when substituting traditional solid tantalum capacitors into older equipment. A long-standing rule of thumb for conventional solid tantalums has been to operate them at no more than about 50% of their rated voltage. That rule should not simply be transferred to aluminium electrolytics, and modern... Continue reading

Here’s an idea of what the picoPSU-80 setup draws from the wall when connected to a Pentium III 800 MHz machine with 512 MB RAM, a hard drive and a floppy drive. It performs surprisingly well. The power meter showed around 5 W before boot, climbed into the 30 W... Continue reading

…Please Press the Start Button… …Checking the Disc… …Please Wait a Little Bit… Thanks to T_chan from ASSEMbler Games for the quick translation. So now I finally have some idea what the poor Aiwa is yelling at me while I press all the wrong buttons. I’m keeping these here as... Continue reading

Sometimes it is good that things break. CityEscaper asked whether I could pull the Mega PC out and test it on some different displays around the house. The video output works on my Samsung LCD TV and on my ViewSonic computer LCD from around 2004 to 2005. My newer Toshiba... Continue reading

Above is the Dreamcast I dumped the BIOS from, along with the BIOS hardware involved. I wanted to retrieve the BIOS from my own console, and it turns out the process is quite straightforward once you’ve got the network connection configured. Getting to that point takes a little more fiddling.... Continue reading

Here’s a closer look inside the Aiwa Mega-CD CSD-GM1 Game Unit, complete with enough capacitors to keep me busy for quite some time. There appears to be some damage around the rear of the mainboard, although I’m not entirely sure whether it’s leaking capacitors or something else that’s made a... Continue reading