January 2013

My HANZO VGA box has arrived for the Sega Dreamcast, complete with an impressive collection of switches. VGA, audio, scanlines, more switches and even more switches. Wonderful! Half the fun is going to be working out what they all do. For testing I’m using my Dreamcast with the smokey grey... Continue reading

Now I could spend this evening soldering another tantalum capacitor onto that troublesome Seagate hard drive, or I could do something completely different and make dinner. Dinner wins! Today we’re having a look at the Tefal ActiFry, which promises to cook a rather substantial quantity of potato chips using only... Continue reading

Here’s the latest addition to the collection. It cost me a pretty penny, but it’s certainly one of the highlights now. This is a Cross Products SNASM Mega-CD development unit, and I’ve finally managed to have a quick play with it. The good news is that it appears to work!... Continue reading

Someone on the ASSEMbler Games forums pointed out that the Aiwa Mega-CD CSD-GM1 BIOS didn’t appear to have been dumped. Well, that’s a good enough excuse to pull another machine apart! This became a three-part project involving disassembling the Game Unit, removing the BIOS ROM, and dumping its contents. The... Continue reading

Another chapter in the ongoing saga of the Sega Mega Drive 32X on PAL hardware. I’d noticed that Doom was developing a glitchy video problem: it would start out looking normal, but after a few minutes the picture would begin shifting around. As the machine warmed up, the backgrounds would... Continue reading

So I was thinking, why not? What a fun little experiment this turned out to be! I’d been dumping EPROMs from a Sega cartridge containing Monopoly, and the board had four ROM chips fitted. While working through them, I started wondering what would happen if I removed one and tried... Continue reading

This is the Mega Drive 2 I was talking about in the previous video. I knew I had it somewhere. More importantly, I knew this one worked properly. Well… close to properly. It’s another peaceful Sunday afternoon, despite me initially thinking it was Saturday morning. That’s what happens when you... Continue reading

Some sock puppetry is also in this video. I’m not entirely sure why, but apparently that’s what happens when I spend too much time surrounded by old Sega hardware! I’d been working on a couple of Mega Drive 2 region modifications, with the intention of giving the finished machines to... Continue reading

Here I try to get an old VL400C-I 486 motherboard going. So much hope. Two other 486 boards had already been scrapped, and I had pinned my hopes on this one finally giving me somewhere useful to install the growing pile of ISA cards. The plan was to put together... Continue reading

The Microdrives are back! Just when I thought I’d had enough of trying to make these things work, here I am with three Hitachi Microdrives, a CompactFlash card and the PCD-60B in the Apple Macintosh LC 475. In the previous attempt I discovered that the particular 4 GB drives I’d... Continue reading

Another round of experiments with the PCD-60B SCSI card reader in the LC 475. The SD-card adapter still isn’t cooperating, and the Microdrives have not exactly covered themselves in glory either. Today I’ve got a few more things to try, including a 256 MB PCMCIA flash card. Surely something is... Continue reading

Here’s a peek at what damage those little power cells can wreak on poor unsuspecting motherboards. It just happened to be an LC 475 as well, didn’t it? Not mine thankfully! :P This Macintosh has suffered some nasty damage from an old lithium battery. The corrosion has travelled quite a... Continue reading

One last look at the Wyse 2112-40 before I pass it on to, hopefully, greener pastures. Farewell, dear Wyse PC. You have certainly been a learning experience. The machine is now in a much healthier state than when I first planned to strip it for parts. Both floppy drives are... Continue reading

A quick look at my Stone Age Gamer Deluxe Mega EverDrive, serial number 123. I’ve just received it from the United States, and they’ve done a lovely job with the packaging. The cartridge has a beautiful black shell, with the Deluxe branding and serial number displayed on the front. Serial... Continue reading

A member of the ASSEMbler Games forums asked whether I could try some of the Sophia hardware in an ordinary retail VA0 Saturn. Naturally I had to find out. The Sophia is still missing its SH-2 processor cards, which makes testing the complete machine rather difficult, so this seemed like... Continue reading

We take a trip down memory lane to my first Hackintosh motherboard, the ASRock 775Dual-915GL. Powered by a wonderfully cheap single-core Celeron, it felt remarkably fast for what it cost and compared very favourably with some of the PowerPC Macs I was using around that period. Quite an impressive little... Continue reading

Scanlines make the world go round. This was my first proper test of the VGA scanline generator I picked up through ASSEMbler Games. I’d promised the creator a demonstration, and what better machine to try it with than the Sega TeraDrive? I’ve got my Model 2 sitting here with Sonic... Continue reading

Without further delay, hurry over to ChimeraRevo to enjoy my first appearance there, and hopefully not the last! My good YouTube friend MasterControl90 invited me along for a chat about retro computers, video games and just about everything else that makes us want to spend our spare time surrounded by... Continue reading

Here’s an overview of where the LC 475 project has ended up after the last few weeks of modifications. This started as a fairly ordinary 25 MHz 68LC040 pizza-box Macintosh, but I’ve been working on it long enough that there isn’t much ordinary about it anymore. There are still a... Continue reading

Time to replace the old electrolytic capacitors in my Apple Macintosh LC 475 with some nice new tantalums. Hopefully this attempt will go a little better than the last one, where I managed to lift a solder pad and damage a trace on my other LC 475 motherboard. That particular... Continue reading

The old LC 475 is officially internet ready! I’m running Mac OS 7.6.1 with the PDS ethernet card I picked up last year. The LC 475 doesn’t have onboard ethernet, but thanks to its LC III-style PDS slot, getting it onto the network is quite possible. Finding a web browser... Continue reading

Resistors are fun! With the new 68040 processor and plans to run the LC 475 at 33 MHz, I’ve been experimenting with additional cooling. Unfortunately, the little fan I’ve installed is darned noisy, so I thought I’d try slowing it down with a resistor. I’ve got four resistors left over... Continue reading

A friend loaned me some 4 GB Hitachi Microdrives to try in the LC 475. I’ve got two of them, one with Apple branding that appears to have come from an iPod mini, and another fairly ordinary-looking one. Let’s see if either of them will work with my SCSI card... Continue reading

A thirty percent increase in speed? Yes, please! This time I’m going to overclock the Apple Macintosh LC 475 from its standard 25 MHz to 33 MHz by changing two tiny surface-mount resistors on the logic board. I did consider trying 40 MHz, but I didn’t have the components needed... Continue reading

Behold, the queen sugar ant! Well, at least I think it’s a queen. I’ve found an absolutely enormous ant, and while it looks like a sugar ant, it’s considerably larger than the ones I’m used to seeing. I’ve had a bit of a look into what it might be, and... Continue reading