May 2013

I’ve been having some late-night fun with a rather cheap capacitor tester, along with a collection of capacitors I’ve accumulated from various repairs. It’s supposed to measure capacitance and ESR, which could be quite useful when you’re trying to work out whether an old capacitor has seen better days. The... Continue reading

I’ve been having a look inside my Netgear DG834Gv5 ADSL modem router, and I’m beginning to suspect the poor thing is getting a little too warm. The underside of the white plastic case has started turning brown, which is generally a good indication that something inside is getting rather toasty!... Continue reading

VBT over at ASSEMblergames has been working on getting Wolfenstein 3D running on the Sega Saturn. More specifically, this is early Saturn support for Wolf4SDL, and it already seems to work in emulators. Naturally, I wanted to see what would happen on the real hardware! I started with my Sophia... Continue reading

Any other console, I probably wouldn’t bother mentioning this, but since it is Sophia, she gets a mention. My 171-6692B SH-2 CPU cards are not quite the same as the better-documented 171-6692D boards. Most importantly for this particular problem, they are missing the second power header used by the usual... Continue reading

These photos show the great work the XRGB-mini Framemeister can do. Lovely picture, but there was still one small problem: the remote. My Japanese is rather limited, so figuring out what all those buttons did involved a fair amount of guesswork. Fortunately, a very kind member of the System11 forums... Continue reading

A silver medal is almost as good as gold. Never take the shortcuts. They are a LIE! Just like the cake was. Unless I’m getting it mixed up and the cake is real and the shortcuts are a great idea. That might explain the silver medal. :) Continue reading

For whatever reason, Burnout 3 hangs and refuses to load on the newly TSOP-flashed Xbox. I tried changing every relevant setting I could find in UnleashX with no success. Naturally, after all the work getting the Xbox repaired, softmodded, recovered and TSOP-flashed, I immediately suspected I had broken something else.... Continue reading

The Xbox power supply was making a nasty buzzing sound and arcing whenever mains power was connected. Once I opened it up for a closer look, the trouble was right there at the AC input connector: a cracked solder joint. As if this Xbox hadn’t already given me enough to... Continue reading

Here’s something a little bit different! I’ve picked up a DNA testing kit from 23andMe, an American company offering genetic testing. I thought it might be interesting to learn a little more about myself. Knowledge is power, after all! And yes, apparently we’re doing an unboxing video. Sorry, YouTube! The... Continue reading

Here’s what I soldered to flash the BIOS on my revision 1.2 or 1.3 original Xbox. We have a Winbond 256 KB TSOP flash ROM on this. Bridging the write-enable connections disables the write protection, leaving us the opportunity to install a much better BIOS. The standard EvolutionX flasher does... Continue reading

This guide is by no means complete but might have some hints if you are stuck like I was. Soooo errr the Xbox was softmodded before I started tinkering. I attempted to TSOP flash the Winbond BIOS flash chip and broke the softmod completely. Whoops! The original dashboard has more... Continue reading

The Xbox project continues… The goal is straightforward: get the existing softmod behaving, TSOP-flash the console, fit the 160 GB hard drive and finally play Burnout. Well, things hadn’t gone quite according to plan. I’d attempted to flash the Xbox’s onboard Winbond chip with an Xecuter2 BIOS, but the attempt... Continue reading

I’ve picked up a few new tools for the workbench, including a decent pair of bent needle-nose pliers and some wire cutters. The pliers are particularly nice, even better than the pair I’ve been using at work. The most exciting purchase, though, is a Bosch PHG 630 DCE heat gun,... Continue reading

I’ve got a Raspberry Pi on the bench, and I’m wondering just how much work I can persuade this little Linux computer to do. It’s small, quiet and hardly overflowing with processing power, which naturally makes me want to give it rather more jobs than it probably asked for. I’m... Continue reading

A quick look inside my old Sony PS one. This particular console has some history attached to it because I modchipped it myself a long time ago, when I was still in high school. Taking it apart now means I get to inspect my own ancient soldering rather than somebody... Continue reading

Back to the original Xbox from the previous assessment. The leaking clock capacitor has now become an actual repair rather than just something horrible to point at. After clearing out that random 9 V battery and all the mysterious wires, I’ve been replacing the affected capacitors and cleaning up the... Continue reading

Here’s something for the modern gamers out there. A friend dug this original Xbox out of his garage and handed it over for an assessment. There are a few things going on here, and I’m not entirely sure what the person who last worked on it had in mind! Interesting... Continue reading

What you see is what you get. Phantasy Star IV running through the XRGB-mini Framemeister, with me wandering around the academy and trying to work out where I’m supposed to be going. Somewhere along the way I started wondering whether future videos should involve silly British accents over games instead... Continue reading

Here’s a Japanese Model 2 Saturn that needed a modchip, so I went ahead and installed one. After spending so much time playing around with my Sophia development hardware, something nice and straightforward sounded pretty good! This particular Saturn uses the 0014 CD-drive configuration. I picked up the modchip from... Continue reading

The final backordered capacitors are installed and Sophia is reassembled. The capacitor restoration was completed on 28th April 2013, after a rather long battle with ageing components, leaking electrolytics and the occasional shortage of replacement parts. It’s nice to finally reach this point! The earlier A-Bus recap had not noticeably... Continue reading

I’ve been digging through some of my old things and came across this rather interesting multi-purpose gadget called the Navir Super Optic Wonder. It’s something MacGyver might have used, assuming MacGyver was particularly fond of the colour red! This thing has quite an assortment of features. We’ve got a torch,... Continue reading