December 2019

Some Gigabyte boards with an Xpress Recovery BIOS were apparently affected by a rather nasty capacity-reporting bug! The explanation below comes from Franc Zabkar’s HDD Capacity FAQ. “When the drive is first in the boot order, Gigabyte’s BIOS will write a backup copy of itself to a small Host Protected... Continue reading

A look back at what I had in February earlier this year. A lot has changed since then with my collection, so stay tuned for a 2020 collection overview! We see some of the old favourites in there and some slightly newer ones that hadn’t been mentioned before. Things have... Continue reading

It’s the time of the year again, the holiday season! In this video we kick off what can only be heard to be believed… and even then you wish it could be unheard. Magnificent off-key singing aside, happy holidays 2019, dear friends of McRetro! Continue reading

Christmas is approaching and apparently the fish are getting another turn in front of the camera! On the 17th December 2019, we’ve got a community tank long play, with plenty of time to sit back and enjoy our little underwater world. Sometimes it’s rather nice to leave the camera running... Continue reading

And here we are at the end of the Sega TeraDrive power-supply adventure. It’s been quite a journey, although perhaps not quite the successful repair story I’d originally imagined! After replacing the electrolytic capacitors, the power supply was behaving somewhat better, particularly around the 12 V rail. Unfortunately, the 5... Continue reading

We’re well into summertime here in Sydney, Australia. Time to throw another shrimp on the barbie, as they say. Not much relevance to this video, especially considering how long this repair has been waiting to be finished! I recorded this one three years ago, like most of the videos I’ve... Continue reading

In this instalment of Faulty Power Supply, we’re replacing a rather impressive collection of electrolytic capacitors. Will it fix the Sega TeraDrive? I suppose we’ll find out once everything is back together! I’ve got the Hakko 808 ready for another evening of desoldering. There’s a mixture of components on this... Continue reading

We’re back inside the Sega TeraDrive Model 3! After leaving the power-supply investigation sitting around for rather a long time, I thought it was about time to finish what we started in March 2016. Before ordering parts, I wanted to make sure the original fault was still there. The problem... Continue reading

The locally added switchless region mod was gone, but this Victor V-Saturn wasn’t exactly back to normal. It’s a weird thing to do, removing a modification and returning a console to its factory configuration, but sometimes it just has to be done! Unfortunately, the console had been left in a... Continue reading

Here we go a little off-topic and talk about some of the marvellous music from my past. We’ll return with regular scheduled programming in the next video, but first I wanted to show you a few old records that brought back some lovely memories. I’ve been rearranging the room again,... Continue reading

We pump out some of the best the past had to offer. TIM.EXE and CCAVES.EXE. Dance along to the greatest hits of yesteryear! After all that work replacing capacitors, it’s about time we actually ran a few things on the Sega TeraDrive Model 3. The hard drive has been recapped,... Continue reading

With everything recapped, we scan the disks… with ScanDisk… in real time! Because nothing says quality entertainment quite like watching a thirty-megabyte hard drive slowly work its way through a surface scan. I’ve booted the Sega TeraDrive Model 3 using a floppy disk and started ScanDisk on the C drive.... Continue reading

Incredible news, I can see the clearing up ahead where these recapping videos disappear. Keep your channel set to McRetro.net and we’ll see you through. This time we’re working on the two floppy drives from the Sega TeraDrive Model 2. They’re serial numbers 03464 and 03465, a rather lovely little... Continue reading

The hard drives are all recapped, so we move along to the floppy drives. Ronnie from ASSEMbler Games had warned me about their leaky capacitors, and given how much work I’ve already put into these TeraDrives, I’d rather get them replaced before they cause any more trouble. The Model 3... Continue reading

Big Fish is back! On the 24th October 2019, we’ve got another look at Trevor, our Australian eel-tailed catfish (Tandanus tandanus). What a fish! Trevor had a rather wonderful habit of getting my attention, and I was more than happy to return the favour with the camera. There’s something rather... Continue reading

Slinky is back! On the 10th November 2019, we’ve got the resident Senegal bichir (Polypterus senegalus) breathing underwater, just one of the two ways to breathe! Yes, actual lungs, as well as gills. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but how could I not? Most people don’t expect their aquarium... Continue reading

With recapping of the 30 MB hard drives complete, we have a look at the exterior of each drive including their model numbers and whatnot. Next up we will be recapping the floppy drives in both the model 2 and model 3 TeraDrives. Well, I’ve finally finished replacing the rather... Continue reading

Mario Tennis (N64, 2000) Developed by Camelot, Mario Tennis brings the Mushroom Kingdom crowd together for a few rounds of tennis on the Nintendo 64. There’s singles, doubles, tournaments and a surprisingly decent tennis game underneath all the colourful Nintendo characters. With lobs, slices, smashes and plenty of running around... Continue reading

With the two spare hard drives recapped, we move onto the main course: removing and recapping the drive from the Sega TeraDrive Model 3. After this we have just the floppy drives to recap, which prove to be a much more error-filled adventure. Tear a cable here, tear a cable... Continue reading

With the first spare drive fixed up, good as new, we move along to the second spare drive. I can’t remember if I bought these as a combo deal or not. Either way I ended up with three separate drives which are all TeraDrive compatible! Lucky! I’ve got three WDL-330P... Continue reading

The recapping to end all recapping begins. In this video the first of three WDL-330Ps gets the capacitors swapped back to surface mount, the way it should have been in the first place! Some of you might remember what I did to these poor old hard drives a few years... Continue reading

A video review of the horrors I had previously done to these innocent WDL-330P hard drives. Don’t worry, we’ll fix them and their counterpart floppy drives in the next set of videos. This series will take us right through until the coming weekend. So please, pull up a seat and... Continue reading

Creating backups of your Dreamcast BIOS and GD-ROMs has never been so easy, provided you have a Broadband Adapter and httpd-ack. Well, that’s the theory. As you can see in the first video, getting everything configured can involve a considerable amount of wandering around Japanese menus. I’ve got an ordinary... Continue reading

This video shouldn’t exist, yet here we are. All Star lyrics beaming over to the Chromecast through Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3. Is it what I wanted it to be? Not really. Will I continue to put up with native HomeKit troublemaking? Absolutely. Why? Because I am just... Continue reading

This handy little piece of built-in software, Sega Katana Set5 Checker, is great for checking your Sega Dreamcast HKT-0120 functionality and ensuring it is firing on all cylinders. I’ve been having another play with the development kit and discovered quite a few interesting things hiding behind its switches and diagnostic... Continue reading

Here’s what the IS Nitro Capture could do. This footage is incredible! If you intend on watching any video today, make sure this is the one you view! Previous: IS Nitro Capture Functional Overview Continue reading

We have a look at what the IS Nitro Capture can actually do, why you should buy one and why I originally purchased one. Then again, perhaps I didn’t touch on any of that in the video. Watch on to find out! After pulling the whole thing apart in the... Continue reading

After tearing down the DS Lite unit last weekend we move onto the big blue box. The IS Nitro Capture unit itself, a sandwich of delight. Forbidden, yet still sandwich-like. You must not eat this. Only futuristic robots are up to that task! There really is an extraordinary amount of... Continue reading

The IS Nitro Capture is quite a complicated beast. This particular model uses a DS Lite tethered to the blue box, which we’ll be taking apart in a future video. For now, we delve into the internals of the DS Lite and what differences exist compared to retail hardware. One... Continue reading

This is quite a long video about one of the poorer design choices Nintendo made with the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom. On this shell design, they attached the DC-in socket to the rear plastic panel, making it a pain to replace. Maybe they sold the replacement socket with the... Continue reading

A few videos are coming up on the IS Nitro Capture device, including hardware teardowns and some of the capture results in both AVI and BMP. In the meantime, here are the DIP switch settings for the blue box. Of particular interest to me were the AV output options. These... Continue reading

This video might be a little out of order as I am sure I have already uploaded all the Sega Dreamcast development kit videos a while back. Better on the internet than disposed of I suppose! Have you ever wondered where the name Set 5.24 comes from? Well, I’ve spotted... Continue reading