The Blog

Building a Development PC

Nix McRetro // 4th November 2018 // Devkit, Sega, Study

Quick, down memory lane! This one was a fun video to put together, slowly piecing an AMD Athlon K7 onto a brand new, old stock motherboard. All-in-all it went together quite well. This PC went on to be used for testing the Sega Dreamcast HKT-0120 dev kit. It worked a... Continue reading

Nintendo Game Boy Vertical Line Repair

Nix McRetro // 19th October 2018 // Nintendo, Repairs, YouTube

Finally, a repair where nothing caught fire. I was surprised when simply applying a lightly heated soldering iron fixed the problem and appeased the pixel gods! The gods may be crazy, but at least I can see all the Tetris lines now. …and I might have uploaded an unboxing video... Continue reading

Intel Compute Stick STK1AW32SC

Nix McRetro // 7th October 2018 // Guides, Raspberry Pi, Study

When I revise for university exams I seem to be in a habit of falling asleep rewatching lecture recordings. Heck, I nearly fall asleep during lectures I attend. I’ve found the only way to stay engaged with the material is to speed the lectures up somewhere between 1.2x and 1.5x.... Continue reading

Nintendo Game Boy Tetris Stress Testing

Nix McRetro // 4th October 2018 // News, Nintendo, YouTube

These two Game Boys were just waiting to be played. I wish I had been able to source a link cable to battle myself at Tetris. Unfortunate, but I guess I can just play both Game Boys and compare scores at the end of the battle. That makes sense, right?... Continue reading

Sega Dreamcast Controller Function Checker Overview

Nix McRetro // 7th September 2018 // Devkit, Sega

This is one interesting piece of hardware. The ROM from the cartridge was dumped a couple of days ago (see the post just before this one) and indicated that even at version 2.00 it was from August 1998. The 27th November 1998 was the launch date of the Japanese Dreamcast... Continue reading