The Dreamcast Karaoke is probably the most useless Sega add-on. It serves no other purpose than to accompany the Sega Kara software, which is useless as well.
Back in the days you were able to download and sing thousands of songs, then in 2006 the servers were shut down for good.
Without the servers there are no songs – you can still connect microphones to the Dreamcast and listen to your voice with Sega Kara, change the volume and add effects, but that’s about it.
Changing settings in the BIOS of a japanese computer can be dangerous if you don’t have any knowledge of the japanese language or don’t what you’re doing. I don’t have that much knowledge of the language either and tried to translate the BIOS.
This is how I did it: I connected my PC-9821Xe/U7W with a sync combiner to the Framemeister and grabbed a video of the selection of each and every BIOS menu item. Then I converted the frames of the video to image files. The images were then cropped and converted into grayscale negatives to be processed by an OCR engine. Most of the output was gibberish and every single line of text needed manual processing. The japanese text was then fed into the Bing and Google translators and some common sense added to the output.
Continue reading NEC PC-9821 BIOS Translation
The 7th Guest is a great game for Philips CD-i. Unfortunately, there is an annoying bug that crashes the game when trying to solve the cake puzzle:
Continue reading The 7th Guest CD-i DVC Compatibility / Cake Puzzle Bug
This is a GameCube that I acquired recently. It has a true HDMI output and blue controller ports.
Continue reading GameCube with GCVideo, Qoob Pro and IcedCube Case
Last year I replaced the broken GD-ROM of my Sega Dreamcast with a GDEMU. While it works great and does everything as it is supposed to do, there is a large open space where SD cards tend to get lost:
This modification adds switchless NESRGB and IGR (in-game routines / in-game reset) to a Nintendo AV Famicom.
A first look at the opened AV Famicom and the NESRGB kit. There is still a lot to be assembled. The installation guide for the AV Famicom can be found here.
The NEC PC-9821 computers output a very unusual resolution that most western monitors struggle with: 640 x 400 @ 24 kHz. I tried at least half a dozen monitors of all types and ages and none of them was able to display a picture at all (except an “out of range” message). Video scalers like the DVDO iScan VP50 Pro don’t recognize the signal either. Some sources claim that the cheap GBS-8220 converter is able to convert the signal – that is only partially true. You can see a stuttering picture that eventually becomes clear when you start the Windows 98 Desktop, but that doesn’t work in DOS.
Of course you can buy a special converter like the Micomsoft XPC-4, that will cost you 300-400€ though. There are other solutions:
Continue reading NEC PC-9821 and the Framemeister
When my FM TOWNS II Fresh・E suddenly refused to boot from HDD and Towns OS (from CD) didn’t show the HDD anymore, my first thought was that the HDD has finally given up. It had sounded like an airplane engine lately (and still does). Then I noticed that date/time settings were lost too, meaning it was probably related to the BIOS battery. To access or replace the battery (3V CR2450), the whole unit needs to be disassembled.
The other day I prepared my Atari Jaguar to build a rotary controller for Tempest 2000. I hadn’t used it in a while and accidentally picked the wrong power supply – smoke was rising from the console immediately.
The culprit was easily found, chip U38 (MC34163DW):
Continue reading Atari Jaguar Power/Sound Fix and Rotary Controller
In order to access the Low-Level Test of Philips CD-i players or debug other units with a serial port, you will always need a VT100 compatible terminal. An old laptop with Windows 98 and HyperTerminal works fine, but I was looking for something more portable. The Atari Portfolio with Serial Interface add-on is a good portable choice.
Update: Meanwhile, I’ve found the Psion 5mx Pro to be a better choice.
First of all, we need to transfer the terminal software ACOM to the Portfolio. This is possible via the serial port, but I had to back up some data from the old memory cards too. I hooked up the Atari PC Card Drive HPC-301 to transfer the data and software.
