Disassembly
2018 will be a great year for the PC Engine. Terraonion, the maker of the NEOSD cartridge, has announced the Super SD System 3 add-on.
Unfortunately I won’t be able to use it with my Duo-RX and GT, and the SuperGrafx is too bulky and ugly to take it out for gaming. I ordered a cheap CoreGrafx from Yahoo! Japan Auctions which came with a Tennokoe 2 backup memory device attached to the expansion connector.
Continue reading Tennokoe 2 RGB Output
Neo Geo games and hardware have been a part of my life for many years. As I was looking at store displays during the early 90s, I was amazed at how huge these game carts were in comparison with other consoles, such as the Nintendo GameBoy.
In the late 90s, the emulators NeoRAGE and NeoRAGEx introduced me to the world of Neo Geo and arcade emulation. At that time, MAME didn’t yet have the capacity to emulate those games properly and at a decent speed. Later on, when MAME finally became a useable Neo Geo emulator, it became quite easy to add new released games and dumps to the source code, and play them as well.
Continue reading Neo Geo MV2FS at Home
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.
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
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.
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
Found two more donor carts for use in a Sega Pico flash cart:
The Lion King: Adventures at Pride Rock and Magic Crayons, both “Assembled in Mexico”.
An unusual SegaSaturn accessory: The 3RADD – A sound enhancer with SRS psychoacoustic technology. Read a review on this japanese blog. Here is a scan of the manual.
The effect with audio sources is quite nice, it boosts the sound and positions it around your head. The technology is used in all kinds of devices and software, e.g. the Windows Media Player (SRS WOW).
Now that I have an extra backup of my Mega-CD save files on the Sega CD Ultra Backup RAM cart, I can replace the battery of my old CD BackUp RAM Cart without worrying about data loss.
It is possible to do an open-heart surgery to prevent the memory from being erased and replace the battery while the Mega-CD is turned on. I went for that procedure to avoid having to copy all files from one cart to another again.
