General Arcade & Retro Chat' Special Championship Edition

Always a good idea to speak to a sparks (had a chat with one on my issue afterwards), but check the breaker that trips and also what is in the cab - is it a B or C type and what are they rated to. Are they 16amp, 20amp.

But lets say the cab has a built in type C as it might have an initial large inrush current on power on. If in a fuse/breaker board upstream on the power circuit is a type B, it can trip.

Getting a bit sick of using a bandridge and joytech scart switch chained together. Even at that I only have 8 consoles ready to go with all the rest left with a setup involved each time. (Which means they don't get played!)

Thinking of picking up one of these https://m.axunworks.com/SCA101-RGB-SCART-Switcher-SCART-CHOOSE-ADJUSTMENT-p931.html

About 319 euro after shipping and then tax on top of that too, so it ain't cheap but the build quality looks great.

Thought this was a great watch (if a little exaggerated at times), if you've an hour to kill. Nice mix of nostalgia, problem solving, and tech (the latter is still fun to watch even if not fully understood)

Good stuff. By the way, you can turn the LEDs that cycle through the inputs off. Depending on where you have it the lights can be annoying.

The best comment

"That's at least a couple million dollars in games unless he bought everything new when it came out. Some playstation 1 and 2 games go for hundreds of dollars"

Just got my email as well. Will be €675 poorer this weekend.

675? Jesus! I'm fairly paranoid bringing my Switch away with me, Steam deck would never leave the house.

Anyone have problems with therage.ie lately ?

I picked up a Master System a few months ago.. took 3 weeks to arrive (I don't live in Dublin). But whatever it got there in the end and we were in the middle of the pandemic. Next order was a couple of games, arrived next day... most recent order is an Atari ST.. which arrived absolutely borked. Trashed RF port - you can make it work by leaning the cable up against the port but it doesn't actually stick in it in any way.. but the really bad parts are the Joystick ports.. ALL are broken or inaccessible rendering it unplayable. In the case of the front one its actually coming away from the board and moving around.In the case of the side ones the board inside is out of alignment with the chassis so you can't even plug one in.

They initially responded saying yeah, the RF thing we knew about, the others we didn't but we tested it (if the test was more than turn on and insert a disk to see if it will load up - which it will do, then I would be astonished because this is not the sort of damage that gets done in transit, at least not whatever is wrong with the front port).

I took a few days to look into a bit more etc, got some quotes to repair.. last 4 messages to them have been ignored however. They put up Facebook posts every few days, but just ignore me.

Anyone else have a similar experience of late ? As far as I can tell they are one of only two retro shops in the country.. its a real bummer if one of them is seriously this unreliable.

... good call. Just checked. It was Paypal.

Worst part is.. totally willing to work with them on this e.g... give me a decent discount off the next order and I will ship this off to the UK for repairs etc... But crickets since that initial contact. It sucks. Because I love their shop and would be spending a fair bit of money in there whilst I continue with the build out of this collection. With Brexit having screwed up UK prices, they are reasonably competitive for many things these days.

... and just as I type that they get back to me (I had left a message on one of their promotional posts earlier today to try get their attention - absolutely hate doing that btw). They are sourcing another ST for me. Its slightly damaged, but I can make one good one between the two of them and frankly that's more than good enough for me.

I guess I'll be buying more stuff from them after all ! They do get some nice bits on a regular basis to be fair. And the prices don't seem to be as bad as eBay these days for most of it.

I'm planning on doing a bit of retr0brighting over the summer and wanted to try the simple but apparently very effective 9-12% peroxide liquid in water under the sun version of the process. It works very well from the videos I've seen(mostly The 8bit Guy). Those are in the US, so have decent summer sun and still need the full day to work. I'll test under the Irish sun when we have the good weather again and also under some powerful UV flood lights(60-100W) in the workshop and see how it goes.

I found a source in Ireland that doesn't charge much and doesn't ask silly questions about why you want peroxide. The 12% was out of stock, so I grabbed the 9% and will just add a bit extra to the mix and hope for the best. The have a minimum order, so had to go for 9 litres :0/

The couriers must think my house is a meth lab with all the chemicals they delivery to me these days.

Out clearing out the family house garden shed, and decided it was time enough to move the 21" Ferguson and the 14" Trini to the attic, to keep them safer from the elements.

Carrying down the Ferguson, I figured I'd prefer test this before going to the bother of lifting it into the attic, as I also didn't want to test ~30 year old electronics inside the house either.... So I tested it in the garden, just a quick power on test....talk about magic smoke! Good lord, fizzing and banging and a big cloud of grey acrid smoke. It smoked for a while after, I actually thought it was on fire inside the case. So that's for the skip!

Tested my childhood 14" Trini, powers on but no screen coming on. Led lights up on button presses etc, but zero life from the screen itself.

Not a good day for crt's, which I'm more mindful of now than ever, can be absolute death traps 🙁

PM sent with the details.

These are the things I have for the job. I actually got a few of them for another project, but they will work well with retr0brighting.

Have you tried the handheld games yet?