General Arcade & Retro Chat' Special Championship Edition

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?

I've a very yellowed and nasty looking PS1 case lined up for this weekend(although the bottom section seems ok). It should work, will take pics if i get around to doing the retrobrighting.

Edit:

Like I said, nasty. It was very yellowed when i got and the years sitting at the bottom of a press have not improved it any. It's worth saving and cleaning as its an SCPH-1002 model, so has the parallel, serial, RCA as well as AV multi out.

Sweet, I love fan translations, they almost feel like new (old) releases. PGXP has ruined me though, the texture wobble in that teaser video is horrendous! Has the Mister PS1 core touched on PGXP at all?

That's just because you're used to it I'd say. I think PXGP is a shining example of a rare modernism that completely surpasses the original hardware. It's a result of the lack of an FPU right?

Some games seem worse than others, the one retr0 linked to above is particularly bad though. Now that I'm tuned into it, it just distracts me...like I say, PGXP ruined me 😔

Took down all my PS2 games from the attic this evening, went through them one by one and found the motherload of memory cards!

That black PS2 card has absolutely everything I was looking for on it. Just firing up my original Vice City save that must be nearly 20 years old.

I'm playing a lot of Gamecube again getting the same nostalgia seeing saves from 2003 and going back to finish the games almost 20 years later.

Seems the Mega Drive Mini 2 is being released in the US as well. Oddly being shipped from Amazon Japan though.

The listing shows 2 games that haven't been announced yet, Sonic 3D and Super Hang On.

Website now live with some new game announcements. Amazon exclusive in the US via Global store from Amazon Japan.

Or a new weight watchers app

It's kind of moot though what these Mini consoles come with in terms of games no? Very quickly you can add any games missing from the regional variants, artwork and all. The thoughts of filling them up with hundreds of roms isn't obviously appealing, but adding in say the missing Japanese games etc is a worthy enough effort.

TBH.....I think they all live on the shelf, boxed up after a few try outs, which is fine I suppose. Eyes wide open when buying them and all that. They never take the place of the real thing, but are nice and kind of quaint to look at when the effort has been put in.

That said, I'm not sure I've even ever tried out the Mega Drive mini before that took up residence on the shelf.....can't recall. Certainly the PS1 one was boxed up sharp and proper. Order is there for a Mini 2 from Japan, even though I'm no fan of the system compared to the first. Might turn it into a Xmas present for someone. Biggest problem that US release has is that name.......it'll be a cold day in hell before I let a 'Genesis' into this house !

I think the PC Engine or C64 Maxi have had the most use, but again, they look better where they are as opposed to strung out taking up desk space.