Arcade & Retro Repairs & Mods, all new recipe, with no added MSG...

Yeah all these early big screens were multiple monitors. Same with those multiplayer Xmen games. Must be a pain in the face trying to calibrate them alright!

and photos for anyone interested

Tom Mann Centuria wrote: »

Such a neat fit. Would you have preferred a green pcb, or happy with purple?

I have a lovely plus 2 you could have in exchange for that old Issue One. Don't bother checking on prices, it's a fair swap, honest guv. If you ever see any issue rubber key, in working order for around the thirty euro mark think of me. I had to sell my rubber key Issue Two when bills got too high.

Purple is OK, ensures folks don't think its an original from Sinclair I guess.
Keep an eye on eBay, quite a few rubber keyed 48ks go for just over that price - just ignore the BuyNow items

Would anyone have this rom type handy, and be able to burn the correct file?? It's for a Konami xmen. Thanks!

eddhorse wrote: »

Great work, and i presume this fits on the green Jammacon?
Colour me interested for one.

Hmm depends on which version you have, will only fit on a V2 board - you can tell by the size of the daughter board connector (or the version number on the back).

working on a jamma board repair, it's tricky to test having to hook it up to the jamma harness in the cab and power the cab up each time. I really need to get a super gun. Would anyone have any recommendations? They seem to vary in price on ebay from €50 to €300

made a repro of the Taito pc030 custom IC used on Arkanoid, Bubble Bobble, Scramble Formation, Legend of Kage and other Taito pcbs . It's the big red IC that handles coin I/O on these boards. it breaks off easily and is often missing on these boards.

Fair play dude! Be great to see it working properly again.

A lot of those units I've seen for sale seem to have the same problem with the optical disc drive. Having a slot type drive on a dev unit probably wasn't the best idea given their proneness to breaking and developers not exactly treating things with kid gloves.

On a site note, funny how much stuff we move on to each other via this forum - I don't own any of the main items in that photo anymore

DECR-1000A is with yourself, LMD is now in the possession of your bro and I think Dinorex has that BVM 1454D...

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

My games room is looking like something they will eventually find my dead body in.
I just seem to be buying masses of great stuff, over the years.
Then it just sits there, awaiting cataloging, as the room grows ever darker.

Just move the collection to a new location, forces you to either display, play or bag up & sell what you have duplicates of or don't really want.

PS3 Dev system update - also found a dev controller and the WiFi antenna on fleeBay so that's also ordered

Is there a rom burning service in ireland at all?

Would be very handy!

sugarman wrote: »

Dont know about zedlabz but Ive tried a dozen different ones and they all have deadzones and usually too stiff/clunky and nothing compared to the real thing.

I've successfully revived any of mine by doing the below

I think I'll try this with one of mine, and try the gamecube replacement for the other. I was never a fan of the stick on the n64 and mine are so loose now that theres about 20 degrees of movement on it without any response.

Fenrir ODE is now available to pre order for Saturn.

https://8bitmods.com/fenrir/



Watch out for compatibility as one of my Saturns wont take it.
Supports all console regions (only for VA0, VA0.5 or VA1 consoles with a 20-pin drive).

Type-1: VA0-VA1 (20-pin cable)
ODE: Rhea
CD-ROM drives:

JVC ENR-007B or D
Hitachi JA0027
NOTE: VA0 units have the power supply (PSU), buttons and LEDs attached to the upper case.

Good details on that here :
https://gdemu.wordpress.com/details/saturn-details/

While in lock down I've been catching up on some old projects I put aside over the years. The latest is to finally get a solid state drive inside my iMac G3(bondi blue).

I decided on the below CF to IDE interface. I have a load of the normal CF-IDE adaptors laying around that I've used on Amiga's, but I got this one as it allows both that larger 40 pin IDE(which i need for the MAC) as well as the normal smaller 44 pin(Amiga, laptops). Definitely recommended if your looking to convert an older PC or MAC to CF and need the option of having both the 40 and 44 pin headers.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0026OYEEQ/

Decided to go on a bit of an adventure this evening to see if I could get my N64 DD to read disks. Thought an attempt at cleaning the heads with some isopropyl would be handy enough.

Took the whole thing apart, everything was going fine, cleaned the heads, put it back together - no noise from the drive at all now, it just gives a disk error the moment it turns on. So i'd made it worse!

Opened it up to see what's going on - There are two ribbon cables that connect the drive to the main PCB -



The one with the blue tip which looked far longer than it was meant to be.
Pulled it a little harder and ended up seeing the other end of it.




'Ah, that's the problem, one of the ribbon cables is just disconnected, easy fix'.

Yeah, famous last words!

Pro tip - if you're ever working on an N64DD, never, EVER! let this ribbon cable disconnect from the internal PCB.

There's literally no way of getting to it with your hands to reconnect it, unless you disassemble the whole internal zip drive. Which, with the amount of springs in it's assembly isn't going back together unless you are a mechanical engineer.

So taking the whole thing apart wasn't an option, but I was going to have to take apart what I could to try to get to the ribbon cable connector. Couldn't even see where it was meant to go at this stage.

Managed to get the zip drive out anyway, and figured out where the ribbon cable was meant to be connecting up to.

To get the cable to the connector (the cable itself is about 3-4 inches long) you've to feed it through a tiny gap between mounting plates and try to fish it onto a ramp that leads up to the connector.

Once you have it at the connector, your problems have only just started. How do you insert a ribbon cable to a connector without being able to actually press on it with your hands and only being able to maneuver it from the end of the cable four inches away?

If you move it too much, it's back off the ramp and you're back to step 1 in the process of just trying to get it to the connector again, let alone actually in.

Took me two hours to get it connected back up. Two hours! :pac::pac:

I figured out that if I bent the ribbon cable a little bit one way it was an absolute pain in the arse to get it up the ramp, but once you did, it was about 1/4 of a mm into the connector slot.

I then managed to figure out that if I held a spring back on the drive, a tiny bit more space opened up, allowing me to get a really thin scissors blade into the connector and push it in once I had it on the edge of the connector.

Tried to get a bit of a photo showing the horror that is this cable.

The red lines indicate where the cable is fed in between the mounting plates, emerging where the green arrow is at the connector.

Blue arrow shows a spring loaded part which I had to move out of the way.

You can see the ribbon cable back in the connector in this photo. I felt like god when it finally clicked in.



Reassembled the whole thing, still not working - however, I could hear it trying to read the disk again now, so managed to get it back to the same condition at the very beginning.

TLDR: Oisin attempts to fix his N64 DD, made it even worse but eventually manages to recover it back to the broken condition he started with

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Let me know when you are selling it.
You can always buy it back from me two months later!

When its fixed

Nicely done, do these still connect to the green jammacon mobo?

Now that I'm running out of easy stuff to fix, though it was time to tackle my Vectrex which has been display garbage for years now.

I came across a project on Github called Scopetrex a while ago and recently ordered some pcbs to make a few of them and finally got around to making them this week - its not a complex build, but it is very time consuming with all the thru-hole parts.



As the name suggests, its intended to be hooked up to an analog XY scope. All my scopes are digital, the Agilent has an XY mode but the blanking wasn't working right so it just looked a mess of lines.

Feck it, lets attach it to the Vectrex monitor and see how it goes... Very well actually





So now I know the power board of the Vectrex is good and have something to compare with the logic board signals to help debugging

I've got two spare sets of pcbs (scopetrex & controller) if anyone wants them. I ordered all the parts off the BOM from Mouser to build 2 units and was expensive enough, but some of the items like connectors can be got a lot cheaper elsewhere. The CPU and sound chip are not available new though, but are very common on older arcade pcbs (68A09E, AY-3-8910).

Ideally I'd like to get a XY deflection board and build a larger bartop Vectrex with a 14" tube or something along those line.

BGOllie wrote: »

oh cool project. I wanted to look into it at some point. wouldn't mind one of the sets if you still have em.

Ya no problem, I'll send you a set of boards.

Could be dead alright.
DTACK stuck high mean its not read any valid data, check the address bus on reset should go to 0 and read back 8 bytes before jumping

The Last Bandit wrote: »

Not really a mod, more of a semi-mod I guess.

I got a couple of RAD2X adapters recently, for Nintendo and Playstation. Nintendo is great as it works with my NES,SNES,N64 and Gamecube (all are RGB modded).

Playstation works well too, however the case popped open as the strain relief is a bit too big for the case. Long story short... they appear to be the same, built a few suitable cables and works great with other consoles as well - doesn't upscale as much as the OSSC but its a lot more convenient to use and doesn't drop sync...

Those cables are a great solution for people just starting out with older consoles on modern displays. Plug in, works
I've got a couple of the newer retrotink devices (2x pro etc) and they seem to be more or less what these cables are(same guy as well).

I picked up another 3DO for myself. This one has the new Black Dog RGB mod installed. The 240p is so much better on this one when compared to the mod i got in 2013.
The install also looks a lot cleaner.


New Black Dog RGB Mod





Older RGB mod

eddhorse wrote: »

Wow thats a lot of cables, i got the USB mod a few months ago, have all the games now for it.

Is that the one from mnemo, the dodgy Russian?
I've a couple of those ones, as well as his Dreamcast version. I prefer not to give him any more business due to his dodgy deeds, but not many options when it comes to the 3DO.

eddhorse wrote: »

Yeah the ridiculously dodgy looking website.
http://3do-renovation.ru/

The website isnt even working for me now.
What are his dodgy deeds?

The current site is http://3do-mnemo.com/
He's always been a bit dodgy. I got one of the first batch of 3DO devices off him a good few years ago and the payment was ridiculously dodge(pay his friend in Poland, making sure to give extra money for a tip etc). I think its a bit better these days.

As for his dodgy deeds, he was found out to be putting time bombs in the firmware on his boards(Dreamcast for sure, not sure on the 3DO). So basically after a certain amount of time or power cycles the firmware will stop working and you just get a black screen with "Firmware Obsolete" on it. Then you need to get a firmware update from him to use it again, which wasn't available when this started happening first.

Some info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamcast/comments/bxfbhd/confirmed_usbgdrom_firmware_contains_code_that/