Year: 2022

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Wonderful Dizzy – Homemade Physical Copy

Back at the end of 2020, a brand new Dizzy game was released for the ZX Spectrum named Wonderful Dizzy. The game itself was designed by the Oliver Twins like all the original Dizzy games. Then an elite team of programmers and artists got to work to make the game a reality. It truly is a Wonderful Dizzy game.

The game can be downloaded from https://www.olivertwins.com/wonderfuldizzy. But there is something missing from this game. And that is a physical release.

A short while back one of the Oliver Twins released some artwork for the tape inlay that people could download and print. This was most of the hard work done. But I also wanted the cassette tape to look like an original release.

I had an idea that laser etching the cassette tape on my mini CNC machine would achieve a similar result. After a bit of experimenting, I found that laser etching the cassette and then wiping over we acrlyic primer gave an almost perfect result.

So here we have it. Wonderful Dizzy, physical copy!

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RCM Hackable Nintendo Switch

Although there is already a Switch in the household, it actually belongs to the Mrs. So I finally took the plunge and got one of my own. Of course, it made sense to go for one of the hackable versions so I could mess around with homebrew, after all that’s more fun than playing most of the modern games!

So I picked this one up off eBay and now it’s all modded and shown below running Simon the Sorcerer on ScummVM with MT32 emulation enabled for that iconic 90s point and click adventure style music.

With a 256GB Micro SD, this should keep me busy on the portable front until my SteamDeck arrives!

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Another PS4? Why? To Jailbreak of course!

With the release of the 9.00 firmware jailbreak, I was very keen to have a play around with modding the PS4. Unfortunately, my daily driver is used in the bedroom and kept up to date to access internet features. Luckily I found a Facebook marketplace bargain and snagged this older version 1TB PS4 for £80. The power button is faulty currently but it turns on and off fine via the controller, and I may fix the power button one day if it bothers me enough.

Anyway, after watching a few videos online, my PS4 was modded with GoldHEN. The method I have chosen to perform the jailbreak is using a raspberry pi zero. Since the jailbreak needs to be done every cold reboot, someone has designed a raspberry pi build that not only hosts the exploit web server but also emulates a controller to auto navigate through the menus and then switches itself into USB emulation mode to perform the exploit. This is a really nice solution to this otherwise mildly annoying problem. More details of this can be seen HERE

So now this is modded I am able to load any PS4 PKG files onto the consoles, this includes backups of retail games so you can store them all on the HDD and not need to worry about inserting discs anymore.

The downside is there is no access to online services, but that’s is what my main PS4 Pro is used for so I have no regrets 🙂

As you can see I also went for a retro-style skin on this console to differentiate this one from my main console.

If you are interested in doing this jailbreak and your console is running firmware 9.0 or below then I recommend checking out the MrMario2011 videos on YouTube.

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Wonderswan Color added to the collection

Since I’m running a bit low on shelf space currently, I decided to pick up another handheld. This is a bit of an unusual one as it was never sold outside of Japan. Released by Bandai in 1999 the Wonderswan range of consoles was born, this one is the color version which was released later on in like but maintained backwards compatibility.

A lot of the games for this thing are stupidly expensive and therefore I have splashed out for a flash cartridge for it. I’ll make a post about it when it arrives, it’s a bit odd as it’s not compatible with all the games, but a large portion will be playable and that will be enough to keep me entertained.

This unit is in pretty good condition but the screen has a fair few light scratches. Luckily replacement screen glass is available and I have one sat here waiting for some time to fit it. It also came with a game named Rockman which I believe is what we call Megaman (or at least it is somehow related to it)

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Sony PSTV (Vita TV)

Been looking into these devices for a while now. The Playstation TV is basically a stripped-down PS Vita console but without the screen or touch controls.

The great thing about these little devices is that they are really easy to hack now. Within 30 minutes of receiving this device, I had it running a custom firmware with 128GB Micro SD storage and the PKGJ software which allows you to download virtually all the VITA/PSP and PS1 games directly from the console.

This device has made the perfect addon to my PS2 TV that I recently purchased. Now, this one TV can be used for PS1/PSP/PSVITA and PS2.

If you want to go further then little console can also run emulators such as Retroarch so 8/16bit console emulation is also easily achieved with this unit.

The price of these devices varies greatly on eBay, from reasonable to not quite so! After seeing what some of the auction prices were finishing at, I decided to skip eBay and purchased mine from CEX for £60. It’s a little more expensive than the cheaper ebay auctions, but hassle-free and has a 24month warranty. I have found CEX to be quite reasonable on certain things recently, it seems the inflation of retro hardware/software is increasing so quickly that CEX can’t always keep up!

If you decide to go down this route then make sure you look into the plugins that are available specifically for PSTV. These plugins allow Vita games that wouldn’t normally run on the console (due to things like the camera/touch pad not being available) to run on the system by using things like the motion controls of the DS3 controller. You can also overclock the PSTV since you don’t need to worry about battery life.