Month: November 2024

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TMS RGB Mod for MSX

One of the computers I have setup on my new desk is the Yamaha CX5M MSX Computer. The only issue with that is the UK version of this machine only outputs a composite video signal and that is going to look terrible on an LCD monitor.

After looking around the internet for bit, I came across the TMS RGB V2 mod from videogameperfection.com. This device works on many different systems that use the TMS9928A and TMS9929A chips, such as the MSX.

The fitment of the device is pretty simple, you just place it over the pins of the TMS chip on the underside of the PCB, and then solder the holes that have the metal ring around them.

Once that was done I routed the wires to the back of the case where I made a small cutout and fitted a mini DIN connector to output the new RGB video signal.

I then made up a quick mini DIN to scart cable and re-assembled everything. After connecting it to my Open Source Scan Convertor (OSSC), I was greated by a beautiful sharp RGB image being output to my LCD Screen.

I think I am going to be much happier now, exploring the MSX software library with a nice sharp picture. All in all, a good afternoons work 🙂

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The Master of BBCs

Recently a BBC Master was listed on one of the Facebook Groups I am on. It was listed as not working for £75 so I decided to grab it and try and revive it.

My assumption was that the issue was going to be the Rifa caps in the power supply.

So after waiting for Royal Mail to take a week to deliver a 24hr parcel, it finally arrived.

First of all I opened it up to see what we were dealing with. I was not surprised at all to discover the Rifa capacitors had indeed let go.

Luckily I had already ordered some replacements so a few minutes later, I had the old ones out of the board.

All of the other capacitors in the PSU looked fine so for now at least, I have only replaced the main culprits.

Upon putting everything back together, the BBC got powered back up and it sprang into life. Since the CMOS battery was also dead, I had to reset the settings and replace the batteries.

I really want to set this up somewhere where I can use it easily. So I think I’m going to look into getting an additional desk for my retro room. Hopefully I can setup some Acorn and Amstrad computers as I don’t have any out currently.

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Casualty of the house move :(

After moving house, one of my first tasks was to sort out my new retro room. I have really enjoyed getting it all sorted, but for a while now I kept having one thought which I didn’t want to know the answer to, where the hell is my FunKey S!!!!

All of my handhelds were neatly packed and bubble wrapped into a single box so nothing got misplaced during transport. However, the FunKey S is the size of a biscuit and weighs next to nothing. After searching high and low for the thing, it was finally time to come to the conclusion that it got thrown away with the box filled with the remaining bubble wrap😭

So let that be a lesson to everyone, when you move house, create a list of what you put in the boxes, and tick them off when you unpack them!

Anyway, I am not one to edit my website and simply remove an item from my collection, so instead, here it is, my new FunKey S! This time I got the transparent version so at least it’s slightly different to my previous one.

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Virtual pinball cab upgraded

When I first started building my mini pinball cabinet, it was designed to be powered by the Steamdeck. This was mainly because I didn’t have a spare PC kicking around that could do the job.

The Steamdeck has being doing the job, but it had one issue, the loading times! Because the pinball software runs on Windows, I was booting Windows on the Steamdeck from Micro SD. Yes, I could have installed Windows on the Internal storage, but I didn’t want to mess around with dual booting and I wanted to actually use the steam deck for its intended purpose with Steam OS.

I decided I needed a dedicated machine to run the cab moving forwards, but I didn’t want something that was going to take up a load of space. So after looking around at various Mini PCs I decided to give the AceMagician AMR5 a go. This little PC runs an AMD 5800U processor with integrated GPU which I figured should do the job for my little 1080p cabinet. It also has a 512gb SSD and 16gb of RAM.

The PC has a USB-C port on the front so the cable that used to plug into the Steamdeck now just plugs into this. After running the Baller Installer and doing a few extra tweaks, my cabinet was back up and running, but now with amazing boot/load times.

All I need to do now is finish off the physical appearance of the cabinet and then setup some additional tables to play on.