Category: Backup Device

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Sharp Twin Famicom

In the UK, we had the Nintendo Entertainment System. But over in Japan, there were a few different systems released. One of these was made by Sharp and was the Twin Famicom. It took the normal Famicom cartridges but also included the Famicom Disk System which was an add on drive which allowed games to be played from a proprietary floppy disk.

I can’t resist things with floppy disks, so when one of these came up for sale on one of the retro Facebook groups with a bunch of cartridge games and some floppy disk games, I had to get it.

I have now also obtained a Famicom Everdrive style SD cartridge for the unit and also an FDS Key which I will do a seperate write up about soon. It’s essentially a floppy drive emulator, but with it you can also transfer downloaded FDS games onto the original floppy disks, which I thought was kind of neat.

You might wonder why I would want to overwrite original games, but these disks were designed to be written too. Over in Japan you could take your disk into a store, purchase a game and then using a special kiosk it would write the game to the disk and you would take it home and play it. Pretty neat concept for it’s time.

I look forward with having a play around with this system to see what it offers over the standard NES that we got in the UK.

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An ODE to the 3DO

As anyone who has looked through this website is probably aware, I like to modify my old hardware to add modern features to them, especially when it comes to loading games.

I have several “Everdrive” type devices connected to my cartridge consoles and many ODE (Optical Drive Emualtors) for my disc-based consoles such as the PlayStation and Dreamcast.

One console that has been missing a solution for me though has been the 3DO FZ-1. There are a few different options available on the market for this console, but mostly, they cost upwards of £200. This is obviously cheaper than buying all the original games, but the 3DO didn’t exactly have an amazing software lineup so I struggled to justify the initial outlay.

That is until I discovered an open-source project for a 3DO ODE named SataTo3DO which uses the Raspberry Pi Pico to do all the hard work. Whilst reading up on this I also discovered a remix of it which was a more compact design using some surface mount components which can be found here.

I quick visit to JLPCB and RS-Components, and the parts were all on their way to me. Whilst waiting, I also decided to 3D print a front panel for the console allowing me to fit a USB connector to the front without destroying the original console and trying to keep the original aesthetic.

All together the ODE cost me around £20 to put together and has so far played everything I have thrown at it. It is also another great usage of the Pi Pico which is seeing itself used in more and more retro projects recently.

Hopefully, in the future, we will see more open-source projects coming along for this type of use case. An open-source Sega Saturn ODE would be next on my wish list 🙂

Anyway, I will leave you all with a picture of the console re-assembled. I think it turned out quite well.

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The Doctor V64 – N64 Dev Kit?

These days Everdrive cartridges are the easiest way of transferring ROM files over to the N64. But this wasn’t always the case. Back in the late 90s, a company named Bung Enterprises Limited released its Doctor V64 device. This device was marketed originally as an N64 dev kit, and some companies did actually use it as such since it was much cheaper than the official developer kit. The device could also be used as a standalone CD/Video CD Player. But the general consumer of this product was more interested in the ability to modify the device, then dump official cartridges and load the ROM files back to the N64 from CD-ROM.

Nintendo wasn’t very happy about this feature of the device and as you can imagine, law suites soon followed. Over in America Nintendo managed to get the product banned from sale. This didn’t stop Bung, and they continued to sell the device in North America by advertising it simply as a Video CD player and not mentioning its additional features.

Using the device is pretty simple, you sit your N64 on top of it so it connects via the external port on the bottom of the N64. Next, you turn on the V64 and load a CDROM with N64 ROMs into the drive. You can then select one of your ROM files and it will load it into the V64 memory (256mbit is installed in mine). Now you can power on the N64 and it will load the ROM straight from the memory of the V64.

There is one additional part needed, an original game. Since the N64 had copy protection via a CIC chip on the cartridges. The V64 came with an adapter that sat between the N64 and the original game, this adapter simply blocked the original game from booting so the only thing that happened in the CIC chip activated and then waited for the game to boot from the V64.

My V64 was missing this adapter, but any original game could be modified by cutting one of the tracks to prevent the actual game from booting. This is quite handy as it doesn’t take up as much space as the adapter and a fully cased game, so it fitted in my IKEA shelving much easier.

Here are some photos of the device in action.

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A new DIY case for the Jaguar Skunkboard

A while ago I put together a small project to flash the Atari Jaguar Skunkboard flash cart from a Raspberry Pi (More details here). The Skunkboard can only hold 1 or 2 games at a time so it was nice to not have to keep removing it and plugging it into my PC to flash it.

Since I built that, I have kept thinking about making it more compact and building everything into a single cartridge. Well, I finally got around to it, and here is the end result:

The cartridge has a DC power jack on the top which is powered from a USB cable. This provides the power to the Raspberry Pi as I didn’t want to risk drawing too much current from the Jaguar itself. The rotary encoder on the side of the unit is used to scroll through the game list and select which game you want and what bank to flash the game to.

I think it turned out pretty well. If you wish to build your own then subscribe to my mailing list from the homepage as I will be uploading the build guide and required files in the new year.

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TZXDuino

I needed a method of easily loading games for the ZX81 and buying original cassettes wasn’t really on the cards. Normally I look for some sort of native SD Card solution and even though one exists for the ZX81 (ZXpand), it wasn’t easily available to purchase and was probably a bit overkill for my needs.

So instead I went for a slightly different method, and although it is still SD card based, this unit actually reads TZX files from the SD card and then plays them back as sound files out the headphone jack.

The obvious disadvantage is games load at the same speed as they did from tape. But the advantage is this unit is compatible with many of the older computers that used tape as their medium.

It’s actually a really nice little device and since the games for the ZX81 were quite small anyway, they don’t actually take that long to load. 1K Chess for example took about 30 seconds (An entire Chess game fitted within 1K of memory, crazy!)

I purchased this unit from eBay for £24, but you can find them in various different shapes and sizes. I’ve even seen a project where someone built one into an empty cassette tape.

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Greaseweazle F7 – Retro USB Floppy Writer

One issue people have these days is writing floppy images back to 3.5inch floppy disks so they can be used in retro computers such as the Amiga, Sam and Atari ST etc.

The first mistake people make is they just go out and buy a USB floppy drive. The problem is these devices don’t give direct access to the floppy drive hardware so none of the applications designed for this purpose work with them.

So now you have two options. You can either put together an old PC which has a floppy disk interface on the motherboard (I do already have one of these for this purpose). Or you can buy yourself a Greaseweasel interface! This interface links to a modern PC via USB and then connects up to an old flopppy drive. Combined with the software available from here: https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle you will now be able to read/write and format floppy disks in the correct format for retro computers.

I have designed and 3D printed a nice enclosure for this to all sit in which can be downloaded here if you want to print one yourself.

I purchased this device directly from Kier and it cost me £22 inc postage to the UK which I think is a brilliant price for a device that is going to be very useful for any retro computer collector. Head over to his Facebook page to find out more information on how to purchase one.

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1.3GB of storage in 1994

Another small delivery today. Since I only had a few zip disks I figured it would be best to have a little bit of stock. They seem pretty easy to obtain still at the moment but the same could be said about 720k Double Density floppy disks a few years back and now they are a pig to get hold of (luckily I purchased 5 sealed boxes of those a while back too)

So here we have 13 zip 100 disks, a few of them used, some “new” and some still sealed in their plastic wrapper. Should keep me going for a while!

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Running in Parallel!!

So since having the Iomega Zip drive I’ve had one missing component. A PC with a parallel port! Nothing modern comes with them anymore and it appears that PCI-E parallel cards just don’t like the Zip Drive. I have tried running VM’s etc but no matter what I did I couldn’t get it working.

I did have one hope, and that is an old Shuttle XPC computer I have running an AMD Sempron processor. This PC is my Retro PC which I keep around since it has a floppy drive too. Unfortunatly although the motherboard does have a parallel port, it was an optional extra connector which can no longer be purchased. Looking inside it looks like an IDC connector but has a smaller pin pitch. After much browsing on eBay I found a Lenovo PC which seemed to use the same connecter so I gave it a shot.

And the result is!!!

IT WORKS 🙂

Now I can get on and stick all my Atari Portfolio software onto a zip disk rather than having to send it across serial cables!

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Time to expand my storage space :) – Iomega Zip Drive

It’s 1994 and I am fed up splitting files across 1.44mb floppy disks to transfer them between PCs. There has to be a better way?

Well here it is! The Iomega ZIP drive. 100MB of storage on a single disk!

Now I never had one of these back in the day as they cost a fair amount of money and I don’t think the media was that cheap either. But I just picked this one up for £15 so that seems a bit more reasonable to me 🙂

The best thing is during the facebook conversation somone annouced that these drives could be made to work with the Atari Portfolio too!! (Thanks Gavin). So with a bit of configuration I can get the entire portfolio of Portfolio software (see what I did there?) onto a single ZIP disk.

I am going to do a write up of this process soon and will add it to the modifications section when it is done. I may do a little video about it soon too.