Category: Games Console

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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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Hispeedido N64 HDMI mod

Recently, a friend of mine asked for advice on modding his N64 to allow for hdmi output as he was using one of the cheap AV to hdmi adapters and not getting very good results.

This gave me the opportunity to test out the Hispeedido N64 mod board.

This mod comes with a nice ribbon cable, making it a fairly simplistic install. Although I would say this is not for the beginner and a digital microscope is pretty essential with this one to see what you are doing.

I lined up the ribbon and then used some kapton tape to hold in in place whilst soldering, making sure to use plenty of flux.

Once everything was installed, a small cutout to the case was needed to allow for the mini hdmi port to be accessible on the back of the machine.

After this, it was time to put everything back together and check to see how the device performed.

Overall, I was pretty impressed with the quality and I would say it was on par with my NTSC RGB modded SNES which I used to have hooked up via an OSSC. So for the £35 the device cost, I would say it is very much worth it.

It even has a built in menu which can be accessed by pressing Start+A+B at the same time. This gives a few basic options of changing some colour settings and also the aspect ration.

if you have the ability to do fine soldering, then I would definitely recommend this mod 😀

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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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Nintendo 2DS, the perfect Spectrum Emulator!

Ok, so I actually bought a 2DS quite a while ago and forgot to add it to my list. So when a cheap boxed 2DS came up for sale I picked it up. Only afterward did I start getting deja vu and realised there was one sitting on display in my cabinet lol.

It did however motivate me to start messing around with it again and I have spent a fair amount of time playing with the 2DS’s best use case, A ZX Spectrum Emualtor! ZXDS is in my opinion one of the best ways of playing Spectrum games on the go. The 2DS form factor is great and the second screen acts as the keyboard for the Speccy.

To run the emulator you will need to have hacked for 2DS which is a pretty simple process and you can follow the guide at https://3ds.hacks.guide/

Once you have got that far, download the emulator from this website: http://zxds.raxoft.cz/

In the zip file, you will need to copy the entire ZXDS folder and place it in the root of your 2DS SD Card. Also, copy over the .cia file.

Then put the SD card back into your 2DS, load up the FBI application and use it to install the .cia file. It should now appear as a new app on your 2DS and you are good to go.

You don’t even need to worry about games as it has an online capability to download games directly from the World of Spectrum archive. Although some games such as ones made by Codemasters, you will need to find elsewhere due to copyright issues.

And there you have it, a portable Spectrum that is much better than any of the other attempts at a handheld Speccy (and cheaper!)

I will also mention that there is a great C64 and Amiga Emulator, but these run better on the “New 3DS/2DS” consoles.

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Analogue Pocket – Portable FPGA

When I first heard about the Analogue Pocket, I thought it looked like a nice device, but I didn’t commit myself to a pre-order. I already have several emulation handhelds that can play pretty much anything I want them to.

But, as time passed, I started seeing more reviews of the device saying that it really was a nice piece of hardware, especially with the 1600×1440 3.5inch screen (which perfectly scales for the Gameboys resolution).

When the device was first launched, the main limiting factor was that it only played original Gameboy/Colour/Advance games with an optional adapters for Game Gear/Lynx/TG16 advertised. This is great for people that have large collections of original games, but I didn’t really fit into that category.

Fast forward to today, and the story is completely different. The Analogue Pocket has now been opened up to the community for development, and many FPGA Cores have now been released for the system that allow rom files to be loaded from the SD-Card. The device now supports the majority of 8/16bit consoles, some arcade machines and even the Amiga (Seen running in the screenshot above).

The system has become a very nice device to play on and has a great community building around it. I’m looking forward to seeing what other systems get ported over to it in the future.

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Super Slim PS2 (Hardware Mod)

After seeing a YouTube video about a modder that had made a super slim version of the already slim Playstation 2, I couldn’t resist building one myself!

This mod takes a 79xxx Series PS2 Slim (Which had a smaller main PCB than other models), then trims it down a bit more and removes the optical drive. Instead of loading from CD/DVD, it uses an internally wired MX4SIO adapter to load games from Micro SD Card.

The modder named Wesk, has also designed a really nice 3D printed case design to house the project. Keeping the design in line with the PS2 slim model, this really looks like something Sony themselves could have produced.

As you can see, compared to the original fat PS2, this new console has gone on quite a diet!

If you want to build your very own super slim PS2 then you can check out a good YouTube video here.

The only issue I came across with this project, is the PS2 version I picked up didn’t have the lid detect switch in the same place. So I had to hot glue my own switch into place. Apart from that everything else worked fine and it wasn’t a difficult project to complete.

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Nokia N-Gage #sidetalking

The only thing I really remember about these devices when they came out, was everyone taking the **** out of them for having to hold them sideways to use them as a phone.

Well besides that issue, the device itself could actually run some pretty good games for the time. Games like Tomb Raider got their own port for the system, and apart from the weird portrait screen, it was pretty playable.

One other big complaint people had about them was having to take the case off and remove the battery to change the game card. This however is no longer an issue since cracked games are easily available now and you can just fill up a 1GB MMC card with all the games you want and just leave it in the system.

I look forward to seeing what other games the system has to offer, already found a pretty good version of Rayman 3 which I have never come across on any other system as this is a 2D platformer like the original Rayman.

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Nintendo Virtual Boy

The Virtual Boy has always intrigued me, a bit like a VR headset, it’s one of those devices that people cannot show you what it is like in a video or a screenshot. You just have to experience it for yourself.

I had previously heard a lot of people complaining of headaches and eye strain etc, but a lot of people suffer from those sorts of things with modern VR headsets too and I’ve never had any issues with them. So I finally decided to take the plunge and add one of these devices to my collection along with a flash cart so I can experience the entire library.

I must say I am actually quite impressed, I mean it’s not actually VR in any way, it’s more along the lines of a 3D Gameboy, but the effect is really good and the games I have played so far have also been very enjoyable.

The device is also completely different from anything else released back then, so it looks great on display and always draws attention to itself. No regrets at all about finally adding this to my collection, especially the fact it was my birthday present.

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Philips Videopac G7000 (Magnavox Odyssey 2)

This is another interesting machine I picked up a little while ago but hadn’t gotten around to updating the website.

This console/computer was released in 1978 and was named the Magnavox Odyssey 2 other in the USA (They got a much cooler name!). Many people refer to this as a console, but with it having a full qwerty keyboard and its own programming language, surely it’s a computer? Although the keyboard is absolutely awful so full respect goes to anyone that actually wrote a program for this thing using the assembler cartridge.

The system came in its original box which is in pretty nice condition, along with a selection of games to keep me entertained for a few minutes. The system itself is also in very good condition and seems to be working perfectly. Such a strange design!

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Sega Mega CD

I’ve always wanted to grab a Mega CD but the prices have always put me off. But recently I came across a listing for a Mega CD that was “not powering on” for £100. After previous research, I believed this was likely due to the pico fuse gone in it as is common on these units. So I decided to take the chance, and sure enough, after replacing the fuse it came to life. I’ve since replaced all the capacitors in it also as these are prone to failure in these units too.

Now I’ve gone this far I guess the 32x now has to be added to my shopping list!