For those who have not heard of this, the Sega Nomad is a portable Megadrive (Genesis) that was only released over in America. I’ve wanted one for a while but they don’t often come up for sale in the UK, and with current exchange rates, importing stuff from America isn’t a great deal at the moment.
So when this one popped up on eBay in the UK, I decided to go for it. Its all fully working and it pretty good condition except for a few minor scratches on the casing.
My next project for this one will be to design and 3D print a battery pack for it using 18650 cells. I have ordered all the pieces I require so will hopefully post about its progress in the near future.
After pre-ordering back in July last year and then patiently waiting (which I’m not very good at). My steamdeck has finally arrived. So the first thing I did was tested the performance to the absolute max and played Monkey Island on it 🤣
Funnily enough the deck managed to play this at full frame rate with no issues 👌
I did try go on and test some less well known games such as Grand Theft Auto 5. It is pretty amazing to see this game running with high settings at 60fps on a handheld PC. This truly is a VERY capable handheld gaming machine.
I’ve also spent a brief amount of time messing around with emulators and currently have it emulating PS2 games pretty well. I will be spending more time on that side of things in the near future.
If you are still waiting for yours to arrive, you will not be disappointed!
I am fully aware that this is in no way a retro console! But it is a part of my collection and saves me having to update my website again in 20-30 years’ time 🙂
This was actually a win in a raffle, so only cost me £12 which I’m fairly sure is a good price. It’s also my first digital-only console, which I have very mixed feelings about. Since it’s not my main console, the XBOX game pass thing just isn’t a good deal for me, and looking through the games available there is only a couple I would enjoy playing anyway so it’s best just to buy them.
I already owned Flight Simulator on the PC, so it’s nice that it transferred over to the console. I have also purchased Forza Horizon 5 for it as I quite enjoyed the last one. I expect those will be the only games that ever go on this console unless some other amazing XBOX exclusive comes out. Maybe I’ll take a look at the developer mode on these at some point in the future and have a mess around with the emulators and homebrew just for something to do.
After trying to use the Wonderswan with its new flash cartridge (Flashmasta) I purchased. I decided that I wasn’t going to spend much time with it using its original display screen. It’s one of those annoying ones where you need to get the light hitting it in exactly the right direction to stand any chance of it being visible.
I try to keep as many devices I own as original as possible, but in this case, I decided it was desperately in need of a little modernisation. So I opted for a nice backlit LCD display. It was actually a really simple installation procedure on this one with just two wires for power that needed soldering.
The end result is simply amazing and I will now be checking out some of the great titles available for the device thanks to a few language translation patches available on the net.
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!
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.
Have just finished my write up of the Amstrad GX4000 console. These articles are not really reviews, as there are loads of those online already. This is just my experience of the console, so I may come back and update them as I get to spend more time with the various systems.
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)
Since I have a bit of time on my hands I decided to start updating some of my experiences with the consoles that I have been playing with. The first update is for the Neo Geo CD. So if you’ve not come across this console before then click the link below to read my thoughts.
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.
