Although the keyboard on the Sam is quite nice to type on, you just can’t beat the feel of a hugh quality mechanical keyboard. Luckily for me, Colin at Quazar builds a lovely mechanical keyboard for the Sam and this evening I got around to fitting it.
The install process is pretty simple, it just plugs into the original keyboard slots and then you just swap over the original key caps.
I went for the slightly clicky keys as it’s what I prefer, but he does give the option of quieter keys switches also.
It’s a really nice product, especially if your Sam’s keyboard membrane has either broken or starting to wear out. I’d highly recommend it 👌
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 N64 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 for changing some colour settings and also the aspect ratio.
if you have the ability to do fine soldering, then I would definitely recommend this mod 😀
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 🙂
A while ago I purchased some UV overlays for the Vectrex. These overlays require a UV light source to make them glow. At the time when I purchased them, my 3D printer couldn’t handle the size of the Vectrex screen so I made a frame using multiple 3D printed parts and glued them together.
I was never really happy with the design though so decided now I have larger printers, I would re-visit this project.
I also decided to experiment which switching filament during the print so I could use transparent filament as a diffuser.
This still may not be my final version, but I am pretty happy with how this has turned out for nowadays
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.
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.
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.
This allows you to plug up to three 8bit ISA cards into the PPC512. I built up the board with just one ISA slot to start with (There was only one available on eBay and I can’t find them for sale in the UK anywhere at the moment so have to wait for some to come from China).
My first experiment was to connect a Soundblaster sound card. This is possible thanks to the Unisound DOS driver which is a driver and config utility for Plug and Play sound card under DOS.
As you can hear in the video above, this worked perfectly. A much better gaming experience than the internal beeper 🙂
The next test was to plug in an external EGA Graphics card. Luckily the wiring for CGA is the same as EGA, so I didn’t have to change any cables. Also, the RGBtoHDMI board in my monitor already supports EGA. So all I had to do was flip a couple of DIP switches on the PPC512 to tell it to use an external video card and voila!
I now have 16 glorious colours on screen at the same time and my Lemmings are the right colour as opposed to their weird pink and cyan CGA versions.
I am really impressed with what I’m being able to get out of this 086 8Mhz PC with 512k of memory.
I now need to wait for the other ISA connectors to arrive so I can get both cards connected at once. In the meantime, I think I’m going to design a 3D printed case to hold the expansion board and the ISA cards securely in place.
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!
