Category: Project

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Mixed Reality Gameboy Emulator for Quest 3

Since getting the Quest 3 on launch day, I really wanted to have a mess around with the new mixed reality feature. So I installed Unity and started to re-familiarise myself with it as it’s been a while since I last used it.

After searching around for a while, I found an open-source Gameboy Emulator plugin for Unity, it isn’t the best emulator and has a lot of compatibility issues, but for a quick project, it would do the job! (https://github.com/KonsomeJona/UnityGB). So with the emulation out of the way, all I had to do was sort out the mixed reality passthrough and controls etc.

So after several hours of messing around, I finally put together a mixed reality Gameboy Emulator.

If you want to give it a try you can download it from HERE

You will need to have enabled developer mode on your Quest 3, then extract and sideload the APK file using SideQuest.

Once installed you can copy Gameboy ROMs to your Quest by plugging it into your PC and copying the .gb files to \Quest 3\Internal shared storage\Android\data\com.northdevonretroarchive.GameboyMR\files\

There is a weird bug at the moment where occasionally the controls don’t always respond properly, if this happens then just restart the app. I haven’t looked into what is causing this yet, so I will update it once I have.

You can move the Gameboy around by grabbing it with the right controllers trigger button. You can also rescale the Gameboy by holding both grip buttons and moving the controllers away from each other. This allows you to play on a 50m tall Gameboy if you so wish!

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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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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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Commodore PC10-ii

I was given this old PC the other day along with a bunch of other bits and pieces that I am still going through. But this was definitely the most interesting item so I wanted to take a look at it as soon as possible.

After measuring the voltages coming from the power supply it was clearly dead, all voltages shoeing around 1.7Volts. A full re-cap had the potential of bringing it back to life, but these old power supplies were not that great. The huge fan on it also failed and rattled around as it tried to spin.

My decision was to buy a small ATX power supply and retrofit it to the unit. After slicing the connectors onto the modern ATX PSU, I measured all the voltages again and then powered it up.

And it is now booting! This one was actually fitted with an ancient Western Digital Hard Drive which has also died, it spins up and tries to read, but it doesn’t sound healthy and wouldn’t boot. The floppy drives, however, do work, and among the other stuff I picked up, was a set of 5 1/4 inch floppies including a Microsoft DOS Boot floppy.

The most interesting thing about this unit is someone has fitted an Orchid Tiny Turbo 286 processor board to it. I’ve not been able to fully test that yet as I need to build up an AT-XT Keyboard adapter. But the PC does boot with the switch in both positions so I think it’s fine.

The next steps are to fit a modern Hard Drive solution like an XT-IDE board, give it some sound with a modern Adlib Sound card replacement and then design and 3D print a bracket to hold the new PSU in place and mount the power input and power switch on the back of the unit. Should be a fun project!

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Another custom built unit

I was starting to run out of shelf space for new toys, so I had a move around and cleared a new area in the lounge. Originally I considered buying some of the usual cube storage that everyone gets. But it was just the wrong shape/size and didn’t fit my needs.

So I busted out my “not to bad” DIY shelf making skills and constructed another shelving unit to hold a mixture of computers, consoles and some drawers for random retro stuff.

if you look carefuly you might spot some spoiler alerts for systems I have not yet added to the site! And you will also spot an ominous empty shelf crying out for something different to sit on it 😁

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Amstrad PPC512 External ISA Expansion

With HUGE thanks to Joao (Website: http://www.enide.net/webcms/index.php?page=ppc512-640-isa-expansion) I recently received a PCB to build up an ISA Card expansion board for the Amstrad PPC512.

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.

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Build guide for the mini CGA Monitor

I’ve had quite a lot of people interested in my mini CGA monitor build so have put together a build guide to show what components I used. I have also uploaded the 3D printable files so anyone with access to a 3D printer can build their own.

I do still need to complete the wiring diagram for one of the cables which I will do shortly, I just forgot to take a photo of it before I put everything back together!

Click the link below to find out more, or head over to the “Projects” section of my website.

http://localhost/wordpress/mini-crt-cga-monitor/
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Amstrad PPC gets a DIY CGA colour monitor

I was originally going to replace the green screen LCD on my PPC512 with a modern LCD colour screen. But there was nothing physically wrong with the built in monitor apart from the horrible motion blur. It seemed a shame to butcher a fully working device. So instead I opened up my CAD program and designed and built a mini “CRT” monitor for it. It holds an 8inch LCD panel and a RGBtoHDMI board for doing the CGA conversion. I will do a write up soon with instructions on how to build your own, including the 3D stl files to print your own.

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Wonderful Dizzy – Homemade Physical Copy

Back at the end of 2020, a brand new Dizzy game was released for the ZX Spectrum named Wonderful Dizzy. The game itself was designed by the Oliver Twins like all the original Dizzy games. Then an elite team of programmers and artists got to work to make the game a reality. It truly is a Wonderful Dizzy game.

The game can be downloaded from https://www.olivertwins.com/wonderfuldizzy. But there is something missing from this game. And that is a physical release.

A short while back one of the Oliver Twins released some artwork for the tape inlay that people could download and print. This was most of the hard work done. But I also wanted the cassette tape to look like an original release.

I had an idea that laser etching the cassette tape on my mini CNC machine would achieve a similar result. After a bit of experimenting, I found that laser etching the cassette and then wiping over we acrlyic primer gave an almost perfect result.

So here we have it. Wonderful Dizzy, physical copy!

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Hello MiSTer

So if you have not heard of the MiSTer project (where have you been?) it is an open-source project that runs on top of the DE10 Nano FPGA board.

OK, so that probably doesn’t help you understand much about it. An FPGA is a Field Programmable Gate Array. What this means is it is basically a chip that you can re-program how it behaves. So imagine you have a Sega Megadrive, inside there are a bunch of chips and a processor that make the console work. With an FPGA and a lot of time, you can re-construct all of that hardware within the FPGA so it will now behave in the exact same way as the original hardware.

The main benefit of all this, is in theory, any core running on the MiSTer should be more accurate than software emulation.

For me however, the reason for buying one was that it looked fun to mess around with. Normally you need to buy the DE10 Nano and then buy a couple of additional parts such as extra memory, an I/O board and an analogue output board (if you want to connect it to a CRT for example).

Recently though, RMC Retro have announced their Mister Multisystem board. This board contains all the additional parts you need and combines them all into a console form factor. They have even designed a case for the unit that can be 3D printed https://rmcretro.store/all-products/

I have already pre-ordered my board which should arrive next month, so I will update you all once that arrives. Until that day though, I have been messing around with some of the basic cores on the MiSTer and also 3D printing the case ready for the new board.

Since the case design obviously took some inspiration from the PC Engine, I decided to stick to the same theme and went with a white colour case with a PC Engine style logo I designed and cut out using my vinyl sign-cutter.

I also have some white Playstation DualShock 3 controllers on their way along with some wireless USB adapters to link it all together. To finish it off I have a white wireless USB Keyboard with built-in trackpad. With that setup I should be able to play all of the MiSTer cores, both consoles and retro computer systems.

This is going to be a fun one 🙂