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Amstrad PPC512

I’ve had this machine for about a week now and am still enjoying tinkering with it. This luggable computer was the first IBM compatible portable PC made by Amstrad. It comes with it’s own backpack to carry it in, and if you want to use it on the go it will quite happily eat 10x C cell batteries in about an hour!

It has it’s own built-in green screen LCD but also has an external CGA monitor output on the back for that high-end gaming experience 🙂

The computer doesn’t have a hard drive but does have two Double Density floppy drives on the side. This is pretty useful since most of the time you will want the DOS boot disk in the primary drive. I have already swapped out drive A: with a Gotek drive to make booting the machine and loading old software a bit easier than constantly transferring stuff onto floppy disks.

I was actually planning on replacing the green screen LCD with a 9inch colour panel, but after using it for a bit I really feel it would spoil the charm of this machine, and the screen is in perfect working order. So instead, as a side project, I am currently building a mini 8 inch CGA External monitor to sit alongside it (Keep an eye on my blog for updates).

I will do a full write up of my experience using this machine once I’ve had a bit more chance to play around with it. I’ve already connected a WiFi modem up to it and trawled around some BBSs 🙂

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Sony Trinitron 14inch TV

So after a few attempts on eBay to pick one of these up (When will people learn that you can’t just wrap a CRT in a single layer of bubble wrap and ship it in a single cardboard box 🙁 ), I finally have a working Sony Trinitron 14″ Flatscreen TV to replace my old “no-name” brand. The picture quality on this one is absolutely gorgeous, so it will now be the main display for a bunch of my consoles/computers such as the Spectrum, CPC464, CD-i, Master System, Mega Drive, Saturn and XBOX.

Shown above: Rayman running on the Sega Saturn 🙂

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XBOX Series S

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.

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Wonderswan Color gets a new screen

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.

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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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RCM Hackable Nintendo Switch

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!

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Another PS4? Why? To Jailbreak of course!

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.

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Wonderswan Color added to the collection

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)