MCGA wrote on 2020-02-18, 20:24:

Is this the Everdrive clone you bought? […]
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Is this the Everdrive clone you bought?

That price is certainly more affordable. I take it that it doesn't have save states? I'd like them for Wonderboy 3 in Monsterland, just so I don't have to manage the save codes. 😳

I would like to get an Everdrive for my SMS. There are a couple of games I want, that would cost more if I bought them on cart. I own 32 games now.

I bought a Sega Genesis Mini last fall and hacked it, so now it has SMS games along with my favorite Genesis games, but I still would like to play the SMS games on real hardware on my 13" CRT.

I have 2 SMS gamepads and 4 of the horrible Sega Control sticks. All of them work, but they are all terrible. 😀 I ended up buying the officially licensed 6 button Genesis controller from Retrobit to use on my SMS. I know there are a couple of games that will not work with this controller, but for the games I've been playing it's so much better than the original options.

Yep that's the Everdrive and you guessed correct, no fancy features like save states etc. It does support regular game saves for those few games that support saving though.

I do like the added bonus of being able to play SG-1000 games on real hardware, albeit with a different/darker colour palette.

I've got one of those control sticks too, always hated that thing. 🤣

Some more retro activity today, working on my troublesome 486 -

Spliced a coin cell BIOS battery from a broken modern laptop onto a spare CD-ROM audio cable and connected it to the External Battery connector. Tested the pins first with my multimeter however, just to ensure it wasn't trying to charge the external battery, which it wasn't.

Having a working BIOS battery seems to have helped a little, but this 486 has some hardware issues. Most notably sometimes if it hasn't been switched on for some time, even though the power cable is still connected, it will lose it's settings and if you enter the BIOS in this state you start rapidly travelling through time - as the system clock ticks through the minutes, hours & days in superfast speed. Really not sure what is wrong with this system 🤣, but that weird behaviour was happening before this new battery was added, so is not related to that.

Also wasn't happy with the ESS 1868 sound card, so swapped it out for a SoundBlaster AWE64 "Value". Think I've found a winner there, the AWE64 seems to be the best all rounder for this 486.

What are you not happy with this ESS 1868 sound card?

Cheers,

AWE Synthesis is useful in a fraction of games that a 486 can run (admittadly it is more relevant for a DX2 and onwards) and a ES1868’s ESFM is a much better ‘clone’ than an AWE64’s CQM. I tend to go for the former and use an external MIDI device (my Munt-Pi3 usually) for Socket3/5/7 DOS builds. AWE32/64 get a lot more useful once you are working with Win9x IME.

Today I finally got around to putting my old P4 board in a case and got it around 80% complete hardware wise. Just need to pick out an optical drive from my stack of 30, butcher an IDE cable to work with my 400gb Hitachi drive with some broken ide pins, hunt down a usb 2.0 card I know I have kicking around somewhere, and finally install XP sp3. Should be fun to run some stuff on it that I struggled with back in the day.

I learned about the recent release of Koryuu, a composite video to component video transcoder. Since I already have to do some repairs on my RetroTINK-2X (loose USB power connector) and the recommended setup for that involves component transcoding anyway, I ordered a Koryuu and gave it a shot. Ran my NES into Koryuu, Koryuu into an OSSC, OSSC into a receiver, and stuck a VGA converter on the HDMI output at the end of the chain and it all worked. I'll have to nab a solid HDMI splitting solution via recommendations over at the SHMUPS Forum since volume adjustments on the receiver cause blanking on the VGA converter. If I leave the audio alone everything works. I'm not noticing any subjective lag, which is a great start. It was also weird running an HDMI modded N64 into Koryuu, but I wanted to test its ability to retain dithering artifacts as seen in Star Fox 64, particularly on the title screen and during Aquas. That test also passed, though I should probably test one last time on an actual composite video TV and see how the raw source looks. In the next week I want to take some time and test CGA composite video artifacts with this setup as well.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-02-19, 03:16:

What are you not happy with this ESS 1868 sound card?

Cheers,

I'm running Windows 95 on the 486 and I couldn't figure out how to get it working well in both Windows & DOS Mode. Leaving the DOS drivers in config.sys/autoexec.bat caused instability in Windows, meaning I'd have to manually specify the DOS driver in Advanced Program Settings for each game.

That wouldn't be so much of a problem for me, but I plan to have friends over in a few months to actually use, install, setup & play games on this PC using 95 as basically a glorified GUI for browsing and launching games. Having to copy & paste the lines for the ESS audio drivers each time would have been a pain.

I am probably missing something obvious with regards to the driver setup, as it's been years since I've tried to actually use the card for this purpose. But I do remember having these same issues back in the day with a Win 98 PC and I don't think I managed to resolve it back then either.

Today I did what I started yesterday:
Getting my PS/2 keyboard to work by soldering in pull up resistors between the 5V and DATA/CLK lines.

Got my Yamaha YMF-719 working under windows95/dos in my windows 95 486 build. Was a bit of a pain to get going it had somehow installed itself more than once and was conflicting with itself. Very helpful having the drivers on vogons drivers tho 😀

Tried to get an old IBM external floppy drive (21mm connector version, 10H3980) to play nice with a non-standard Gotek.
First clue:
The drive uses a TEAC FD-05HF as the mechanism:

This meant that like any member of the TEAC FD05HF family, it uses a 26 Pin, 0.5mm pitch FFC ribbon (FFC26) instead of the usual standard 34 pin cable.

Fortunately, the TEAC mechanisms are used in various devices like Korg keyboards, Brother embroidery machines and such, and Gotek does sell a model of the floppy emulator that would work, the SFR1M44-DU26.

Well, the cable position might be a bit...problematic if it has to go back into the enclosure...

Still working on this one...

Fired up the Toshiba Satellite A205 S5800 craptop I was given years back to see about upgrading the processor and perhaps adding more functionality to it, but it seems to be dying the death, constantly halting at random, even in BIOS. If it's failing caps, I don't want to deal with it. Its battery is already stone dead, and the board itself was hobbled at the factory, having an SD card slot in the casing, but no socket inside of it. I'm surprised there weren't loose cards rattling around in the system. It's also lacking SATA connectors for a secondary HDD, though the pads are on the board, next to the empty bay, and on top of that, several other ports on the system are missing connectors, and have been covered with cheap plastic to make them inaccessible. With the Thinkpad 760E having a crushed screen, no removable drives, and IBM's whole "we'll just kill your computer if none of the internal batteries work" BS, I think I'll just dump them both into the trash. It's not like the local shooting ranges will let me set them up as targets.

Last night, I tested my newly acquired PS2 bundle that I got for $30 and had to clean the battery acid from the one controller due to leaking batteries and fix the other receiver as it was flashing quickly (cleaned the contact points inside and out, unplugged and plugged back in twice, and started to work). Next is to put on white lithium grease on the eject mechanism gears for the drive, then inspect the newly acquired Original Xbox 1.6 I bought last night and do repairs if needed. Will soft mod these systems, upgrade the HDD in my Original Xbox 1.6, and install a SATA 1TB SSHD in the PS2 to rip every game I have onto the system and find a way to copy all of my game saved to the HDD and use it as a virtual memory card.

seagate ST351A/X 40 MEG hardrive,my 1st ide hardrive.
It had a jumper for AT/XT use,the 8 bit controller is long gone.
The controller itself cost $40 back then, 2x the price of a 16bit controller.
It was like 5 hours pay. DOS 5.0 and windows 1.03 ! which crashes too fast to see the error message on a p4 2ghz machine.
NDD shows no bad sectors even after 30 years.Last time it was used was 1999.

I upgraded (downgraded?) my 1996-1998 Games build from an MPV4+Voodoo2/SLI to an MVP3+Voodoo Banshee.

Met some Vogons:

root42 wrote on 2020-02-20, 22:27:

Met some Vogons:
AEBF1C67-B5DE-4E4E-A60B-DD4AB389899B.jpeg

🤣 - that's great! I used to have a Psion Series 5 - several in fact as I kept on breaking the screen but I had accidental damage cover so I didn't have to keep paying for the repairs. Wish I had kept is now I've become a retro/vintage collector...

Updated my Amiga600 blog-post on my blog...

FazzaGBR wrote on 2020-02-20, 22:59:

root42 wrote on 2020-02-20, 22:27:

Met some Vogons:
AEBF1C67-B5DE-4E4E-A60B-DD4AB389899B.jpeg

🤣 - that's great! I used to have a Psion Series 5 - several in fact as I kept on breaking the screen but I had accidental damage cover so I didn't have to keep paying for the repairs. Wish I had kept is now I've become a retro/vintage collector...

We all have regrets... the series 5 is some serious hardware. But the 3a is pretty neat as well. Borderline slow for playing Infocom games though.

I got some of these StarTech.com 3.5-Inch drive bays for IDE / CF readers. They also come with a slot bracket conversion. The black base is of solid steel, feels heavy. Front loading a CF based hard disk seems more convienient than a slot on the back of the machine. I might have a try at painting one beige color.

root42 wrote on 2020-02-20, 22:27:

Met some Vogons:
AEBF1C67-B5DE-4E4E-A60B-DD4AB389899B.jpeg

MAME just within the last month or two added support for Psion Series 5mx emulation. 😀

Not sure if MAME has a ROM dump from a flat Series 5. If memory serves, there's a utility you can download to dump it, and then you would need to extricate the dump over to another PC with Internet access. 😉