console mods

[mew barios]

nevermind, the playstation runs off 7.5v there's no point running 2 extra wires just for that :o



this is a 4021 static shift register. it costs about 25 cents and is the only thing besides a proper plug that you need to make your own nes controller. i had been thinking about making my own nes arcade stick but always when it comes time to pay i decide to run off and do some other less expensive project. there's never a box full of arcade style buttons and joysticks at the thrift stores :< i guess you could potentially wire 2 of these together to make an snes controller but i'm not 100%

[darkvare]

so that 25 cents chip has all the software you need for an nes controller? also speaking of arcade parts over here i found 10 buttons for like a dollar fifty how expensive are they supposed to be?

[mew barios]

well that and some 10k ohm resistors, 8 of them would put you back another 25 cents or so.

the cheapest i've seen for arcade parts is 20 buttons for $20 and 2 joysticks for $20, microswitches included. they're kinda cheapy and i don't know how well it would hold up. happ sells buttons for 2.50 so i guess i'd consider that the high end. none of that may seem like very much but i use almost exclusively harvested parts and $40 sounds like an incredible amount for something i'm making myself. if people know good deals on things i will accept advice :o

[Chojin]

when we were getting parts for our Neon FM cabinet, we went to Betson to get parts. that's also how we got them on board as a producer, but that's another torrid story.

they have a ton of buttons and shit in stock (since they service more than 50% of the US arcade market, they need to have spare parts on hand), and i'm pretty sure they mail them out too. see if you can find one of the betson catalogs online.

[k0k0]

I ended up just getting a tankstick when I was building my arcade cabinet. The people at several of the places here wanted me to buy a whole cabinet to take a few buttons and joysticks. I could have done a bit more looking, but I figured I had the money, might as well just get it made right. It still works after 4 years, so I'm happy with the purchase.

[mew barios]

Originally Posted by Chojin

see if you can find one of the betson catalogs online.

thanks i will check it out :o

i got a tankstick for my arcade cabinet also. i do like how easy it is to hook it up to any kind of console i have lying around but i've been pretty disappointed by their assembly and the quality of their parts. i haven't had any problems since i opened it up and replaced the trackball pcbs and the wires they pinched putting it together but i do plan on replacing its joysticks and buttons eventually. actually you're the first person i know of that has one and hasn't urged a mandatory disassembly :o

[k0k0]

I forgot that when I got it, a roller wasn't working on the trackball and had to replace that, but it wasn't too much of a problem. It's worked pretty well since.

[mew barios]

in the end i still feel like it was worth it to get one, but it's hard to recommend when 100% of them have some kind of defect out of the box.

my description of what emulators a gamecube could run was woeful, i didn't really test them out hardly if at all and i didn't want to make wild claims. but i've gone through the ones most interesting to me and given them each at least an hour.

sd media launcher is back on the codejunkies website for $20 as of this second http://us.codejunkies.com/Products/G..._EF000589.aspx. if you don't mind taking care of a single irreplacable disc then this is the solderfree option for you.

all the emulators i've tried can be run off of the sd card, though if you prefer to burn them to dvd that's an option also. most of them had the ability to output in progressive scan though the gc component cable is expensive beyond reckoning and depending on your model it might not even be an option.

also most emulators allow you to load roms using smb via a crossover cable, and i believe gcos will also do this with your backup games much like the ps2, however the gamecube broadband adapter might as well have been forged of meteor iron i've never seen one in the wild.

here's the stuff i tried out

nes - fce ultra gx 3.2.6
looks really good, sound is good though sometimes maybe a slight imperfection here and there only a supernerd would notice. my sample size was small but i had no problems as expected.

snes - snes9x gx 4.2.8
i wasn't expecting much when the ps2 failed to deliver, but this is really good :o i played several games at full speed with no sound issues. if i have any problem with it at all it's that the gc controller layout isn't really that good for snes games. you can remap it any way that suits you but even so i just couldn't figure out a way that seemed super comfortable.

genesis - genplus gx 1.7.1
no troubles here, it has no problems with the reflection effect and the weird sprite rotation that i remember genesis emulators having issues with in the past. though that may have been a far distant past, i didn't get a genesis til late in it's life and i don't play that stuff as much :< several internet websites described this emulator as genesis/32x/segacd but they are liars, nothing but genesis is implied or delivered.

turbografx16 - hugo gx 06-13-2010
no supercd support unfortunately :< at least i don't think so :o pretty sure. this is an excellent emulator that i'll likely only use to play devil's crush. once or twice i saw a weird flicker of screen garbage i dunno what that's about, but it didn't really detract from the overall experience.

neogeo cd - neo cd redux 1.52a
i didn't test this as much as the others because the only neogeo cd game i could somehow put my hands on was samurai shodown 4. loading times are vastly reduced, though how could they not be :o music and sound was fine and everything appeared to move at full speed.

n64 - cube64 beta 1.1
unusable :< some n64 games will work using the emulator nintendo made for the zelda collector's edition which i know runs mariokart 64 and mario 64 and starfox 64, maybe some other stuff too, i know it was limited to things that saved directly to a cartridge. i guess i was meaning to talk about this cube64 emulator though :o everything i tried was impossibly slow or just didn't work.

vba/gbc/gb - visual boy advance gx 2.2.5
i had initially overlooked this because i have a gameboy player stuck on my gc already but i thought i'd check it out while the checking was good. i might actually like its handling of original gameboy and gbc better than the gameboy player because it has a lot more options for adjusting the visuals. the gameboy advance part however is choppy and slow, playing some kind of action themed game would be impossible.

here's some things that exist that i haven't tried
master system/game gear - smsplus-gx
atari 2600 - stellagc
neogeo pocket/color - neopop gx
playstation - pcsx revolution
scummvm

[creeposaurus]

How many watts do you recommend for beginner's soldering iron?

[mew barios]

i guess it depends on what you're planning to do :o i use a 15w with a superfine tip for most things

[Nick]

Does anyone know how hard it would be to mod a Sega Gamegear to not take 15 AA batteries?

[mew barios]

the gamegear will run comfortably off 7.2v-9v so any means you have of delivering that to it should be fine. i guess a couple of lithium ion 3.6v wired in series, maybe you could wire a usb port to them to charge them with :o i'll think about it a little more. my old game gear battery pack stopped holding a charge years ago and it looked ridiculous lugging that giant brick around anyway

one of my gamegears needs its video capacitors replaced (i think) and the other has tremendous acid damage and a blown audio capacitor, but i got it from goodwill for $2 so it's ok. i saw a fun modification of a gamegear with svideo out so i want to try that once i repair them :o

[Nick]

I'm not exactly what you would call 'good with electronics' I just thought it would be pretty interested to see someone mod all those horrible clunky handhelds to actually look and play decently. :P

[mew barios]

you'd have to build your own board to pull the rgb out of a gamegear before you can do anything to improve the screen. it has been done but it's a giant pain in the butt i'd rather run away.



this was my original playstation, i gave it to my brother several years ago but apparently it stopped working at some point and one time when he got sick he spraypainted it with an angry face. i got him to give it back to me so i could fix it, and while i was in there i changed the power led to red and put a red/green one in on the other side to indicate if the chip was active. but it turned out to be more of an amber/green and it doesn't really match :< whatever it's just a spraystation.

[Nick]

Jesus, three months spread over three years on that gamegear? No wonder you'd not wanna touch that.

[mew barios]

ok i finally did a softmod on an original xbox. i'd guess that of any of last generations consoles this is the one that the average person is most likely to have everything you'll need to set it up but i had enough stuff to do a memory card exploit so i got to do it the easy way. otherwise you'll need to open up your xbox and your pc and swap ide cables while they're running. i'll probably have to do this myself later anyway if i want to put in a bigger hd. once it's properly prepared you can move things around via ftp, it's very convenient :o i used this guide.

right quick, here are the emulators i tested out. i tried to make sure i had the latest version of everything, but microsoft doesnt like people hosting things compiled with their stolen sdk even today so it seems all scattered across the internet.

nes - fceultrax v15
no problems, at least after i turned on vertical sync which was off by default for some reason.

snes - zsnexbox 3.7
a port of zsnes. i didn't see a single flaw while testing. it seems to run at fullspeed even with filters on

genesis/32x/segacd - neogenesis v16
genesis and 32x emulation are fine. the only segacd game i had to test was snatcher which probably isn't the most cpu intensive segacd experience. apparently it supports just putting a cd in the tray and running it directly but this particular xbox doesn't seem to want to read anything but dvds. it may need some adjustment.

tg16/supercd - mednafenx-pce v5
there was a port of hugo but it was awful. it had the same graphical problems as the gamecube version, and the sound was just. wrong :< i felt a disappointment creeping in, but i noticed there was another pce emulator. it's much better :o and it has supercd support. but it has the same problem as i remember pce emulators having 12 years ago where it doesn't always get the message to stop playing audio track music and can create some weird audio situations. it's not a gamebreaker, at least not in any supercd game i own but who knows.

gb/gbc/gba - xboyadvance v10
a port of visualboy advance. if i had a gripe it would be that there doesn't seem to be a way to have different preset resolutions for gb and gba so you end up with either a stretched out gb game or a squished gba game. at least i dont know of an option like that i may have missed it? emulation wise it's pretty good though. some gba games may need some tweaking to make them run well but it is at least possible to have a good experience.

ps1 - pcsxbox v11
i messed with this for a while but i just couldn't get it to run as well as i wanted. movies and some gameplay situations are choppy, music doesn't always play. it's not unusable, and some things may work fine but i have too many playstations to spend too much time wrestling with it. also during the initial loading it makes a noise like your speakers are exploding.

pc286/386 - dosxbox v13
a port of dosbox. i was curious when i saw it so i had to try a little :o setup is a little awkward when you have to use the onscreen keyboard, and i was still having trouble getting things to work just right. it's likely i'll just need to mess with the options more but it does seem promising, and playing omf2097 via an xbox was pretty fun.

there is a tremendous amount of emulators available, pretty much anything sitting around that was open source seems to have been ported. i guess this probably is your best bet if you want an all in one console from the last generation. one downside is that it isn't possible to stream xbox game data over ethernet unlike the other consoles due to some restriction on the hardware. most people probably don't care about swapping disks though, and installing them to the hd is still an option.

[Fathom Zero]

Dude, I couldn't do the memory card thing, so I had to take a desktop and move the IDE ribbon from the HDD on my computer to the one on the Xbox while both were running. I was panicking when I thought I'd short something out.

Thankfully it all went alright.

I hate FTP, but it's alright, I guess. Could be worse ways to move things around.

I mostly play Rival Schools and Super Nintendo games, as well as a shitload of arcade stuff.

[dextire]

What's it like to play NES and SNES games with the Xbox controller?
If I did this the first game I would play would be Chrono Trigger, and I'm afraid the buttons would be too slow for the Millennial Fair games.

[mew barios]

i only have s-type xbox controllers so i don't really know how the original huge ones would do. the small ones have a layout very similar to the snes and feel pretty natural when you're using it. one thing that is difficult is doing a doubletap on the l or r buttons because they're analog and emulators give them a huge deadzone that i can't seem to adjust. in a pinch you might have trouble with the infamous barrel roll for example

[mew barios]

since i have a bucket full of 40g hds laying around i figured i stick one in the xbox to increase its killing power. after system files and emulators and whatnot there's only enough space to put 8 or 9 dvd based xbox games on there but at the moment i can't even think of 8 games that are exclusive to or best played on an xbox, maybe an xpert could advise me as to what the pros would choose as their top 8.

playing off of the hd works well, there's a large reduction in loadtimes as you'd expect. i'm not 100% on this, but it does seem to cause a weird glitch in cutscenes though. every now and there there is this little jittering of the video, like the video is trying to escape from the audio and it gets flicked back into sync. during normal gameplay though everything seems fine. i've only tested a couple of games so i may come back later and call myself a liar.

[kahljorn]

RED DEAD REVOLVER

[mew barios]

i took your suggestion but i haven't played it yet :o someday

today i did an overclock on a sega genesis, upping its 7mhz clock to a massive 10mhz. it's a little scarier than the usual mod cause you have to lift a leg on the cpu, but the mc68000 has some pretty big legs compared to the average modern ic so it's only kind of scary. don't mess up though. also this cpu is pretty overclock friendly, you're fairly safe to give it a little boost to cut out some slowdown without making anything act up.



i didn't even think to take a picture til i got way into it. i have a 10mhz oscillator mounted on some perfboard and all the frightening stuff is already over with



and skipping ahead a bit more i have the whole mess wrapped up in electrical tape and wired up to a dpdt. the other pole goes to a red/green led whose color will give you a hint as to what clockspeed the cpu is running at. being able to return it to its normal setting is important also since the 32x and segacd will not function properly on an overclocked cpu. i don't know if the power base converter works with it cause i don't have one :<



the switch honestly doesn't look all that great :< the sheetmetal screws holding it in dont help much either. but it's all i had on me forgive me somehow



so when i was about ready to start testing it out i realized that i don't have any kind of video output cord for a genesis which is kind of silly. i do have some 8pin din plugs though so i made one on the spot. looks great i know.



and there you have it :o subterranian action at a blistering hyperspeed.

if i have some time tomorrow i'll try to do a comparison video

[mew barios]

forgive the $15 usb video capture device quality

[Emu]

Mew, do you know anything about modding an FM synth board into a US Sega Master System? I have both models released in the US but I would like some of the games not to sound like shit when I play them.

[mew barios]

until you made this post i had no idea there were us region sms games that supported a ym-2413. i saw some blurbs about prefab pcbs but i'm sure they're all stock parts. i'd have to research it more