Job lot of broken boards

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Apr 282011
 

Got a box of broken boards from a guy on the Jamma+ forums.
Included are:
Rastan Saga – white screen
Hot Shots Tennis – constantly resets
Mortal Kombat – messed up controls
Seibu Soccer (Seibu) – no sound, very low
Karate Champ – non jamma pinout, looks clean though
Taito F3 Motherboard – no game to test it
X-Men Vs Streetfighter – Working
Sega STV Titan Motherboard + Die Hard Arcade – games dont load
Two Crude – all the ROMs are missing
Street Fighter 2 – bootleg – intermittently working
Another Street Fighter 2 bootleg – Dead, all roms and rams are dead, not worth fixing

The X-Men vs Streetfighter board is fully working and even has a working battery.
The SF2 bootleg is intermittently working, looks like the M5 bootleg.
All the other boards have the fault the guy stated.
Im pretty pleased with this lot.

 Posted by at 5:17 pm

SEGA Naomi super capacitor

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Apr 252011
 

The Naomi has a 0.1F super capacitor on board labelled C29, in between the button cell battery and the 8 pin DIP labelled 315-6188. This capacitor is a usual suspect on a broken board as it is prone to leaking and damaging the traces to the serial EEPROM. If you own a Naomi board (not sure if it applies to the Naomi 2) you should check the condition of this cap and replace it.
The capacitors can be ordered from the links below:
CPC
Farnell
Mouser

 Posted by at 4:42 pm

Retrobright attempt

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Apr 222011
 

After reading a simple guide by 1200xl over on the RCM forum, I decided to give this retrobrighting thing a go.
Retrobrighting is a process of removing the yellowing that tends to occur on old plastics. I’ll not go into the science behind it cause i don’t really know it.
As a test subject I used the casing of one of my Fluke 9010a pods.

I ordered some peroxide online and this Saturday was the ideal day to try as to make this work, sunlight is required.
Apply a nice thick coating of the peroxide to the washed down plastic and wrap it in clingfilm, then place it in the sun for a few hours turning it every so often to get all sides.
Probably should mention that rubber gloves are a must for this job as the peroxide doesn’t feel good on bare skin!
After its been roasted, remove the clingfilm and wash off the peroxide and let the plastic dry.

Pleased with the results for a first attempt and have since don’t the body of the Fluke with better results.
I was advised to apply a UV treatment after this as the yellowing will return but at this point I haven’t got any. I’ll get some ordered though.
Will no doubt have more stuff to do in the future.

16bit ROMs byte swapped

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Apr 132011
 

Just a note to anyone attempting to burn ROMs that are available online.
This mainly concerns the ROMs for 16bit systems such as the Amiga, Atari ST, Megadrive etc.
The ROMs available for use with emulators, like the Kickstart ROMs for use in WinUAE, have all been byteswapped. If you are going to burn these into an EPROM then they needs to be byteswapped. This can be done using many different tools. I use my own drag and drop program to do this quickly but I know Hex Workshop (and probably most other hex editors) can do this too.

More random finds

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Mar 262011
 

Nothing much to write about recently so I’ll share some more blasts from the past found by my mate in his bindle of retro goodness.
First up, the Iomega Ditto


Between 250MB – 10GB of storage, depending on which tape you bought. It used the parallel port to send/receive data with speeds of up to 1MB/sec
Pretty amazing stuff at the time. I used to have the Iomega Zip drive which was 100meg discs. At the time my HDD was 120meg so it was pretty useful.

Next up, the Elsa 3D wireless shutter glasses

I know absolutely nothing about these things. Never seen them before and will probably never get a chance to try them out as they require a CRT monitor. Probably something similar to those dodgy 3D glasses they brought out for the Master System though. Bring on the headaches!

 Posted by at 2:26 pm
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