So over the past few months, I've been trying to find ways of making the RCA jacks that I install into consoles more secure so they don't free spin over time. What I've been doing in the past that actually works 90% of the time far as I know...is that instead of using the small lock ring washer that typically comes with RCA jacks, I use inner star washers of the right diameter to do the same thing, but with more points of contact to lock into the plastic. It also has the advantage of holding the
Seems to be lately that I'm getting in more and more Intellivision consoles that all arrive with the same similar condition. Basically what most might call a black screen when powering on the console but it is more like a dark grey screen with a few lines along the bottom of the screen of even lighter grey. Pressing the reset button does produce a full black screen that will flicker and come back to the same dark grey screen or sometimes it might do something different like an all fuscia colored
My first 7800 was received in the early 1990s...long after the company stopped making them. What games I got with it was pretty much all I ended up with. I admit I had mixed feelings about the system because I wanted to like it, I wanted to enjoy the games, but the controllers were keeping me from doing so. Often times I forced myself to play it, enduring hand cramps for a couple of hours, just to play it. The only game I found I liked using the joystick on was Ms. Pac-Man. That's it. So I p
Received my BBPro 7800 adapter today and we have some really good things and some not so good that I'm hoping can be worked out in time.
- First the good, is that the menu of course is easy to navigate working in the same manner
- This might be the fastest loading flash cart for the 7800 with the exception of the older Mateos cart
- Plays the many of the original released games without issues including both Commando and BallBlazer with properly balanced and proper sounding Pokey audio! Ni
Won't got into too many details on this other than to state up front, that I try to be as transparent as possible with the work and services I provide. As a consequence of this, mistakes can and will happen. It is just a matter of when. One such big mistake happen to me this week while installing a very expensive DCDigital setup into a clients Dreamcast. I actually had the main installation done and was ready to test. However, in order for a DC to boot up, it requires that the cooling fan and GD
The BackBit Pro multi-system flash cartridge is quite amazing in all the systems it supports and the Atari 5200 is one of the newest systems to recently be added over the past few months. One cool thing that the BBPro cart has for the 5200 side of things that other similar devices do not have, is the ability to reset the console and go back to the game folder browser without having to power cycle the console. This feature works out of the box on the 2-port model 5200s by having a selector switch
I originally did most of the work on this 5200 about 8 years ago. It was also one of the first projects I did and to be honest, the wiring work inside wasn't that great. For some time I had wanted to redo it all similar to how I redid my 7800 about a year ago but just never got around to it. Well, now that I have a new BackBit Pro flash cartridge and it was designed to allow resets back to the game menu, I felt it was time to perform a small modification to allow this function of my BackBit Pro
A quickie game review by RickR. I'm having some fun going through the old PC CD games I've kept over the years.
Game: Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver 2
My Take:
It's a very simple racing game with an interesting use of FMV technology. The game uses FMV movies for the track footage with a 3D car rendered on top of that. It works surprisingly well! There are plenty of tracks. But the game is meant more for kids and isn't very challenging. I like the ability to do "stunts"
I had a blog entry a little while ago about the desire to set up a machine to run my old collection of DOS and CD-ROM games. I successfully set up a Win 7 laptop, but hinted at something better....
Well, here we go. It's a Gateway Profile 4 all-in-one with a built-in LCD screen. Windows XP, Pentium 4 (single core), 1GB DDR memory, 40GB HD. Built in speakers, modem, network, DVD drive, etc. It needed a bit of repair, but I got it up and working.
I tried DOOM and DOOM2 first, and they
As per my prior blog post, I'm attempting to re-enjoy all the old classic 90's PC games. In that post, I mentioned using an old laptop running Windows 7. Well as luck would have it, something special has been donated to me. Check this thing out -- the Gateway Profile 4. It's a complete all-in-one Windows XP machine with a built-in LCD monitor, 3.5" floppy drive, DVD drive, speakers, Pentium 4, and....that's about all I know at this point. It may need a bit of repair. My best guess is that
Another day, another hare-brained project.
I've gotten the urge to play the multitude of old PC games from the 80's -> 00's. Think Doom, Quake, King's Quest, etc. I kept almost all of those games, especially if they were CD based. What I've found is that they mostly don't work on a Windows 10 PC without some help from DOSBox or D-fend. My idea was to set aside an old laptop exclusively for this purpose.
A friend gave me an old Dell laptop. It's a 2010 model and has Windows 7 i
What started out as a small, innocent adventure has turned into a bit of an obsession. Up until last year (2021) the thoughts of owning a Famicom system were a dream, an afterthought, a fantasy. I had an opportunity to import a junk model last year, fix it up, and get a few games I was after. The library of games I obtained hit a niche in me I had been missing from the good ol' NES years yet I didn't realize I was missing them. And the visual appearance of the Famicom did not agree with me a
I've done a video on something similar to this but here is a rundown on what I was encountering:
A 5200 sent in for services had a note stating that top fire button wouldn't work on the console. This is an issue I've run into before and in fact have created a video on it. It can be due to the controller having a broken trace of course on the flex circuit inside it. But... it can also very well be due to a faulty 4052 MUX chip inside the console located at U13 or A13 depending on the age of
As part of a large project I've been working on for over a month now, one of the situations I encounter is when a console is sent in for services that has already had another tech's hands inside it. In most cases, it might be simple repairs like replacing an IC chip or some capacitors. But now and again, I get a console sent to me that I don't always know what to expect. In those cases, there can be undesired surprises waiting for me. Here is a 2600 that I would like to show as an example of wha
I'm not going to provide a ton of pics on this one because it just isn't needed. But I had been fighting with a 7800 that I've been servicing for a total of just over 12 hours in trying to figure out why it would only play 7800 games? If you put in a 2600 game, it would only give a black screen and not much else. If I put in my Plus+ cart, I could barely make out the plus cart logo on the screen as it would flicker all over.
This told me that the 7800 was in fact switching over to 2600
After all the life changes happening as of late I finally managed to sit down and play a video game on real hardware. I decided to hook up my STe and the game I picked to play was Lotus Turbo Challenge. Granted I have not seen this game since the Genesis days so it was nice to see it again.
The first thing I noticed were the graphics. To me they seemed to be better than those on the Genesis but on par with those IBM PCs equipped with EGA graphics adapters. Those were the good ol'
YARS: RECHARGED (VCS)
Published 2022 (Atari)
Developer: Adamvision Studios, Sneakybox
Retail: $9.99
YARS: RECHARGED is a modern take on Yars' Revenge, the 1982 smash hit for the Atari 2600. Programmed by the incomparable Howard Scott Warshaw, Yars’ Revenge went on to become the best-selling original title for the platform. This is quite a legacy to live up to.
YARS: RECHARGED is available on multiple platforms, including VCS, Switch, XBOX Series X/S, XBOX One, PS4, PS5
Just wanted to give those that might be curious, an idea on part of what my project has been lately that has taken up much of my time as of late. These photos show 13 different 2600s that I recently serviced and installed UAVs into along with all the needed AV jacks installed as required by the client.
An no...these do NOT have two sets of audio outputs. The red/white on the left rear next to the 4-pin s-video mini din, is actually separate chroma/luma connections. This is handy for co
The process to install the UAV into a heavy or light sixer is pretty well known and documented. In summary you basically set the jumpers on the UAV for the 2600 setup and then solder a socket ontop of the 4050 IC chip and header pins into the UAV and plug it into the socket. Job done...
However, there is a caveat to this method that doesn't become apparently until you find yourself moving consoles around a lot. And when I mean moving the consoles, I mean as in them being packed up, stacked
I bought this kit a few months back as a pre-order and had to wait since I wanted a different colored shell. But the kit allows you to use a donor GBA mainboard from a standard GBA and essentially turn it into a small console to play your games on a modern big screen display using an SNES controller. Here are thoughts on this:
The small ribbon cable that has to be soldered to the GBA CPU is tricky and requires a lot of patience to get soldered into place. The pitch of the soldering is quite
So as the title states, I'm temporarily suspending my console services for repairs, refurbs, and upgrades until about the fall timeframe. This is to ensure I have plenty of time to work on a large project that has a strict timeline. Anyone that has already sent their systems to me will still receive their service requests and will take priority to get them done quickly. But for others, I'd rather hold off and have them wait because I'm not comfortable with my client's systems sitting at the ITC
Magneto Bugs is a one player, dot munching, maze game. The objective of the game is to get as many of the white dots as possible while avoiding the bugs in the maze. As you move you leave behind red dots that can attract the bugs. This game is played with a joystick controller.
I have spent my weekend trying out this game along with two others I picked up. I kept coming back to this one. While it might look like a Pac-Man clone it is far from that game. The back of the package me
Oh man. Where to start? I reckon I should start at the beginning. Star Raiders, as any Atari gamer would know, is the iconic first-person space action adventure game published by Atari in 1979 on their Atari 8-bit home computers and later porting it over to the 5200 and 2600 game consoles. It is the game that defined that genre which others would follow. Star Raiders II (the published one and the one that did not get released) took the basics and attempted to improve on them. Solaris for t
