133MHz's awesome blog.

Not alot of news at the moment so i'm just gonna reroute you to 133MHz's extremely cool blog where he posts alot of fun retro tech articles.

http://133fsb.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/famicom-compatible-printer-port-interface/

http://133fsb.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/sega-light-phaser-to-atari-xg-1-adapter/

BrokenLizards Saturn floppy drive SD adapter

"I have been very busy with work and have found few opportunities to work on this project. However, I have made some progress. In a couple of months, I may be able to dedicate more time to completing the design.

The project's goals have evolved over time. Presently, the project consists of two parts, developing a replacement Sega Saturn floppy drive that uses SD cards instead of floppy disks and creating an adapter allowing a Sega Saturn floppy drive to be attached to a computer. The final design will be compatible with the official software.

At the moment, the project is not ready for public testing.

Implementing the SD card protocol - 85%
Hardware design - 25%
Schematic of Sega Saturn floppy drive – 40%
Documenting the serial backup device communication protocol – 60%"

http://segaxtreme.net/community/topic/16648-communication-port-information/page__view__findpost__p__156518

IDE adapter for 3DO

Heres a cool project I stumbled over, it's a russian guy whos made a ide adapter for the 3DO. The whole page is in russian so google translate will have to make do but theres alot of nice pictures :D.

"In February 2009, I began to develop this device.
Because no one could create such a device, I do not was sure that I can,
and therefore did not once again stir the people. (As some are doing: D)

Most of the time left to reverse engineering and theoretical part.
The most difficult thing was to find a way to connect, providing 100% compatibility.
P ervym thing I did was look inside her bus XBUS.
Then dismantled and its Protocol and the command system of the native CD drive.
These searches and research is progressing very hard and looked like searching a needle in a haystack. "

Currently the adapter only works with fz-10, but he plans to support Goldstar(GDO-202) and FZ-1 soon.

http://3do-renovation.ru/IDE_for_3DO.htm

Lethal Weapon 3 SMS prototype music.

"1992 wasn't a great year for movies, and one of the not great movies from that year was Lethal Weapon 3.

Probe Software were apparently speculating on making a game based on it (let me guess... a poor quality platformer?) and again commissioned Jeroen Tel to write a soundtrack for it. Thanks to forum member Kimuji, we got hold of the code and now you can hear great chip music that has been lost for 18 years!"

http://www.smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12422

Tree sap decapping :)

"I dissolved the plastic casing in acetone and tried sanding down the epoxy blob which didn’t work real well so I started looking for a chemical solution. Apparently people don’t like giving out Nitric Acid so I had to find an alternative. I found a dead site describing using Rosin which is basically just tree sap. I tracked some down at the local musical instrument store since violinists use it for what not.

After boiling a smartcard in it for about 20 minutes and dissolving the residue with acetone the chip came out beautifully clean and undamaged. I glued it down to a microscope slide to have something solid to work with, it really is incredibly small. Since the Microscope I was using was 30 years old I couldn’t get any decent pictures so I’m gonna try finding a better one."

http://s3cu14r.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/boiling-chips-in-tree-sap/

The idea of something as archaic as tree sap being used to decap chips just sounds awesome :)

64DD Ipl gameshark dumping utility.

The 64DD ipl dump is easy to find but the tool for actually dumping it is very hard to find so the only reason i'm posting this is so that people who google for it will actually find it.

"### What's this? ###
This is a patch for GameShark Ulitiles that can dump 64DD IPLROM.
Please apply patch to "N64 Version 3 Utilities Hi-Res Patch".
download at http://doc.kodewerx.org/

This IPL rom are dumped from retail 64DD.
using GameShark and Hacked GS Utility."

Here is the japanese site of the guy who released the tool back in 2009 http://nekokabu.s7.xrea.com/
A mirror of the .zip incase his site vanishes: ipldmp_patch.zip

UFE - SD/MMC floppy drive emulator.

"A number of SD/MMC floppy emulator projects existed around the time I started working on UFE. These worked well, but there were limitations. The most notable limitation was poor support for the Amiga computers, including lack of write support. In addition, the user interfaces of the existing floppy emulators were not practical. They were either based on a small LCD screen and a few buttons, or they had external connections such as joystick and video ports. Generally, major case modding was necessary.

The underlying philosophy behind the UFE design is that it should support a just few computers, but it should support them as well as possible. The host computer’s keyboard should be used for controlling the floppy emulator. The video output should be overlaid on top of the host computer’s video output. Read and write operations must be fully supported. All these features make UFE an ideal drop-in replacement for a real floppy drive."

http://retromaster.wordpress.com/ufe/

Fm Towns tech demo.

Heres a neat tech demo for Fm towns that I found on a disc. The background song reminds me of early Prodigy songs or UK/Eu electronica from that era so it's a bit odd to find this stuff in a fm towns demo that I think didn't really have much to do with Europe :).

Heat is killing the sk3n3 and Dragon 32 homebrew.

This awful heat wave is making the internet deader than ever so theres really not much activity, but Ciaran Anscomb has released some tech demo homebrew for the old Dragon 32 powerhouse!.

http://www.6809.org.uk/dragon/demo/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64

Rastersofts 3DO homebrew demo

Charles doty has released this small demo for the 3do, the archive also includes some tools:

BMP to 3DO Image
BMP to 3DO Cel
BMP to 3DO Anim

Download: http://sharebee.com/7cd6fbaf

"I finished the demo, and it runs fine on a real 3DO. It should work correctly in either NTSC or PAL modes. I couldn't test the PAL version though. The start button will restart the demo, and the directional pad will move the alien"

http://3do.cdinteractive.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=16375&highlight=#16375

Fast Striker is released.

This ambitious neogeo mvs project has finally been released and it costs a whopping 459 euro but I guess it's not exactly cheap to produce the carts.


http://www.faststriker.com/index.html

Charles Doty's 3DO devkit for windows.

"I'm now setup to do 3DO development on Windows. Previously, 3DO had to be done on a classic Mac or an emulator. I've released a set of tools, headers, and libs and an example project. 3DO development requires one of the ARM SDTs (ARM SDT 2.11a, 2.50, and 2.51 have been tested)."

3DO devkit header, libraries, and support programs:
3DODev.rar
Example program:
3DOBounceExample.rar

Source: http://3do.cdinteractive.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=16327&highlight=#16327

Super Mario Bros ported to Megadrive/Genesis.

"After read the title, maybe some ones thought "WTF means a so strange title?", but I'm sure all the games lovers recognized inmediatly the first 3 letters as from Super Mario Bros, the classic of the classics. Well, that is exactly what is this, a complete port of the Super Mario Bros game from NES to our lovely Genesis.
Of course, some people can say: "oh, sure, this is awsome , well done on copying a game that is ported to at least ALL the consoles in existence", but the amazing of this port in particular is the fact that I used an automatic conversor to "translate" from the 6502 asm (NES processor) into the M68K asm. In fact, despite the HUGE optimisation I did only to fit the game in less that 64kb (I was thinking to create a LAKABAJO version... maybe in the future, when I build mine ), at least the 75% of the code is still untouched after the translation.
Of course, I nedeed to create from scrath the I/O function, which emulates "on the fly" the NES I/O function, since ALL THE ORIGINAL DATA IS STILL HERE. Also, if you check the memory usage, only $800 bytes are used (000-7FF, like in the original NES!!)"

Download the game here
and check out the original post of it here: http://devster.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=dev&action=display&thread=613

USB enabled gameboy camera mod.

"Recently a few of my mods have been called into question regarding their complexity, rather than seeing this as a negative i saw this as a challenge to do better. So I have been working on a few more complex mods.

First I gotta thank nitro2k01 for sticking by me on this project, there were a few times when I was going to give up on this, but staying up late, bouncing ideas off each other made this project happen

So this is my USB enabled camera, it is a Gameboy Camera with its ROM chip replaced with a flashable chip, and a USB programmer wedged in there too.

What’s the point? Well now the camera works like a real digital camera, i can plug it straight into the computer and dump the saves without a gameboy or a programmer. If littleFM works i can put the camera software on there and other roms too like LSDJ. If I can work out how the camera part works then i could make some interesting home brew software which uses the camera."

---> http://nex.gg8.se/modblog/2010/06/usb-enabled-gameboy-camera/