The Last Starfighter and Air Race emulation.

(Video from the real hardware)

















(Running in mame)

"Here's an interesting pair which never saw life outside of the Atari labs.

The Last Starfighter is of course, Atari's aborted game adaptation of the film/game within the film. If you haven't already done so, I recommend checking-out the proposal for the game.

On show here is an unfinished cave-chase sequence. You can shoot and destroy the enemy ships in the cave but that's pretty much it (there's no end to the enemies nor the cave). A dogfight sequence was also programmed and can be seen in this game footage.

The unsightly coloured-blocks are due to missing graphics data for the text and HUD :(

Air Race is a slightly more advanced prototype where you pilot a ship around a futuristic indoor race course. Very impressive-looking stuff for 1985. Perhaps too impressive as the high cost of the hardware was the main factor that kept the games from market.

Both games ran on System IV hardware (whatever happened to System III?), comprising a 68000 and a TMS32010 DSP for geometry calculations (an extra DSP was added for Air Race). Rasterization is performed by custom hardware (Hard Drivin' and later games used a software approach).

AFAIK, the hardware for these games no longer exists. There are no ROMs - we're running the binaries that were uploaded to the RAM of the development hardware. You could go as far to say that these games are MAME-exclusives :)"

-------> http://philwip.mameworld.info/

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