MAME Cabinet
January 4, 2007
So… My MAME cabinet is working great again. It’s at the point where I just have to finish the physical clean-up, resoldering of some connections in the control panel, and photography. As
Category games
January 3, 2007
It works!
(Click for more moblog photos…)
1) I have Founder’s Breakfast Stout.
2) My MAME cabinet (photo gallery retired) is working again, this time running completely from Compact Flash. I played Bubble Bobble!
As soon as I figure out why the sound card keeps failing (it’ll just cease to work suddenly, for no apparent reason) and fix that, everything will be good. Oh, and once I get all the controls / display stuffs sorted out. But that’s not too difficult.
I just bid on another card on eBay. I think it’s the card failing, so it’s best to replace it.
Expect more on the MAME cabinet soon. There will likely be photos and a write-up in the projects portion of nuxx.net.
Also, today I:
· Smoked a power supply after replacing the fuse inside. I guess more than the fuse was bad.
· Diagnosed a motherboard bearing a rather nice AMD Athlon XP 1700+ chip as no longer powering on. I hope I can figure out why, as it was working fine a few months ago. (It’s not the power supply.) This was to be the board in the MAME cabinet. Fortunately I still had my trusty nine year old Abit BH-6, formerly of many different computers including bornslippy.nuxx.net (photo gallery retired). Seems to be working well enough with MAME.
· Ate Kraft Macaroni and Cheese w/ curry powder for dinner.
· Played with Compact Flash to IDE adapters, which work great.
· Installed DOS a few times.
· Ate an enormous salad for lunch which had completely too much blue cheese on it.
· Learned that RAMDRIVE.SYS RAMdisks can’t be more than 32MB.
· Found that AdvanceMAME runs horribly from flash unless you turn on write caching. (Not sure of why yet.)
DS lite and MIDIbox SID-LC
June 2, 2006
Nintendo DS lite vs. Nintendo DS
(Click for more DS lite photos…)
Well, the photos of my Nintendo DS lite (photo gallery retired) are up. Like the phoot above there are also comparisons to the original DS. The screen is amazingly better. There’s almost no comparision… Oh, and the form of the device itself is much improved. The new one is so, so, so much nicer.
Also, last night I got that SID-based synth (which will hopefully become the for-sale MIDIbox SID-LC) to make its first sounds. At first I made this sample which has some background noise due to what I think is a bad SID. So, I then replaced the SID with a newer version one, supplied it with appropriate power, and got it to work. However, before I applied the proper firmware there was all manner of nifty glitchyness going on. Listen to this file right here for all the wonderful glitch: midibox_sid_first_-2.mp3
That was made by triggering a MIDIbox SID-LC prototype (stuffed with a MOS 8580R5) with an x0xb0x set to ‘Random’, occasionally switching back to keyboard mode and hitting a few keys.
Nintendo DS lite
June 1, 2006
Pile of Nintendo DS lites at Meijer in Waterford, MI(Click for more moblog photos…)
After some calling around,
I think I’ll wait until I get home to open it, though… I want to take step-by-step photos of the unboxing. For some reason.
Now, what to do with my Mario Kart DS…
Oh, and yes. That is
To explode, of course.
May 21, 2004
Thanks to
Basically, you pilot a bomb that must be detonated to create chains of explosions. There are some bonus bits you can pick up to increase your score, speed up the game, etc. It’s almost like a combination shooter / puzzle game. Absolutely wonderful.
Download it here, and be sure to download the replay files here (light mode) and here (heavy mode). There’s good play technique that can be learned from the demos (waiting for the pink / quicken blocks to speed up the game, etc).
Very, very good.
My highest score thus far, on heavy mode, is 1045960 points, 80 chain, and no spare bombs left.
HDD for PS2
January 19, 2003
Okay, so I did it. I put a hard drive in my PS2. And guess what? Nothing happened. The disk spun up and there would be occasional activity on the IDE bus, but nothing beyond that. I was hoping there’d at least be a new menu option or something that showed up. Oh well…
Just FYI in case anyone feels like playing with it, a Quantum 840MB disk fit in there perfectly. I would have tried something bigger, but that is all I had to play with. See the previous post for information on the Maxtor disk.
PS2 HDD
January 19, 2003
Hrm… So I got a Playstation 2 network adapter. The curious thing is, it seems that there are connectors for an IDE hard drive as part of the adapter. It doesn’t fit a Western Digital hard drive that I have, but maybe another? Possibly Quantum… They seem to make a lot of disks for OEM applications like Tivos, etc.
UPDATE: This picture make it look like a Maxtor disk along with a bit of hardware to mount the drive more securely. I just need to see if I have a Maxtor disk around anywhere…
UPDATE PART DEUX: Okay, I should do a little more digging next time. The PS2 Linux dmesg output from this page indicates the following:
PlayStation 2 IDE DMA driver
hda: Maxtor 4D040H2, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0xb4000040-0xb4000047,0xb400005c on irq 41
hda: Maxtor 4D040H2, 38146MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=4863/255/63, (U)DMA
So… Yeah. It is a Maxtor. And since the PS2 Linux kit ships with the same network adapter, all I need to do is find one of these drives. Or any old Maxtor. I wonder what the machine will look like then… Or how the disk needs to be formatted for games to support it… It’d be nice to have the QCast Tuner also support playing from a local disk. It’d be nice to be able to play off of both the network and the local disk. Or imagine if there was support to rip audio right into the local disk… Mmm… I wonder how fast the PS2 would actually be at doing audio compression?