Yesterware

From time to time I like to fire up my disc based systems to keep the grease viscous and make sure everything is in good working order.  Well last night I fired up my Model 2 Sega CD and discovered that all was not well. The disk tried to spin up and this horrible grinding and scraping noise came from the drive.  After several attempts the disk finally loaded, but it was painful and I shut it off immediately to prevent damage.  I managed to do some damage getting the silly thing apart, but everything is back in working order now. Problem: Grinding The grinding noise from a Sega CD Model 2 is evidently a pretty common issue.  There's a laser limit switch which the system uses to tell that the laser assembly has reached the center of the CD spindle.  Over time this switch stops working as desired.  The switch is essentially just two thin strips of copper inside a plastic shell.  When the sled touches the switch, the two strips are supposed to make contac...

Short story long, most 80's and 90's era game consoles used off-the-shelf integrated circuits for video/picture processing, and most of those integrated circuits generated RGB as well as composite video.  As a result, even when the console manufacturers didn't bother to connect the RGB lines, RGB could still be enabled by tapping the RGB lines from the IC directly and connecting an amplifier to drive them.  The best example of this is the Turbo Duo/PC Engine Duo. When it comes to the NES/Famicom, things become a bit more interesting.  Nintendo used a custom "PPU" chip to drive video, and as a result, RGB is not exposed, and can't simply be "tapped and amplified". Enter the NESRGB.  Rather than trying to tap RGB from somewhere on the board, the NESRGB actually hijacks the entire PPU chip. You literally have to desolder the PPU from the board and place a device in between it and the system.  I mean, look at this thing, it's crazy. NES RGB Mod - the...