Yesterware

When choosing my "modern" TV, I did a lot of research and comparison and wound up with the very excellent KDL-70R550A which has so far supported everything I have thrown at it.  Every console via the OSSC just works, every scaling mode, every oddball resolution, every janky sync signal, everything. A few weeks ago, I installed an NESRGB on an NES for a friend.  He was using an OSSC to scale it to his PC monitor and a Panasonic Plasma, but could never get better than 2x.  He wasn't terribly concerned as those were stopgaps until his "real" gaming TV arrived.  Unfortunately the TV he bought couldn't tolerate the NES's irregular sync signal.  Fiddling with OSSC settings made it possible to display in 5x mode, but it would randomly lose sync. Some Background Others have analyzed and explained it far better than I, but the gist of the problem my friend was having was because of a design flaw in the original NES/SNES video output.  CRT televisions were cons...

Backstory Everything I do has a little story to go with it.  If you just want to know how I fixed the Squeal issue, skip to "Resolution" below. I bought my 32X brand new when Sega had given up on the platform and the stores were liquidating them.  I think I paid about $30 for it, then took the free copy of Virtual Fighter out of the box, went across the street to a used game shop that hadn't yet caught on and sold Virtual Fighter for $35.  So essentially I got paid $5 to take the 32X off of the store's hands. A Tale of 2 32X's It's probably not a wonder then that I didn't have very high expectations of the 32X, and simply dismissed the video distortion and audio squeal it introduced.  I legitimately thought it worked that way.  At the time I only had a Genesis Model 1, so I misplaced the spacer that it comes with for use with the Genesis Model 2.  About 3 years ago I went to a local used game shop and bought a whole 32X for $25 just to get the stupid space...

The 3DO isn't a great platform.  It's also not a particularly bad one either.  I've only ever met one person who professed nostalgia for it (specifically the game "Twisted").  There aren't really any "killer app" games for it.  Supposedly its version of Need For Speed is superior to the Playstation version in some way (I never bothered investigating the rumor).  There are a handful of interesting games.  Star Control II, a couple of Wing Commander titles, "D", etc... Regardless it's still a great piece of gaming history and represents an alternate view of the way things may have gone.  Comparing it to the other consoles of its time, the best way I can sum it up is to say that the 3DO iterated where the Playstation and Saturn innovated.  Like the Atari Jaguar, the 3DO was more of an extension of the 16-bit arc rather than the start of a new 32-bit trajectory. I'm in the process of getting ODE's for all of the platforms I can, an...

When I set up my current retro gaming area around 2013, I grouped the Dreamcast with the rest of the consoles of the generation it kicked off - the Playstation 2, the Gamecube and the XBOX.  That particular area has a dedicated CRT TV which natively supports all of the best resolutions those consoles have to offer.  Most games of the era max out at 480p, and all of those consoles have official support for 480p via Component/YPbPr except the Dreamcast.  The Dreamcast is absolutely capable of it, but until this week, all of my attempts to get 480p Component video out of the Dreamcast could be measured in degrees of failure.  If you just want to know how I finally did it, skip to the end. In the middle is the journey. 1999 The Sega Dreamcast was born during the earliest days of the transition from Standard Definition TeleVision (SDTV) to High Definition TeleVision (HDTV).  DVD was an up-and-coming technology which was driving the adoption of cleaner analog video te...

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...