Yesterware

The FM Towns PC was one of the very first 32-bit gaming platforms.  Its visual design is a striking portrait of everything that was cool about Japanese technology of the late 80's and early 90's. Ever since getting a first glance of the futuristic gray PC in Electronic Gaming Monthly #4, I have wanted one. I must have read this page out of the magazine fifty times: The article that inspired my obsession with the FM Towns when I was a kid. About 11 years ago someone offered a broken one for sale on Ebay.  IIRC, it was just the PC itself, without a keyboard or monitor.  When I reached out to him to ask about the potential of repairing it, the seller did not want to let me buy the broken one.  He was an Australian living or visiting Japan, and he was evidently trying to make a little money on the side by selling what were common items in Japan but rarities in the rest of the world.  He told me he'd get back with me when he had sourced a complete and f...

What is a 3DO FZ-10 USB Host Controller? [UPDATED] [UPDATED July 2020 - added some images of the installed ribbon in response to requests, updated the link to MNEMO's new website and made a couple of minor cosmetic corrections.] If you know what an "Everdrive" is, that's basically what this works out to being for the 3DO.  This type of device is most commonly referred to as an Optical Drive Emulator (ODE).  It installs into a 3DO game console in place of its CD drive which allows you to load games from a USB device.  The main advantages to this are that there are no moving parts to wear out, and more importantly you can have the entire library of 3DO games loaded onto the console at once. Overview Back in June of 2018, I wrote about a 3DO FZ-10 that I "rescued".  It had a broken latch, and literal dirt and dead bugs in its innards.  The CD drive spindle was seized, and the power and access lenses were missing. My main motivation in purchasing an "as-is...

Deal with Atari hardware long enough, and sooner or later you're going to come across "Best Electronics" (http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/).  While I haven't done a ton of research on the company, I gather that at one point they were a (or possibly THE) official Atari repair shop.  When Atari called it quits from the gaming biz, Best ended up with most, if not all, of the leftover stock of systems, games, accessories, repair parts and miscellany. The first thing you're likely to notice is that browsing their website is like time-traveling to the early nineties.  Seriously, just fire it up and you'll see what I mean.  Monolithic old-school HTML pages complete with in-line gifs, center-justified spacing, funky font color transitions, and yes, a hit counter at the bottom of the page!  The whole thing is disorganized and difficult to wrap your brain around, but kind of fun if you aren't in a hurry to find useful information. Some pricing is available on the...

A little over a year ago, my ViewEra V220D-B monitor started struggling to wake up out of power-save mode.  At first it would take a few seconds to come on, then it would take minutes and pretty soon it simply wouldn't come on at all.  This a classic case of spent capacitors. According to my NewEgg order history I bought that monitor 11 years ago in 2007.  It doesn't even go up to 1080p.  Over the years it ended up front-ending secondary and tertiary computers that I barely used.  When it finally quit altogether, I stashed it in a corner and it stayed there for at least a year gathering dust. It's customary when an old monitor goes out to use that event as an excuse to buy a new one with better features and chuck the old one in the bin.  Given that and the age of this thing I think the odds against someone stumbling across this post and finding it useful are astronomical.  But I've never been a fan of wastefulness, and if a perfectly serviceable bench...

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...