Retro Gaming, Projects, Repairs and Blog
Looks like I can add the Philips CDi 450 model to my list of consoles that can be RGB modded.
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Results are very good. Click on a picture or here to see the work on this customers console.
Hope you enjoy CDi in RGB George 🙂
I’ve been looking for a cheap RGB Scart to HDMI adapter for some time. Its already been proven that most of the cheap units on Amazon or eBay are crap and don’t in-fact support RGB or resolutions down to 240i/p. So I got a recommendation to try this one. Elephas Scart to HDMI and can be found on eBay and Amazon.
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Converter-ELEPHAS-Adapter-Support-Set-top-Black/dp/B00RMMGOGS
It actually works quite well for the low price, but does have a little lag. Picture quality ranges from Ok to quite good, with some of the best results on the MegaDrive and Neo Geo Consoles. Its no replacement or a OSSD, but not bad at all.
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It certainty allows for clear stable screenshots and for testing purposes. I don’t I could recommend it for extended play sessions with the lag. I’ll do a full review later.
Its time for my monthly report. What Have I been up to this month….
Well firstly I managed to get time to visit the new Arcade Club in Leeds. If you’ve not heard of Arcade Club, its basically a perfect place to find retro arcade machines, and play as long as you like. All machines are on free play, you just pay to get in! Loads of amazing games from the 80’s, 90’s, through to some modern ones. Well worth checking out.
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Regarding work on customers machines, Its not been a very productive month. I just never seem to have any time available, but a few jobs were complete and sent out.
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This was a full Mega CD recap for a customer. He also asked for a region free bios, new drive opening belt and laser replacement.
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Next we have another PC Engine Duo for a recap and RGB mod. All looking great now.
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And there was also another PSIO switchboard to install. The 3DO USB installation covered below, and Saturn with the full table of mods.
That’s about it for June. Its going the a tight month in July to get any work done with Holidays and weekends away, but I try 🙂
Just to let everyone know, I’m fully booked again for repairs/upgrades. By all means please email for quotes but I won’t be able to accommodate more work for July and August.
Last week I finished working a beautiful Japanese Sega Saturn for a customer. He wanted the full list of modifications for this stunningly mint condition unit.
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Click the image or Here to see what was done.
Page created with more details of the MNEMO 3DO FZ-10 USB drive installation.
This was commission for a customer to install the USB drive for 3DO. If you would like one of these drives installing please get in contact.
Click the image or here for more information.
Due to popular request, 8Bitplus is now on Facebook! Please like and follow my page.
https://www.facebook.com/8BitplusServices
During the last couple of months I’ve been playing around with the idea of building a DOS based retro PC. Now I’ve finally gone and made a start.
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My aim is to have a good, fast, DOS/Win98 compatible PC for games. Nothing too fast or fancy. I also wanted to keep the price down. Unlike some other projects, this should be cheap.
I settled on a board, CPU and memory combo from eBay. The motherboard is a Lucky Star 5I-VX2B. CPU is a Pentium 100mhz without mmx, and it came with 32Mb of 72pin SIMM RAM.
I was tempted to go with a highend 486 biuld, but this was a good speed/value price-point. The motherboard chipset is also new enough to work with large drives (by that I mean over 8Gb) so no worries about fitting a large game collection on the HDD. 60Gb should be fine. Win98/DOS7.1 allows for FAT32 and removes the old 2gb partition restrictions. DOS7.1 is actually just as good as the older versions when setup correctly. Windows 98SE is just for a few Widows only games that need it.
I’ll upload more pics, videos and info as this project progresses.
Its been a funny month. I’ve had lots of time, but for some reason it seems hard to get any work done. It sounds like a problem, but actually I’ve been working on couple of projects for myself. More on that another time, what did I actually get done….
One customer from Sweden sent me a Sega Mega CD mk1. it was not powering up, and suffered from the usual capacitor leakage. He also wanted a region Free bios, new laser and drive opening belt.
Next up was a very nice PC Engine DUO. This also needed all the caps replacing and a RGB video mod installing. Sounds much better now.
Lastly I’ve had multiple PlayStation’s in for PSIO switchboard installs.
I’m getting quite a lot of PSIO install requests now that the units are selling quicker from the supplier https://ps-io.com/
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I’ve taken a little timeout this weekend to play with my Amiga 1200 Tower. Recently I got a very cool Apollo 1260 Accelerator card with a 80Mhz clocked Freescale 68060 CPU. One downside to the A1260 over the Blizzard line of cards was that they only shipped with a single RAM socket, limiting memory to just 32mb. This is still fine for most setups, but I always like to extract the max potential when possible.
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The reason for this limitation was to allow the card to fit correctly in the original A1200 wedge case. A mounting point is present on the card for an additional 72 pin SIMM socket. After I tracked one down with the help of a fellow Amibay member, it was very easy to install. Now I have 64mb of ram with a pair of matching 32mb simms.
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I also got to install the Elbox FastATA MkV controller that arrived recently. Replacing my original MK1 16bit version gives a big speed increase to HDD access. I’ll do some benchmarks later..
More to come soon.