Projects

Hello. Its been a while since I last posted an update. We moved into our new house in the middle of February. The house had been empty for 4 years and is completely outdated, so we have a huge amount of work to do.

During this lock-down I’ve been able to start planning my new workshop. I’ve marked out the area I should be able to build in. It gives me an area of 19 x 8 foot. That should be plenty for a decent sized workshop and space for my arcade machines. The building will be breeze-block construction, and too keep the cost down, I’ll be building it myself.

I’ve also been brushing up on my Sketchup skills and done some renders of how it might look.

To get a better sense of the space I wanted accurate models of my 3 arcade machines, but couldn’t find the exact ones in the 3D warehouse. I finally found a model of the Naomi Universal, but not for the Electrocoin Neo-Geo or my Scud Race cabinet. So I made them in Sketchup too 🙂

So As you can see, its a long way to completion. I need to remove the old greenhouse foundations first, level the ground and get a new foundation ready. This project needs to be done alongside the house renovation when I can afford it. Until its build I have nowhere to work and understandably I still cannot accept and work requests. I’ll post more updates as the work starts.

I’ve finished working on my mini Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo Raspberry Pi consoles.

Click here to see how they work. Both are based on the Raspberry Pi 3B and running RetroPie. Now I have a new way to play my favourite Sega and Nintendo games over Christmas.

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.

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.