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Replacing the BIOS on the Book 8088
Imagine: a CGA laptop, in a modern form factor, but with a classic Intel 8088 (or even a NEC V20) inside. Throw in expansions for an ISA bus and an OPL3 sound card, and you’ve got a vintage computer afficionado’s dream, right? Well, for one thing: they stole the BIOS. Let’s fix that.
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Bringing the Arcade Home, in 1984: The SG-1000 Arcade
The SG-1000. Somehow, we’re on the third blog post this year on this little white box. In part one, we RGB modded it, but then decided that it wasn’t good enough. In part two, we built a cartridge, and complained more about RGB. And now, we move on to something completely different: the SG-1000-based arcade hardware! But I don’t have one of those. If only there was something I could do about that… (Plus: a little more complaining about RGB)
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Making Every Ball Count with a Pachinko Data Counter and... React?
So, you decided that after reading my post on hanemono, you had to get a modern pachinko machine for yourself. And now, after spending some time finding the sweet spot on the shooter and the perfect timing for the waving arms, you realize something: there’s no score. Even Pachi-Com has that! Well, the score in a gambling game is in your wallet (and will inevitably be negative). But if you’re playing for fun? What can be done then? And can you work Javascript into it?
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Timing Matters on the Neo Geo
The other day I did a long drive for a business trip, which meant a lot of listening to music. And that’s when I wondered something about a CD I’ve had for some time. Let’s look at some Neo Geo music. And maybe learn something I didn’t know about the AES before.
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SG-1000 Smörgåsbord! Cartridges and RGB
Did you think I could leave well enough alone with the SG-1000 II? Of course not. There were some follow-up questions raised by the last blog post, so I’d like to take a look. Also, we’ll build a cartridge to allow for some more in-depth testing. And some more thoughts about a way forward for RGB, too.
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A Review of the RGB Blaster: No Mod, No Problem
It seems like I’m covering krikzz’s products a bunch now, with the Turbo EverDrive Pro and now this. But it’s not my fault he keeps making interesting things! Here, we see something particularly interesting: the RGB Blaster, an affordable device that promises Famicom users RGB video directly from the cartridge slot. How is this possible? How does it work? And I’ll say in advance, this one surprised me: things I expected to work didn’t, and things I didn’t expect to work did.
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Loading screens? On my Super Nintendo? It's more likely than you think!
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was, in many ways, the most advanced game console of its era, featuring 128kiB of work RAM, tilemap scaling and rotation, a massive color palette of 15-bit colors, translucency, flexible graphics modes, DMA, HDMA, and many other acronyms. But SNES gamers also know that it had an Achilles’ heel: speed. The pokey S-CPU wasn’t always the fastest kid on the block, and with SlowROM, it can be even slower than that. Let’s take a look at one particular game that runs slowly, Fatal Fury, and see if we can speed it up a tad.
