hymiechode

bought mine at Kroger's black fri (just went in to find dinner) for $24.99.

they also make illuminated sanwa/happs with led + resistor built in - might work good for mod above. i think you can mod a generic happ to use a click/on click/off switch (like in your pc tower).

i bought the pause kit. i added a bilateral switch (4066) in order to use a sanwa button for the pause button. i figure if you're going to have a pause button on the system, it should be big & momentary (like the master system 2). i am currently working on programming a pic to activate a "pause" text screen when system is paused. just a b&w text & mute sound when pause button is pushed. i also noticed when the 6502 execution is resumed, it skips a frame or two. i think it happens because the cpu resumes but it has to re-draw the entire tv frame over, so the picture doesn't show until next tv vblank even though actual execution begins at next instruction (just my guess from observations). i hope this behavior doesn't cause anyone to loose thier last live in a bad spot. just remember to pause a slow spot in the game. also need to work on good debounce for sanwa. i noticed if paused/unpaused rapidly, the cpu resets. not good. ultimately i want to make a daughter board that would have the av/svid (with balance control for stereo sound) mod + pause + rapid fire all on one pcb with a easy way to mount (probably with standoffs) & a custom connector panel for back.

i bought one couple days ago. love the joysticks! wish i had'em years ago. i heard about the system being "based around compact flash"? i know about the bootleg with the sd & pre release rumors of FB3 having sd slot. naturally, when i first bought mike i opened it up to take a peek inside (if you use a razor, patience, & a little hot breath, you can safety remove the sticker covering the 5th screw & replace the sticker without damage). the motherboard is far less modder friendly than FB2. no test pads or silkscreen. there's the arm cpu, what appears to be the BIOS rom, a blank spot for another prom, & a soic flash rom (presumably where the game bins reside). I've seen similar layouts on other pnp boards. the bins might be hacked for compatibility or contain special header info. i don't have the ability to rip the data. but the binaries usually can be found by comparing/grep'ing them to existing rom dumps. that being said it is probably possible to reflash any set of roms to the system, but how cool would it be to use a memory card to upgrade games / run homebrews. a cf card is parallel & functions like ata. i think it could be possible to add a cf (perhaps with addition of a mcu) to one of the BIOS rom spots or the flash rom spot. has anyone looked in to this? I'm kinda at a dead end without being able to get a bios & rom dump. also need to know which arm cpu is in there.