papa_november

Are any of these still available?

Any chance of more FinalGROM99s before the end of the month?

It's not too difficult to convert an older PC analog joystick to work with the CoCo. I've done a couple.

ebay the bastard, tube swaps are a thing and arcade people would love to use it as a test monitor

I did not know any of that! I went straight for the Control Panel beep to see if it was working. Further testing indicates that it does play music/sfx from applications, as well as the TransWarp startup whoosh (which plays too soon to be heard on a Framemeister setup). Thank you for the tip. I wonder how hard would it be to mix in the regular Apple II beep channel. It'd have to be intercepted off the board with a clip probe or soldered wire or two I guess. This is the mod I did. The audio backplane connector is coincidentally a perfect fit for the DB-19 port hole.

I meant to ask if it mutes the audio output from the internal speaker when you plug an audio cable into the audio out connector on the card. I suspect the motherboard connector could be reversed, but if it is it must have been wired the wrong way around on mine - I have mine plugged in in the proper orientation. Can anyone post a photo of how it's plugged in on their working setup? If mine is plugged in right and I reverse it, I'm terrified of screwing up my motherboard.

For what it's worth, I changed the sound jacks on mine to connectors so I could hook it up to a cool back-panel connector plate I found and I can't seem to get any sound out of it. Still need to troubleshoot further. For people with working ones: does it mute the internal speaker when something is plugged into the audio output?

There has to be some kind of hobbyist exemption in the law for super-low-production products or perhaps a distributor company for hobbyist projects to get around this issue.

A switchable 16-bit board like the 32k16 is what I'm after. I'm a total noob when it comes to this system, but adding that 16-bit RAM can only help, especially if newer software comes out that uses it. The amount of new development on the TI-99 is a pleasant surprise and has been on the increase as of late. If I'm going to have to solder up a rats nest of jumper wires in there anyway, what's 3-5 more wires if it makes the system run faster?

Will there ever be any more of these boards produced? Is there anything else like it in the works?

how beat up would i get if i suggested that at least any future 7800 games (if not this one) never use on-cart pokeys again and instead use the far easier to source ay-3-891x family if i remember correctly, you can even get some winbond clone of them brand new

we're all forgetting one thing: even the shitty CD-i controllers cost a fucking fortune

I know about what's on the site, but I'm thinking of higher-res scans (or source files if the people that made them are willing to share). (If they don't want to then that's ok.)

Is there any way I can download any of these (such as the label and box made for the 7800 port of Space Invaders) to print myself? Blank label sheets exist for 2600/5200/7800 carts, and it's really easy to print inserts for the popular Universal Game Case.

Just tried an NEC MultiSync LCD2070WNX - no go at all whatsoever.

I'm getting this too (wavy picture, interference, dim colors), and I bought the kit off of eBay. I'm also not getting any sound but that's probably unrelated. Is there anything specific that needs to be done for the Intellivision II? Could this be a power supply issue?

You may not even need to use any original NES parts when making these if you're already making the shell - this place makes reproduction Game Boy button parts which can be made to drop into NES shells with little effort. You might also want to consider keeping the Start/Select buttons around for a pause mod. You could take a page from the FM-TOWNS/J-PC standard and map Start and Select to simultaneous presses of Up+Down and Left+Right. You could then create a circuit for use inside the 2600/7800 that would watch for these impossible button combinations and trigger Pause (which would be where Select was) and Select (which would be where Start was) as necessary. You could even implement a "Squaresoft reset" that would press Reset if both buttons, Pause and Select were held down simultaneously on the controller!

I'd buy one! By the way, speaking of the 7800 is there a decent solution for getting stereo audio? Something that mixes TIA 1 to left, TIA 2 to right, and the cartridge audio to the center?

Most modern 9VDC bricks are vastly better (and smaller) than the Atari OEM unit. Many of them are much easier to open, which makes transferring the cable over relatively painless. The OEM PSU isn't even regulated.

Here's one idea: make it a "CD" game. Just have it cue up the tracks from an attached SCSI CD-ROM drive; the end user can then mix in the audio at the speakers or through the Falcon's audio input (does that work?). You don't even have to use the game's original soundtrack (though I can't imagine why you wouldn't).

The Commodore monitors and a lot of older, dumber tube TVs will happily accept NTSC-50. LCD monitors and multi-format standards-enforcing professional CRT monitors usually won't. Upscale devices tend not to like it either.

Insane! How do you plan on handling the music? .MOD remixes? "Redbook" audio files?

Finally managed to figure out the transformer he's using. It's an Okura LP433. It's sold as an 18V transformer, but it's center-tapped so you can cut it down to 9V. I even found a couple in one of my local shops. The transformers in the US Robotics bricks are bare-bones, just 120V in and 9V out. They also lack mounting frames, which is why I resorted to double-stick foam. It's kind of odd that you can't buy a transformer mounting frame seperately when you can find just about any piece of metal hardware imaginable on the internet these days, but no matter. Shells/housings are the other big problem. Project boxes cost way too much for what they are, and when I did my PSUs I'd just re-use housings from other PSUs that happened to be either orphaned or dead and big enough to hoise all the parts inside. I imagine the proper way to do it would be to track down a lot of suitable surplus PSU shells, fashion a simple sheet-metal chassis that is screwed/epoxied into the bottom of the case and bolt all the components to the sheet-metal chassis for easy service and replacement, I've seen one of Ray's units in person though and he did make the right choices. Nobody else has the System Saver circuit, and nobody else is going to be using 100% new parts. I just wish it was easier to source those Amiga/C128 connectors. Mechware was the only source for them for a few years, but he seems to have closed up shop for good.

I've built a few homemade C64 PSUs much like this. They were done entirely out of used parts though, and I always used plastic cases and secured the transformer/PCB with double-stick foam. This didn't always work out too well. The Carlsen PSUs improve on this by screwing everything down, even in the plastic cases. I'd love to know where he gets his AC transformers from because the only way I can reliably get a 9V AC 1A transformer these days is to smash open the power bricks from old US Robotics modems. Far more importantly, his have switchable input voltages (110/220), which is not a very common feature on the low-voltage AC transformers that are typically found in electronics shops.

So the idea is to clone the Sound & Speech but make the speech part optional? And maybe add Orchestra-90 functionality if it's feasible?