BurritoBeans

Oh hey look, a thread on these chunking idiots and mention of NEC drives! Here's a third of what I have scattered around my house: I've been pretty big into NEC-related gear for the past year and a half or so, mainly focusing on earlier machines. As y'all have posted with Leaded's mention of the 9811K/the NEC N5200-05 (APC), those NEC FD1165s are beefy. They do adhere to a relatively normal Shugart standard but require TG43 signal control, the simple adapter board described above doesn't work amazingly well for writing these disks out (I have one of the ones you can buy off Tindie for hooking 5.25"s to my Greaseweazle). You'll preferably want something like the fdadap to get any serious jobs done. On the 9801 side, you have a "1MB Floppy Drive" connector with a pinout that follows the picture below (From the PC-9801M User's Manual): Regarding power, drives (as-mentioned in the link above) just need +24VDC and +5VDC to function. On original PC-9801s, and only original PC-9801s, there's a SRCN6A16-7 connector (Female on the PC, Male on the FDD) built onto the power supply which carries what you need. I can't find my original PC98 manual to save my life, but whenever I do I'll come back and add what the pinout is: With the PC-8811 (8" FDD for the PC-8801) and all later 9811 models (9811K, 9811N, 98H81, any third-party drive, etc.) you'll have an internal box that does your AC-DC conversion. I just plug it into one of the daisychain ports on the back of whatever 9801 I'm using at the time, if you wanted to replace it with a more modern supply then that wouldn't be too tough as you have a ton of room. Same as the SRCN, whenever I come back with my manual I'll get the color code for what wire is what voltage down. I don't have any good photos but you can see it along the bottom here: I'm currently in the process of getting a Greaseweazle setup going as I have a pile of about five games, four PC-9800 system disks, and a whole box-set of Mitsubishi Multi16 system disks and industrial control software which I'd love to get dumped sooner rather than later. Whenever I get it going, I'll try to remember to get it posted here for y'all. Remind me to mail you a box of 8"s with your NABU xD

MSX1: Hydlide 3 - 192 minutes I found some time to both play games and exist on here, woohoo. Been working on this Pioneer PX-V7, making it less unreliable by adding better cooling/removing the old transformer and also trying to emulate a LD-700 using a Raspberry Pi, a GPIO pin, and LIRC. Would be pretty cool to have a LaserDisc "emulator" for real hardware 'cause the real players are pretty much undocumented, the real discs are both expensive/from an era of heavy rot, and PiLD never actually got a public release. Yeah you can just emulate everying on openmsx but eh, I wanna make the hardware do work and hear all the relays clacking. Hydlide 3 is a game I've played way too many times at this point. It's also still one of I think five MSX games I own. I just find it fun, I dunno why. The old built-in English translation is pretty funny for just how bad it is. I got to the temple that rises out of the one lake and had to quit but I hope over the next week or two to finish the game up.

FM Towns: Splatterhouse - 14 minutes NES: Crystalis - 64 minutes PC-9801: Diamond Players - 25 minutes HR2 - 183 minutes Night Slave - 45 minutes I've been doing a lot of overtime alongside working on some of my more "pain in the butt" hardware. Finally took a break on both and oh hey, I have time to play some games again! I picked up a Towns 20F, it works but I know it's going to need a new power supply (paid for a board and backplane connector last week) and at least a FRAM Rescue IPL card + SCSI2SD/BlueSCSI/RaSCSI/whatever, probably a Wizard ODE as some stuff won't boot from SCSI. Just to test it I do own three games: two weird eroge titles and Splatterhouse. Splatterhouse won that choice by miles, best part is it's pretty much just the arcade game. I beat it in 14 minutes and 18 seconds. Neat. Crystalis is the NES game I think I have the best memories of from when I was younger? I always had a box for the game but never the game itself. Nowadays I have the game and I love it, it may be linear as all heck but it's a cool game. I also suck at it. I got myself to Brynmaer and pretty much stopped there, I'll go farther next time I have some free time. And then PC98 stuff, pretty much I had 39 different PC98s in my house at one point. Over this year I've gotten it down to 11. I plan on selling or giving away six more of those within the next three months. A lot less PC98 means I can do things like actually buy some games, for example a baseball game with a pretty crazy MT-32 soundtrack, a game about using a minituarized C programming language to code robots to build a tall tower, and that one about the space lesbians in mechsuits where you can turn off the adult content and just enjoy yourself. I also got a LAPC-N and SC-55MkII so it's been really cool finally checking out MIDI, never did play with it until just last week. No idea when I'll get more game time but hopefully soon enough! The X68K and Towns are both top-priority to fix, I'll have to play some more PC98 to test systems and new expansions made by the community, and I've been itching to get some more Kirby so maybe I'll buy the SFC titles? I guess we'll see in time. All else failing I'll be playing stuff in late-July as I'll be getting ready to go to CCAG (Table 18, wanna buy a fully-serviced PC98 for $125?) and I need to test everything coming with me!

Sharp X68000 Akumajō Dracula - 225 minutes Mr. Do! - 1 minute, 55 seconds Spindizzy II - 40 minutes Managed to squeeze some qualifying games in this week! I've been taking a while off of games to focus on actually getting my hardware fixed up, and this week was my IBM XT and X68000. The XT is near-ready, I'm just waiting on a keyboard adapter as the only XT-compatible keyboard I own is a degrading Keytronic foam-and-foil which I quite dislike, and the X68000 is finally good to go. Akumajō Dracula is (of course) the classic, and I still have yet to beat it. I can get to the final stage without too much issue, I think I've used 18 continues so far, and then I just flop at the Dracula fight. Not unlike the NES version where I'm just about as bad! Someday I'll finish the game, I just don't know when that day is. Definitely a neat soundtrack, but I still have no MIDI card (I need to build a midiori) so it's just the FM version. Mr. Do, speaking of games I'm bad at, was I think the best I've ever done. A whole four stages. Wow. (Anyone ever submit a time with seconds? This gives it to me so I may as well provide!) And then Spindizzy II is just really cool. I've never played any of the Spindizzy stuff before but I really enjoy Cameltry, a game similarly about moving a silly object through a silly world. I saw that title screen and I just had to try it out, my gosh is it a good time! It took half of my playtime to figure out controlling stuff properly but, once I got it together, I really started enjoying the game. Definitely one I'm going to remember for the future! I'm unsure if I'll have much time for games next week, there are something like five more obscure Japanese computers coming into the house which will need cleaned and prepped for repair, but I have a little XT-CF set up with some MDA titles that I want to give a shot on the XT. Maybe I'll get a bit of DOS playtime in? I need to figure out if the V30+8087 is going to screw me or help me, I remember hearing how a lot of stuff is meant for a straight 8088.

Not right away, they're almost always fine in my experience, but feel free to check the board and recap if you want. The PC-FX and both FXGA types (C-Bus / ISA) released after NEC had notable capacitor issues, they used the same capacitor type present in the Game Gear on most (but not all) circuit board designs from mid-'91 to mid-'94, so you are outside the "recap this or it will need board repair" space. What they replaced it with, those little SME can capacitors, are usually okay but are in some cases known to leak. The only time I've personally had/I've heard issues with them are in the PC-9821As3 where they placed a bunch right under a hot power supply which seems to accelerate things going bad. So far, three different PC-FX and two different PC-FXGA in, I've yet to encounter a single cap-related issue.

I sadly didn't have anything, just a few reference pages. NFGGames has a nice area including the wire color codes so you know which goes where, that proved extremely useful as I didn't check things beforehand, the creator also has some tips on his GitHub repo, but that was about all I had to work with. I just bought the power supply they mentioned in the eBay listing and did the best I could to plug everything in the right way. So far so good but my soft power section is broken, turns out gamesx has a nice section regarding fixing it but I've been slow on getting through it.

PC-9801 Libido 7 - 5 minutes Libido 7 Impact - 5 minutes Rance 4.1 - 40 minutes Rance 4.2 - 10 minutes The Screamer - 250 minutes I... y'know how the PC-98 has a reputation for being a smut machine? I bought a cheap lot of software to test shipping from Buyee and yeah, 4/5 are smut. Fun fact, "only" 45% of the known game library is adult content! I won't be providing an image for any of the top four titles for the following reasons: Both Libido 7 titles are entirely pornographic, not only every screen but also the front/spine/back of the boxes Both Rance titles would require me censoring the sidebar which is too much work, I could attach the cases but meh. The Libido 7 games downright suck. They're just CG collections with text and odd childlike sketches of characters, nothing but straight-out smut with no backing to 'em. They're the first time I've gotten adult titles that weren't at least attempts at games, shoot YU-NO has ended up becoming one of my favorite visual novels of all time/Xenon is pretty solid/Desire is also pretty solid if you don't take one of the two routes. I'd say "I won't be buying anything else from the dev" but lucky me, these two are all they ever seemed to have done. The Rance titles are at least playable RPGs, some sort of detective plot about the sudden appearance and proceeding takedown of monsters terrorizing a town. Not too far off of the other games for the little bit I can remember, the games fall in the same "aren't bad but also aren't anything I'd recommend you go play" territory as the previous three entries. I didn't beat either, I got a while into 4.1 then just started 4.2 which is the other half of the game, and I can't say I really plan on picking them up again any time soon. Now, unlike the others, The Screamer is a really cool game. I don't remember if I mentioned it in the past but it's kinda Ultima dungeon crawling meets Shiryou Sensen combat meets weird punk world. I ended up getting pretty far and wiping out, the usual for me with these types of titles, but it was enjoyable so far and I honestly can't wait to try more. Not a representation of how I actually played the game but a funny one, this is what happens when you put any 200-line game into a Xa7e-or-later PC-9821 aka the ones you don't want to buy as a western collector. The top 200 lines are the game, the bottom 200 lines seem to be some sort of visual glitching that goes with screen RAM. Kinda funny.

PC: Cave Story - 110 minutes I tracked some modern time using the PC-9821Ra266, something kinda cool so I actually remembered to take it down! Cave Story is an old favorite of mine, it's been a long time since playing it (on the PSP of all things!) and I'm really happy to have it running on the old Pentium II. I did have this running a month or so ago, I just didn't have audio so it kinda sucked. Now, after swapping some op-amps, it's golden. I didn't get too far, just past the Igor fight, but I'm happy to have it going again.

MSX1: Hydlide 3 - 310 minutes MZ-80K: Numbertron - 250 minutes Well, I played a whole lot of two games and two games only. Let me just say, I love Hydlide 3 but damn my choice of screen made it hard to read. Of course the picture is my starting character stats, not the the greatest but hey Monk is supposed to be the "hard mode" of classes. Barely legible numbers just adds to that "hard mode" experience. I'm actually really excited about playing the MSX version, I recently bought my first MSX (A Mitsubishi ML-8000) and I knew I had to have Hydlide 1/2/3 because I do quite like the games. Didn't actually beat it, I ended up dying at the 255 minute mark and forgot to ever save the game but whatever, next week? And then there's Numbertron. Brought the MZ-80C back out as I've devoted some of my free time towards porting FujiNet to the Sharp, a silly task but one I think would be cool, so I had to also grab the Numbertron tape. Still love the hell out of this game, Sharpworks still has copies for sale, and other than "it's a really fun puzzle game" I don't have a ton to say. Give it a shot some day, it's real simple and getting high scores honestly feels great. I'm honestly unsure what I'm doing this upcoming week for games, I have a lot of hardware projects mapped out. Maybe I'll try Half Life on the 9821Ra266 again? I bought this fat Voodoo Banshee card and I think so far the most I've used it on is Cave Story, not a hard game for even a Pentium II 266 on its own, so I should push it a little.

I know that Gremlin, Ocean, and Mastertronic did this quite often and I'm sure more developers did the same. Here's an example with Way of the Tiger: I have no honest idea about the European MSX scene, I've never looked into it too much, but I'm sure that the system was a minority compared to the Spectrum in some areas. Why spend time and money to make a whole new version of a game when you can quickly create a (dirty but "serviceable") port to do the same?

PC-9801 EVE Burst Error - 20 minutes Popful Mail - 20 minutes Relics - 50 minutes The Screamer - 120 minutes X68000: Mr. Do! - 30 minutes Not a lot of games but hey, a good enough way to close out 2021 if I say so myself. EVE Burst Error was the first of two silly scenarios. I was messing around with my PC-9821Ra266 and, after a little while, figured out that you can run PC-98 emulators on the hardware. Quite silly as this does contain the hardware you need to run older games, well not the audio board but at least the graphics controller. I've never played much of EVE and remembered it, I have "beat" it but how much I could tell you is minimal. It's not my favorite in the grand scheme of C's Ware titles, it's definitely the most family friendly/least strange content-wise but I guess the premise never did a ton for me. It has been a while so, once I get an actual copy on disk/disc, I'll try it again. Popful Mail is the same setup, emulate a PC-98 within a PC-98, but this time using a more modern emulator with Neko Project II. The game isn't too demanding, I mean it runs on a 9801VM so of course it won't be, so it played exactly like it would on actual hardware... well, minus the sound. I have a PC-9801-26K and PC-9801-86 board, the YM2203 and YM2608 sound cards which get used in DOS titles, and sadly they just don't work as they conflict with the forced-on Crystal audio chipset. I didn't try enabling emulation of these, I imagine it would work but I was scared about crashing things. Sadly, at some point playing Popful Mail, I think one of the amplifiers on the computer headphone board ate it. I no longer get front panel audio, well I have it but there's a loud buzzing over top of it. Going to have to fix that. Relics is a weird game, amazingly an old title that doesn't run at crazy-fast speeds using a Pentium II when it was designed for a V30. I still seriously don't understand what I'm doing, there's a lot of broken English and this whole mechanic of turning into a ghost and hijacking the bodies of random enemies on the map, and the manual just says to figure it out yourself. Chunky, clunky, definitely a PC-8801 port, but cool if I say so myself. The Screamer is a role-playing game, a pretty neat one at that. It plays like a mix of the first-person Ultima portions and the action sequences from Shiryou Sensen, you explore this large complex called BIAS and try to solve a monster issue keeping it from serving the world. Don't run this one on a fast computer, I think a VX/UX (i286) would be the upper limit, because while the exploring is fine the side-view combat scenes get unplayable with anything 386SX and above. And then, finally, there's Mr. Do! I'm not good at this game. I've never been good at this game. But y'know what? The X68000 has a great port by Denpa, it's spot-on to the arcade machine, and maybe I'll eventually get good. You can see my high scores from my absolute best set of games are pretty miserable compared to others, I have yet to clear all the boards but maybe I'll get better in time. I'm excited going into 2022, I've got a lot of projects lined up and various new hardware on the way which should provide for tons of fun times as long as things go according to the rough plans I have. It's going to take a little to get into it, my first goal is to clean up the collection and organize my setups, but if I stick to it then I should actually be able to enjoy using my stuff and playing games instead of having to fight half-maintained hardware on janky solutions.

Hah, speaking of things like this thread coming back to life about an hour ago, the Expert lives after a month and a half! Apologies for the messy desk picture, tearing this thing down made me throw stuff all around and I have yet to clean up again. Step-by-step through what I did: The power supply was replaced. I was just going to order my own PCBs but, after looking on eBay to see if anyone else had PicoPSU boards for sale, I found this listing. Pretty cool if I say so myself, the removable terminal blocks are an awesome feature, and it was a bit crammed with all the new wiring but that's alright. It works, it's a lot more reliable, and I have no complaints. The SRAM battery was replaced. Simple enough to do, just tear the old one out with side-cutters and solder a new CR2032 with positive on the same side as the diode. I could've gone with a rechargeable battery but, as I want to know when it's flat and time to replace things, I figured a standard battery would be fine enough. I bought a keyboard adapter. Seriously, good lord those original keyboards are expensive. Maybe it's being used to the PC-98 but, at least with the PC-98 you only spend ¥1,500-3,000 on a good keyboard. Maybe ¥5,000-7,500 if you want the original model and it's not in some yugen-listed lot that becomes a bid war. ¥14,000 on suruga-ya? ¥12,500 on YAJ? That's a bit much at the moment. So, after being told the same seller had RaSCSI boards for sale, I found this booth listing for a Logitech Unifying Receiver to X68000 adapter. Pretty cool if you ask me, yeah you need to have the alternate key image to tell what does what else but in games I doubt it'll be a huge issue. So, with all that done, the machine runs! Mr. Do/Mr. Do Vs. Unicorns and one of the Viper games are all I still own for X68000, I'll buy more games eventually, but my current plan is to write a 5.25" boot disk with all the settings so I can get that RaSCSI going.

Well, I should say that I've had a box under the tree for a little while. I was going to open it, I got swamped out between work and projects around the house, but just today I finally got time to open it... ...wow. I'm absolutely in love with the contents! Never owned a VIC game that wasn't a cartridge or .WAV file, the shirt is slick, the beanie will come in serious use with winter finally hitting, the Frogger magnets are just cool, and the coloring book may just be my reason to buy some crayons again! Huge thanks to the sender, my honest apologies as it seems (if there was a note I've entirely missed it so) I don't have your username to credit you, and I'll definitely be getting my VIC 20 out to try that tape out when I have some free time! It was a ton of fun on both sides, finding stuff to send was great fun and opening this box was just as awesome, so a huge thanks to the organizers for getting this together!

Famicom: Getsu Fūma Den - 95 minutes Kirby's Adventure - 105 minutes PC-9801: CRW Metal Jacket - 200 minutes Desire - 120 minutes Xenon: Mugen no Shitai - 90 minutes So yeah, I had a box come in the mail full of software goodies, user's manuals, driver diskettes, and 256K RAM boards. Out of the box I got five new games, five pretty decently long playtimes were the result. I even remembered to take some photos of things running! Getsu Fūma Den is a game I really only knew because of Castlevania: Harmony of Despair on the Xbox 360 about ten years back. The stage for it in that game was cool, this weird pixel-y world, and ever since it's just been kinda in my mind. Went on Suruga-Ya, found that a copy wasn't too pricey, and bought it for myself. Definitely a cool game, part-RPG part-sidescrolling action game, but also a little confusing and grind-y at times so far. Kirby's Adventure is honestly one of my favorite Famicom games I've bought so far, just a really fun platformer that I haven't touched in ages. I have it on my Wii via Virtual Console, when I was ten years old or so I had played all the way through, and having it on cartridge just makes me so happy. It's a funny pink cartridge, the game looks great, the game plays great, and it was only about five dollars to add into the box. So far I've gotten to Level 3, not too far in but I am doing a lot of screwing around and failing at the mini-games. CRW Metal Jacket is a game I never thought I'd honestly (reasonably) own, the price climbs easily to $100 on a normal day. A tip from someone in the PC-98 Discord server scored me a $55 copy, much better, and all the disks work great! It's a cool game, "real-time" (slow but sure) strategy where you command your people in mechs around to beat each stage. Bit of story, amazingly no adult content, and it runs on everything down to my VX which means I'm in love. There's even an English translation! Desire is an adult title, mind you one with a really cool soundtrack and pretty alright graphics. There's some plot about journalists investigating a relatively unknown research complex on a remote island, moral issues, and the usual adult related whatnots. It's not exactly my favorite game I've bought but hey, at least it sounds really nice. Finally, Xenon, another adult title. Oh joy. You may notice that box looks similar to Desire, I guess C's Ware re-released a lot of their bigger titles on that format for both PC-98 and FM Towns making these two my first physical non-Splatterhouse FM Towns games! This one is a bit sillier than Desire, the plot based around some high school boy with dreams of some outer space station full of women that ends up being real. The visuals are great, the soundtrack is also great, but yeah just a smut VN so not a ton to really say. I'm fairly excited, work lets off for two weeks starting Wednesday which means I should have a good bit of time to play games. I also have some cool boxes coming in, the start of a "meme machine" (Celeron 766, Voodoo Banshee, and 256MB of RAM in a PC-98) and my first ever MSX (Mitsubishi ML-8000 because I thought it looked cool so I wanted it). The new experiences should be great!

Ohh man, I've been looking for things to run on my PC-8001 (once I get the darn color cable built) and pre-SR PC-8801s, these look slick! Thank you!

Game Boy Tetris - 308 minutes PC-9801 YU-NO - 125 minutes Coming in a bit late, just received and finished wrapping my Secret Santa gifts for mailing so sorry that's just happening now, a cartridge was stuck in the mail for three weeks, aaaah after I get some sleep so the "just a bit out" theme seems common. Whoops. The Game Boy is back, I left it at someone's house and they didn't even realize I did, and one battery stuff cleanup later (I still really need that cleanjuice thing...) I was back to Tetris, two 2.5hr sittings plus a little extra to be exact. Worst part of it all? I did terrible. I was able to start on higher levels but nah I lost it all. Oh well, have to start again somewhere! And, other than that one game, as usual, the PC-9801 is in. I've been absolutely loving YU-NO with the English patch, it's just epilogue work so by all accounts the patch should be done by the time I get to unpatched areas, and man am I glad I picked up the PC-9801 version. I tried the Steam release, a modern re-release with redone everything, but the visuals are so flat and uninteresting/the music doesn't sound nearly as nice to me/the characters look a lot worst to me. So far so good, there's a plot but I'm still a little confused. I was going to have some PC-8801, I bought the original model and had to do some minor restoration work due to a leaky barrel battery, but nope. Turns out the original model, just like the original PC-9801, uses its own special connector (A DIN14 not unlike the one I think Atari used for floppy drives) which none of my keyboards are compatible with. There's also something about an IBM XT with Hercules graphics but that'll wait until I get it booting.

By chance, if someone with a Turbo Everdrive could try, can someone do the same thing I did (Just rename .HES to .PCE) and try running the file to see what happens? I'm interested to know if it's just an issue with my hardware or the file in general. There are mentions elsewhere of .HES files running too fast, I just have yet to find anyone saying how to fix them. I'll get a recording of what my Super SD System is doing when I get off of work tonight.

PC-9801 Love Escalator - 45 minutes Ys - 120 minutes Ys II - 40 minutes YU-NO - 80 minutes Well, all PC-9801 this week featuring some messy desk photos! First up for the week, and the physical game I've been enjoying the most, is YU-NO. I really don't have a ton to say that I haven't said before, the graphics are beautiful/the script is nice/the soundtrack is amazing, but I did find one neat thing out: There is an English translation being made! It isn't quite finished yet, as-of the day I'm posting this the Epilogue still needs work, but I'm going to be giving it a shot next week to see how it is. I broke out the first two Ys games, beating Ys I and just starting Ys II, and man has it been some time. No I don't have actual copies yet, if I'm being honest Popful Mail is probably going to be the first Falcom game I buy physically as I loved playing it on my 9801UV, but I do plan on getting them in the future. I haven't actually touched the old versions of these in a while, mostly playing via the Ys I & II Chronicles version on Steam which is quite awesome if I say so myself, so I did have a bit of adjusting to do. The "just bump into things" combat always gets a kick out of me, I guess I'm just amazed it still feels okay to this day. And then finally, one of the last games made for the system, Love Escalator. It's quite impressive if I say so myself, there's some really smooth animation in here, but it is pretty much just restricted to the adult content. I was surprised the thing installed as well as it did, I've played it by just dragging the files onto my CF card before but never using the actual CD-ROM, and it turns out I just got lucky. Usually PC-9821As/Ap models are associated with crappy proprietary NEC drives with tons of failures, people say to expect them to not work, but I guess my As3 uses a standard ATAPI interface instead of the NEC-proprietary interface which bogs down the As/Ap/As2/Ap2 models. It's looking like next week is going to be more of the same, no boxes are coming in for a bit with games, but the X68000 repairs should be winding up by Friday. The week after should bring me about six more games and two bits of Famicom hardware to play with. It's looking like December will be a nice wrap to the year for me when it comes to gaming!

Figured I'd give this a shot! Having a couple of issues on my end: I can get the file on my Super SD System³ with no issues, that's easy as .HES just renames to .PCE, but I'm fairly sure it's playing back way too fast. It's just a long buzzing noise, nothing like what I hear in Mednafen, and something a good few other .HES files I throw on the system seem to be doing. I do have a few .HES/.PCE files that work fine, the ones out of here work great, but everything else I can find seems to just break. If anyone knows the process of fixing things up, I assume a hex editor is needed unless someone has some script somewhere, I'd be glad to give it another shot!

Figure I'll give this thread a nice 'ol bump six months out, not about games for now but at least the hardware to run 'em. I've had interest in X68Ks for years. I bought a Compact about six years back which I used to love, but I always felt "cheated" as I wanted a tower-model with the 5.25" floppies. Not sure exactly why I feel that way, the Compact is a fine machine, but maybe it's just that finding software I find interesting on 3.5" disks was always a pain. I'm proud to say that now, after a while, I finally got myself something more like what I originally wanted! $300, a steal if I say so myself, and I'll probably end up spending just as much (if not more!) to get the games I want for the thing! It ain't the prettiest externally, you can see that front-left side is scuffed up a bit, but I don't think that'll be a tough repair as it's just flat gloss black plastic. Speaking of repairs, so far what I've figured out needs to be done for "safe operation" through asking around and reading online: The PSU needs to be replaced I've seen a lot of people talking about retrofitting some sort of SFX power supply into the thing and adding a 74xx04, while that's nice I'm not entirely sure it's what I'd want to do. I've picked out making one of these as my solution as while pricier I think it would just be cooler, I'm more a fan of having the "right shaped" PCB, and it keeps a more original cord. The I/O board needs a new SRAM battery and electrolytic capacitors It looks like I got lucky with picking the Expert, dodging the barrel batteries I've heard make these things into absolute nightmares. Instead of a huge mess I have an I/O board that looks like this: So it seems by just dropping some sort of coin cell holder in I could do pretty much exactly what I need, there being pads for a non-rechargeable SRAM battery (what I have now) or a rechargeable (what I probably won't do). Regarding the caps these look ok to me, there's nothing visibly leaking anyways, so I honestly think I'm just going to hold off until I power the computer on and maybe find that audio output is weak. The 5.25" drives need recapped This is one I think I'll be quicker to do, I've been having a lot of failing drive drive mechanisms in Japanese computers recently (A lot of PC-98s for some reason, 8" and 5.25") and it seems like redoing capacitors plus a good cleaning generally helps. So yeah, you could say I'm excited to have this as a repair project. I'll finally get to mess with the 5.25" games on real hardware, a copy of Mr. Do!/Mr. Do! Vs. Unicorns sitting on my shelf right now as the first thing I'll run in here. I'm not all too interested in shmups, I just suck at them so I ignore them, but the various arcade conversions and other genres of games do interest me. I don't know why but I used to absolutely love Cameltry in emulators, I've never seen the game anywhere else even though I know it was ported other places, so I think I'll be looking to buy a copy of that if I can!

Game Boy: Kirby's Dream Land - 110 minutes Tetris - 200 minutes PC-8001: Bug Fire - 75 minutes PC-9801: Legend of Galactic Heroes - 35 minutes Maision Ikkoku - 60 minutes I'm out of game time for the week, well I've got more games for today but they're tabletop RPGs. The Game Boy sees yet another game, this time one that I've been wanting for a good while! Kirby's Dream Land was one of the few Kirby games I've never played, not because it was pricey or hard to find but just because I never did spend the $5 on it. I ended up getting a Super Game Boy in a box from Japan and, right there in the cartridge slot, it came with Kirby. I like it! Tetris also got some playtime, of course it did. Speaking of the Japan box, I now own a PC-8001. Originally I never wanted one, it was "just another Z80 computer" in my mind, but I looked at it for a while... $50 and shipping later, I can say I quite like this wedge-shaped box of metal and thick plastic. The keyboard feels nice, BASIC is more than usable, it doesn't have a ton of I/O but I'll get the 8012 box to fix that, and so far it plays the one game I own really well. Bug Fire is interesting, a zoomed-in Pac Man-ish game you could say? Run around a maze, destroy monsters without being taken out yourself, and unlock a door to leave the board. I had fun. And finally, also with the Japan box, a few PC-9801 games on 2DD floppies. These are important to me as I need anything for my 9801F, the "oddball" model in that it uses two internal 640K 5.25" drives instead of the standard two external 1.2MB 8" drives of the time and era. Legend of Galactic Heroes is proving to be a real test of my (minimal) knowledge of Japanese, an extremely wordy "Space Opera" Strategy title with a decent chunk of complexity. You'd think Maision Ikkoku would be harder, a visual novel, but not really as the VN doesn't use a bunch of weird words and terms! I'm just glad both work. Next week should be good fun, I have a Famicom Disk System/Cassette Vision/PC-8801 which all came in that same Japan box and I'm looking to do a bit with all three. I can't wait to remember how horrible I am with platformers by playing a bit of Super Mario Bros. 2!

I saw PC-9801 so I had to figure things out and oh gosh. I'd be tempted to push that PC-98 game to 1000 minutes but installing it... nope, too much of a pain for me. Maybe the MSX2 one?

Haven't done one of these before and it sounds fun, sign me up!

Arcade Crossbow - 35 minutes Zaxxon - 50 minutes Game Boy Tetris - 230 minutes MZ-80K Heiankyo Alien - 40 minutes PC-9801 Lode Runner - 30 minutes Lunatic Dawn - 60 minutes YU-NO - 90 minutes X68000 Mr. Do! - 30 minutes No more gaming for today but, against all odds, I actually played more than five games this week. The Japanese computers are all out on the desk and got playtime, well the X68000 just being the three games I own (Mr. Do, Castlevania, Cameltry) as the computer itself is sitting in Ohio and should be delivered tomorrow afternoon. I have projects lined up for each, making a PCB for MZ-80C/repairing the X68K/getting the right cards in the PC9801s, and I'm excited to get to all of 'em. Can I just say how much I love suruga-ya? I finally had the drive in me to work on some arcade boards... I no longer have the drive in me to work on some arcade boards, I forgot how frustrating some of 'em can be. Crossbow wasn't too bad, I just needed to burn six EPROMs and drop 'em in place, and I'm hoping soon to buy a multigame kit that way it can also be things like Chiller or Crackshot with the press of a button. Zaxxon was hell, having to scope out which stupid little IC was making everything go bad got frustrating. And finally, as-usual, Tetris stuck in my Game Boy all week. Nothing amazing, no new high scores, no new strategies, just a lot of killing time since I was in the slowest position at work which was fun.

Simple, arcade-y, and fast are the things I usually look for. If I know I don't have all too long then something which lets me auto-start on a higher difficulty level by code or whatnot is always appreciated, without that I get a little annoyed as redoing the start just drags after a while. What that actually ends up meaning? A whole lot of Tetris.