Bruce Tomlin

That's called a "reef store" dream (after someone in rec.games.video.classic had a dream where he found all sorts of wierd cartridges and stuff in a thrift store that was off shore in a reef), and is often considered a good omen for going out thrifting that day.

You know what they had to do with the 32X? That's what they would have had to do to get better graphics on Sega CD. The scaling and rotation was just a processing chip. You fed it the graphics data, it chewed on it and spit it out, and then you had to write it to the VDP yourself.

Is it a "fat" PS2? Google for "ps2 white gear". While this won't help a truly crapped-out drive, and it's a pain in the butt to take the unit apart (especially to avoid pulling out cables that you shouldn't), it may in fact fix it.

Actually, the only hardware needed for an adapter is for the pause button. I'm not sure what the chip in a genuine PBC is used for, but it may be related to the card slot. There have been adapters which are nothing more than a circuit board in a vertical-stack cartridge, if you don't care about the games on card. (aka "Tower of Sega" mode) The adapter is also necessary to ground the "M3" line, which selects SMS bus mode. (I really don't know what Sega was thinking by putting SMS games on cards as well as carts. I guess maybe they were thinking of making a portable system, but didn't follow through on the card format. All they succeeded in doing was confusing customers. Using the card slot for the 3D adapter was okay, I guess, but it would have been better in port 2.) The support supposedly exists even in Sega-branded MD/Genesis systems without the physical ability to use Sega's adapter. Note that the Genesis 3 was not produced by Sega, and has the support removed. The one game on card that I know won't work (F-16 Fighting Falcon, which is as far as I know the only 32K card game), doesn't work because it is one of the few SMS games that use a TMS-9918 video mode. EDIT: Apparently the card slot was for backwards compatilbility with a card-slot add-on for the SG-1000. Still, it sounds more like a gimmick than anything else.

Very interestring. Even more so when there is one 4-port board revision in existence that already had the update built-in.

Have you ever found a board that was modified in such a way? (Or do you even know of any random person who has actually made this modification?) Over the years I have personally found two circuit boards, which can be identified by "REV 3" appearing through a corner of the base, that support the adapter. These in no way appear to have been modified from an original board. (And I would have noticed, because I had to replace a CMOS keyboard select chip in one of them.) In fact, I think it would be unlikely, since I think some of the pins involved were orignally wired to ground, and would likely have been "flood" traces that would be almost impossible to "isolate"... especially if they were on the top side. My suspicion is that (when requested) Atari "modified" units by replacing the main circuit board with the compatible revision. I also suspect that this board revision may never have been shipped in a retail box. As for identifying them, flip the 5200 over, and look through the case in the lower right corner (the corner under where the power button is) and look at the board revision for REV 3. I don't know the CO-number, but I don't think any other 4-port CO-number revision ever had a REV 3. (If absolutely necessary, I could go dig one out and look for the CO-number.)

Nothing older than the NES, and not the RF-only top-loader NES. You could put an old junk VCR in between as a tuner. Yes, they are big. But anything smaller is hard to find. You could also get older systems specifically modified for composite or better video output.

I think the Champ keypads were the right idea, but done the wrong way. And so was my idea to make a 7800 joystick that used a D9F jack and a 9-wire extension cable to connect to the console. But if you combine the ideas... What I want to do is to rig up a Wico stick for 2-button CV operation, with a male D-9 plug on it to use a standard Coleco stick as a keypad. Most games don't need the keypad during the game, so it's no problem if the wire falls out.

I see no RF input. If it has no tuner, it is not a television, it is a monitor.

FWIW, Girl's Garden was essentially done and working two weeks ago. The current binary has some cheats turned on (the keypad is a nice way to support cheats), but it runs fine on real hardware. Anything that still needs to be done hasn't been specified yet. And my current high score without using cheats is 78130. The game starts to get mean at about level 5 or 6. When run under some (many? all?) versions of the MESS emulator, it can lock up due to problems with the VDP losing an interrupt, but since this is a direct port, if you really want to play the game on an emulator, there's no reason you can't just play the original SG-1000 version. I'm working on translating the instructions now. When Pixelboy asked me about it a couple of months ago (once he mentioned the pink cartridges, it became a Moral Imperative), I was pleasantly surprised to find I had already almost finished a proper disassembly of it. Only the RAM addresses still needed to be done, and one bad reference found. But Coleco put the VDP interrupt on NMI, which, to put it simply, is a big pain in the butt, and the hard work was in making it work with non-maskable interrupts.

It looks like Shining Force (one of the few "important" Sega CD titles I don't have) has been going for $40-$60, but someone still lucked into a copy for $15.

If the item is as pictured, it appears that someone has hacked the power supply to power something else. That is the correct power brick, but not the correct plug. In that case, it is most definitely NOT "New Old Stock". (Which means "old but in shelf-new condition".) What, an ebay seller not knowing WTF an acronym means? That's unpossible! Oh, and it's mint (flavored) too!

Yep, Kindly Uncle Jack (as the DTACK Grounded guy liked to call him)... his buying Atari helped set back the home video game industry. To him, consoles were just junk that got in the way of his desire for revenge against Commodore. Ah, yes, that was it. I had forgotten the reasoning behind Nintendo trying to make it not look like a video game console. The retailers. It's a bit hard to sell something when the retailers have been burned by having to clearance stuff at a loss. Never mind that much of what they were getting rid of was due to third-party companies churning out crap games, with the thought that all games would sell equally. The SMS deserved better than it got in the US, but there are reasons why it lost. Nintendo's exclusivity contracts, and Mario+Zelda (in that the best games for NES were better than the best games for SMS). The NES had a larger library because it lasted longer, but I can think of very few SMS games that I actually enjoyed playing, other than Rastan. And FWIW, even there was no corporate lineage, the SMS and Genesis/MD were the successors to Colecovision in terms of architecture. Or perhaps more accurately, the CV was a branch of Sega's lineage, that had previously been limited to Japan only. In any case, from 1986 to 1995 (the Playstation launch), TMS-9918-style character cell + sprite graphics were king.

I may have found one or two dead units over the years, and one Genesis 2 with a ton of bad solder joints on all the plugs, but I have to agree, they rank up there with the 2600 for durability. Of course the SNES has the problem with its plastic changing color, sometimes only one of the two halves.

SDLmess is good when developing code, because you can run it from a makefile: messpm coleco -cart ${CART} -window -keepaspect -skip_gameinfo -skip_warnings -switchres -nofullstretch & Testing on real hardware is more important than testing various emulators. I have written code that can lock up under an emulator (some versions of MESS) but not on real hardware, presumably because of a subtle bug in how the VDP interrupt is handled.

I have a feeling the case design is going to be rather unimportant until there is some actual working circuitry to put into a case.

As I've said before, Nintendo won out because they were the only company "stupid" enough to believe anyone still wanted home video game consoles. Everybody else "knew" that it was a fad that had ended, and nobody with money would have wasted it on trying to sell the things when everyone knew they were dead. Nintendo even had to go to an effort of making it not looking like a video game console (the "toaster" design that hid the cartridge like some kind of dirty underwear).

If you don't have the special magic wire that connects the base unit video to the 32X, the 32X is worth approximately zero. The mushroom is rather useless without it. (And maybe add a few bucks if you still have BOTH versions of that cable, or sell it separately.)

Sunday at a thrift store I found two junk Genesis carts priced at $4, but the last day of that color being half price. That made them a buck each, so I bought them for their shells. Gotta get cracking on my coding already... And just now I found: * NES Metroid w/box $1.50 (I didn't have the box) * NES Last Action Hero w/Box $1.50 (I didn't have the box or cart) * NES Yoshi $1.50 (already had it, oh well) * A "pirate" tape of random Star Wars stuff like Troops, Hardware Wars, etc. * Princess Bride 20th Anniversary edition widescreen, still shrinkwrapped, $1.50 (I think)

If nobody pays to download them, they're not going to get pirated. WIN. ...meanwhile, there's nothing new on the PSP that I want to play. So I'll continue to play rips of stuff I already have, both UMD and emulation. (Current game: Popful Mail)

I think point #5 is actually the most appropriate.

Actually, your best bet is if you can find someone local to you with a Pandora kit who already knows how to use it. The battery alone is not enough. You need a properly formatted memory stick with the necessary files on it. It is possible to make the necessary file from publicly available versions of the Sony updater, but as far as I know, you need to run a program on a hacked PSP to generate the files. Of course you can get the necessary files (and even a disk image of the mem stick) as warez. The best place I know of for info on hacking PSPs is on forums.qj.net, so you might want to go there and read around a bit.

I think we need to be clear about something here. In the subject line you say "should've been released", which to me implies "back in 1983-1984". And that's the point of view in which I'm telling you it would not have happened, probably not even if the crash had never happened. But if you're talking about today, then there's a different problem. In that case it's "then why don't you just play the original on an emulator"? It's one thing to make homebrews of new or under-represented games on an older system, but porting existing games which already had plenty of ports... there just doesn't seem to be much of a point. ...and not that the game impressed me all that much back in the day anyhow. I was specifically not impressed when I learned that no matter how good you were, you only got five (?) laps for your quarter, and then the game ended, period. (However, I didn't mind the absolute ending as much on Outrun, because the design of the game made it obvious from the start that there was an end, and each stage lasted longer too.)

That's correct. The absolute minimum stuff you need would be Binhex 4.0 and a version of Stuffit. If you can get a Mac with built-in Ethernet (they did make SCSI Ethernet adapters, but good luck finding a driver), it may be possible to set up a file server, but unless you can find a copy of the non-free Appleshare Server software, you will probably not be able to connect to a newer computer, like one running OS X. That's because at some point they switched over from Appletalk to TCP/IP, and the client needs to be compatible with the server. (Localtalk is an option too, but it's slower than floppy disks and probably more trouble than it's worth.)

That's why Sega made a power strip specifically for plugging in up to four of the enormous wall warts. I always thought of it as Sega saying "sorry" for all the wall warts.