RARusk

The JamPack demos are put out by Sony and therefore they have the memory card holder. I used these to replace the shitty cases I usually end up with when I buy used PS2 games. They usually cost between two to four dollars depending on age and where they are sold. I examine the case for damage before purchasing. The only problem is now I have a large stack of demo discs I have no use for.....

I would like to know too. Usually I just go and get cheap JamPack demos at Best Buy (after examining the cases for damage). Of course, finding replacements for original Xbox cases is a little bit harder (and the ones I need most for my large collection).....

I found a black GameCube at a local thrift store for $20. It came by itself, no controller, no power supply. The case was damaged, the logo disc (which sits in the lid) was missing. I could hardly open the lid due to it being stuck shut by juice that had been spilled inside the GameCube. I took it home and took it apart. The handle was cracked and a couple of screw posts were broken off. The lid swtich was broken. There was a lot of dust inside along with the juice which was still sticky. I cleaned out most of the juice and acquired a third party power supply. Not surprisingly, the GameCube didn't work. So I looked over the power board. Then I hooked it back up to the motherboard and used my multi-tester. I found that the power wouldn't go beyond a certain part. This part had wording that looked like a fuse rating so I decided to solder a wire to both ends of the piece. The GameCube worked when I turned it on. I replaced the wire with a wire/ferrite part. I repaired the plastic with Plastic Welder. I replaced the lid switch with new parts. I repainted the sides of the GameCube to cover up scuff marks. I even had to replace the system battery, due to it being shorted out by the juice, using the battery holder from a dead PS2 and popping in a new CR2032. Now it works great. The only thing missing is the logo disc. What I believe happened was that some kid spilled juice into the GameCube which shorted it out. Then it was thrown across the room in anger causing the extensive plastic damage. Then the GameCube was quickly dispatched to the thrift shop, to punish the kid I think, where I was fated to find my new toy. I swear, people just don't know how to take care of electronics anymore..... Anyway, below are some pictures of my GameCube repair: Power board repair. New lid switch. Fit perfectly with minimal work. Repairing the cracked handle. Screw post reattachment. System battery replacement. Finished unit. Note the missing logo disc. I have since added a GameBoy Player and acquired two GameCube Component Video Cables. One is unmodified and the other is RGB modified and I even wrote a detailed page for the GamesX Wiki on how to do the cable hack.

If you get the Wii do you plan to bring it for a show and tell to a future XCSSA metting Bruce? I think it would be cool to show off the Wiimote to everyone and I would like to get a close-up look at the unit, especially the A/V port. Personally, I would like to get a Wii at some point. But I want to see if anybody comes out with an adapter that will allow you to play game cartridges on the Wii through the Virtual Console. Some games will never be availabe through the VC system ("GoldenEye" is the most notable example) and the Wii may help some games play with a decent frame rate (*cough*Perfect Dark*cough*). Besides, if I have the cartridge already, why should I pay for the game again if I want to play it on the VC? In addition, I would like to see an adapter that will allow you to use the original controllers on the VC. Nothing against the classic controller but if I want to play an N64 game on the Wii's VC I would like to have the option to use the original controller if I desire. I don't know if anybody else has had the same problem as me but every time I see the Wii I think "Zip Drive". Maybe that's what I should call it from now on: The Nintendo Zip Drive. Or, maybe better, the Nintendo Zip Drive Revolution. Well, it's certainly got to be better then "wii" don't you think?

I think laptop drives max out at 120GB. Anything with more capacity is going to be too large to fit into the PS3.

I also found this picture of a new hard drive install on the PS3. Yeah, it's going to hang out the side but I am sure that somebody is already designing a PS3 specific hard drive enclosure to prevent this from happening.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35549 Some guys in Japan got their hands on PS3s and took them apart. Some nice technical info and pictures plus additional links. http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/11/ps3-manu...ry-replacement/ Believe it or not, Sony left instructions on how to change out the PS3s hard drive right in the owners manual. I honestly didn't think they would let you be able to do that. Are they trying to one-up MicroSoft concerning replaceable hard drives or does it have something to do with potential homebrew development?

I've heard a lot of music in my 30+ years of gaming but my favorite theme right now is the main title to "Hitman 2: Silent Assassin" by Jesper Kyd.

Speaking of "Axel F", I just downloaded a cool remix of it (tbo_axel.xm) plus a nifty mix of the music from "Zak McKracken" (zak.it) from The Mod Archive.

You may want to try The Mod Archive. Plenty of chiptunes there.

To help out Pete5125: When you start up the game and you see the names of the pinball games, press Option. There you will see the Game Options Menu. You can see the Joypad option near the bottom. There are three Setups: Setup 1 ****** D-Pad - Left Flipper A - Nudge Table B - Right Flipper C - Pull Spring Setup 2 ****** D-Pad - Left Flipper A - Right Flipper B - Pull Spring C - Nudge Table Setup 3 ****** D-Pad - Left Flipper A - Pull Spring B - Nudge Table C - Right Flipper As you can see, the use of the D-Pad in any direction will activate the Left Flipper. For my hack I used D-Pad (Right) for the Left Shoulder Buttons to simplify things.

While I am trying to get my rotary controller working again I went and did another hack I've been meaning to do and make it work with the joypad interface I built in this topic. I found this nice little Gravis joypad at Goodwill Computerworks. It is a PlayStation joypad clone for PCs. I wanted to make a joypad for the game "Pinball Fantasies" so I can use the shoulder buttons with my forefingers similar to the action you do when playing a real pinball machine. I opened it up and stripped off all of the components, rewired it to mimic a Jaguar joypad, and added a 25-pin plug to the end of the cable so I could attach it to the joypad interface. In a stroke of luck it turns out that the joypad cable contains exactly ten wires which is the number you need for the Jaguar joypad. For "Pinball Fantasies" I wired the two left shoulder buttons to become D-Pad (Right) and the two right shoulder buttons to become the B Button when the game is using the Setup 1 control scheme. The pad can also work with any other game as long as you don't use the shoulder buttons. After doing the work and testing it out it works great. I tried it out on both "Pinball Fantasies" and "Tempest 2000". Ironically, I got a 200,000+ high score on T2K which is the highest score I've ever achieved in a Tempest game. The first picture is the joypad itself with the new 25-pin plug to the right. The Select button is Pause and the Start button is Option. The Blue button is the C Button, the Red button is the B Button, and the Green button is the A Button. The Yellow button is not used. The second picture is of the rewiring that had to be done to get the pad to work with the joypad interface. Messy, but it works. Not as impressive as the cardboard controller but I do what I can.

"Indeed, he'd never even played it properly until he used one of my rotaries at a retrovision, he was like "woah, so thats how it should have felt", which made me more than a little proud." Awesome Tyrant. It's nice to know that he had a chance to play around with one of your controllers. Even though he never had a real chance to build upon the rotary feature at least we found ways to make use of it and to play the game as it was meant to be played. I wonder why the rotary feature was put in at the last minute instead of it being in the design in the first place. After reading on where you make your connections I have a suggestion to make. Solder three wires to the encoder and then solder the other ends to where the ribbon cable is soldered to the lower board so you won't have to do the extra work of hacking up the ribbon cable and not having to worry about fixing up traces on the upper board. As for optical encoders, it doesn't hurt to play around with them and learn from them. I may still be able to get this thing working perfectly and it opens up options for those who want to build their own rotary controllers. I did a little more surfing at the CUI website and I like a lot of the encoders they have. Who knows, I may find some in the wild on my outing tomorrow as I try to find parts to repair my controller.

I live in San Antonio and I've never heard of FX until now. Where are all their locations and do they have a website? Down here it's all EB/GameStops. For my independent gaming fix I have to go to Austin and hit the GameFellas and Game Over stores.

Wow. Kinda makes me wonder what his version of a rotary controller has got to look like.....

Did some research on mechanical encoders and found this website www.cui.com. Lots of encoder options there. Might be very useful for this type of project.

There are three games that hooked me on a particular console or computer to the point that I would either buy the unit or have it given to me as a gift because of it: "Defender of the Crown" (Commodore Amiga) - First saw the game in 1985 and it blew me away. Would later acquire the Amiga and game in 1990. "GoldenEye" (Nintendo 64) - Kept playing the game at a nearby Best Buy during my lunch break and wanted it badly. Got the console and game for my 31st birthday in 1998. "Grand Theft Auto III" (PlayStation 2) - After playing it at a gamestore I just kept raving about it to my family. I got the system and game for Christmas 2001.

Thanks for the info Tyrant. Being that this game came from the Tramiel run Atari I'm not surprised about the circumstances. Given enough time I'm sure that Jeff would have perfected everything. Tonight I decided to find alternate points on the mainboard to acquire signals and in the process I knocked it out of commission (hopefully temporarily). I had tried several points without success. I was trying to attach one of the wires to one of the chips. I was trying to apply a little solder to the end of the wire so I could attach it to the chip. However, a small blob of solder fell onto the mainboard. To compound my careless error the mainboard was on. Luckily, the blob didn't fall on any major components. But a small part of it crossed the +5VDC with one of the sensor wires and before I could do anything I blew out one of the optical sensors. Yeah, that was really stupid of me. But I may be able to replace it and I will take the optical board to some of the electronics shops here in San Antonio to find the right sensor part. I may also go to Goodwill Computerworks to get a cheap mouse and get them from that. By the way Tyrant, where specifically on the joypad do you connect the left and right wires leading to the encoder?

Interesting. I will try to find alternative points on the main board since I am getting them raw just off of the optical device. It's possible that the circuit that you posted, or a similar version of it, may already be on the main board. I think the plug area where the joystick cable is connected would be a good spot to try since that is where the signals leave the main board to go to the computer. If that doesn't work I'll get the necessary parts next week and build the circuit. I also think that using a switch on the +5VDC line heading to the main board would work just as well for switching between normal and rotary modes. Turn off the power and you turn off the main board and the signals cease. I also wonder what they built to test out the rotary controller code during quality assurance of "Tempest 2000". I am curious what they used. I also built a simple 9-pin to 25-pin adapter to try the Indy 500 driving controller to see what it did. It worked nice at the main menu but it was terribly slow in gameplay. Still no keypad function. I am beginning to wonder if the reason the rotary option was hidden was because any rotary device would cause problems with the keypad functions. But, this is also not just a hardware problem but a game design flaw. If T2K did not use any keypad functions at all there would never be an interference issue. If they knew about the keypad problem than they should have programmed around it by taking away the camera and sound toggles from the keypad and allowing the rotary controller to have the keypad all to itself thus removing the need for you to use it during gameplay. They could have programmed T2K to let you to pause the game and allow you to switch camera modes (without the threat of losing any lives) using the main firebuttons as well as turning on or off the music and sound effects. A little lack of foresight there.

I just recently acquired a PBC and the only game that I have that works on my SMS but doesn't work on the PBC is "Alien 3". When I put it in the PBC it comes up with a blank screen and single tone noise. But when I put it back in the SMS it works fine.

"I hope the modifications you made to the encoder are reversible, since you just degraded its performance... Why did you do this ?" Yes, the modification is reversible. The reason I did it was because I felt that there was too many "poles" sending back too much information which I thought may be a partial cause of the interference. I was wrong of course. As for degradation, I don't think I degraded the performance at all. Before, when at the menu screen, if you barely tapped the paddle, the cursor would go nuts. In this case, the controller was too sensitive. In the gameplay, I didn't have any problems but I could see that if I barely moved the paddle I would move the shooter. With the modification, even though the cursor would bounce around a bit, it was less than what it was before. I also found that I had a little bit more control over the shooter during gameplay. In essence I tweaked the sensitivity down a bit by blocking out half the windows. "The "interference" is an electrical incompatibility that isn't fixable with mechanical tinkering -- besides, if I understood the way the encoder is currently connected, you may even damage it in the long term, since pressing buttons short-circuits the outputs." Are you meaning to say that there is an actual current, in addition to the signals, going back to the interface? What buttons are you referring to? The firebuttons or the keypad buttons or both?

I had a look at the replies in my "Optical Rotary Controller Project (Sneak Peek)" topic concerning the keypad interference issue and I will try to play around with the proposed solution to it. I will also continue to look for other potential solutions to this particular problem. I opened up the main unit again tonight to try something to solve the interference issue. Using a combination of masking agent and black paint, I went and blocked out every other window on the encoder wheel. It didn't solve the problem but it managed to make the controller a little less twitchy and improved the control a little. Well, I'm done here for the night. Let me know what you guys think of the project.

The final picture is what the setup looks like. The rotary controller, which is on my Xbox, would sit on my lap as I play the game. The joypad is used to set things up and make gameplay tweaks. The Jaguar is attached to my RGB box using the PlayStation AV plug I hacked into it eariler in the year and displayed on my NEC MultiSync 3D monitor.

The first picture in this post is of the stand for the joypad interface. It used to be a NES Advantage joystick. This was originally going to be used for a stand for my PlayStation joypad interface (a picture of that, a project done years ago, is the third picture) but I never got around to finishing it. The reason I was using the Advantage was because it has a solid metal base which gives it weight and keeps it from being moved around. I resurrected the stand for the Jaguar joypad. the two posts go into the screw holes near the 25-pin plug. The piece of velcro is used to attach the top end of the joypad because the screw posts there are too shallow. The second picture is the joypad interface on the stand. The third picture is of the PlayStation joypad interface I was going to use the stand for originally.

The next couple of pictures show the joypad interface to the rotary controller (plus any additional homebrew controller projects). The first picture is of the joypad interface itself. You can clearly see the 25-pin plug on the bottom. You can use the interface like a regular joypad if the need arises. The second picture is a closeup of the 25-pin plug. The pinouts, going from left to right, is as follows: Row 1 ***** 1 - Keypad Row 1 (Pause) 2 - Keypad Row 2 (A, B, C, Option) 3 - Keypad Row 3 (Right, 1, 2, 3) 4 - Keypad Row 4 (Left, 4, 5, 6) 5 - Keypad Row 5 (Down, 7, 8, 9) 6 - Keypad Row 6 (Up, *, 0, #) 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 - Not Connected 12 - Rotary Controller (Left) 13 - Rotary Controller (Right) Note: I decided to give the rotary controller its own pins just in case I may need to do something special. Row 2 ***** 14 - +5VDC 15 - Not Connected 16 - Keypad Column 1 (Pause, A, Right, Left, Down, Up) 17 - Keypad Column 2 (B, 1, 4, 7, *) 18 - Keypad Column 3 (C, 2, 5, 8, 0) 19 - Keypad Column 4 (Option, 3, 6, 9, #) 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 - Not Connected 25- Ground