jmetal88

Who are you? - The Who

Okay, what I ended up doing was buying an N64 controller with a broken stick from a pawn shop for $3, and ordering an $8-ish replacement thumb stick off eBay. I'm hoping it's decent quality. I've found a decent write up about it that says it's better than any of the replacements previously available, but that doesn't give me any kind of absolute reference. I might look into the Super Pad 64 to replace this other third party controller, though. Now after a few days' use, it's starting to develop the same problem as the one I just returned.

Neither is 'better' than the other. Just depends on what type of games you like to play.

My only disappointment with it is that it seems to only let you play in single player mode. Unless I just haven't figured out how to activate two-player mode. It does run very well, though.

I don't know, but I've never used an original N64 controller without a loose stick, somehow. I mean, they were perfectly functional, just all loose.

My roommate told me when we first moved in together last year that I could have his N64 when he moves out if I bought some controllers for it. Yesterday, I finally bought a couple of repro controllers from Vintage Stock in Joplin. They were Retro-Bit brand and felt really cheap as soon as I got the packaging open. I bought a purple one and a grey one, and while the purple one functioned well (even if it didn't necessarily feel nice in my hand), the grey one had an issue with the analog stick pulling to the right by varying degrees when it should have been centered. I returned it for a refund, but kept the purple one, although I'm not expecting it to last very long at this point. So, I was wondering, what would be the best route to go with for getting another controller? Should I just get one of the official controllers used, or is there actually a high-quality repro brand out there somewhere? Thanks!

Nah, it's not released yet, just a demo. EDIT: Here's the project page that has the downloadable demo files: http://www.atari8.co.uk/gui/index.html

I got a couple more games today! Night Stalker with box and one overlay, $3.99. Space Armada, complete, $1.99. Got 'em at Vintage Stock at the mall in Joplin. I've been to other Vintage Stock stores before, but this one is probably the largest. Massive selection! They didn't have very many 'rare' games like I've found at smaller stores before, but I guess that's probably because Vintage Stock is more well-known in the area and would probably sell the rare stuff more quickly than the smaller stores.

I guess it's not gonna happen.... I'll just keep an eye out and see if I can run across an auction other people are missing or maybe see if there's a copy available locally at a decent price.

My games look better on my CRTs than on my Insignia LCD. The Insignia seems to have a tuner similar to that in my VCRs, and I get similar excess noise on the screen when I try to use it.

I actually have a diagram of the whole mod in my thread now. I might as well upload it here, too.

The 7805 replaces the shunt circuit, and also has the benefit of powering the whole mod without power from another source, the way I drew it in the other thread. It could possibly benefit from another capacitor on the 12V side of the regulator (the standard regulator circuits always have capacitors both before and after the regulator), but when I built it, mine worked without it.

Well, the interesting thing is there's ghosting on my video monitor, but not on my TV. There's also ghosting from my Atari ST on my video monitor (it puts out PAL, so I can't test it on my TV). So there may just be something wrong with my video monitor. Anyway, it doesn't bug me too much (and there was a ton more ghosting on the RF output than on this video mod). I haven't tried to feel the temperature of the 78L05, I just kind of put it in hoping it would work, and it did. EDIT: I do have an oscilloscope, but both of my probes are broken right now (that's what I get for buying the cheapest probes I could find off eBay).

Nah, I like the idea because it means I'm not tapping anywhere that the original RF modulator wasn't tapping. That circuit is effectively a drop-in replacement for the RF modulator. Besides, I have 5V regulators just laying around for some reason, might as well use one of 'em.

Okay, this schematic is exactly the way I have mine built (not including the connections to the 3.5mm stereo jack).

Gimme a bit and I can draw a new schematic.

I don't own an arcade machine, but I have an empty arcade cabinet that's partially finished that I built out of plywood from my own design. Pretty much the most complicated thing I've ever built out of wood. It's not great-looking, but for me it's pretty good. Just wish I could build up the enthusiasm to finish the thing, though.

I'm looking to buy a copy of Super Smash Bros Melee for Gamecube at a good price. If anyone's willing to let a copy go for under $30 (preferably including shipping), you have my attention. I've never played the game before, and people tell me it's a must-own for the Gamecube (and I currently have only one game for my Gamecube), but at the prices I'm seeing currently (which seem to be around $60), I just can't justify the expense. So please, if you're not all about market value and whatnot, I'd really appreciate if you could help me out!

Yeah, it would get quite hot dissipating that much power. Like I said, there might be something else limiting the current that I don't know about, so it may be perfectly safe (I just didn't want to chance it). I fed the 5V output of the regulator through a 470-Ohm resistor (I didn't have a potentiometer to try different values, but 470 Ohms looks good enough, to me) and to the video input of the mod circuit. I'm using the same regulator to feed power to the 2N3904 circuit as well, by the way.

Hmm, maybe something else is limiting the 12V current then. Here's my math: Vr = V - Vz = 12V - 5.1V = 6.9V Ir = Vr / R = 6.9V / 33 Ohms = 209mA Pr = Ir * Vr = 209mA * 6.9V = 1.44 Watts And 1.44 Watts would have been a lot more than my resistor could handle.

Alright, I gave the video mod its own 78L05 rather than tapping 5V straight from the board and now the picture is rock-solid! There is some very, very minor ghosting, but the 'shimmering' I mentioned in my last post is completely gone. It's certainly at least as good a picture as the RF was when hooked straight to my CRT set. The way I've got this set up would make an interesting case for a drop-in replacement for the RF modulator. It doesn't use any connection points on the board that the original RF modulator didn't use, and for the output jack I just used a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack mounted where the RCA jack used to be so that the case doesn't need modification. I just need to use a headphone to RCA breakout cable to the TV. If I use an audio cable, I get audio on the white plug and video on the red plug, but it also works with the video out cable from my digital camera, with video on the yellow plug and audio on the black plug.

Okay, I just did the Solarfox video mod. Unfortunately, the output isn't nearly as clean as I was expecting (granted, I did take a couple of shortcuts as far as board placement, internal wiring, and output jacks), but I guess I'll keep it like this for a while and see how things go. I still need to try it on my actual CRT TV, though, as all I've tried it on so far is my PVM and my really cheap bedroom HDTV set. I will say that it definitely looks better than RF through a VCR, but it doesn't look as good as RF straight to my TV did (I mean, there's no ghosting at all now, but the picture has more noise than I'd expect in a composite signal). EDIT: Eh, it's not really 'noisy' so much as it is 'shimmery'. I would guess it's because I didn't have any shielded cable to run inside the console, although I did mount the board right where the RF modulator used to be so I could keep the wires really short. Also, instead of the 'shunt' mod, I took 5V from a nearby IC and fed it to the video input via a 470 Ohm resistor. It works, but since it's not isolated from the rest of the system, I suppose that could be introducing some of the noise I'm seeing. I really didn't want to install the shunt regulator as the schematic was drawn up, though, as it would be causing the 33-Ohm resistor to dissipate around 1.4 Watts, and I only have 0.25 Watt resistors on hand. I do have a spare 78L05 regulator on hand that I could try to get power from if I wanted to keep this isolated from the logic circuits, so maybe I can try that later. Right now, I have homework to do, haha.

Thanks! That Solarfox mod along with the removal of the modulator and the addition of the shunt circuit looks like it would work the best. It may be well worth modding the Intellivision. Next I'll have to decide if it's worth modding my 5200. In picture quality, it probably would be, but I have the 4-port version with the automatic, powered RF switchbox, and I enjoy the novelty of that thing.

That's debatable. If your TV has a bad scaling engine and you feed it a 240p signal, you'll tend to get worse results than if you feed it a 480p signal because it doesn't have to scale the latter signal by nearly as much.

While you are correct in that the video gets scaled eventually either way, you may get different-looking results depending on how the TV does the scaling versus the external device. Usually, a dedicated device will have higher quality scaling hardware than that which is built into your TV, and you may very well end up with a sharper picture and more vivid colors. Of course, if your TV doesn't support RGB input from the Jaguar, you don't have a valid comparison, but I believe Gunstar uses a projector that takes both 15kHz RGB as well as VGA, if I'm correctly recalling an old thread from vague memory.