July 10th, 2010: And that settles that...
Well, my joy was short-lived.
No sooner had I backed up my important files last night, when Ami-chan suddenly crashed. I spent all day today trying to diagnose the problems, and after eliminating all other possibilities, I've come to the conclusion that the main ROM is dead... meaning my A2000 is out of commission until I can buy a replacement. Thankfully, replacement Kickstart ROMs are plentiful and relatively inexpensive, but even if I ordered one today, it wouldn't arrive until the Retrochallenge is over.
I thank Vendor that it wasn't my 68040 accelerator that had died... the prices for those are almost criminal, even in the used-and-not-guaranteed market!
So, a major blow but a minor setback. In the grand scheme of things, all this does is push my art projects back one or two days.
Tomorrow, I deputise Natsumi to take over as my main Amiga until I can resurrect my Amiga 4000 early next week. Thankfully my Deneb card will work in the A4000 too...
July 9th, 2010: Into the 21st Century for you, old girl!
Today, I brought Ami-chan into the 21st century. I installed the Deneb card I ordered a couple of weeks ago. I have USB 2.0 on my 1986-vintage Amiga 2000.
I had to sacrifice my VLab video capture board as it and the Deneb board conflicted, but it's a small price to pay. I am now able to use USB flash drives, card readers, and external hard drives (et cetera) and thus can finally back my data up reliably! So I'm pretty excited about my Amiga's newfound abilities... this will increase my productivity a hundredfold!
A few shots of the card and the installation process. The final pic is of the Trident GUI, which acts as the user interface for the Poseidon USB Stack. The software recognized my USB 2.0 hub, my Imagemate card reader, my Bayern München logo USB Flash drive, and a USB-ethernet dongle. So far, I'm very pleased with my purchase... so much so, that when I resurrect my Amiga 4000 (aka Miyuki) sometime next month, I'll be buying another Deneb.
One thing that struck me as interesting was that there were no disks included with the card. No, in true innovative Amiga fashion, the drivers, Poseidon stack, Trident GUI, and extra tools were located in a Flash ROM on the card itself. All it took was setting a jumper on the card to "RESCUE" mode, which allowed the card's Flash ROM to appear as an Amiga DOS drive in Workbench.
You know what else was in the Flash ROM? A little "Animated Amiga Tribute" by Amiga artist (and creator of my favourite webcomic Sabrina Online), Eric Schwartz. It's also available on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.
Now, all I need is to upgrade Ami-chan's RAM (next month) and connect my scanner (next week), and I'll be set!
The downside to this is that I won't be mapping out the Coco 3 game Rad Warrior this time around, as my capture card has been removed...
July 7th and 8th: We have no bananas today...
No updates today or tomorrow I'm afraid. I'll be hanging out at a World Cup-related gathering where we'll watch the Germany-Spain match and drink copious amounts of Weißbier.
Thursday will see me performing regular maintenance on my mountain bikes, as well as repairing my old Cappucino/Espresso machine. Yes, even in this stifling heat, I still drink coffee. Call me mad. Call me coffee mad.
Friday will see the return of my Amiga 2000 with an interesting upgrade...
July 6th, 2010: Today, I hacked a Gameboy...
As the subtitle to yesterday's update has drawn the curiosity of our twitter-monkey, I'll oblige:
Q: What's black and white and re(a)d all over?
A: A newspaper! Especially one used in a certain way!
Well, no CDTV today. Instead, I did something totally spontaneous, something that will be of immense benefit to my art project next week. As I was cleaning up the remainder of the two original Gameboys whose parts I'd used yesterday, an idea struck me... instead of putting the pieces into a box as spare parts (and summarily forgetting about them), why don't I put them to good use?
So I did. Today, I hacked a Gameboy...
Remembering I had an old Olympus D-460Z camera also sitting in "The Spare Parts Box of No Return", I decided to take it apart to grab the one thing I'd need to make this work. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Originally bought for parts for my beloved D460Z, this old camera has been languishing for over a year. Today, I pulled it further apart to extract the tripod port.
I removed the front logic board of my old Gameboy, along with the buttons and pads and began filing the headphone jack down to accomodate the tripod port. I was originally going to use my Dremel, but it's an old one with only one speed setting: fast. I decided to play it safe and used a set of modelling files instead.
Now, I didn't have screws that were long enough, so the camera mount is held
in place by a few dabs of Krazy Glue Emotionally-challenged
Adhesive.
One other issue: I had to remove the headphone jack and in doing so, eliminated the audio output board. I will eventually re-wire and re-route it if this experiment works.
Once the glue dried, I put it all back together. Not a particularily pretty hack by any stretch... much like my ex, she's uglier than sin but she works! Let's take 'er for a ride!
Plugged in the power adapter, connected to my mini-tripod, and took a picture of myself taking a picture...
... and here's how it looked from the other end.
I fitted the GB to my main tripod to see how well it would work. Man, this is going to make my art project even easier.
I was going to do this as a dry-run before installing the hack into my other, recently repaired Gameboy, but have since changed my mind. When I have a bit of time, I'm going to try to fix the screen on the now-hacked Gameboy (using the procedure described yesterday), as well as cleaning out the battery compartment (which is corroded but should be salvageable). Eventually I'll re-wire and re-route the sound board, but that's a low priority.
All in all, not a bad morning's work. I took a few spare parts and cobbled together something rather useful and cool in its own little way.
As an aside: I realized I could achieve the same result by gluing a 1/4" - 20 hex nut to the bottom of the Gameboy, instead of wasting a morning hacking the poor thing up and silencing it. But where's the fun in THAT? Besides, doing things MY way allowed me to keep the Gameboy in its original dimensions.
July 5th, 2010: What's black and white and red all over?
So, I'm lucky for the second day running.
A few weeks ago, again in anticipation of this summer's RC, I decided I was going to repair the screen on my original Gameboy (the original grey brick DMG-01). The screen was buggered - it wouldn't display the right and left edges of the screen, about an eighth of an inch either side. I did a quick search online and found that this was a common problem for Gameboys of this vintage - the glue holding the screen cable to the LCD would dry up and the cable would peel off. Apparently, it was a relatively easy fix... all you had to do was touch a "relatively cool" soldering iron to the edges of the plastic screen cable to melt it back into place. Although laughing at the absurdity of a statement like "relatively cool soldering iron", deep down I knew that I had to try it. What self-respecting lunatic wouldn't?
I figured I'd give my ol' GB a precursory inspection, just to ensure it was indeed the fault of the cable. Now, if you've never opened up a Gameboy before, heed this warning: Nintendo has given us a big "Screw You!" - in order to keep the end-user from trying to repair (or modify) their Gameboy units, Nintendo used an uncommon "tri-foil" three-pronged screw pattern, similar to a Phillips-head screw but with three branches instead of four. Of course, any console buff worth their salt already has a pair of these screwdrivers (those of you with a lower sodium content can pick 'em up cheap on ebay), so I set upon the old grey brick with a devilish gleam in my eye... only to find that most of the screws were missing!
I unscrewed the remaining screws and opened the unit... apparently the posts that hold the (missing) screws had broken off inside and were rattling around inside the Gameboy. This thing won't go back together properly... but anyway, I checked the screen cable and, sure enough, the glue had dried up. I thought briefly of grabbing my soldering iron right then and there, but ultimately decided to wait until the RC started instead of cheating (heh). Instead, I went on eBay to see if I could find a broken Gameboy for parts, figuring I could swap out the cases. Sure enough, I found one in decent shape that was described as non-functional (wouldn't power on) but had an almost immaculate case. After a day-and-a-half of an intense bidding war, I won it for a buck (plus eight bucks shipping)! But that was then, and this is now.
The broken Gameboy arrived this morning. I put a game cart and fresh batteries into the unit and... no go. Just for shits and giggles, I grabbed my AC/DC power adapter and plugged the unit it... and CHRIST ON TOAST! The damned thing powered up! Not only that, but the screen worked beautifully (after I turned the contrast down).
"So, let's see," my fevered brain got a-thinkin', "I have an old Gameboy that worked flawlessly apart from a broken case and malfunctioning screen. I have a broken Gameboy with an immaculate screen and decent case, but won't run off batteries. What to do... I KNOW! I'll swap out the battery compartments!"
Which was as easy as unplugging a ribbon cable, swapping the back halves, and plugging the cable back in. I put the screws back in, popped in a game cart (my favourite: Heiankyo Alien!), popped in four new batteries and...
Ga-Ding!
It started up.
My old Gameboy is reborn!
Now that the ol' Boy is back in action, I'll be able to start phase one of my art project. I'm planning to take the hobby of Gameboy Camera photography to a whole new level.
But first, let's see if my newest GB Camera works...
I prefer using the original Gameboy over the Gameboy Colour when using the camera. The older model gives a better representation of the image onscreen than the GB Colour, which helps immensely when setting up a shot. But we'll save that for next week when the art phase of my RC begins in earnest.
Tomorrow and Wednesday I will be catching the World Cup semi-finals (Germany vs Spain & Uruguay vs The Netherlands respectively), but I'm going to try to do some work on my ailing Commodore CDTV after the match.
A bientôt!
July 4th, 2010: Week Two DOES begin with a hangover...
Happy Independence Day to our friends and neighbours to the immediate south!
If you were to look up the word "Lucky" in the dictionary, you'd find my picture...
luck·y (lk)
adj. luck·i·er, luck·i·est
1. Having or attended by good luck.
2. Occurring by chance; fortuitous.
3. Believed to bring good luck: hoped to draw a lucky number.
4. Conceited Jerk
"Why are you so lucky, CJ?" you may ask. Well sit back, my retrofriends, and I will tell you about my evening.
About a month ago, in anticipation of this year's summer Retrochallenge, I began planning in earnest. Scouring eBay for interesting items for my TRS-80 Model 100, I came across a keyboard for the TRS-80 Model 4P. As you may recall, the CLEAR key on my Model 4P's keyboard has been nonfunctional since I bought the unit in 2005... and go figure it's the ONE KEY that every program uses as its "meta" key. As my many attempts to remap the clear key to another key have been spectacularily unsuccessful, I jumped at the chance to buy the one on eBay. There was just one catch - it was still attached to the motherboard! Not really needing or wanting a new motherboard, this was a source of temporary consternation... I really didn't want to pay shipping for both keyboard and motherboard (especially considering the mobo was still attached to the 5lb steel "pan") and the seller wouldn't separate the items. I decided to suck it up and pay the shipping costs... they were still much less than buying a whole new Model 4P!
The package arrived a couple of weeks ago, but I left it unopened in my office until I was ready to start work on Sigrid (my own Model 4P). I opened up the package, threw out the eight pounds of packing peanuts and bubble wrap, and took a good, long look at the keyboard. "Hmmm," I thought, "it's in pretty decent shape... How about the motherboard? Let's see... SWEET JABBA THE HUTT, WILL YOU LOOK AT THAT?!"
There, still attached to the keyboard, lay the motherboard - a much newer Gate Array motherboard, fully populated with 128K RAM! If this thing works, I'll be in my glory! So, let's get to work...
Seen here for the first time since Summer RC 2009 is Sigrid. But there's no time to admire her mature beauty... let's take her apart!
Now that I've skinned the beast, let's see what makes her tick... Sigrid's original motherboard is an older non-Gate Array model with 128K RAM that sometimes only registers as 64K...
Nicely populated with 128K RAM, along with PAL chip in U73 to address the RAM, and a new keyboard to boot. Now we install the motherboard and cross our fingers...
Will you look at that? She works beautifully, and seems to boot 25-30% faster too! Now let's get her dressed...
There we go... all put back together and running better than ever. All in all, not a bad evening's work, eh?
There's just one thing left to do...
That's the end of that.
It took several Retrochallenges, but I finally got around to fixing Sigrid. In this instance, it paid to procrastinate!
Hallelujah!