Introductions

wow. it seems like no matter the problem, you have an extraordinarily good answer... im quite impressed, shocked, in awe, and amazed all at the same time. its people like you that people like me look up to.

Modding-Halfling wrote:

wow. it seems like no matter the problem, you have an extraordinarily good answer... im quite impressed, shocked, in awe, and amazed all at the same time. its people like you that people like me look up to.

That's good because not a lot of people look up to me. This morning I had to block a guy because he was arguing too much. I was very impressed with this mod here:

http://mikejmoffitt.com/wp/?p=74

And I showed it to this guy. The guy told me that it was a waste of time and that this modder only rewired to rgb to go to a custom connector instead of the multi av port at the back. I kept trying to explain that this modder wired up a component video signal that wasn't wired to the multi av port but no matter what I said this guy refused to listen to me. It basically got to the point where he said "you don't know how to read a schematic" so I blocked him and deleted him from my windows live. Really out of all the people on the internet I'm pretty sure I know how to read schematics better than most people out there. What really bugged me is this guy refused to listen to me even though I'm a much better modder than a lot of other people.

well if anything i definatly look up to u. your a pretty awesome dude who aparently knows a thing or two about what your doing. i hate it when people dont admit they look up to someone.

i dont really care though because i do look up to you as a modder. whenever i need help or advice or a nice old fashioned tip, im coming to you for help

Modding-Halfling wrote:

i hate it when people dont admit they look up to someone.

As you improve you realise that you can do what many "you look up to" can, so don't any more (and sometimes surpass), it's the way it goes. There's always many out there with more experience in modding however if the field isn't your interest then you don't look up to them but do respect them.

Hello. I'm Son Rolo.

I'm not a modder, so I may be in the wrong forum. Never tried modding a console, but I enjoy reading about old consoles and games.

Particularly the whole topic about the inner workings of old consoles and the tricks programmers had to use to get the most out of them fascinates me to no end

I'm currently in the process of building an arcade machine that runs on a PC, and, well, I don't know what else to say here.

Hello, everyone.

Hello Everyone!

I'm TMBlitzK, AKA "Blitzkrieg". In real life, my name is Throckmorton Jay.
I'm a video game collector from Michigan who is into games from the Late 1980's to the Early 2000's. I'm mostly into the Famicom, Genesis, and the PS2. I have over 20 different consoles.



I'm Also into drawing art and playing music. Most of my music I play is ether recorded from a keyboard and/or bass guitar, or is programmed into a midi's that use Soundfonts.

I joined this website because it looked like an interesting community, and I happened to find the link to it on Sega-16, in Drakon's signature.
It's nice to meet everyone here!

Son Rolo wrote:

Hello. I'm Son Rolo.

I'm not a modder, so I may be in the wrong forum. Never tried modding a console, but I enjoy reading about old consoles and games.

Particularly the whole topic about the inner workings of old consoles and the tricks programmers had to use to get the most out of them fascinates me to no end

I'm currently in the process of building an arcade machine that runs on a PC, and, well, I don't know what else to say here.

Hello, everyone.

Whoops I missed this.  Welcome.  What programming tricks are you interested in?

TMBlitzK wrote:

Hello Everyone!

I'm TMBlitzK, AKA "Blitzkrieg". In real life, my name is Throckmorton Jay.
I'm a video game collector from Michigan who is into games from the Late 1980's to the Early 2000's. I'm mostly into the Famicom, Genesis, and the PS2. I have over 20 different consoles.



I'm Also into drawing art and playing music. Most of my music I play is ether recorded from a keyboard and/or bass guitar, or is programmed into a midi's that use Soundfonts.

I joined this website because it looked like an interesting community, and I happened to find the link to it on Sega-16, in Drakon's signature.
It's nice to meet everyone here!

Welcome.

So I'm Ryan and I'm from Scotland.

I started off collecting Sega MegaDrive games after discovering my old Sega system packed away somewhere and playing the crap out of it. From there I progressed into reading lots about the system and games, the history of Sega and all that sort of stuff. This got my interested in emulation and roms. I'm not that interested in how emulators work or how much they match the target system but I am interested in all the fun stuff that can be done with roms and savestates. This got me into ROM hacking and savestate editing which expanded beyond the MegaDrive to the Playstations 2, the Xbox 360 and the PC.

I've released a couple of tools of interest, one was a save state editor for Toejam and Earl which was my first editor and another was a deck injector for the Magic the Gathering game Shandalar which was pretty well received.

Recently I've been looking to learn more about the hardware side of things which was born from looking into the 68K Processor's assembly, (the two are pretty tightly linked if you didn't know). I bought an Ardunio as a way to get introduced to the hardware / software relationship but so far I haven't done anything amazing with it.

And that's pretty much what lead me here. I saw some posts from Drakon on RHDN and checked out a few of his videos on YouTube and it looks like he'd be a useful guy to get to know

Hope I can be of some help to others as well.

Your post is interesting.  You say you don't care about emulator accuracy but you enjoy romhacking.  Probably one of the best tools for romhacking is an accurate emulator haha.

Don't feel bad, I've never done anything with an arduino, the stuff I've done so far is either romhacking, simple conversions and analog circuit design. There's people out there who're way more brilliant at this stuff than me.

Drakon wrote:

Your post is interesting.  You say you don't care about emulator accuracy but you enjoy romhacking.  Probably one of the best tools for romhacking is an accurate emulator haha.

Don't feel bad, I've never done anything with an arduino, the stuff I've done so far is either romhacking, simple conversions and analog circuit design.  There's people out there who're way more brilliant at this stuff than me.

Indeed but someone else can develop them I just know that there are people out there who like to try and create 'perfect' emulators even though much of what we have is already pretty great. Continuing development on that just wouldn't interest me when there is so much more out there. It's the same with the video picture you guys seem so obsessed with (I'm worried I'm about to make some enemies here ) I've saw a good few posts where you've modding a console to have S-video or RGB or similar (I'm not too sure cause I'm not that interested!) but I reckon the consoles already look and sound good so don't see a need to change it. Ok you can ban me now if you want

I won't ban you, I'll just show you this:

It certainly looks better side to side but I just can't see it having a huge impact on your actual enjoyment of a game. Same with HD verses standard on films.

RyanfaeScotland wrote:

It certainly looks better side to side but I just can't see it having a huge impact on your actual enjoyment of a game. Same with HD verses standard on films.

It's just a matter of taste, I don't mind at all if some people think it's not worth it.

As long as you are enjoying yourself! I'm in the processes of making a rom dumper through the Arduino. Pretty pointless even by my own opinion since almost all roms are dumped anyway and there are already plenty of dumpers out there but I enjoy the learning process and the sense of achievement in getting something done from scratch so it's still well worth doing.

RyanfaeScotland wrote:

As long as you are enjoying yourself! I'm in the processes of making a rom dumper through the Arduino. Pretty pointless even by my own opinion since almost all roms are dumped anyway and there are already plenty of dumpers out there but I enjoy the learning process and the sense of achievement in getting something done from scratch so it's still well worth doing.

I thoroughly enjoy doing a lot of hardware mods for even the smallest improvement.  This stuff is definitely a hobby of mine and I've always enjoyed it.  I don't think making an arduino rom dumper is pointless at all.  Would it be difficult to make your device also able to program eprom / flash chips? If you're into romhacking having a way to program eprom / flash chips is a great way to test your romhacks on real hardware if it's rom based. There's also a lot of roms out there that haven't been dumped.

Drakon wrote:

I thoroughly enjoy doing a lot of hardware mods for even the smallest improvement.  This stuff is definitely a hobby of mine and I've always enjoyed it.  I don't think making an arduino rom dumper is pointless at all.  Would it be difficult to make your device also able to program eprom / flash chips?  If you're into romhacking having a way to program eprom / flash chips is a great way to test your romhacks on real hardware if it's rom based.  There's also a lot of roms out there that haven't been dumped.

Nope it wouldn't be difficult at all, this is a good example of things leading into other things! If you follow the blogs at insideGadgets ( http://www.insidegadgets.com/projects/gbcartread-gameboy-cart-reader/ ) this is pretty much what he ends up doing. Starts as rom reader, then ram, then ram writer, eprom would be pretty similar. However I have another final goal in mind but for now that remains a secret.

That looks pretty awesome actually. I wonder if you can make it test other things like ttl chips, program pld chips, maybe program it to dump pld chips.

Hello!

I'm from france, live in Lyon, got 34 years old.I collecte Super famicom games since years because super famicom boxes are so cute . i also like arcade video games, got an italian european cabinet "Ritlegno" with some good PCB (like daimakaimura, some cps2 -ssf2x my favorite game ever- and mvs games too)
i used to overclock my starfox game since a long time and i follow all drakon investigation to final overclocking since months, was so interresting.
i made my own Starfox maskrom original GSU2 (doom cart) 27mhz 4 pin oscilator wich works like a charm, thx to all drakon advise all around the web.
So i decided to come to forum at first to thx you for all the good works & speak with other modding retro snes passionate too

i don't even had an eproms programmeur ATM but i'll buy one soon this gona be usefull for other stuff like cartmoding ect...so i can make my own 40mhz+ starfox too

sorry i have a bad english language i had do my best  

hello to every one there ! best regards

edit: forgot to mentionned that i'm a big Commodore Amiga fan my favorite computer ever

Welcome, those are nice pcbs.

hi guys, you may have seen me around various forums, am a big enthusiast for all things retro gaming!  

dvd2vcd wrote:

hi guys, you may have seen me around various forums, am a big enthusiast for all things retro gaming!  

I'm glad, great to have you here.

Hi I'm Howwy. I've recently started doing minor console repairing/middling, pretty simple stuff like replacing the capacitors in a game gear and modding n64 rumble packs to work without batteries. I'd like to do something a little more challenging like someday building a nintoaster, but for now I'd like to try my hand at over clocking my copy of starwing (starfox). I've read over Drakon's work learning how it's progressed and gotten better it's quite interesting. Unfortunately with the equipment I have I won't be able to do the latest verion of the mod or any recent version of the mod really since I am unable to write epRoms, I'll be forced to stick with the maskroms. So really I'm here to find out what the best version of the overclock I can do, whether it's get the best out of the FX chip already in starwing or very carefully getting the maskrom into a better doner cart. Advice on how best to tackle this would be great.

Putting the maskrom into a different donor won't change the top speed you can get.  From a stock cart the fastest speeds I recall getting were from the globtop pcb, the cheap one without chips. I believe thunderblaze16 posted a guide on how to do that modification based on my tutoring before he started posting how much he hates me.

Ah I didn't realise the Eprom made such a difference I thought it was mostly down to which version of the fx chip you were over clocking, hence why you always used doners with the improved versions. If that's the case what's the best that can be done on a non glob cart without replacing the maskrom?

Howwy wrote:

Ah I didn't realise the Eprom made such a difference I thought it was mostly down to which version of the fx chip you were over clocking, hence why you always used doners with the improved versions. If that's the case what's the best that can be done on a non glob cart without replacing the maskrom?

Whatever you read is way out of date.  It turned out I was wrong about the superfx chip making the difference.  I don't know what the best can be with a glob top, but you can ask around.  I never experimented much with overclocking the glob version.  Thunderblaze and people on sega16 seem more interested in the slower overclock because it's simpler to do so you can ask them.