A new project I have been working on, which I recently completed: using the Sega Saturn Audio chip DSP to process 3D polygons. Finally we can use ALL the chips and the Saturn is more powerful than the PlayStation! 😉😉 youtu.be/7ve8xyCD7ME

Hello old friend 🙂

I deleted from my PS5 FF7 Rebirth. I know I suck at games, but my level of frustration in the boss battles is beyond belief. I absolutely adore the art, the music, everything and I completed FF7 Remake twice. I hated XVI as well, so I doubt I will buy more FF games.

After EIGHT YEARS of intense, continuous use, the "T" key on my Matias QuietPro keyboard stopped working. Called them up, they sent replacement switches (cheap!), I whipped out the soldering iron... good as new. Kudos to Matias, great products and great customer service!

Finally proud owner of a “This is COOL” Saturn. Not only it has very cool looks, but for a parallel computing nerd like me it is special. The cost-reduced VA15 board hosts a dual-core SH2. Not many dual-core (single chip) systems before this, I tell you…

Replaced the dead BIOS battery with a battery holder and a new CR2025, replaced the old 120MB HDD with a 4GB CF card and IDE adapter (formatted as a 540MB drive), swapped the German Keyboard for the US one, cleaned and reassembled everything. Good as new (except the battery)...

The BR1225 that is supposed to hold the BIOS configuration and system clock is long dead, so I had to pull the motherboard to replace it. Neat design, as expected the 486SX is on the bottom this time and it touches a large shielding at the bottom for heat dissipation too.

First task: testing monitor transplant. The old machine has a SHARP LM64P83, decent industrial panel with separate adjustable contrast and lamp brightness. The newer (broken) one is a SHARP LM64183P. The sheets say they are compatible and sure enough…

Also interesting to note: the older motherboard has the 486SX right in the middle, whereas the newer one it’s not visible at all, and may be under the floppy drive or on the other side of the board. I will find out when I remove the boards to change the dead CMOS batteries.

Ok let’s start analyzing the differences. The older AcerNote 730 sold in the US uses a C&T 65520 display controller and PhoenixBIOS. Acer did not use a branded BIOS for this model. I will try to dump both BIOSes.

Starting to work on the AcerNote 730i identical to the one from my 90s summer escapades. The LCD and some other parts are in bad shape so I purchased an AcerNote 730 to swap in some parts, I mean how different can it be? 🤦‍♂️

Aaand the LCD is toast. Time to replace it I guess.

For myself one of these beauties. It’s an Acer AcerNote 730i, a 1993 486SX laptop that has sentimental value for me as it is the exact same as my very first laptop. I worked on my first ModeX 60fps scrolling game on its insanely laggy LCD. Good times…

Next on my reading list 👍🙂 “Like a Hurricane: an unofficial oral history of Street Fighter 2”

It’s important we tell our own stories if no one else does. Here is my memory of the Unisys ICON and some ICON games, a computer that only Xennials from Ontario would have used. They were almost all destroyed and no archives or emulators exist. True lost media. postgamecontent.com/post/7717260...

I haven’t touched my NES game in more than 6 months, time to get back to it… 👍

1980s and 1990s for me, any day of the week…

🥳🎉

Santa delivered these, it’s going to be a great 2025! 😁👍

Really interesting dynamic here. It's very true that I post very seldom here (as of yet), but I did post something I thought would interest a niche of retro gaming nerds like me, and I had zero likes, zero. On the other app I am approaching 70, hmmm.

Ok, NOW it’s Christmas 😁

And for tonight’s show…

Name a game with a 10/10 soundtrack

I was studying the Pentium processor's die and I noticed strange connections that I didn't understand. These turned out to be "antenna diodes", special diodes that protect the chip from damage during manufacturing. Let's take a look... 1/6

CAVE, a developer known best for its shmups, used to make drift racing games. Using translated Japanese material and other weird sources, I take a lengthy peek at CAVE's first racer, Touge King The Spirits — known in North America as High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge. youtu.be/vizSYWLRMgY

Good memories: this is when I repaired a Sega Prologue 21. Such a crazy machine, so many logic boards! I had fun disassembling parts of the BIOS to see how it communicates with its peripherals.

roguelike fans! 🎲 we put together a starter pack for games & devs in this exquisitely random & endlessly replayable genre more suggestions welcome, shares greatly appreciated! 💪 🔗 go.bsky.app/7wn2WaN

I hope the Bluesky developers have the opportunity to include a language translation feature. On the other app, I follow many Japanese folks and unfortunately my Japanese isn’t very good (to say the least), so I use the “translate” button a fair bit. I have not seen an equivalent here (yet)?

First post here! Hi everyone, I am a (old) software engineer. In a previous life (career) I developed videogames and now I work on AI systems. In my little spare time I play with old hardware and write retro games. Hobbies: - Retro computing - Retro games development - Anime/manga - Motorcycles