New Era Desktop Pinball

New Era Pinball is a simple, cheap desktop pinball game manufactured by a company called Golden Bright.  Apparently it's been sold in different revisions for a while. The latest seems to be powered by simple AA batteries, though older versions seemed to require C cells.  It does, however, seem like it might be eminently hackable.

Much of the game is purely mechanical, including the flippers and ball reload/launch mechanisms.

Backbox to playfield connector (PLAYFIELD END)

PIN COLOUR PURPOSE
1 WHITE +5V
2 BLACK GND
3 BLACK ??? SIGNAL FROM PLAYFIELD (INCREASE SCORE?)
4 BLACK GND (LIGHTS)

When a mushroom is hit on the playfield, it briefly completes a circuit that sends 5v to the microcontroller/ASIC, telling it to play a sound and increase the score?

Pin 4 on the connector controls the lights on the playfield. When the circuit is completed the lights are on. During the game these flash, so the signal is presumably ASIC driven. Many interesting gameplay mods would seem to require access to the playfield which unfortunately seems to be glued down, though access might be obtained by cutting two tabs on the clear acrylic playfield cover, though this would make re-assembly difficult.

The stock ASIC gameplay could probably be quite easily replicated with an Arduino allowing for more interesting backbox possibilities, such as game modes, including a game over state, sound replacements, an actual screen in the backbox rather than a three number LCD, as well as a high score table that might survive power off.

The simplest mod would probably be to allow 5v from USB rather than 4.5v battery power.

Family Game 1 - Fun with Famiclones

This is a famiclone I obtained from Ebay some years ago, when I was on a retro binge.

Very obviously a complete ripoff of the original Nintendo Famicom design.

It has a pair of 15pin connectors for joypads on the front, which are apparently the same as the real Famicom's expansion connector.

Retains the dust cover of the Famicom. 

A fairly generic Family Game style clone controller, complete with turbo buttons and unfortunate circular d-pad.

 Both controllers are marked "1". There are variants I've seen which have independently marked 1 and 2 player controllers, and some which even retain the second player microphone, so I'm not sure what happened on this model.

Expected complement of AV out, audio out and RF modulator. RF has never been tested.

 Standard 60 pin famicom-style connector: Supports Famicom expansion audio and interestingly, the chips inside seem to run at PAL frequencies because genuine Famicom games run slightly slow, and PAL games are just right.

3 month guarantee label on the bottom might suggest a date of about 1996, but may not be original.

Quite similar to most other Family Game systems I've seen on blogspot, but notably the styling isn't identical. Less curves in general, mean, aside from the grey coloring and engrish language text, it looks very very similar to the real thing.  It also doesn't have any "built in" games, so it predates that wave of famiclones, too.

It's actually the 8-bit Nintendo system I use the most, simply because there's none of the vagaries of the 72pin connector or lockout chip.  It seems pretty close to the "real thing", though internally it's quite, quite different.

Wireless SNES controller project

01/01/2016
So, i purchased an Everdrive for a friend for Christmas, and something that came up was the leap backwards to cabled controllers.  And I got to thinking "electronics has come a long way. The SNES Controller port isn't that complicated.  Maybe I could hack something up with an Arduino?

And thus begins the
Wireless SNES controller project, time and money permitting.

Tthe plan is to acquire a pair of cheap SNES clone pads from ebay, cut off the SNES ends and use them to connect an Arduino with a wireless RS232 reciever, with matching transmitters inside the controllesr,  The SNES controller port supplies 5V with which it should be possible to possible to power the Arduino, though obviously the controllers will need a their own battery supply.

The Arduino should be able to receive data from the pad via RS232, package up the data neatly and supply it to the SNES serially, as though it was the original 4021 IC in the SNES controller.

Ideally the result should collect to both ports at once, and pretend to be two controllers.

So, I got some rubber pads in for my Super Nintendo pads.  Replaced the ones in my best condition pad.  Feels pretty good. The start and select buttons feel shorter than I remember. And the D-pad feels pretty stiff at the moment. But it's been so long I don't remember what they were like when they were new!

Overall it feels pretty damn good.

Got some thoughts about where to go next.  I'm thinking I may need to try region-free and 50/60hz switch before I get too far into trying to restore the shell.

It's been a while, but finally the stars have aligned and my Super Famicom lives again.

One of the weirdest things to deal with about the Super Famicom is how much like the domestic PAL version of the console it looks. Even down to the shape of the games. Always gotta be paying attention to which version of the system I'm using else I accidently put one of my PAL carts in there by accident!

The ZX81

Well, the ZX first.   It's a 1980, issue 1 ZX81.  So it's only about a year younger than I am.  I also think it's the first time I've ever seen one of these machines in the flesh and it's ridiculously tiny.  The Membrane keypad is horrible.  And the resemblance to it's younger brother is more than just skin deep.  It's really obvious that this is the machine that Sinclair designed just before the Spectrum.



Anyway, A visit to Maplin and one overpriced PSU purchase later, and... nothing.

Turns out this is was my fault.  For some reason, Sinclair decided to change the PSU polarity between the ZX81 and the Spectrum, but I didn't realise this until later.  The 7805 Voltage Regulator got pretty hot, but fortunately it wasn't on too long and it doesn't seem to have done any long-term damage.  Not that a 7805 is a difficult component to replace.

So, a 9VDC Power supply was all this old soldier needed, and it's ready to roll.

Every Color of the Rainbow, so long as it's Magenta or Cyan

So, I've branched out a little.  A schoolteacher friend of mine found a couple of classic Sinclair computers buried in the cupboards at his school:  A ZX81, and a 48k ZX Spectrum+.  The ZX81 was missing a power supply, and the Spectrum was missing nothing, but the keyboard wasn't working:  A common complaint in old Speccies.

Here's the thing.  I have a not insubstantial collection of old Speccies in various states of "not working", including a Plus and a Sinclair 128, both of which use the same keyboard, so I figured we'd be able to get both going in maybe an hour or so.

No.  Ha.