Hardware

Background Behold... Treasure! After literally years of considering, putting off, and reconsidering getting a Sega Mark III, I finally bit the bullet and snagged one at the fairly reasonable price of $160. I had been putting it off for so long because I really don’t collect console variations when they don’t grant me some sort of new functionality or capability, and I already own a Sega Master System. Two, actually… Don’t ask. However, I’ve been obsessed with how sleek the Mark III looks, and found myself checking eBay on the regular in the middle of the night. Once a good deal finally came across my screen, I was hitting that “Buy It Now” button, and as soon as I had, I knew I’d need some other accessories to make my Mark III setup legit. ...

Background My friend Michael is a big fan of the arcade version of Groove Coaster. Whenever we go to the local Round 1, we spend a goodly amount of time in front of that machine. However, we don’t make it there more than maybe once a month, at best, and that just won’t do. Let’s bring it home! Home Versions We had researched previously what it would take to bring the arcade experience home. As far as the software goes, there is the Steam version and the Nintendo Switch version. There’s also running the arcade version from your PC, but then you’re also beholden to running it in a vertical monitor setup, and that doesn’t jive with my game room projector setup. ...

Back in December, my buddy Epitrope moved to NY, and was trying to get rid of the things he wasn’t going to transport across the entire US. One of these things was an older 720p plasma Zenith TV. He is a hacker extraordinaire, and after doing a bit of looking at the manual, saw that the protocol for the serial interface on the back is documented. He created a set of programs to communicate with this port to do some TV automation, which I thought was really cool. After doing him the favor of taking the TV off his hands (I’m an altruist at heart…), I decided I wanted to use the same programs, running on a dusty Raspberry Pi 1 I had laying around instead of using a full computer like he did. ...

This is my most recently completed project. “Complete” is a fairly subjective word though, as the likelihood that I pop the top on my Atari 7800 again soon is fairly high. The point of this project was to install the Atari UAV board inside my 7800 in order to get a much better video signal out of it. The Atari 7800 only supported one type of video output signal, ye olde radio frequency modulator. You may remember the box doohickey you’d screw into your TV’s coaxial connector from the NES. The 7800 has the same thing, except the box is integrated into the console itself. This is, in fact, the worst consumer standard for video (and audio) output. It combines all the signals into a single crappy signal that is then adjusted (magically) to appear on channel 3 of your old-ass television. Needless to say, this doesn’t look great on a modern digital television. It really never looked good on older analog TVs either, but our expectations have changed since the 80s. ...

I’m finishing up my yearly summer stint here in Craig, AK, and I thought it might be a good time to actually build that Home Theater PC that I’ve been dreaming about for the last 3-4 years. For those unfamiliar with HTPCs, the basic idea is to have an all-in-one computer that is good for all media duties that you may have relating to your television. In my case, that means being able to watch movies and TV shows from many sources, including Netflix and Hulu (because I don’t have cable), as well as being able to play videogames, both old and new. As I said above, this has been a dream of mine for a few years, and after seeing Sauerkrause’s build, I felt the need to finally spend some of my hard-earned money and commit to the project. ...