Ever since I found that ‘cheap’ Commodore 64 online I’ve been wanting to try something. The machine came with a tape drive, so I ordered some ‘cheap’ reproduction tape game, to see if it worked.
1530 mech
While it almost works, it sees the program on the tape, the thing stalls out. Granted it being dated to 1991 probably means the belts are beyond usable. I am having a friend proxy some belts for me as nobody will ship them to Hong Kong (pandemic didn’t have any real effect there).
While this machine is a newer ‘C’ model, I’ve had seen this auction pop on and off on Ebay from time to time advertising a refactored and improved CP/M cart advertising that it works on all models. I’ve read somewhere that post 128 that they finally had figured it out, far too late to matter. But maybe with this new cartridge things could work?
I managed to get a SD2IEC board delivered from Germany, which uses external USB power, so it won’t tax the C64 PSU (I should look, is there an ATX to C64 PSU?). I can load some silly games and stuff seemingly okay. I haven’t bothered with GEOS, as I used it far too much when I had to, and it’s just far too slow to even dream of being usable. Anyways with the SD2IEC it came with ZERO instructions but I did find the page with the needed firmware, and the ‘FB64.PRG’ program to have it browse the SD card and mound D64 images as needed.
I have to admit, ever since I did that article about “Running CP/M on the Commodore 64” I’ve been dying to try this on real hardware. With all the excitement in the room, I mounted the CP/M disk, and held my breath as the *’s went across the screen….
DDDDDDDDDOOOOOOOOOOBBBLE TROUBLEEEEEEEEEEEE
And, well something isn’t right. I tried a bunch of images I could find online, and they all do the same thing. They print far too many characters on the screen from time to time. Clearly it’s some timing/IRQ issue. Something to do with the VIC chip.
Despite the screen being corrupt, it is running, and it does let you run commands, it’s just the output is being doubled (or 10x!) up.
So I tried the soft80 program which will setup an 80 column CP/M experience. It didn’t matter what version I used, the old one from the 80’s or the patched up one from Luis Antoniosi, they all do the same thing, which is run at a blistering 1cps.
I thought it’d be fun to stream this old beast playing the CP/M version of planetfall, but at 1cps I just can’t do it. Which is just a shame. I haven’t tried a regular C64 Infocom game, as the 40 cols was always crazy, but I guess it’s the fallback.
I know these things are so rare, but I had high hopes for this thing.
I never heard of this one before, but it’s legit!… As long as you have expanded your RAM, Edilbert’s Z-Machine opens up the world of Infocom to a whole host of machines:
I’ve never seen the more advanced ‘European Business’ PET’s before, I’ve only dealt with the incredibly limited PET 2001-8C Chiclet keyboard models that were so insanely limited. It wasn’t until much later I saw the dual disk drives (4040’s??) that could have helped those machines so much more, but that was that. I’d been asked as a kid to make an electronic card file on an 8kb machine with a single tape drive. Sadly 8 year old me didn’t know about loading and saving sequential records on tape. Or maybe luckily as I can only imagine how insanely slow this would have been, and or tedious to not only save and update, but find things.
Anyways I thought I’d fire up some mythical 8296 beast with 128Kb of RAM. Attaching the disk image, and firing up “LOADER”, you can watch it load up as much as possible into memory:
And once it’s loaded up, the Z-Machine is active!
Now granted I don’t have a PET to test with, but using VICE, I can happily say that for an 8bit machine, this is incredibly fast. Maybe it’s the disk subsystem interface, as the VIC-20/C64 have an absolutely dreadful interface, but yeah wow playing HHGTTG on a non C64!
But at the same time there is great value in old computer hardware.
In my opinion around 2006-2007 we basically hit peak computing. The biggest restrictions I see on older machines is memory sizes, and disk speeds. And for the most part these can be taken care of with ease, although many chipsets and formfactors of the time seem to have these incredibly tiny 8Gb/16Gb/32Gb limitations that just really are annoying in the distant future of 2019 when you may want to run a few things at once.
Yes, ‘Mouse’ computer is a thing
So I bought this used i640GA6-BDO, an i7 machine oem’d by mouse computer. Yes the name of the business is the same name as the 2nd most popular peripheral of all time. From the blurb:
From the “NEXTGEAR series” with high cooling and excellent maintainability, Intel® Core™ i7-4790K processor, dual channel 16GB memory, 1TB hard disk (7200rpm), DVD super multidrive, NVIDIA ® GeForce® GTX™ .970, 80PLUS® BRONZE certified700W power supply, pre-installed Windows 8.1 Update i640GA6-BDO” is 149,800 yen.
I paid just over 20,000 yen for this machine. So losing some 120,000 yen, or about 80% of it’s value over 5 years is certainly not a good investment proposition. It seemed like a good bargain.
Finding the corporate website was NOT easy, but thankfully they own mouse-jp.co.jp so one of those wild guesses turned out being right. They seem highly influenced by the ‘idol group’ thing that is popular and japan, and they have an extensive YouTube channel over at MouseComputer2010. And an extensive ad gallery.
(the original video was taken down and made private… ? https://www.youtube.com/embed/mPd-vUSsAAo very strange)
They even have the making of videos. I could find so much about the advertising and various talent, but the machines… that was much more difficult than I could imagine.
The build quality however left a bit to be desired, when I turned it on and jumped into the BIOS the first thing that I noticed was that it ran HOT.
75c in under a minute!
So yeah 75c in under a minute is not a good thing. The water pump was making a weird noise as the bearings were clearly shot, and it’s just not circulating anywhere near fast enough.
Although I didn’t take a picture I was able to find one online, that shows that despite the bottom of the case has a big slot for the PSU fan, but the fan was pointing up into the case, not venting to the bottom.
I guess that the original owner got rid of the machine as it was overheating, and/or thermal throttling. I ended up going back out looking for a new cooling solution, and I was torn between a cheap fan thing for $10 or another all-in-one liquid cooler for $50. I decided to go with the all-in-one, as this machine was originally liquid cooled anyways.
I’m not sure why everything needs a cartoon..
The machine also had no storage, so I also picked up a M.2 drive, and a spinning rust disk. I have to say that even for this ancient machine, it’s great it had a M.2 slot, and WOW I thought SSD was fast, but this positively blows it away!
While I was out I see this former holy grail of GPU’s a Nvidia GTX 980 for Â¥12,000. Now granted the machine I picked up has a GTX 970, a nice touch as I wasn’t expecting anything, but I can always use another DVI capable card back at home, so I’m probably taking that along with the i5 back to my HK office.
Now the real killer is that the card is a ASUS GTX, and looking around online it’s the STRIX-GTX980-DC2OC-4GD5 model.
I look around and find it on Amazon, and if the ad thing is to be believed the new price on this thing was ¥70,900! Looking around on that part number also shows kakaku.com with a list price of ¥73,480!
So granted the card is 5 years old now, but wow what a drop in price! It’s one more stop away from the junk piles that the other 9xx’s currently are (I’ve seen boxes of Zotac 750’s and up).
Naturally of course, like the i7, this card also had issues the moment I put it into my PC. The screen was flashing with garbage, and it’d eventually lead to a system freeze after a few minutes. What a pain, bad memory I suppose. And like the PC, I took the card apart, cleaned up the old thermal compound, and added some new generic stuff, put it together, and left it running The Outer Worlds at ultra high settings just fine. Who knows, maybe it’ll break later on, I don’t know, but I now have a ‘high end 5 year old’ gaming system for about the same or slightly more than a PS4. And I could be wrong but i’d like to think an i7/980 would crush a PS4. Although I could be wrong.
Naturally running cinebench 14, basically shows that the 970 & the 980 perform so close to each-other it makes no real difference. Although the fan setup on the 980 is far more aggressive, and it runs much more quieter. So that’s a nice bonus.
And if userbenchmark.com can be trusted, the performance difference from the 980 to the 1080, isn’t all that bad. It’s unreal that now even with 2nd generation RTX 2080’s out there, the 1080 is still an expensive GPU.
So, sometimes it may be worth looking at the junk piles. Although at the same time if you have nothing, the new/lowend stuff like the 1030’s/1050’s really aren’t so bad either. But for some reason I always seem to like yesterdays powerhouse.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
DEC Multias are known for notoriously overheating. Someone even coined a term “Multia Heat Death”. The typical folklore recommendation of the time was to only run it vertically and replace the built-in fan with a more powerful one.
In modern times one can inexpensively acquire a thermal camera that attaches to a mobile phone. So why not take a peak inside the inferno.
Multia with 166 MHz CPU Under FLIR
This is how Multia looks like in a thermal camera. PS is on top right. CPU on the left. FDD/HDD bottom left.
The CPU, Alpha AXP, runs at around 60C, not great, not terrible.
Scanning up close through individual chips I found this curiosity:
Wedged between the memory chips and the power supply is a little chip that generates almost 100C. That’s a boiling temperature of water. Note the thermal image is shifted in regards to the visual part due to close range.
What does this chip do? I have no clue. Perhaps someone can help here. What I however did to it is this:
Slapped on this really nice radiator. In fact I added little radiators you can buy for Raspberry PI to all the chips generating tons of heat.
This is how the motherboard looks like right now:
I also added a tiny fan on top of the CPU. Drilled some holes in the case and of course replaced the main fan with a highest air flow I could find.
Time will tell if this resolves the heat death, but my Multia now runs much cooler with help of all the radiators and extra fans.
UPDATE in 2022:
Readers frequently asked “what about the heat death chip?“. Multia indeed has one specific chip that is a source of most of Multia casualties. According to NetBSD Multia Page the chip is 74F623 and is located on the bottom (flip) side of the motherboard.
You can tell it’s little charred. I so I went to take a peek with a thermal camera:
Can you locate it? FLIR found it immediately… Up close the chip goes above 100C:
I have added a small heat sink to it and now looks a little better!
I saw this great board online carousell, on some local seller board. Although eBay may be the defacto site for buying old garbage, keep an eye out for local stuff too. There is craigslist in the USA & Kijiji in Canada.
Intel l440gx+
Yes, it’s an Intel l440gx+, a dual processor motherboard, with an ISA slot! I’m pretty sure it’s all 5v PCI slots, but who knows. And at $250 HKD, much cheaper than the ones on eBay. Although condition is pretty much unknown.
Pentium III 750Mhz
And it has two Pentium III’s clocked in at an amazing 750Mhz. It’ll make a great MS-DOS box for sure, with plenty of punch. Along with being great for Windows NT 4.0
I think it may have 128MB of RAM as well. Not great, but it’s still pretty good.
Being this old also means it most certainly is MP 1.1 compatible, as I just found this mp_v1_1.c lurking in the OSFMK used in the ancient/abandonded mach kernel for MkLinux. Of course half the fun will come in trying to build the kernel from source (can’t find any intel binaries), and seeing if this old board works.
Of course getting the board was a mission in itself, as I had to cross through one of the big protests last night to get it. I took some video of it on my way back, and walked up to where the front line was going to be.
It was everything I had hoped it to be. I paid extra for a 3d printed mounting bracket and the cute led display.
I had one adf handy to test, Captain Blood, a nice pirated version so the weird encoding wouldn’t be an issue.
It was kind of nice watching it boot up, although as slow as I remember a mechanical drive being. But at the same time nice not using 30 year old media.
I have a few more upgrades on the way to deck out my 600, although I need to do some kind of RGB thing as the composite video has so much noise it’s unreal.
Anyway despite the old flame war on floppy emulation, the Goteks are dirt cheap, and. Hell if it’ll work in an Amiga, it’ll work anywhere.
I was cruising around New Capital Computer Plaza, looking for some cisco console cables, and I saw a bunch of old Xeon desktop computers for sale. Prices were in the 250-500 USD range, which seemed pricey to me. And keeping in mind that my desktop is already a Xeon E3-1230, it did seem kind of pointless. But then I saw this Dell Precision 490 for about $99 USD.
Dell Precision 490
Great, so what are the general specs?
Well, the ‘nice’ thing about Dell is that they keep all their old stuff online, so looking at the specsheet we can see It’s not a bad machine for something circa 2006. Even archive.org has the old pricing online too!
Mine came with a Xeon 5160, 8GB of ram, 250 GB disk, and an ATI HD 4850
250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM NCQ Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst Cache™ [add $90]
By my calculations this machine was about $5,012 USD, and that isn’t including the after market video card, which would be about $180 USD when it was new in 2008, bringing the total MSRP on this thing to $5,192 USD!
Of course it is now 2016, and this machine is 10 years old, with an 8 year old video card. Also of interest is that it came licensed for Windows XP x64, which was the first publicly available AMD64 OS from Microsoft. Unlike traditional Windows XP, this 64bit version is actually built around Windows server 2003.
The computer came with a pirated copy of Windows 7, which I wanted to promptly remove. I have an old MSDN copy of Windows XP x64 that I wanted to install, however the optical drive is broken, and I needed to install from USB. Thankfully even though this machine is old, it can boot from USB devices. The first step was to download WinSetupFromUSB 1.2 to get XP onto a USB stick. Naturally once I had booted from USB, the disk controller wasn’t supported. The BIOS screen revealed that it was a:
Serial ATA AHCI BIOS, Version iSrc 1.02.25 07222007. Copyright (c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation. Copyright (c) 2003-2006 Dell, Inc. Controller …
This translated into the Intel iaStor product, and I was able to slipstream in the last version from 2009, 8.9.0.123 into the USB by using nlite.
I have to say that once I had removed the gratuitous pirated Chinese Windows 7, and installed XP that this machine was pretty damned snappy! As always I updated to service pack 2.
The onboard NIC is a Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx gigabit NIC, which unlike the ‘gigabit’ NIC on my newer desktop, this one actually works at 1Gb.
With Windows XP installed, I went to the AMD/ATI site, and found the download for the HD 4xxx series, and went ahead and installed Steam.
I have to say that Half-Life 2 runs GREAT. According to it’s onboard FPS counter I was getting anywhere around 60-180 FPS. Pretty awesome. Fallout 3 runs pretty snappy too. I tried Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and much to my surprise this vintage 2011 game runs on my 2006 Windows XP x64 setup.
What about the overall internet experience? Well this being Windows XP, You are pretty limited by the traditional browsers. Internet Explorer 6 is the default browser which to say it’s dated is an understatement. I prefer Internet Explorer 7 over 6, but they are both so old it doesn’t matter. Internet Explorer 8 is also an option. The last version of Google Chrome to support Windows XP was 49.0.2623.75. Chrome 49 plays youtube just fine, Scripted Amiga is a little pokey, but does run.
And how does this thing compare to my normal desktop? Running Geekbench 2, I get a score of 3396 vs 10864. Now keep in mind this $99 machine only has a dual core processor, while my newer machine has a quad core + hyper threading CPU. An interesting comparison is with the Xeon E5320 CPU, with the Dell eking out a victory.
Installing additional software was possible via Virtual Clone Drive, while I did have ISO images of stuff I’ve had physical media of in the past, a broken drive wasn’t going to help me read anything.
I didn’t activate it, but Windows 10 will run on this machine as well. I’ll probably upgrade by getting a second JD210 heat sink (I already found another 5160 processor for $10)
It’s a great machine for sub $100. I’d hate to have spent over $5,000 on this thing, but it’s kind of cool to see that a 10 year old machine like this can still be sort of usable. Of course updating the software will certainly go a long way in making it really usable.
So, Ive been playing around with emulators, and for some reason I think it’d be awesome to have a real one. Â So I check ebay, and yeah there is a few, Altered Beast, Shinobi, and even an Outrun, and a couple of Hang Ons! Â Wow this is so cool, then I check the prices, and shipping and yeah it’s REAL expensive, REAL quick. Â And even back when I did own an Altered Beast board, I never got it hooked up as it was ‘too hard’.
So, I’m about to give up on the whole thing, then I spot this Altered Beast board, for sale for a mere €50!  And the shipping isn’t too insane either!  But looking at the PCB board in the picture, and I can tell something is not quite right:
€50 board!
Now for those who don’t know, this clearly is not a System16 board. Â However it certainly does have a 68000, and z80 processor! Â Could this be some 2nd tier manufacturing job? Or perhaps it’s one of these infamous bootleg boards?
For comparison, here is a real SEGA System16 board
A real System16 board
As you can see, they really look nothing alike.  Also the other give away is that the far cheaper €50 board is JAMMA compatible.  All the old SEGA boards are not.
What the heck is JAMMA anyways? Â You see that edge connector? Â That is where you would plug in the power, coin catchers, the player buttons, and the speakers to. Â Even in the old days, recycling cabinets was a thing, and having modular boards was a ‘good thing’. Â But SEGA didn’t want you to swap out their boards with anyone elses, so they used their own system. Â But it’s just a wiring thing, there is nothing digitial locked down, no encryption either (look at HDMI!). Â So you can use an adapter, to interface from SEGA to JAMMA.
Anyways, I went ahead and placed the order.
Now doing some more research, and the monitors used in 1980’s arcades were RGB+Sync driven.  Which are ancient, and of course, HEAVY. But a little bit of searching led me to the to the GBS 8200 v4.0.
GBS 8200 v4.0
AKA known as the “GBS8200 CGA/EGA/YUV/RGB To VGA Arcade Game Video Converter”. Â Well this certainly looks perfect! Â I mean from the description alone, it’ll do what I want. Â Even better they make them a few KM from here, and I could get one for ~ $20 USD. Â Perfect.
Next up is the power, I decided to get a “JAMMA” power supply. Â A bunch of searching, and this one was the cheapest one I could find, and again shipping wasn’t too bad, but not great either. Â The supply was again around $20 USD, but shipping was $15. OUCH.
MD-9916A JAMMA switching power supply
I figured having the ability to screw in would be a ‘good thing’.
Naturally, I need the cables to wire this mess together, so I ordered a “JAMMA Cabinet Wire Wiring Harness Loom” for about $15 USD. Â Naturally mine is all in Chinese since I went cheap. Â But it’s OK, I have a multi meter so I can test continuity.
Finally I saw a QANBA N1 arcade style joystick in a local mall for $230 HKD.  That is less than HALF the price of the ones I see online in the USA, Europe, or Canada.  So at least that is nice.  Now with all the parts, I just have to wait for the board to arrive.  And wait, and wait.  Nothing updated on ebay, then suddenly I check a few days later, as it’s been two weeks by this point, and it turns out that it’s been sitting in the post office in Hong Kong for a week!  If only they let me know…  SF Express, and FedEx have come without issues.  Oh well, now I have the board!
I can now finally flip it over to reveal:
Graphics board
It’s all 74L TTL logic chips, EEPROMS, and some PALs as well. Â There are NO custom SEGA chips at all. Â If anything this is what is inside of the SEGA ASIC’s on the System16 board. Â Whoa.
Ok, so this is certainly a bootleg board. Â A quick search of MAME shows that they have a Datsu ROMset, so maybe this is one? Â Nothing on the boards say Datsu, however it does say ALTER/S, and it shows being QA’d on 11/11/88.
Now it’s time to cable this thing up!
But first JAMMA boards are typically key’d so you cant put the adapter in backwards. Â There is no key on this board, so I need to check the voltages to make sure I don’t flip it backwards.
JAMMA Standard Pinout
**
Solder Side
Parts Side
**
GND
A
1
GND
GND
B
2
GND
+5v
C
3
+5v
+5v
D
4
+5v
-5v
E
5
-5v
+12v
F
6
+12v
Key, No Pin
H
7
Key, No Pin
Coin Counter 2
J
8
Coin Counter 1
Coin Lockout
K
9
Coin Lockout
Speaker (-)
L
10
Speaker (+)
NC
M
11
NC
Video Analog Green
N
12
Video Analog Red
Video Composite Sync
P
13
Video Analog Blue
Service Switch
R
14
Video Ground
Tilt/Slam
S
15
Test
Coin B
T
16
Coin A
Player 2 Start
U
17
Player 1 Start
Player 2 X-Dir
Player 2 Up
V
18
Player 1 Up
Player 1 X-Dir
Player 2 Y-Dir
Player 2 Down
W
19
Player 1 Down
Player 1 Y-Dir
Player 2 X-Clk
Player 2 Left
X
20
Player 1 Left
Player 1 X-Clk
Player 2 Y-Clk
Player 2 Right
Y
21
Player 1 Right
Player 1 Y-Clk
Player 2 Button 1
Z
22
Player 1 Button 1
Player 2 Button 2
a
23
Player 1 Button 2
Player 2 Button 3
b
24
Player 1 Button 3
1 Player 2 Button 4
NC
c
25
NC
Player 1 Button 4 1
1 Player 2 Button 5
NC
d
26
NC
Player 1 Button 5 1
2 Player 2 Button 6
GND
e
27
GND
Player 1 Button 6 2
GND
f
28
GND
This is the standard pinnout of a JAMMA harness. Importantly you can see it’s Ground than +5v. Â So looking at the 68000 processor to check it’s pinnout:
D4
1
64
D5
D3
2
63
D6
D2
3
62
D7
D1
4
61
D8
D0
5
60
D9
AS
6
59
D10
UDS
7
58
D11
LDS
8
57
D12
R/W
9
56
D13
DTACK
10
55
D14
BG
11
54
D15
BGACK
12
53
GND
BR
13
52
A23
VCC
14
51
A22
CLK
15
50
A21
GND
16
49
VCC
HALT
17
48
A20
Reset
18
47
A19
VMA
19
46
A18
E
20
45
A17
VPA
21
44
A16
BERR
22
43
A15
IPL2
23
42
A14
IPL1
24
41
A13
IPL0
25
40
A12
FC2
26
39
A11
FC1
27
38
A10
FC0
28
37
A9
A1
29
36
A8
A2
30
35
A7
A3
31
34
A6
A4
32
33
A5
 You can see it’s power input is on pin 14.  Likewise, the ground is on pin 53.  Also looking at the edge connector, you can see the two pairs of pins, which correspond to the double ground, and double +5v.
Connecting the harness
From there, it was a matter of connecting up the power supply, adding in the power to the video board, connecting the RGBS connector, and powering it up. Â It was very cool to get a glimpse of Altered Beast!
Something is wrong
And hello, it is a Datsu board.  I’ve tried to google about these boards, and all that I could find out is that they seemed to be popular in Italy.  They may have been made in Korea.  There was another variation called ‘Mutant Warrior/Super Warrior‘.  There was some posts about it in an Italian game forum mameitalia.net, and arcadeitalia.net . Google translate works fine enough to read, but they were in smaller places that couldn’t afford mainstream games, so enter the bootlegs.  And this makes sense, as the board I got was from rural France.
I maybe had a picture for 20 seconds, it was frozen, then the screen went black. Â I power cycled, to nothing. Â I tried it again to a green screen. Â And again to a green screen. Â At this point I think it’s died. Â I let it rest for a few minutes, and try again. Â Nothing. Â I leave it powered up, and feel the processor, and it’s warm. Â It’s doing something, so I think. Â So I start to play with the video board, and as I change resolutions, I get an image!.. then it disappears. Â Power cycling, and changing resolutions occasionally gives me an image. Â I look more closely at the CPU board, and notice that it has 4 standoffs placed on each corner. Â There is nothing in the middle, and over the past 28 years the board is sagging.
In order to fix the sag, I decouple the two boards, and spread them out. Â I try it again, and it doesn’t show me anything. Eventually I play with all the video board settings, and manually set it to the RGBS input, and then the image stays! Â The board is running. Â I tweek some of the settings, and the pink goes away, and now it looks correct!
LOGO
And even the intro animation is OK
Looks good
OK, now it’s time to turn it off, and wire up the joystick.
The first step is to remove the joystick ball, and on the QANBA N1 you first flip it upside down, and remove the little cover.
Remove the cover
to reveal the screwdriver slot to let you hold the stick in place as you unscrew the ball.
slot
Now it pops off, and it’s really easy to remove the USB interface cables, and drag in the JAMMA cables. Â Again use a tester to tone out what goes where. DO NOT FOLLOW MY COLORING GUIDE. Â I’m pretty sure there is no colour standard, so just because mine is like this, yours will 99.9999% not be. Â The only common thing is that each of these buttons needs a ground.
Joystick wired up
My harness has a common ground for P1 and P2, so I just tapped up the end and tucked it in the joystick body. Â Now with wired up, I can put the joystick back together, and play!
And that is when I could finally see that something was wrong. Â I was doing pretty well, then in the 2nd level I saw this weird thing:
An actual wall of text
The sprites are working fine, and the gameplay continues. Â But eventually the wall of text effect went from the background to the foreground obscuring game play.
foreground tile corruption
So no doubt something is bad on the board. Â I need to get it looked at, and see about first dumping and checking the EEPROMS. Â Next the RAM on the graphics board, may be suspect as well. Â I think the CPU is fine since it runs OK, I’m just unable to really see pass the wall.
For the heck of it, I went and got some powered speakers, and hooked them up:
And it sounds so different from the SEGA version. Â An inspection of the board shows that there is no YM2151, but rather a pair of YM2203’s and an OKI M5205 for the speech synths.
In retrospect, I probably should have gone with something like the arcade supergun. Â I didn’t know it was a thing unfortunately. Â My solution is more “traditional” , but it works.
So I apparently have more time to spare, so lets get this one out of the way, the Retro Freak!
The Retro Freak in the wild!
I saw these originally for demo during an Electronic and game show in Hong Kong.  A vendor in Taiwan who claimed to be the manufacturer was willing to sell the units to me (in bulk mind you!) these units for $160 USD in qty 15-100.  So it was a LOT more than I was willing to spend as this is no doubt an expensive retro console to device.  And much to my surprise I’ve seen them out in retail world for sale with prices ranging from Â¥18,000 to Â¥24,480.  And that was a major surprise.
So I bought one retail for the price I had been quoted back in the autumn.
The exciting box!
As you can see this is the box. Â And yes that is the bed in the house I’m currently renting. Â Such a festive background.
And for those who love this kind of thing, here is the back of the box:
Back
Once I purchased it, and they counted the cash it was opened up, and they put their store chop on it. Â Unfortuantly they used crap ink, and I have to dig out the receipt. Â But it was the cheapest price, which put it at $150 USD (before the 8% tax).
Opening the box
Opening the box, and we get that made in China feel. Â The box is cheap, but hell I didn’t pay for a box, I paid for…
the dull console
The most utterly dull and uninspiring console ever. Â The plastic feels VERY cheap too. Â Holding something like a Mega Drive (Genesis), or a Super Famicom feels so solid. Â And the SONY gear is top notch. Â This is just featureless dull soft gray plastic. Â And not even a logo, or any real surface features save a power LED. Â It just feels cheap.
Now one interesting thing, is that the majority of the body is actually the cartridge reader. Â You have the ability to flip it over, and slide out the actual console, which is much smaller, and cast in the same dull and cheap plastic.
The actual console
The console has 2 USB ports for 2 controllers. Â I haven’t seen any USB SEGA controllers (what the hell are they doing? Â Is there that much money in Gundam VR, and Pinchino?) Â But there is lots of knock off Nintendo USB controllers. Â I have some to test later that I scored for 700 YEN.
Console underside
Flipping it over, reveals that it is made in China, and it is made by Cyber Gadget, out of Japan.
Turning the unit on, doesn’t reveal any fancy startup screen or logo, just a language selection. Â There is online help, but of course its in Japanese.
HELP!
I am still not sure if you can just plug and play cartridges at will. Â It also doesn’t like it if you just power it off abruptly.
Because it was getting late, I slapped in the only Mega Drive game I bought so far on this trip, Air Diver
Air Diver
It detected just fine, and I was able to play without issues.
Playing the game was much like the real thing, and you can add all kinds of screen filters, and other things to make your LCD TV behave like a CRT including overscan, and some saturation if you go further into the video settings.
The bundled controller is more SNES+WiiU feel to it. Â Again I am just bummed out there is no SEGA knockoff stuff.
The good part is that it supports a crazy amount of formats!
So the plus is that this does a LOT of emulation for the buck, if you want to read your own cartridges. Â The practical side says that they have all been downloaded and converted ages ago and are trivial to find online. Â It isn’t as cool as the actual hardware, but considering it is new it is much cheaper than buying and recapping a bunch of machines.
And honestly, you would probably prefer the retrode 2, which is a USB peripheral to read Mega Drive, and Super Famicom (Gensis and Super Nintendo).
While the Retro Freak does read many more formats it is better suited to someone who “just wants the damned thing to work!” Â And it succeeds in being a magical box you can slap the cartridge into, and start playing.
A few months ago I made a guest-post about my personal experiences with the Gravis UltraSound cards. In this article I mentioned there were a few variants
besides the standard GUS “Classic”, MAX, and PnP series. I was unable to
comment on the other cards since I did not own them. Well, that all changed
a few weeks ago when I contacted someone who wrote some pack-in software that
was included with most GUS cards and surprisingly he still had all his cards.
Even better, he was willing to give them to me!
One of the cards I received was the Synergy ViperMax. I have read some usenet
posts and have talked to other people who were active in the demoscene in the
mid-90s and apparently this card was originally designed by STB and then STB
produced their own card that has an ESS1688 chipset (for SB Pro compatibility
and better Windows drivers) and the GF1 chipset (the IC that makes the GUS
it’s own). How true is this story? I have no clue, as I have never seen an
STB variant of this card, but I have seen STB GUS PnP (the AMD Interwave
version) as Compaq OEM clones for sale occasionally.
In any case, Synergy started producing this card and it’s kind of a rare
number. Again, rumours afloat, that the guy from Synergy was coming to
demoparties and giving these away to groups that won competitions in an
effort to stir up some interest/sales. And before Advanced Gravis all but
gave up on the sound card market they took the Synergy ViperMax cards and
simply placed stickers over the Synergy logo and card name. Gravis also maxed
out the onboard RAM to 1MB (the ViperMax comes with 512kb by default). It is
exactly the same board, which leads me to believe Gravis may have purchased
remaining stock of the Synergy cards and unloaded them. The UltraSound Extreme
may be even more rare than the ViperMax. It’s hard to say as I have personally
never seen either of these cards for sale on ebay.
Keeping the GUS roots, the card is almost completely plug and play. The only
thing you must change is a jumper for CD-ROM Enable/Disable. Like the GUS MAX
there is CD-ROM interface support. Contrary to rumours, this card is NOT GUS
MAX compatible! It does not contain the Crystal CS4231 CODEC chip or emulate
it. This means no MAXSBOS and no special demos that will output 48khz (I only
know of one, The Secret Live of Mr. Black by Orange). I feel this
misinformation was started because of the CD-ROM interface that was also unique
to the GUS MAX. To setup your card you just run viprinit in DOS with your
appropriate SET BLASTER and SET ULTRASND variables and it configures the rest.
However, I noticed viprinit will not properly change your base address for the
ESS chipset (i.e. you want to change it from A220 to something else). No fear,
Synergy included the ESSCFG.EXE utility as well allowing you to change the
base address. Initial configuration is set with VSETUP.EXE from DOS.
Windows 95 installation is basically the same as the earlier cards. You
run the setup.exe and it will install the ESS drivers. It tries to setup
some extra stuff for UltraSound as MIDI device. And it does work just fine
but a gotcha is that the DOS stuff will break. I never had a reason to use
GUS’ MIDI capabilities from within Windows so this wasn’t a deal breaker
for me. After a reboot you will likely have to reconfigure your card
manually from the device manager but after that it’s smooth sailing. And yes,
you can install the updated ESS1688 drivers with no ill-effects. However,
if there are any differences in performance I have yet to notice it. Last known
official ESS drivers for Windows 9x at http://dk.toastednet.org/GUS/drivers/WIN95/VMAX-GUS_Extreme/1688_v1087.zip
The ESS chip is really nice, it sounds very similar to the OPL3 and it has
SB PRO compatibility (take THAT SB16!). Whats the difference? The SB16 only
states that it’s Sound Blaster compatible, not Sound Blaster PRO compatible.
This means some earlier titles like Wolfenstein 3D will only output in mono
on the SB16. With the ViperMax, you can hear stereo sounds again.
Wolfenstein 3-D
Someone asked me if SBOS and MegaEm work. SBOS, no. MegaEm, yes but with no SB emulation. You can probably make MegaEm work with the SB emulation if you
want to play around with running ESSCFG, changing your PnP settings, updating
your BLASTER and ULTRASND variables then running viprinit. But, you’ll need
a lot of free resources and quite frankly I fail to see a point. If anyone
out there has pulled it off drop me a comment.
Since the card has a GF1 IC there is no comparision between the earlier GUS
cards. They will all sound the same. The signal-to-noise ratio is acceptable
though I haven’t measured what it truly is, but for gaming and watching some
demos it’s capable.
All in all, this is a great card. If it was released earlier and through
Advanced Gravis they could have still been in the market. Another nice
side effect of this card is that Windows XP has ESS1688 drivers. Just install
the cards as a non-pnp legacy device, configure manually and enjoy sound!
I made a few more rips comparing the differences between the ESS mode and GUS.
The few module files are played with XTC-Play and two of them (ATBIA3 and
Parallel Universe) are XM modules over 1MB. XTC-Play has a way of quadrupling
the RAM usage by downsampling. However, the modules still sound quite good
and it’s quite a thing to hear the GUS playing large high-quality modules.
VMAX 3D
Before I bring this article to a close, here is some ViperMax/GUS Extreme
Resources:
Enjoy the rips! In a few weeks I’ll have a write up on the Gravis UltraSound
Plug and Play Pro (waiting for my RAM upgrade) and finally some last minute
thoughts and information about a few other OEM cards and the GUS ACE.
