Add a reset button to your Master System II

The Master System II is a dumbed down version of its older brother, the Master System: to save costs SEGA removed the expansion port (probably used only in kiosks to attach multiple cart devices), the card port, the A/V out connector (except for the French version, i think) and the Reset button.
Of all these features, at least two can be restored: the A/V port and the reset button. As for the A/V port I'll write something in the future, now I want to explain how to put the reset functionality back into place.

SMS2 with reset button added back

Playing with pixels

Being the old-hardware maniac I am, I bought an MKIII Myth flash card from ic2005.com to play my (regularly bought at flea markets) Master System games without having to keep all the carts around. A nice side-effect of flash carts is that they let you try your own code on game consoles: in short, you can write and play your own games!

I've already done some homebrew console development on Nintendo 64 and SEGA Saturn, but the Master System is a different beast: being older and more limited, high-level languages are out of the question (Well, actually you CAN use a C compiler: see z88dk), so I'll have some fun learning Z80 assembly!

In the meantime, I tried drawing a sample tileset (keeping hardware limitations in mind, and beware: I'm no artist!) for a game idea I have:

And here is a level mockup made with the tileset:

It's set in a weird farm... Will go more in depth describing it some other time, if I can go on developing the idea!

Project MAM - test run

This week I had enough time to dedicate to my Project MAM (the automatic flea-market-mapper) efforts (mainly because there was too snow outside to go to any real flea market) so I decided to finish sketching up the basic software and do a test run.

Example test run with Project MAM software

Project MAM - alpha client hardware

I finally received my SparkFun GPS shield for Arduino so I can go on building my first Project MAM client! MAM is an acronym for Mappatura Automatica Mercatini which means automatic flea-market mapping in Italian.

Why would someone want to do this? I want to keep track of the size flea markets I visit and draw maps to show how and where the benches are placed. Doing this manually gets boring VERY fast, so a bit of automation is needed.

My MegaCD is region free!

...and speaks japanese :-)

My european Mega CD

I finally received my lot of EPROMs (ST M27C1024) pre-programmed with a modified region free Japanese Mega CD bios, thanks to l_oliveira at assemblergames forum for the hacking!

European VS Japanese BIOS screen

Here is how I installed the new bios...

Bringing a Game Gear back to life

I recently recovered a Sega Game Gear from a box full of junk: the seller told me that probably it wouldn't work, so he sold it for a very small amount of money, but sadly had no games to go with it.
As soon as I got home I tried powering it up using batteries: It turned on but it also left me with a black screen and a very dim backlight illumination (the black screen turned out to be normal on the original Game Gear units without BIOS).

My repaired Game Gear

Keep reading if You're interested in some nasty repairs ;-)

How to extract legal ROMs from Intellivision Lives

Intellivision Lives italian cover

Last flea-market I went was cold, there weren't many sellers and most of the interesting things were overpriced. Just when I lost all hope of finding something interesting I spotted a few games in a bin: one of these was the Intellivision Lives package for PS2. It's basically nothing more than an emulator bundled with around 70 Intellivision games.
So... What if You're not interested in playing these games on your Playstation 2 but want to try them on a different emulator?
Keep reading if You want to know more.

Atari 2600jr with color problems?

Today during a cleanup I spotted my "collection" of Atari 2600jr consoles. They usually go very cheap on flea markets here so from time to time i pick up one as a spare (which regularly ends up forgotten inside a wardrobe). Beside cleaning them and putting them away again I decided it would be a good idea to test them as some were never checked for anything but basic functionality.

Most of them were fine, but one showed a weird behavior with graphics: distorted colors. Lucky me, it was easy to fix. Keep reading if you want to know more!

Alien 3 and Golden Axe 2 bootlegs

A month ago, while I was visiting a flea market (precisely Stellata di Bondeno, province of Ferrara), I spotted a bunch of Mega Drive games that caught my eye because of how fishy they looked... And I ended up right: two of them were bootlegs!

I tried them, dumped them and quickly verified differences with the "official" versions.
Read the rest of the article if you want to know more :-)

Hi everyone!

Introductory blog posts are always the most difficult ones for me.

This is not my first blog, I already have an Italian (my main language) version of this blog which deals with my three main passions: computers, old books and flea markets (which joins the other two interests as a way of acquiring cheap items).

The problem is that mixing literature and tech talk didn't fare very well on the Italian counterpart, so I decided to "split" my blog: posts about tech, programming, game development, weird hardware, repairs, etc. will all go here (in english, of course!) and literature/book talks will go on the other website in Italian. Also, this won't be a very strict policy: there might be some mixing up of topics!

See you on my next post, which might be about my last gaming hardware acquisition at a flea market last week... we'll see ;-)