The weird Amiga "Cubo" CD32

Before people started thinking that modding consoles to fit them inside an arcade cabinet is a cool thing, a little known Italian company called C.D. Express decided to take standard Amiga CD32s (which, funnily enough, is a consolized version of the Amiga 1200 home computer), slap a sticker on them. fit them with an expansion provided with a JAMMA connector  and sell the resulting combo as multi-game, cd-based arcade boards. The SISTEMA CUBO CD32 was born.

BTW, "cubo" in italian means "cube". Do you see anything remotely cubic in this thing?

Dumping an EPROM using an ATMEGA MCU

I recently built a development board using an ATMEGA 1284-PU microcontroller and some spare components I had lying around. Since then, I searched for fun & cool things to do with it: there are the usual sensors reading/LED matrix lighting/graphic LCD drawing/motor controlling experiments available, but my interest lies in data preservation so, as a first task, I decided dump a few EPROMs that dwelt undisturbed in my junk box for too long.

This mess of wires actually works as an EPROM dumper!

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...