New Test Rig

From now on all of the power used to host this site is supplied by the sun. This is down to a combination solar panel / battery system installed by UPS Solar which seems to be performing well at the moment, certainly better than the info I gleaned from several websites as to how much…

Since Windows 10 becomes an unsupported OS next year, I re-enabled secure boot on Windows 10 (via the BIOS settings for my motherboard) so that Windows Update would let me perform the update to windows 11. Once that had all completed, I disabled it again and my machine now boots into Windows 11 and still…

One of the PCBs I own had a dead SLAPSTIC, Atari’s custom protection chip used in several games of the time, which meant I just got a nice ROM error in test mode and a blank screen instead of the game. Some old 8 bit hacking and we have hopefully fixed the problem. Check out…

The postman bought me a package today containing the updated versions of most of the PCBs from the website as well as the new ones for the MiSTer -> Gorf (and others) interface. I need to get soldering and make sure that they actually work. I think I’ll start with the multigame, not had one…

One of the members of UKVAC (Aaron) put together a piece of test gear that allows you to visually check the signals on an IC whilst the board is running normally and I picked one up earlier this year as it can do a few things that the ABI Board master cannot. Having sourced a…

One of the users discovered a minor problem with the Fluke pod converter PCB which causes problems mainly when used on Zaccaria pinball PCBs. It seems I missed one of the tracks off from the original article that connects the INTACK signal to GND. This has been fixed on the latest PCBs, but if you…