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…

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…

I decided to reverse engineer a bootleg of a Century playpack, as used on their conversions for Galaxian, Scramble and Donkey Kong hardware * For what I found out see the information page in my repair log here * Each hardware variant would have a custom memory mapping IC at position 3

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…

With some changes to the website planned over the coming weeks, it has become necessary to improve the security a little. So, with the assistance of an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt the site has now moved across to HTTPS at long last. Hopefully I have configured everything properly and it won’t end up by…