New Test Rig

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…

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 reasons I wanted to build a Retro Chip Tester (RCT) was because there are several adapters available that let you extend the capability of it. The one I had an immediate use for was the 2708 programming adapter. I ordered some PCBs for this, put it together and it has now been…

The Retro Chip Tester (RCT) was developed to test „old“ memory chips from the 1970s and 1980s, which are often no longer recognized by today’s programming devices. The RCT is able to identify defective memory cells very reliably. It can save the contents of ROMs, PROMs and EPROMs to a memory card. If the memory…

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…

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…