Graham Ollis 🇺🇦🌻🌮Starting my day off with a vintage Lego build. Certified complete my Bricks & Minifigs.
Okay taking break from fun stuff to tidy up a bit. More fun stuff to come but.
Listening to retro computer band The Stop Bits while tidying up. This song as far as I can tell is just 6502 instructions sung to music.
Okay next toy gonna try out is this RetroTink 4k I picked up years ago but am only now getting around to trying out.
I normally play my retro video games on an olds RCA CRT but I have a few RGB modded Vintage consoles I want to try out with component video. I am hoping it will look quite good. It takes component, composite, s-video, VGA or HDMI and will output HDMI with low latency.
Okay come with firmware was 1.3.4 so I am upgrading to 1.9.6. Now let’s plug something in.
Dracula X for SNES was fun but I am not very good at it only got to the third level.
The SNES Jr I got a while back also seems to work. I have misplaced my NES top loader with the RGB mod which makes me sad.
MS Pac-Man works. The S-Video looks okayish but I also haven’t tried to tweak anything yet just using the defaults.
I also have this do-dad that lets me load roms. I’ve only scratched the surface of what I can do with this things tbh. And I also don’t have a very good idea of what is worth playing aside from old arcade games ( I do very much like the Q*bert port ).
I have an Atari 7800 which has been modded for S-Video. My only complaint is the new ports face down from the console so I have to set it on something ( otherwise the cables get bent ) but that is only a small thing.
I picked up Ninja Golf some time back but am playing it for the first time today. The 7800 looks much better than the c64 on S-Video though that may be the adapter I am using for the c64 and I gave not tweaked and of the RetroTink settings.
Ninja Golf is as silly as it sounds. I also just played Food Fight which reminds me I should get some lunch.
More snow and PM activities have been cancelled at school so gonna go pick up Fire Rooster.
Played a little Doom Eternal with Fire Rooster. Finally beat my doppelgänger at the end of the DLC.
I also have a CoCo MC-10 in the box. It has chicklet keyboard and I don’t think it has ever been used except when I originally tested it. Unfortunately it does not have a cartridge port so the only way to run software ( other than by typing it in to the BASIC interpreter ) is off of tape. You can apparently get programs in .wav format and “play” them into this thing but I haven’t tried that yet.
Okay it then crashed and would only come up with an empty green screen. Internet suggested opening it up and checking the socketed components. Did this and sure enough it came back up.
The first couple of times I tried running a program I got an IO error. As I understand it when you mount a disk image it doesn’t go over the cartridge slot but uses the serial cable, so I tried reseating it and sure enough I was able to run this program that shows where the ISS is. Nice!
Well I’m getting IO errors again that’s too bad.
I will play around with it some more later. Could be something wrong with the serial port on my coco or the cable on the cartridge or it could be user error. I should have put that one first. I was hoping to try some games but the coco doesn’t use standard game ports so I will need an adapter or coco specific joystick anyway.
At VCFSoCal they told me they were working on a version that didn’t need the serial cable. Would be interested in trying that out if the serial port is the problem.
Okay it is Coleco Vision time! The Coleco was the first console I had at home. This isn’t that exact unit. When I got it, it had some visual glitches … which I’d say is common for this console even when I was originally playing the one I had in the early 80s. The same vendor who did my S-Video mod go for the 7800 did a composite mod for this one, and he cleaned the unit and it now plays real nice. The composite is a big improvement over RF which is all it can do from the factory.
