Dan Mons

Sega Master System blue channel mysteries further uncovered

Back in November and December of 2020 there was some discussion around measured non-linear ramps in Sega Master System’s blue channel.  A tweet exchange between Chris Covell and Bernard Bygott lead to some interesting measurements and documentation written by Bernard with the assistance of Tianfeng and others, which we covered in January: Sega Master System […]

Dan Mons

Magic Castle PlayStation game released after 23 years

The Unofficial Net Yaroze Archive has uploaded information, a developer interview and a full game ISO of a freshly completed PlayStation game named “Magic Castle”.  The title began development 23 years ago, and the developers finally decided to finish and release their work. The game is a randomly generated dungeon crawler, featuring Rogue style perma-death.  […]

Dan Mons

Sega Master System non-linear blue channel findings.

An initial tweet exchange between Chris Covell and Bernard Bygott lead to some deeper analysis by Bernard into the Sega Master System’s blue channel.  Initially Chris mentioned the phenomenon: That's cool! Have you tried this analysis on the Sega Master System, by any chance? I hear its RGB is not exactly linear. — Chris Covell […]

Dan Mons

CPS2 reverse engineering progress – DL-0921

In addition to impressing us with his highly objective and accurate controller and game engine input lag measurements, Loïc Petit has been working hard on a years-long project to fully reverse engineer the Capcom Play System 2, or “CPS2” arcade system.  This arcade hardware is responsible for some all time classic titles in series such […]

Dan Mons

NES palette comparisons

The Nintendo NES was a strange beast when it came to how it generated a video signal.  Most other retro video game systems generated colour information internally (and often externally) in a combination of well defined red, green and blue values and then later combine or converted them into various broadcast signals like composite video, […]

Dan Mons

UV Holographic Overlays for Vectrex Consoles

Browsing through a recent issue of my favourite in-print retro magazine, the aptly-titled “Retro Gamer Magazine“, I stumbled across an article about Laurence Bennion’s “Blacklighter” project.  These are a series of prints on transparent film that react to UV “black lights”, and when combined with the vector video screen of a classic Vectrex console, look […]

Dan Mons

Darksoft CPS3 SIMM ROM replacements

Darksoft has shown a very short work-in-progress video on the arcade-projects forums of a new Capcom CPS3 modification: https://www.arcade-projects.com/forums/index.php?thread/15229-new-cps3-simms-8-times-the-size-of-a-regular-simm/ This kit replaces the RAM SIMMs in a standard arcade CPS3 kit with flash ROMs.  This offers two distinct advantages: ROMs cannot corrupt, unlike RAM chips can. ROMs are instantly accessible, and avoid the very lengthy […]

Dan Mons

Racketboy interview arcade collector Daniel Gewargis

The always-brilliant Racketboy recently posted another excellent interview in their Retro Collecting series, this time with Daniel Gewargis. https://www.racketboy.com/journal/building-modern-portablemultiplayer-arcade-setups-sega-naomi-more Daniel has a very impressive collection of arcade equipment, much of which he’s consolized for at-home play on flat-screen TVs and monitors.  His Sega collection in particular is quite impressive, with many units linked together for […]