Derf

The ConsoleMods Wiki’s Second Anniversary!

Posted on by Derf
Wow, where did the time go? It seems like only last week I was holed up in a quarantine hotel room in the Dominican Republic, celebrating the launch of ConsoleMods.org. It’s been quite the ride over the last two years and it’s been amazing to see the amount of collaboration that has gone into the ConsoleMods Wiki. I just wanted to make a quick post covering some past, present, and future highlights and to say THANK YOU to everyone in the community who has helped out!

The Past

Here’s some highlights of things that were accomplished over the last two years!
  • The RetroTINK-4K and RetroTINK-5X manuals are an incredible resource for owners of those consoles. Old Kid and KBABZ have put a crazy amount of effort into these pages!
  • The sheer amount of pages made for random CRT models (400+!) on the CRT Wiki. ApolloBoy, Agfa, and Mikewags particularly have gone nuts on it!
  • 35 out of 42 of the consoles have over 50% of placeholders completed.
  • Harcroft has made a page advertising the known missing DLC for original Xbox that has yet to be archived. An incredible amount of DLC has been located due to his efforts and the efforts of those checking their consoles.
  • We’ve setup some awesome features on the wiki since launch like dark mode, image juxtaposing (used on the Tink pages!), right-clicking section headers to copy their URL, and enabling the Visual Editor (WYSIWYG).
  • And some fun stats!
    • Total site users: 3,601
    • Total content pages: 829
    • Total images/files uploaded: 7,611 (8.34 GB total size)
    • Discord users: 3,637

 

The Present

These are some things that YOU can help out with, without any deep technical knowledge. New to editing wikis? Check out our 5 minute wiki crash course!
Here’s some low-hanging fruit pages that are crossed out on a lot of the console pages, waiting for someone to fill in.
  • “Creating Game Backups” – options for dumping games to a PC.
  • “Playing Game Backups” – all the options for loading games.
  • “Region Information” – saying if the console is region locked and how to bypass the region lock if there is one.
  • “Homebrew Games List” – a list of all the homebrew games you can find online. A lot of them are only mentioned on forums, so it’s something that should be highlighted!
  • “Controller Adapters” – a list of adapters for adapting a controller from another console to this console.
  • “Video Cables” – a list of video cable options for the console.
  • “Power Fuse Replacement” – picture showing the location of the power fuse(s), symptoms, and the specs of the fuse.
  • “Internal Battery Replacement” – a picture showing the location of the clock battery for consoles that use one, what battery size, and (if applicable) how to convert it to use a rechargeable battery.
 
Other things that we need help with:
  • Pages to be created and filled out for any link that’s crossed out. These are placeholder ideas to be filled out, but new pages and ideas are always welcome. Atari Jaguar, Odyssey2, CD-i, ColecoVision, PSP, Vita, Atari Lynx, and Neo Geo Pocket especially could use some help as they less than 50% of placeholders “completed”.
  • The Sony PDF Sorting Project could definitely use some help. If you have any interest in Sony BVM/PVM CRTs, please take a look. Even 5 minutes of your time could help get a bunch of files sorted!
  • If you own a CRT, check out the CRT Wiki and see if a page has been made for your specific model. If not, show that model some love and make one!
  • Are you a non-IBM compatible retro PC (e.g. ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64) fan who is interested in making a section of the Retro PC Wiki? Let me know, and we can setup a place for you to setup.

 

The Future

Here are some projects that we are considering taking on for the site. I’m going to open a discussion channel for each of them on the Discord soon to try and plan them out.
  • Translation Project: There is an extension for MediaWiki which allows you to create an auto-translation of pages and manually check (or edit) them before saving. It would be very useful to assemble small 2-4 person teams of some common languages to check and approve these translations. There definitely will need to be some research on the administration end into how this extension actually operates, especially when the primary page gets updated. Please let me know if you are interested and what language(s) you are fluent in outside of English!
  • Regional Site Support: It’d be neat if you could select your country and it would change the front page to reflect consoles and console names from your region. For example, Sega Genesis would show as “Mega Drive” and the Dreamcast logo would be blue in Europe.
  • Game Save Repository: Recently, a member in our Discord volunteered up a repository of game saves they had. Since some previous game save sites have disappeared, it may be useful to have a dumping ground for general game saves. This is something that will need to be looked into on how to best sort and present them. Categories could include 100% saves, modded saves, etc.
  • Disassembly Guides: It’s often been requested, but it would be awesome to have modern disassembly guides for each console. iFixIt is a fantastic resource for that for certain consoles, but it’s very inconsistent with quality and how far they actually go with the disassembly of each console. It’d be nice to organize an approach that documents all screw locations, replacement screw sizes, and tools needed for each revision of a console. This is something that will take some planning to come up with a way to standardize these disassembly guides on the wiki. The image taking method could also be standardized with having a DIY lightbox that we could come up with for anyone with a good camera to help out with.

 

Conclusion

If you have any desire to pitch in and contribute to the wiki, feel free to make an account and edit away. If you need any help with editing the wiki, have any questions, want to collaborate with others, or just want to hang out — join our Discord and someone will be willing to work with you. I am also always reachable (@derf) and open to help anyone with anything that the general chatroom can’t help with.

Thanks once again to everyone who has contributed to the wiki in any way and lastly, HAPPY NEW YEAR!