New soldering station (DSE T-2200)

Posted Monday, 29th August 2011 under Hardware modifications
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So DSE are having a sale on all their electronics stuff. This is in some ways a good thing, as I picked up a DSE T-2200 soldering station for a nice price (along with a couple of tips), which means I can retire my cheapie 25w soldering iron I’ve been using for years.

At the same point, it’s also sad. My understanding is that DSE are well and truly getting out of the hobbyist electronics scene – most of their electronics gear is on sale at the website as the company moves to only sell cheap consumer electronics gear (generic imports from overseas), laptops, PCs, Apple products, home electronics accessories (like RCA cables and powerboards), phones, that kind of thing. My local DSE was recently refurbished, and I was shocked to see all of the electronics were unceremoniously dropped as part of the fitout. No more switches, caps, resistors, soldering irons, LEDs, and so on.

In some ways it probably makes sense – the staff lacked electronics experience so they weren’t much help in that regard, and the margins are probably better with CE gear with faster turn-around compared to hobby electronics.

But anywho – new soldering station. I’ve been using cheap/disposable 25w soldering irons for years now. I picked up my first one from DSE back in… 1999 or 2000 when I started modding consoles, and that one did the job for a number of years until the plastic shrouding started heating up too much and made the thing difficult to handle during long soldering sessions. I replaced that one with a similar entry-level 25w iron from Jaycar and that’s done a good job over the last 3 years, but the iron and the tips aren’t offering the kind of performance I’m after. It also helped that the price on the station was amazing.

I haven’t given it a whirl yet, but I have a few mods on the to-do list (Master System II S-Video mod and A/V mods on an Atari 2600 and a Famicom), so there’s plenty of excuses to give it a whirl. Expect posts in the future showing the above mods – I also have a stack of images from a series of mods to a Mega Drive 2, as well as a mod to disable a late-model SNES security chip (the theory on that one’s not mine, I just followed another tute).

The purchase of this has also inspired me to write up a post noting some of the essentials that should be in every console modder’s toolkit, or at least what things would have been handy if I had them when I first started modding consoles over 10 years ago

Oh, and for the record – that denim shirt on the guy in the above photo is a golden time capsule

Getting the Xbox EEPROM serial reader working on v1.6 machines

Posted Wednesday, 22nd June 2011 under Hardware modifications
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I recently picked up an Xbox I wanted to softmod and was having trouble doing the HDD swap – I was really only interested in opening the machine up to function as a media player and to copy all my purchased games to the HDD because I’m lazy (:P) so I wanted to softmod the machine. Someone mentioned I could give the Xbox serial reader solution a whirl – the kit contains a 2-prong probe that sits in socket pins 13 and 14, an alligator clip to connect to the shielding to get a GND connection and a little IC attached to an RS232/serial port connection.

The only problem with this is that v1.6 Xboxes act a bit funny when you use it! The Xbox fan speeds up something crazy and the machine turns itself off when you power it on with the serial socket connected to the serial port. After doing some research on Whirlpool, it turns out you have a very small window to read the machine’s EEPROM with your machine, you just have to be fast. Thanks to Ads79 for the info!

Disclaimer

You mod your machine at your own risk. Myself nor anyone else is responsible for YOU modding YOUR Xbox. If your machine doesn’t work as a result of this, don’t blame me – you do this mod at your own risk.

Using my WinXP machine turned off, I inserted the serial device into the serial socket and connected the probes and ground clip to the Xbox, but with the Xbox powered off, and turned on the PC, installed and loaded/configured PonyProg. Here’s where you have to be tricky!

With PonyProg open, disconnect the serial device from the PC and turn on the Xbox and let it load past the flubber sequence. With your mouse hovered over the “Read EEPROM” icon, connect the serial device to your PC, hit the icon as soon as it’s connected (the Xbox’s fan will speed up!), and you should be able to get it read before the machine powers off. You have a window of perhaps 3-6 seconds.

Save the EEPROM binary image, then proceed to softmod your machine (or recover your machine if it’s dead) via your preferred method.

Easy as that.

Fitting external audio jacks to a RGB to component transcoder

Posted Wednesday, 18th May 2011 under Hardware modifications
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If you have an RGB to component transcoder like the CSY-2100 (useful for playing RGB retro console on a TV without SCART or RGB inputs, but happens to have component video), you may have noticed the box doesn’t have any built-in way to get audio (stereo or mono) off the SCART adapter. However, it’s not too difficult to build this on yourself if your console has no other way of outputting audio by adding a couple of RCA sockets to your transcoder. Note that in no way do I take credit for the idea – that goes to legendary modding stalwart GameSX and their equally awesome NFG forums.

The theory is simple – consider the following from Wikipedia’s entry on the SCART standard:

Pins 2 and 6 carry right and left audio respectively, and pin 4 can act as a ground. So, all you need to do is wire something off the SCART connector inside the transcoder’s box to add an output for your audio. The following should help you achieve such a feat.

Equipment needed:

• Two insulated wires of a length suitable for mounting the connectors – I used some old stereo RCA cables I butcher for various mods, as the shielding can be used to carry the ground to the RCA sockets
• 2x RCA sockets (red and black in this example) you can solder to with the screw-in sleeves to protect the solder points
• Solder, soldering iron, screw driver and drill/drill bits for threading the wires

Disclaimer

You mod your machine at your own risk. Myself nor anyone else is responsible for YOU modding YOUR RGB transcoder. If your machine doesn’t work as a result of this, don’t blame me – you do this mod at your own risk.

Step one:

Remove the screws so this:

Becomes this:

… and the part we’ll be working on is the SCART connector:

Step two:

Before we get started on the soldering, it’s time to mod the case. Since I wanted the wires to hang outside the case (there’s not enough room to mount two extra RCA sockets, though the NFG crew used a 3.5mm stereo headphone socket so that’s an option if you want to try something different), I drilled a hole on the output side of the case with enough give for two wires to hang out, and the whole is open at the top so I don’t have to thread anything through, the two wires simply sit in the groove and the top of the case will cover the top:

Step three:

Next up I cut the wires to length, stripped the ends, gathered the shielding and separated it from the signal and tinned all the tips. To make it easier at the SCART connector, I combined the shielding from both wires and tinned them together. This will make it easier to make one connection to pin 4 on the connector.

At the other end, slide the sleeves down the wires and wire up the RCA connectors. The inner portion of the shielded cable (in my case, one had red insulation, the other white) goes to the middle solder connection on the RCA socket, and the shielding goes to the outside connection. Solder everything up, test with a multimeter to ensure everything’s clean (optional, but recommended), then slide up and screw on the protective plastic sleeve.

Finally, tie a knot in the middle-ish of the cable – the idea is that the knot will hit the side of the casing before the wires tug on the soldered connections on the SCART socket if pulled, so experiment to find the best spot to tie the knot. An alternative method would be to use a cable-tie instead of a knot.

Step four:

Time to solder the sucker! Using the SCART diagram, locate pins 2, 4 and 6. In my case, they were on the top row and took the first three pins from the left with the connector pins facing me. Solder Right (red) to pin 2, shielding/ground to pin 4 and Left (white or black) to pin 6. Ensure your connections are strong and clean, we don’t want any dry solder joints! Again, a multimeter makes these kind of checks simple, so I recommend you use one to test everything.

Step five:

Finally, place your wire in the area you’re ground/drilled out of the case (if your hole isn’t open on top like mine, make sure you put the wires through the hole first before soldering in the previous step), plonk on the top of the case and re-assemble everything.

And there you go – external audio-out connections to ensure you can still get sound coming from the transcoder’s box

Adapting the “Penny mod” for Rock Band drums in Australia

Posted Wednesday, 11th May 2011 under Hardware modifications
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I was recently fixing up my mate McAdam’s 1st generation Rock Band drums after a session resulted in his green pad becoming unresponsive. Cue the illustrious “Penny mod” and adapting this for Rock Band players in Australia, or the return of the humble 5c piece

This one’s pretty simple – the following two videos off YouTube show how to perform the Penny mod:

If you’re after the software to test out the end result as seen in the video, you can get it at the Drum Machine website. I used it in my case, and it worked a treat.

For me, I found that a 5c piece was a good substitute for a penny. I used two for each of the outer pads (green and red), and one for each of the inner pads (yellow and blue). The end result was a much more responsive drum, which was great.

The other thing to keep in mind is if the actual solder connections have been killed, either through the solder breaking or the wire snapping. If either of these greet you when you check out the sensors, OXM Online have a guide.

Adding a switch to the 60hz colour mod

Posted Wednesday, 6th April 2011 under Hardware modifications
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Last year I wrote a guide to get colour video out of your Mega Drive via s-video, composite and RF cables, but I’ve noticed that since using the RGB to component transcoder, the colour was flickering on my CRT I play my Mega Drive on. I tested it on our flat panel TV, and sure enough there’s some extra noise in the picture when running the SMD with the external oscillator. So, I figured I’d make a switch to go between the original feed from the Mega Drive and the oscillator, which gives the best flexibility if ever I use the SMD via s-video or composite if I’m not hooking it up via RGB/component.

The theory is simple – grab a SPDT (single pole, double-throw) switch, wire the middle (output) pin to where we used to put the oscillator’s output, wire the oscillator to one of the remaining sides and grab the existing feed off the mainboard and wire that to the other. To help out, here’s what I did:

Equipment needed:

• Remember to read this one in conjunction with the previous mod and have the oscillator ready to go!
• Two wires of a length suitable for mounting the switch (remember you’ll only need two as the existing output wire off your oscillator will be fine for adding to the switch, unless you need to lengthen it, then you should replace it)
• SPDT (single pole, double throw) switch
• Solder, soldering iron, screw driver and drill/drill bits for mounting the switch

Disclaimer

You mod your machine at your own risk. Myself nor anyone else is responsible for YOU modding YOUR Mega Drive/Genesis. If your machine doesn’t work as a result of this, don’t blame me – you do this mod at your own risk.

Step one:

Obviously, discharge and disassemble your Mega Drive and remove the mainboard and have it facing up. Be careful you don’t damage the wires hooking the oscillator you fitted from the previous tutorial.

Step two:

As per the previous mod, here’s the input signal being fed from the external oscillator into the CXA1145 IC. We’ll need to remove this to replace it with the switch’s output so we can select between the original and oscillated frequencies.

Step three:

Here we have a SPDT (single pole, double throw) switch wired up and ready to go. The middle (yellow) wire goes to the CXA1145 IC’s input, which is where we used to send the oscillator if you followed the previous mod; the green wire is from the external oscillator, and; the brown wire will take the original feed from the Mega Drive’s mainboard for RGB compatibility.

Step four:

This shows the middle (yellow) wire from the switch wired to where we used to put the oscillator. It functions as the output from the switch’s two sources.

Step five:

I’ve highlighted a point on the underside of the mainboard where you can easily solder a wire to connect to carry the Mega Drive’s original frequency to give RGB compatibility.

Step six:

To ensure I only wire the correct signal, I use some electrical tape to isolate the solder point.

Step seven:

Tin the tip, heat some solder and attach one of the wires from your switch’s input poles to the point. I’ve used the brown wire.

Step eight:

If you haven’t done so already, grab the output from the oscillator and wire it to the other side of the switch. If the wire isn’t long enough to reach to where the switch will be mounted, remove it and use another wire – it’s best to avoid joining wires together part-way along the oscillator’s input to ensure the signal remains strong and steady.

Step nine:

And that’s all there is to it – use the output from the oscillator (green) and attach that to the other side of the switch, secure your connections with electrical tape, and get ready to assemble. For those interested, the black wire at the top of the mainboard in this pic is a hardwired composite socket I built so that I could use standard AV cables with my Mega Drive.

Step ten:

I wanted to keep everything on the back of the unit, but placed in a way that would allow for the Power Base Converter to still be hooked up, so I installed the switch next to the 60/60hz and JP/Eng language switches which are next to the AV socket, where the Ext. socket would be if I had an earlier-model Mega Drive 1.

All in – would be great if I’d lined up those holes a little nicer though! Once I had the switch installed, I found I was no longer getting any issues with my Mega Drive when running it in RGB via the transcoder, so if you intend to run the machine in RGB at some stage, fit the switch!