Back from vaca and some stuff...

Before I went on vacation, I found a decent looking Gameboy Pocket at a Goodwill Outlet. It was a bit grungy, but I figured it might be worth a shot to see if it worked OK.

...it didn't. Didn't power on at all.

I opened it up to see if there was some corrosion that could easily be cleaned off, but it wasn't that easy. There was a spill inside, and it got all over the components on the mainboard. I tried a quick degunking with alcohol and swabs, but it didn't work.

...had to go a little deeper than that.

I ended up taking it to the sink and scrubbing it with an old toothbrush and dish soap until all the gunk came off. I pretty much let it dry for almost 3 weeks. Coming back from vaca, I had a little time tonight to do a quick reassemble and test.

...lo and behold, it powered on! All I need to do now is clean up the case itself and it's good to go (I hope).

During vaca, a sale thread came up on a Facebook group I'm in. A friend of mine tagged me in a post. It had a Sega Master System 2 in it for a good price! I immediately PM'd the seller to see if he could hold it for me until I got back from vaca, but my friend insisted that he'd get it for me, possibly for me helping him move and whatnot a couple of months back.

...for the record, I'd help a friend out for free...or at least for food. So this was an awesome gesture.

Other than the controller it came with, the console worked perfectly! I just got it disassembled to get it cleaned up and possibly modded for A/V/S-Video mods later.

There are more things to include, but it's late and I was excited to blog again, even for little things like this.

I'll put pics up later...maybe I might go over what I did on vacation soon as well.

After 18 years....

Too lazy to blog nowadays. Anyway...

Latest thing? Pokemon GO! Yes, gave me reason to like Pokemon again...Speaking of which...

After 18 years, I finally finished my Pokemon Red version...the original Gameboy game.

I first got it when I was 22. Played the hell out of it. Grinded the hell out of it. Made a huge effort to get all the Pokemon in the game. Before I stopped playing, I was in the process of getting the last legendary Pokemon, Moltres.

I remember saving right before the battle with it. The first time I encountered Moltres, I accidentally killed it. From there, it was a combination of either killing it (fainting, whatever) or running out of Ultra Balls (wasted my Master Ball on Zapdos). This went on at least 18 times or so a day. I got fed up, I just stopped playing it.

Fast forward 10 or so years later. I picked up a Super Gameboy from a Goodwill and wanted to test it. I found my Pokemon Red and popped that in. Remembered about that bastard Moltres and how frustrating it was trying to catch it. Just for giggles, I took some time trying to catch it again. It took me no more than 5 retries or so to finally catch it!

...but then I didn't remember where I was or what do to...back to the bin it goes.

Fast forward to the release of Pokemon GO! After catching some Pokemon and taking pics with them with my kids, I felt the need to finally finish Red. I figured I'd just get into random battles and let all my Pokemon faint. Doing that took longer than I expected since I had some high level Pokemon in my team.

...since it's been 18 years since I've seriously played Pokemon, I had to use an online guide...that helped a lot. Needless to say, the guide helped me get my team going for the final boss(es) battle(s), and those battles were pretty one-sided at times.

Anyway, happy that I was able to finally finish it after all this time.

My team consisted of: Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Venusaur (my evolved starter), Slowbro, and Pikachu.

Oh, and mods...Tendinitis still there, so nothing currently...soon, though...

GASP! He's alive! And still blogging!

Well, sort of. Been real lazy to blog at all.

What's going on? Not a whole lot.

First off, I have maybe about 3 repairs to finish up. One is a 2DS that needs a fuse replaced. Another is a JVC X'Eye that has no CD player functionality. The last one? The PCE Duo-R...again...

What happened to it? Well, after PRGE, something happened to it and now it won't boot up. Sources (AKA forums I frequent) say that the region mod might be the culprit, second to that is the little repair that was done on the console before (follow the PCE's mods from last year). I haven't had time to look at it, but I will soon. I want to get that finished up quickly.

In terms of finds, I found just little things here and there. Biggest one so far was a 2001 series PSP, the ones that you can connect to a TV. I just recently updated that to the newest available custom firmware.

I tried updating my old one as well to a new one call Infinity...that was a huge mistake.

Let's put it this way: I didn't read as closely as I should have and after updating, I bricked my 1000 series PSP.

...trust me, not my proudest moment...

I did have a recovery battery system to unbrick it (Pandora Battery and a Magic Memory Stick), but I didn't know where I placed it. I had to continue the search the next day.

I eventually found the recovery battery and went to work updating it to it's former glory. An update here and there and properly flashing the correct custom firmware, I have it back to it's former glory.

What a time to be alive.

I've had several personal mod projects that need to be done as well: The Genesis and the Atari 5200. The 5200 has a bit of casework to do before I move on, so I may tackle that first...as soon as I finish the rest of the repairs....ugh...

New Year...

Yay first post of 2016!

No mod projects on hand just yet. I just have a SNES to work on and the Panasonic Q to finish up after the part comes in. Then comes the repair of the PC Engine again...I really hope that it's something simple and nothing super complex.

Otherwise, I got a PS4 for Christmas from my mom and my wife. Playing Star Wars Battlefront...and having a lot of fun with it! I got Minecraft as well for my daughter so when my brother in-law gets his Playstation Plus account running, her cousins can join her online to build stuff together.

Hoping that I can do more posts, game related or not, this year. We'll see what happens.

Qoob Pro installed, Panasonic Q 99% done...

I have an old notebook computer that I use mainly for my Gameboy flashcard that required a parallel port to program the card with. Now, I can use it to flash a Qoob Pro with!

I started off with flashing my own Gamecube with the computer, updating, at least, the secondary launcher (Swiss for Gamecube). Other than the fact that the case I got it sucks, everything worked as it was back in the day.

I disassembled my Gamecube to use the USB connector to program the other Qoob Pro that I was installing. Flashed it, no problem. Now the real test: to see if my connections were good enough.

I opened up the Q just on one side so I could access the harness for the Qoob. Hooked up the harness to the Qoob, and tested it out.

...it booted the Qoob BIOS!

I did some testing with backups and US retail discs, and all booted up nicely. No glitching, no read errors, nothing!

I had to open up the Q one more time to get the Qoob secured inside the case. Pretty much an expert at opening this beast now.

The only reason I call this 99% complete is because of the disc drive belt. As soon as that can be replaced, this thing can be considered 100%. For the time being, though, all I'm using is an old gift card to slide in and pull the tray out a bit.

No pics because of what a behemoth this thing was. But it really does look better now.

Panasonic Q: DONE! sort of...

Yeah, I haven't slept yet since the last blog post...albeit it was just about 4 or so hours since that.

I took another look at the Panasonic Q, just wondering what the heck was going on with it. I swapped the LCD board on the top (functions the DVD portion of the console) from the nice looking one to the hashed one. That seemed to work.

Swapped just the main boards from the cases. Tried again, now it didn't work again (the front function buttons was the problem before, but after the swap, both the top and front buttons weren't working).

...

So I left the top as is and tried the front case from the hashed one.

Boom! That worked! All the functions worked in that combination.

So I swapped the boards on the front panel as well. Got it all to a point where I could test it.

BOOM! Worked again...except for the drive. It wouldn't open up even if the LCD shows it now.

...

A bit of searching lead to a solution that the little drive belt is bad. Opening it back up again, I could tell that the belt was really old. I tried swapping it with the other belt. Still got the same results, but not as bad as the older belt was. I'm gonna leave it like that for the time being.

Since I had the case opened up again, I decided to swap out the fans as well. Something I learned about the Q; Press the DVD/CD button on the top to start the Q in DVD mode, press the Game button to start it in Gamecube mode. The fan doesn't start in DVD mode, but does in Gamecube mode. Anyway, the fan was really loud, so I swapped it out with the other one. That one worked much quieter.

There was also talk about having a Qoob Pro installed in it. I already had the wires installed where they're supposed to go, but I haven't tested the Qoob just yet. I'm gonna have to play around with my Cube to check a different OS for it, then possibly flash it to the drive.

Almost the end of the year...

Yeah, I skipped a whole month of posts...I REALLY don't like the holidays.

Anyway....

PRGE GETs!

Day 1 GETs: 3 Famicom Pulse Label cartridges (Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong 3, and Mario Bros.), Super Street Fighter 2 for Super Famicom, and Super Mario Galaxy 2 for Wii (Sans the manual).

Day 2 GETs: Soul Calibur 2 for Xbox, Capcom Fighting Evolution for PS2, Gunbuster 2 for PC Engine CD, and Dead or Alive 5 for PS3.

Forum Raffle GET: Savage Reign for Neo Geo MVS.

Random Goodwill find #1: Jigglypuff Amiibo.

#2: Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

#3: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island

Currently for repair work, I'm working on a Panasonic Q, "trying" to make the parts I have for it to work as one complete unit.

I also got word that the PC Engine Duo I worked on stopped working. Hopefully I can get to that soonish.

Add to that an SNES that has a problem and a 2DS that doesn't power on.

Currently, though, I'm having problems with my eye. It just plain hurts and it's being more sensitive to light that it usually is. 

I've got my work cut out for me.