For a while I frequented the local tip shop/refuse centre where I often picked up broken tech that I could repair or give a new lease on life. On this trip I managed to find an old Ryobi belt sander sitting in the corner at a $10 price tag. It looked in pretty good condition other than the switch was completely missing and the wires were hard wired together.
As my console and retro gaming obsession began to take hold and with my tiny room to hold it all I had to come up with a easy setup solution. Luckily I had the chance to grab all the left over rimu timber from my poppa’s old shed from our previous projects.
Really the one and only part of the build was to size up each console in height and width and make sure each fit on a shelf. Most of the boards were already cut to size so I had a maximum size I could work to. I ended up stacking CD cases and scrap wood to get the correct heights for each shelf. All put 1 were basically the same size.
The cabinet turned out pretty well and it is fairly light but sturdy. The only thing that is a bit of a bummer is that the height of shelves is a bit lower that i’d hoped but I was limited in the stock of wood I had. Once you had the Sega CD or the Super Nintendo Floppy unit attached they are too tall.
I received a few Atari 2600’s as gifts or as part of another bundle I purchased and since I had more than one, I felt fine with keeping one stock and modding the other one for composite video and audio instead of the RF signal out. The RF out was absolutely awful and wasn’t even worth hooking up, not even the old CRT tv would hide its bad signal.
Because I wanted the mod to the reversible ( even though that is unlikely ) I decided not to drill any holes in the case but to find a 4 pin 3.5mm jack socket that could break out to 3 composite plugs. I had seen this same port of a portable SNES I had purchased a while back. A quick look and order on AliExpress and I was most of the way there. Once the order arrived I desoldered the original RF socket, broke out the connector to some hookup wire and hot glued the new plug in place of the old one. You would never know the difference once it was closed back up.
Finding a mod that actually worked was the hardest part for the Jr. I started off with a passive mod that tapped off the video and audio signals, which then went through some caps and resistors and out to the jack. This version produced very sub-par results and was still very fuzzy and had bad colours. I ended up going back to the drawing board.
After seeing Mr Mario’s softmodding video I decided to dig out my old PS2’s from the box that had as a kid and put some of the old hardware to use. At the same time I was definitely wanting to make these work with modern TV’s as best as I can.
I started with ordering some PS2 hard drive network adapters. Originally intended for use with specific games, the modding community has managed to get it sorted so you can load games and home brew off the hard drive. At the same time of ordering I grab a component cable, hdmi adapter and some wireless controllers. Great tip, the controllers work on PS1 and Raspberry Pi adapters as well!
All working great after the hours and hours of transferring games was done. You might find some games don’t work and will need to reload the image there. One last note, as mentioned in the video, make sure you use a Magic Gate memory card otherwise none of this works like it should ( most on AliExpress and eBay aren’t Magic Gate ).
If you ever need a testing rig, rip apart an old PC case and build one. When I was looking at building some “ultimate” rigs based on each era ‘Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 7’ I had a lot of parts sitting around that I needed to test together, test if they worked at all and make quick builds to see if it was going to serve my needs. I ended up finding a premade rig on Trademe with a motherboard combo I was after.
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