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Monitor / TV test dongle update

I’ve been in the field, testing these dongles, make sure they perform as intended. This mainly involves going thrifting and plugging these things into TVs and monitors while curious people stop to look at me like I’m up to something . It combines two things that I like, looking for electronics and playing with electronics.

It turns out that the VGA dongle is a little too big to fit a small percentage of the monitors. The TV monitor dongle needs to have its RCA jacks relocated for easier connection. 

While working on this, I decided to create a similar board for arcade monitor testing, which may come in handy when testing arcade monitors in the field. Hardware and software is similar across the 3 devices. 

More info on the project can be found here. The project page will have more information on these, and will be updated when these become available.

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More JAMMA adapters about to be released!

It’s been a lazy summer. Not very motivated to do work. Being addicted to the internet isn’t helping. Stuff that should have been done months ago is still on the back burner.

But… I’ve somehow been able to get a number of things accomplished. There are four new JAMMA adapters that I’m about to release. These are:

  • Exidy to JAMMA – For games like Mousetrap, Venture, Targ, Spectar, Pepper II and Victory

  • Space Invaders to JAMMA – For the Midway variant of Space Invaders and Space Invaders Deluxe

  • 8 Liner to JAMMA – for your poker and video slot games.

  • Nintendo Playchoice 10 to JAMMA – for the dual monitor version of the PlayChoice 10 board. Still looking for the single monitor version of the PCB if anyone has one and wants to sell it.

These adapters are fairly complex and took a few months to develop. I hope you’ll appreciate the quality, functionality and the price of these adapters and support my work by buying a few of them, from my Ebay page here.

Thanks!

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Monitor and TV test dongles

I made a couple of battery powered CR2032, TV and monitor test donges, using an MSP430 microcontroller. These dongles plug into either a VGA port or the RGB or Component plugs and allow you to test the TV or monitor without having to bring with you bulky test gear.

  • TV Test Dongle

  • VGA Monitor Test Dongle

 

I intend to use this to test TVs and monitors when I go thrift hunting.

I’ll put up a page with more information soon. While these are already usable, they wont be released for a while longer due to some minor design issues that have to be dealt with.

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Supergun project completed, work on the minigun begins!

A supergun is a device for playing arcade games on your tv or monitor. This is a side project that I just recently completed and made a video about.

This is going to be used to play games and test the various arcade projects that I’m currently working on.

Check out the Supergun and the Minigun project pages for more information.

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HP / Agilent Logic Analyzer Adapters

I started testing the logic analyzer adapters that I designed over my last vacation. Over the course of a week I designed 6 of these for the following chips:

  • 8086 / 8088 CPU
  • 8051 MPU
  • Z80 CPU
  • 6502 / 6800 CPU
  • 6801 / 6803 / HD6303 CPUs
  • 27XXX series ROMs

To use these, your hardware must have one of these ICs  in a socket. You’ll remove the IC, plug in the adapter, then plug the ICs into the socket on the adapter. The PODs plug directly into the adapter, and the adapter provides the correct termination, so you don’t have to mess around with all the probes and worry about hooking something up the wrong way. Config file for the logic analyzer will also be provided to simplify the setup.

Swap the CPU for the adapter, plug in the PODs

These adapters are specifically for the HP / Agilent analyzers with the 40 pin POD adapters, and they’ve been tested with the Agilent 1672G which is the unit I have. I really like this unit, and I’m planning to keep it so I’m investing a little time and effort to expand its capability.

I have some dead arcade boards and broken audio gear that I need to debug, and I was hoping to use these adapters to help me with that. In fact, hooking up the analyzer is such a pain, that I simply couldn’t be bothered to do it, and I held off the work until these were completed.

After the initial tests and troubleshooting work, this looks really promising, but while this is a step in the right direction, there is a bit more work to be done to perfect these.

Check out the Logic Analyzer Adapter page for more information on this project. I’ll send out more information once these are ready for release.