Modding – synt4x's blog

Building a Game Boy Pocket Color

I’ve always thought the Game Boy Pocket was the sleekest looking model of the Game Boy line. Even after the Game Boy Color came out with its undeniably sharper looking color screen, I thought the GBC itself looked quite bulky and ugly in comparison. And apparently I’m not alone in thinking this, because over the last couple of years there have been several projects to recreate the GBC so it fits inside a GBP shell. I decided to build one of these ultimate Pockets for myself.

Adding 2 MB RAM to Amiga 500 revision 3

The RAM expansion I’ll talk about in this post is this one, designed by PeteAU with improvements by Mathesar, over at the English Amiga Board. When fully populated and with the use of a Gary adapter, it is capable of adding 1.5MB of slow RAM and 512k of chip RAM to an A500. If you don’t need/want the chip RAM part you only have to use the Gary adapter and connect two pins on it with corresponding pins on the expansion board. No cutting of traces at all!

Disabling the audio filter on revision 3 Amiga 500

All Amiga computers, the A500 included, have a low-pass filter applied to the audio output. On most of them this filter is able to be toggled on or off in software, but on the Amiga 1000 as well as the revision 3 A500 it is permanently on. This post describes how to permanently disable it instead.

Region modding the Sega Mega Drive

A friend of mine was kind enough to get me a version 1 Sega Mega Drive for Christmas, since he knew I had been meaning to get one for quite some time now. The main reason I haven’t is that I’ve been a bit worried about the space all the games I’d get for it would take… but I guess I’ll have to worry about that as it happens now!

Either way, the Mega Drive I received was a PAL unit, and these days I can’t stand playing games in 50hz with borders. So obviously something had to be done. Continue reading “Region modding the Sega Mega Drive”

Fixing Glitchy Graphics on Famicom Disk System

The Famicom Disk System is an interesting piece of hardware that I’ve been interested in buying for a long time, but have been a bit apprehensive about collecting for since the floppy disk format is rather fragile. Add in the fact that the disk drive itself often needs to be recalibrated and repaired because of the drive belt wearing out and that a lot of the disks for sale have been overwritten with other games over the years, and it’s a pretty hard sell for me. Continue reading “Fixing Glitchy Graphics on Famicom Disk System”

Game Boy Pocket Backlight Mod

Recently I’ve been teaching myself how to solder, and also reading up on various console mods I could try out just for fun. An obvious, and quite simple mod is installing a backlight on a Game Boy. It only involves four solder points in total, soldering the backlight to the main board of the console. The original Game Boy consoles of course didn’t have a lit-up screen, so installing a backlight is a huge improvement. Since I already have an original Game Boy with a backlight and bivert mod — generously gifted to me by a friend who did the mod himself — and the fact that I have a bunch of Game Boy Pockets lying around, I decided to install a backlight and bivert mod into one of those. Continue reading “Game Boy Pocket Backlight Mod”