I received the Texas Instruments Expansion System (PEB) from a dear friend.

The Texas Instruments Expansion System (PEB) although fully functional, needs a restoration, for example; some parts of the top and bottom cover are rusty.

Some photos of the work that i have done:

Some new games or tools (Cracked / Trained or Unrealeased) for Commodore 64 have been released from your favorites groups.

Titles:

• Centipede Junior +1J
• Power Pyramids +31D [crazy hack]
• Helicopter Attack Preview +3E [pal/ntsc]
• Wacky Waste +2D
• Eggland +4
• International Karaoke +
• International Karaoke + [Extended Party Disk]
• Mr. Mephisto +5DGM 101%
• Dr Jones [swedish]
• Aviator Arcade Preview +2
• Aviator Arcade Preview +
• 4 Swedish Adventures [swedish]
• Darkland +2
• X-Force +6D [2in1 version]
• Donkey Kong Junior
• Donkey Kong Junior +6D
• Donkey Kong Junior +D
• 3D Roam +2D
• Penetrator Preview +
• Bandana City +22D [crazy hack]
• Donkey Kong Junior +3D [onefiled]
• Gravitrix Preview +2

Download: All Games in One Archive (3110)

I thank my dear friend Ciro (www.ti99iuc.it) for giving me the “Peripheral Expansion System” and for making me discover a whole new world of the Home Computer Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.

Gallery:

The Peripheral Expansion Box (aka P-Box or PEB) is a stable, silver/gray plastic and die-cast metal box containing eight slots for peripheral expansion cards and a compartment for a floppy drive or two drives of half height (“slim-line”, slim as understood in the 70ies and 80ies; today it is the normal height of 5,25″ drives for PCs).

The PEB offers space for 8 expansion cards. All slots are wired in parallel, and the power supply is designed to supply all cards including up to two floppy drives. Floppy drives may be put into the right compartment of the box.

With the appearance of hard disk controller cards, users tried to mount hard drives into the box into the floppy compartment. However, the power supply is not designed to sustain the current required for the hard drives; thus, a separate power supply is recommended.

All peripheral cards are expected to provide their own voltage regulators. Therefore, it is not recommended to replace the power supply by today’s PC switched power supplies, as those already provide regulated power which may cause the regulators on the cards to lower the voltage below the acceptable range.

Zoe playing at Ms.Pac man on the TI-99/4A:

source: ninerpedia.org

Commodore Amiga 600 (Black Screen) Repair

Defect:

• Black Screen.

Replaced parts:

• 4 x Electrolytic Capacitor 10uF 35v
• 2 x Electrolytic Capacitor 22uf 35v

Note:

The Amiga 600 Motherboard looks in good conditions; no traces of a acid leakage from capacitors, as usually happens on Amiga 600/1200/4000, but all had a too high ESR (Equivalent Series Resistance).

Atari 7800 ProSystem (NTSC) Repair.

Defect:

• The console doesn’t power on.

Replaced parts:

• Replaced 1 x Push Button. Recovered from a PCB of an Atari 7800 that lying inside the box of the spare parts.

Yamaha AX-200M MSX (Arabic) ROM Dump (click to enlarge)

Download: Yamaha AX-200M MSX (Arabic) ROM-IC321-27256 (1354)

Perfect – Daewoo MSX 2 (Arabic) Rom Dump (click to enlarge)

Download: Perfect - Daewoo MSX 2 (Arabic) Rom Dump (1442)

Spectravideo SVI-728 MSX (Arabic) Rom Dump (click to enlarge)

Download: SVI-728 (Arabic) ROM-ic48 OKI M27128 Prom (1552)

Commodore Educator 64 Repair.

Defect:

• The video signal was distorted.
• Smoke coming out from the monitor.

Diagnosis:

• Short circuit in the horizontal video section.

Replaced parts:

• Replaced 1 x Diode MR 854
• Replaced 1 x Electrolytic capacitor 470uF 25v
• Replaced 1 x Resistor 1 Ohm / Tolerance 10%

Working Commodore Educator 64

Commodore Dual Drive Floppy Disk Model 4040 Repair

Defect:

• Completely dead with all LEDs lit up like a christmas tree.

Replaced parts:

• Replaced 1 x LM340K (7812) Voltage Regulator (VR1)
• Replaced 1 x 7406 Hex Inverter Buffers/Drivers (UJ6)
• Replaced 1 x 6522 (VIA) Versatile Interface Adapter (UM3)
• Replaced 1 x 6504 8-Bit CPU (UH3)
• Replaced 1 x 6502 8-Bit CPU (UN1)

Note:

The cause of many problems was the previous repair. It was replaced the voltage regulator LM340K (7812) with a LM338K (Adjustable Regulators). The two components are not compatible and have a different pinout.

Download:

• CBM 2040-3040-4040-8050 Disk Drive Manual + Led Diagnostic (1040)

CBM prg Studio Version 3.2.0 is released. There are a lot of new features in this version. I’d really appreciate it if you report any bugs you find or have any suggestions/comments.

CBM prg Studio allows you to type a BASIC or Machine Code program in using a nice Windows environment and convert it to a ‘.prg’ file which you can run on an emulator, or even a real C64 / VIC20 or PET if you’re feeling brave and have the right kit.

CBM prg Studio is the result of merging C64PrgGen and VIC20PrgGen. Adding new features and fixing bugs in two apps which were 95% similar was a bit of a nightmare so merging them made sense.

It was also a good opportunity for a face lift and to add some new features, such as:

• Programs are project based, meaning all related source files, sprite files etc. are kept in one place and multiple source files can be linked more easily.
• Tabbed MDI.
• Syntax highlighting.

What CBM prg Studio isn’t is a front-end for tok64, cbmcnvrt, bastext or any other tokeniser / detokeniser / assembler. It’s all been written completely from scratch.

New features:

• PTEXT and NULL directives.
• NULL added to GenerateTo directive.
• Colour printing.
• Source overview.

Bug Fixed:

• Assembler:
  • Reformatting code.
  • Some arithmetic problems with variables.

• Basic:
  • Some screen code fixes.
  • Renumbering TRAP keyword (BASIC 3.5 & 7)
  • Mixing upper/lower case in DATA statements.
  • Wrong load address for some C128 BASIC projects.

• General:
  • Better support for Turkish language.
  • Wrong toolbar shown after start-up page.
  • Case sensitive auto-complete
  • Problems with the build events.

Download: CBM prg Studio v3.2.0 (1093)

source: ajordison.co.uk

I must thank my friends which have contributed to the growth of my Repair Laboratory with donations of spare parts.

For this donation i thank: Andrea Pierdomenico, Paolo M.R, Paolo Cognetti.

The items listed below are in poor condition and they are not working.

Donated items:

• 2 x Atari 800 XL
• 1 x Amstrad CPC 464
• 1 x Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2
• 2 x Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k
• 3 x Commodore 6499
• 1 x Joystick Spectravideo
• 1 x Joystick Suncom Slik Stik
• 1 x Joystick Competition Pro deluxe version (PC)
• 1 x Commodore VIC-20 RF Modulator
• 1 x Commodore VIC-20
• 1 x Philips MSX VG-8020
• 3 x Commodore 64 Power Supply
• 1 x Commodore Amiga 500 Power Supply
• 1 x Philips NMS 800 Data Recorder
• 1 x SVI Spectravideo 904 Data Cassette
• 1 x SVI Spectravideo 728 MSX Home Computer
• 1 x Commodore 16
• 1 x Commodore Floppy Drive 1541
• 1 x Apple IIc
• 6 x Sinclair Spectrum Microdrive (only the drive)
• 1 x Motherboard XT Clone
• 1 x Motherboard XT IBM 5150
• 1 x Power Supply Clone XT 5150
• 1 x MDA Graphics Card ISA
• 1 x Floppy Controller ISA
• 1 x Motherboard Amiga 600
• Some Floppy Disk.
• Some Tape Cassette.
• Some cables.

This is the official demo party results from X-2014 (Top 3 Entries only). See also the CSDB X2014 section for more informations and downloads.

C64 Demo Competition:

• Comaland / Censor & Oxyron
• The Booze Demo / Booze Design
• RGB / Fairlight & Offence & Prosonix

C64 Graphics Competition:

• Duck It / PAL / Offence
• Tentacles / Redcrab / G*P
• Fakers Home Boobs Palace / Yazoo / Oxyron / Censor

C64 Music Competition:

• 64 Forever / Linus / Viruz
• Featuring Daft Punk / Randall / MSL
• Title Needed / GRG / Shape

Download:

• X-2014 Full Party Stuff (1407)

Video:

• X-2014 Youtube

source: csdb.dk

Ikari has released a new firmware for the SD2Snes Flash Cartridge (Super Nintendo/Famicom). The upgrade instructions can be found here.

Full Changelog:

A minor update, mainly in the name of stability. This hopefully eliminates glitches unrelated to the in-game buttons on some consoles, e.g. Seiken Densetsu 3 rebooting intermittently or graphical glitches in DKC 2+3, that had been introduced with v0.1.7 preview 1.

• Reintroduce more aggressive filtering for control and address lines from the SNES, previously removed after v0.1.6
• Unify and centralize signal edge detection for all sub-units (e.g. S-RTC, MSU1, BSX, DSP etc.) instead of each unit having its own (slightly different) edge detection.
• In-game controller scan has become slightly more time effective under certain circumstances (Auto Joypad Read enabled but no NMIs).
• In-game hooks are now disabled for 10 seconds after loading or resetting a game to help certain games get past their boot screens. This will be configurable in the final.
• Reconfigure the FPGA only when necessary on warm reset, speeding up “reset to sd2snes menu” by a couple hundred milliseconds.
• Fix an MMIO access priority bug for DSPx.
• Fix BS-X ROM detection for games with 2 startups left.
• Fix directory browsing being broken after setting the clock.

Download: SD2Snes Firmware v0.1.7 Beta/Preview Rev 3 (1423)

source: sd2snes.de

I must thank Davide M. for the donation.

Gallery:

The Commodore 4040 is the replacement for the previous models 2040 (USA) and 3040 (Europe). It’s a dual drive 5¼” floppy disk subsystem for Commodore International computers. It uses a wide case form, and uses the IEEE-488 interface common to Commodore PET/CBM computers.

These drive models use a similar single density, single side floppy data storage format to that used by the Commodore 1541 drive, but with a slightly different data marker indicating which model originally formatted the disk. The low-level disk format was similar enough to allow reading between models, but different enough that one series of drive models could not reliably write to disks formatted with one of the other model series.

Download: CBM 2040-3040-4040-8050 Disk Drive Manual (2217)

Testing the Floppy Drive with the ZoomFloppy interface:

source: wikipedia