Oh yeah, I still have a website. It has received so much neglect. Between school and Ad Liberation there is little time for me to do anything else, but I am trying. So, here is a peek into my latest project.
I am fixulating my Sega Game Gear. The problem with mine (and almost all others) is there are many capacitors on the board that are faulty and leak rendering the system unusable. The effects vary from a very dim and faint picture on the screen to downright not staying powered. Mine is the latter. I am going to replace them all, and ordered the replacements today. I am also replacing the caps on the audio board as a precaution.
The whole Game Gear splayed out.
The Game Gear mainboard. The little square things are the surface mount capacitors that I need to replace.
The audio board. The round cans are the caps to replace.
I’ll let you know how this goes and throw up some videos of the finished (and hopefully working) product.
I have been working on a project for a while (2-3 weeks) and it’s finally ready for public consumption (finally). So I’m in this improv group that I am sure I’ve mentioned before. Anyway, we wanted to incorporate music and sound into our shows, but not everyone knows how to play an instrument and we didn’t want people solely devoted to music. I pontificated on the matter for a while and decided to try to make a sampler-type thing. I wanted to program it myself because any program I could find wouldn’t let me customize it exactly as we needed it. I ended up using a program/language called Pd. It’s a graphical language that is geared specifically for audio. I also had a MIDI controller kicking around so I used that for input. This is what it looks like all labeled and stuff.
Here is the breakdown of what it does:
Pink keys are sound effects. Hit the key and it plays and left the key and it stops it immediately.
Orange keys are background sounds. Hit the key and it plays that sound and when you lift it will fade out. It will also loop the effect if it hits the end of the file.
Green keys are emotional music. If you hit the key it will play a randomly selected song in that emotion. Let go it will fade out. It will also loop the track if it hits the end.
Here is what some of the program looks like and I will release the source when I know I have all the bugs out of it (I don’t know of any that exist, but we will see)
The whole thing was a bear to figure out because I had to learn Pd first and the logic is much different from traditional programming languages which is what I knew. I also ran into problems with sample rates which caused the songs to play at double speed. The fix for that was converting every file to the same type of wave with the same sample rates. Anyway here is a video of it in action and it should be in use this Friday at our show which will be online at our website sometime next week.
This is one that has been in the hopper for QUITE a while. I am so glad to have it done now. The Virtual Boy is long considered to be Nintendo’s big flop. I don’t know why I love it so much. The games aren’t great (save Wario land), it is only displays red, even playing it is pretty uncomfortable. Despite all it’s flaws I love the li’l guy. Here is where my project comes in. The virtual boy is powered by 6 AAs out-of-the-box. There is an AC adpater you can buy, but it’s rare-ish and expensive. I decided, hey I am a dude who knows things, I’ll just add my own AC adapter. That is what I did.
I found that it needed to give it 9V DC. I went to my local Radio Shack to purchase the jack and plug and got a universal AC adapter that could output 9V.
Inside the Controller
Where I need to solder to. VCC (+) and GND (-)
The jack
Soldered up and testing
It works!
Not a lot of room, but trying to fit it into place
