It’s Saturday, and I’ve filled it with geekiness today. Following on from my recent posts on the NES PC, I received 1 Gb of memory and a 60 Gb laptop drive during the week. I fitted both but found I’d bought server memory from Ebay (my fault not the sellers) so ordered another gig of SDRAM which came on Friday. Windows had already installed on the 60 gig drive and after fitting the ram the NES PC started up ok but refused to boot. Damn. A few tries and some F8 boots to select last known good config and it booted Windows again. Then I was trying to install SP3 (service pack) so I could install DirectX 9. From USB drive it kept failing. Across the network it kept rebooting when copying the installation packages across. I swore at it, which didn’t help. Just before I decided to defenestrate it I tried some other stuff. It still didn’t work I think it runs out of power now on the DC convertor. Oh well maybe an upgrade for later…
So onto the second geek project, my daughters cheapo Chinese Android tablet which we got her for Xmas last year. I’ve been reading how it can be improved with a complete new install of Android which also has other benefits (Play Store, better touch screen and a bit faster response). I’d also read that it can go wrong and “brick” the tablet. I promised my little girl that if it went wrong I’d buy her a new one. I downloaded the files to install Uberoid at TechKnow forums and just followed the instructions using a micro SD card. It worked, the tablet is a little quicker and has access to all the goodies at the Google Play store. Result.
Third geeklike activity was to mod a Master System 2 with a composite video out and audio out to plug into our TV’s without any tuning. Opened up the console by undoing five screws and made the holes for two RCA sockets. Looked up the schematics for doing the mod which involves soldering 3 wires to pins on a chip in the console, and adding a resistor and capacitor to the video out line to the RCA socket. That’s when I found that among the hundreds of resistors and capacitors I have collected over the years I didn’t have the right ones for this project. Ordered some and now await their arrival. But I did end up playing The Ninja on the Master System for a while on the old RF out lead (just for research purposes).
