Catching up on the last few months...and looking to the future

So once again many moons have been gone by since our last blog post, and once again we are going to try not to do a repeat (or lack thereof?) performance.

What have we been up to?  Mostly more of the same, meaning we have been working on our NES Reproduction shop  - maturing it and really getting our wheels spinning with it.  While we have not released as many games as I would have liked I am very pleased with the products we have and our customer satisfaction.

That being said we are now looking only to improve and branch out into other areas.  We are on the verge of releasing some new products  - including but not limited to decals for the wall or car and retro console modding.

Because this is not just a blog for the business and honestly I am a huge fan of everything we do (and classic gaming in general) I am going to catch you, dear internet friend, up on things I have been doing gaming wise for the last few months.

I have started building a small private Retro Fools collection.  When we (my brother and I) were younger we had a moderate sized collection, mainly NES and SNES which was mostly lost years ago when my LAN center got robbed.  So naturally lately we have been in a very good position to start building it back up.

Some of my favorite pickups lately have been a Turbo Grafx 16 and a Sega 16, both items that I have wanted ever since I was a kid.  The games I have been playing mostly are Sonic CD, Popful Mail and Vay.

I have joined 2 awesome communities - NintendoAge and a local Long Island Classic Gaming Group on Facebook.  Granted the Facebook group is much smaller but it is a lot of fun since everyone is local and you can easily meet up for trades and just shoot the shit, gaming wise.

We've also been fixing up the arcade in the garage, keep an eye out for a post in the near future about it.  Also keep an eye out for a post regarding the modding services we will offering and kind of a beginners guide to it all.

Research has begun!

So, since we have finally established a system of reworking the circuit boards reliably on the NES carts and have been failure free for a while, Ive started researching Sega Genisis and SNES repros.  I have a feeling SNES will be kind of a tough nut to crack so we will probably have Genesis up and running first... its more straight forward.  SNES will require adaptor boards to be soldered to the IC chips which in turn are soldered into the socket and the chips are surface mount so Im going to have to learn new soldering techniques.  And of course Im one of those people that hates following instructions so Im sure trying to figure it out will be an absolute bucket of fun :)  Once I begin, wish me luck withholding the overpowering urge to slam my head against the wall.

Been away for awhile, been cooking up some really neat stuff! 

We started doing some NES Reproductions and have decided to make the service public!  I think from the second we made our first repro (Earthbound Zero) we were hooked, I mean how cool is it to play prototypes and translations on the actual hardware?!  Yes, emulators are great and they do a very good job but let's be honest, there is nothing like the real thing, sitting down with an old NES and a shitty TV and going to town.

Anyways, if you are interested in what we are up to visit us at retrofools.com, or email info@retrofools.com.

Since we have been asked a million times, yes we do plan on doing SNES and Genesis, we just have to recoup some of the cost of all the materials we've purchased by making some NES ones.

We are also offering some gaming related items like coasters, a NES cartridge housing a wireless router and things like that.

We will still be updating the blog with new products and anything else wacky we are messing around with at any given time.

Ms. Pac-Man is a Drag Queen

Note the NES Box Art

Finally up to the Ms. Pac-Man Cocktail Cabinet restoration!  As you can see in the pictures below this thing needs a fair (but not extreme) amount of work. 

 

 First and foremost the second player joystick is fucked.  Next the graphics (while they look to be lovingly done) are all inkjet prinotuts and not very attractive.  Third the cab is kind of beat up and the plexi-glass is shot to shit.








So I begin by researching what parts are available to purchase for this thing.  Bingo, in less than 10 minutes I am on an official page that sells are kinds of parts for Ms. Pac-man machines.  "Well, this isn't going to take nearly as long as I thought," said my unsuspecting brain to my.......unsuspecting brain.

  

Will the real Ms. Pac-Man please stand up?

Lo and behold as I start going through all of the offerings every single picture looks completely different than what I have here in front of me.  After careful cab inspection it turns out that...........................(drum roll)................this is actually a mother farking Donkey Kong Cab, fully modified from the days of its simian glory!












 Well great, this slots it right into the nothing is ever easy category. Ok, no biggie I go right to see what artwork i can find, since I know nothing that I find will fit, but maybe I can rig something up.  I was able to find some nice vector art for the Ms., and (what I believe to be) a correctly sized DK control panel JPG that I am using as a template. 

Trying to fit a square pac peg into a round pac hole

Two hours later (an Illustrator wizard I am not) I have something that may work, though the size of the holes for the buttons and sticks may be an issue.  Daniel (Retro Fool Deuce) is going to print them out in black and white on a large format printer and we are going to match them up and see what needs adjusting.




I also sent some pictures of the non working joystick to Andrew at The Twisted Quarter.  I have no idea if it is original or aftermarket, but hopefully he can find me something that works.
 







  So, here I am.  I strongly considered converting this back to a DK as I like original stuff, but that would require obtaining the right board and to be honest I would play the Misses more than the Monkey.  Updates to come soon when progress happens!

Not Emulation related, but I wanted to share a good pickup we (myself and my room-mate, with the help of my brother) got this weekend.

I was woken up at 10am with a text of, "Do you want to go to an arcade auction?"  "Well yes," I thought, "I would like to do that."

So away we went and when all was said and done for under $300 we got an X-Men, Pac-Man Jr. and (2-Player) Tetris cabinet!  Shitty pictures below, I will add better ones when I am able.

Apologies for the late posts, had a nasty cold for about a week there and the rest of the time was spent finalizing ConsoleBox.

Alright, not all of that is true.  SOME time was spent on ConsoleBox, but let us not forget we were just through the hurricane that is the summer Steam Sale, so that was where any free time was spent (and I finally got into a pool for the first time this summer).  I picked up some nice goodies including Dust:An Elysian Tail, Fez and the new Tomb Raider.

Anyhoo, some housekeeping items are finally being resolved.  There were a few issues with Dolphin (Gamecube and Wii emulator), one of them being a ~90% crash on startup that for the life of me I could not fix.  Error logs brought me to something with DirectX, but after trying everything under the sun relating to DX I could not fix the problem.  How I finally resolved it was by using the 32 bit version!  I am filing this one under don't know, don't care, so fuck it.

There was also an issue getting the Gamecube controllers C sticks to properly center.  After playing with the GCPad dialog box in Dolphin I found an unnamed feature where clicking the image of the analog sticks brings up more configuration options. Pure luck, and that was fixed.

The main thing that is being an asshole to me currently is Xebra (PSX Emulator) and configuring it to work with analog sticks.  This may be left as digital only for the time being, as I either wait for more information to surface or a new version.

Doing some final testing tonight, if the fates are kind and I finish I'll put up a video of it in action.

NES Box, Revisited

One of the issues I am correcting going forward is not skipping around everything that I do around here.  When Daniel and I made the NES Box we really did a lot of work and did not post anything close to what we did.  While a lot of the step by step is lost to the anals of time (I know that's spelled wrong :) I did come across some pictures of the process.  So let's step in the old time machine and go way back to 2011....






 The pictures below are what we started with.  This was the original NES we got back in Christmas of 1987, and it was decorated with the destruction of childhood.  Apparently we liked stickers.  And scratching the shit out of the case.

The first step was to clean up the case by removing the stickers and sanding down the outside with very fine sandpaper.  Dremeling out the raised bottom was next, as we needed every centimeter we could get.

 

 

We had our motherboard (Mini-ITX) and we had our case, but how to combine the two?  Easy!  Suspend it like a bat(man).  Actually no Batman, just suspended like a bat.














 
Once we received the USB boards from Retrousb soldering the existing NES ports was a piece of cake.  I even did one myself, being the one and only thing I have ever soldered.  ROB also makes a cameo as he really wanted to be included in the process, even though all he did was drink and criticize the entire time...

 Hard drive in a cartridge.  In retrospect I regret using the gold cart but what's done is done.

Field testing the parts, making sure it work's BEFORE it's in the case.
























Assembling the beast, with a Pico power supply. HDMI & power cable being ran from the mobo to the back.  When I say this thing JUST fit I do not exaggerate, I am really surprised it actually worked.

And the finished product!

Of course having more experience now we could do it much better (news of tat may be coming soon right here) but as of this date it is still running great and is a great hit at our parties, having found a semi permanent home in the garage at the tiki bar, with people sitting and playing at the bar.