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Best way of playing Wipeout these days?
  • I would recommend to pay a visit to Wipeout Phantom Edition.

    It's an enhanced PC port that uses the original assets from the Playstation CD and I had a lot of fun with it on my deck a few months ago...

  • Game Gear (VA0) - works when removing C49
  • No, I didn't. But I suspect that there might be some unwanted bridge somewhere which is directing electricity where is shouldn't and lowering the overall voltage in that part of the circuit.

    I had no time yet, but I was thinking to remove the components of that part of the circuit and solder them onto an external board one by one. If I reach a point where the circuit starts working, I should then see if the last component moved was shorted with another one.

    It will take a while, but I'd like to keep searching for the answer until it's found :)

  • Do you play non-steam games?
  • I use regularly Lutris, Bottles, ScummVM, Dosbox-X or EmulationStation. So I can play from GOG, Epic, Itch.Io or plain old games (Dos) / emulated.

    I do have many titles on Steam as well and generally I don't look too much at whether something is verified or platinum on ProtonDB, I just avoid titles from companies like Activision, EA, Ubisoft and generally all works very easily or easy enough!

  • SteamOS as your daily driver?
  • So, I've been using my Steam Deck as my main driver for more than a year. While there are options to install software without having those removed when you update (steamos-btrfs, nix, distrobox), you can just boot another OS from an external drive.

    I have WinesapOS on a SD card so I can use SteamOS without restrictions (and there are other options like Bazzite that others have mentioned).

    So far, I have not found anything that was not possible on my machine, because, well, it's a computer with an Arch distro on it!

    Something that I read elsewhere, not in this thread, is about limits when it comes to work with external peripherals. Now, I can tell you that I use an external Bluray player, printer, scanner, drawing tablet, floppy drive reader (to make images of floppies), azeron pad, programming esp32, work with sound with a Creative GC7, and I'm not sure I'm missing anything. My SteamOS is great!

  • Game Gear (VA0) - works when removing C49

    Hello fellow friends of Console Repair!

    Today I'd like to ask for some ideas about an old Game Gear (the first one I ever recapped) as it is showing the "red light for one second and off" issue.

    Basically, as this was my first attempt (and a successful one) at recovering a Game Gear, I knew I did not clean the board too well or properly removed solder before changing caps, so when I saw the issue, I removed all the caps, cleaned the board and changed the caps again for good measure. Still, the issue is still there.

    So here is my fruit of my troubleshooting afterwards:

    1. the voltages from the power board are correct (I tested as well with the working power board of another VA0 I have around, no change). And all the capacitors are of the correct value and polarity.

    2. the issue seems related to the VBat circuit as I observed that:

    • R50 receives around 13V from the power board, which seems the rough amount expected when powering from the wall adapter.
    • R50 ends with just 0.90V - however, removing the resistor (it's a 9.1K one), and testing with a multimeter, provides 9.01K, which is good enough, and definitely not something that would kill the voltage that much
    • as we get 0.90V from R50, the other resistors just reduce the voltage even more. I removed R51 and R52 and they both tested well on the multimeter (2.98K for the 3K one and 1.09K for the 1.1K one).
    1. I thought that the diode D4 might be faulty and replaced it, but in reality it seems it was just dirt, anyway, it's a new one now...

    2. VRef at the power board outputs 1.26, but it arrives to the ASIC as 0.30V.

    3. Finally, as part of the troubleshooting, I noticed that removing C49, the system works fine... After the removal of C49 all the voltages that were too low becomes higher, in line with the ones of the other working Game Gear.

    So here my doubts that I hope someone might help me clarify:

    1. What could affect VRef as in principle is directly connected from the power board to the ASIC? Following the schematics here, I don't see anything that should interact with the circuit, modify the current. Still, the removal of C49 normalizes the voltage to around 1.25V...

    2. what could be the reason why the voltage drops when the capacitor C49 is installed?

    I think it might be useful to share a couple of pictures of the relevant parts of the board, but I can share more, if needed.

    !

    !

    2
    What lesser known free and open source software do you use daily to improve your life?
  • Cofi seems quite nice! I've already installed it as it seems much better than me using the standard Android stopwatch! Thank you for sharing!

  • I finally nuked windows
  • I remember when I did the switch in 2008 and never looked back. I had a similar experience where across a few years I have been trying different distributions and finally settled on Lubuntu. Years have passed and different machines as well. Now my main driver is a Steam Deck with his Arch based OS and a secondary pure Arch on a sd card for more specific tasks.

    Linux made my life more comfortable and relaxed, without even mentioning secure. My family uses Linux now, Windows is long dead.

    We are free.

  • Linux reaches new high 3.82%
  • As stated from official Valve's page https://www.steamdeck.com/en/oled

    "Use your Deck as a PC, because it is one." So Valve did market it as a PC and it's one of the reasons I bought one more than a year ago. And it's really my desktop (that I bring with me to places occasionally)c

  • Self Hosting an RSS feed for news/media/etc?
  • I use rss-bridge for scraping sites that don't offer rss feeds: https://rss-bridge.github.io/rss-bridge/index.html

  • Alabama’s plan for nation’s first execution by nitrogen gas is ‘hostile to religion,’ lawsuit says
  • We should stop allowing priests to touch people. I think they have already touched more than enough...

  • Working on an emulated-OS docker container
  • I think you will like: https://simone.computer/#/webdesktops

    There are and have been many of these around for many years now!

  • Can we get more hands on Florisboard? We need a modern open source keyboard with all crucial features.
  • I've been using "Unexpected Keyboard" for quite a while and very happy with it!

    Repo here.