Why I’m not posting nearly as much

Hey everyone. By now you’ll have noticed content has dried up a lot. Now there are several reason for this so I thought I better document them.

Work

In February I finished up my long term job that I’d held down for over 10 years. This was, by far, my longest single employment, and with that came some benefits. Most notably, I’d arranged for a 9 day fortnight. This effectively gave me an extra day a fortnight to concentrate on my hobby. You would have noticed a cadence of fortnightly posts, as I tended to work on a project unimpeded on the Friday, finish it up on the Saturday and then spend Sunday writing it up.

I no longer have that luxury at the new job.

However, the new job is a lot less stressful. Oddly that means I am doing less retro stuff. I was using the hobby to “escape” the stresses of my day job by turning off my “day brain” and focussing on something fun. The new job just doesn’t stress me like that so I need less “turn off brain” time (Which is nice).

Completeness

I also have almost all the systems I want and most are working reasonably well. I still have some that I like to putter along on, but really, how many times will my audience want to see me trying to fix Microbee keys?

As such, I’ll primarily posting up when I do something really excitingly new. There are still things that need fixing, other than Microbee keys. (Looking at you, Omega MSX)

If I get one of the few systems I’m still interested in, I’ll post it here (Cough “CoCo 3”) and document it.

There’s also, hopefully, a build of a new console or two coming down the pipe once I order the parts I need (Waves at “Leaded Solder”. I need to talk about getting some of your reproductions built up).


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7 responses to “Why I’m not posting nearly as much”

  1. Greg Howell Avatar

    Good to hear the new job is going well.

    1. Cheshy Chesh Avatar
      Cheshy Chesh

      Cheers Greg 🙂
      Currently working on a Macintosh project. I’ll hopefully write it up this weekend.

  2. Glen P Avatar
    Glen P

    Would you be interested in trying to repair a Brazilian US-NTSC Sega CDX (the American version of the Sega MultiMega)?

    1. Cheshy Chesh Avatar
      Cheshy Chesh

      At the moment, I’m not looking at doing external repairs any more. My backlog of personal projects is currently stretching out to months, if not years.
      Out of curiosity, what are the symptoms?

      1. Glen P Avatar
        Glen P

        Console works but on both Mega Drive and Mega CD games after approximately 7-10 minutes the screen goes from colour to spotty colour/black and white before losing all colour and being stuck on black and white.

        I’ve tested this with an NTSC CRT TV, an NTSC portable DVD player with built-in screen and on modern TVs with an AVI-to-HDMI adapter and consistently the problem has occurred with every cartridge and CD game. Snatcher is one I took photos of it happening with for reference.

        I’m suspicious that the crystal oscillator is the cause, but the components are so packed into this console it’s honestly just a guess.

        1. Cheshy Chesh Avatar
          Cheshy Chesh

          Right! Brendan mentioned this one to me 🙂
          For systems of this vintage, and depending on the analog circuit section, I’d first have a look at the electrolytic capacitors in the video generation circuit. Crystals tend to be pretty rock solid. They either work or they don’t. Capacitors, on the other hand, are prone to failure when heated if they’ve already started leaking.

          1. Glen P Avatar
            Glen P

            I’ve had all of the capacitors replaced but the problem persisted. It’s been a real mystery. The Sega CDX/MultiMega uses the same Video Out as a Sega Saturn.

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