I recently got a Sharp Twin Famicom for around 70€. This is rather cheap, they usually go for over 200€ in good condition. The Twin Famicom is a Famicom with a built-in Famicom Disk System drive. This was a floppy disk system for the Famicom that was only used in Japan. The one I got worked well with carts (at least with 8BIT MUSIC POWER FINAL), but disks wouldn’t read at all.

If you remember my post from a few days ago, you’ll know that I modded my PAL Mega Drive with a region switch. This works well for Mega Drive games, but Mega CD games have their own problems. The Mega CD bios is region locked and will display an error when you start it in the wrong region.

There are a few ways to get other bios roms running on the system. One is to swap the EPROM on the Mega CD with either another region or a region free bios. This is rather invasive and involves soldering. An easier way is to use a Mega Drive flash cart. These can also run the Mega CD bios files, which makes them a good way to make your Mega CD region free.

In my free time, I develop a free software social network server called Pleroma (code). It is compatible with GNU Social, Mastodon, Friendica, and any other server that implements the OStatus protocol. Recently, there has been some buzz about a new protocol for federated social networking: ActivityPub. This protocol is now a W3C Recommendation, which means that it’s a kind of ‘standard’, if you care about that sort of thing. Here’s my opinion on it, and how it came to be where it is now.

If you want to get a Neo Geo, you should probably get the MVS (arcade) model instead of the AES (home) model. The games are much cheaper and 200-in-1 type cartridges are readily available. If you have an MVS board, you’ll need a way to power it and a way to connect controls and the screen.

As the Neo Geo MVS uses the JAMMA arcade connector standard, there are many ready-made solutions that will give you standard SCART RGB output, some controller connectors and a way to connect a power supply (either ATX or special arcade ones). I got one from http://www.retroelectronik.com. You can reuse this for non Neo Geo arcade boards, too.

Here’s the system how it was when I got it.

The PAL Mega Drive can rather easily be modded with a switch that enables switching between PAL, NTSC-J and NTSC-US. It doesn’t require much skill, if you can do basic soldering, this one is for you. For proper instructions, take a look at this site.

Here’s a picture of my Mega Drive running at 50hz.

If you try running the Touhou games on newer PC98 machines like my PC-9821 Na12 laptop, you might run into issues. When I tried to start any of the games, they would just hang on initialization of the sound driver. This makes sense, because my system has an enhanced FM chip, that is not fully backwards compatible with the original FM chips of the PC98. Interestingly, this has never been a problem in any game but in Touhou for me.

I tried to just load other FM drivers and then manually start the games, which nearly worked: I was able to use the menus, listen to the music, select new game… and then it would crash.

I have a PC-9821 laptop computer. This is a Japanese system that’s almost-but-not-quite IBM compatible, with the biggest differences being the graphics and sound system. It’s an interesting system, with a few thousand games that never came out in the west in any way, including the first five Touhou Project games.