Or not… as the case may be. I’ve got a modchip, while installing it I took many photos with the intention of documenting it for the interested and curious. Unfortunately, for reasons I can’t work out, the damn thing doesn’t work. All it does is flashes the CD light red and green and fails to boot. If I pull the modchip out, the XBox boots as normal.

I’ve just spent several hours fiddling, resoldering connections, burning my fingers and melting plastic in an attempt to fix it. I’ve also learned quite a bit about what the modchip does. It’s quite interesting… but not as interesting as a working modded XBox with XBMC, which is my intention.

Tomorrow I will try putting the modchip in my working XBox to see whether it’s the machine or the chip. I suspect the modchip is faulty, or the BIOS in it is corrupt. There’s a way to reflash the BIOS, so I’ll give that a go.

My god, what a haul of goodies we managed today! It was like someone knew we were going and got out the goodies ready for us. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to have a second XBox running XBMC in my bedroom, but never thought it worth the £40-odd for a second hand XBox.

Well… how does £10 grab you? No? Well after taking advantage of our technical knowledge and bamboozling the seller we got it for £8. People’s brains fuse if you start prodding their stuff and saying “ahh the labels are intact, it’s not been opened. This one would be ideal”. It also helps if you have a female counterpart

The XBox even works. I’ve had to order a video cable from eBay, and a Modchip is now in the post too. Looks like I’ll be spending a fun hour with my soldering iron again soon. I get to go cross-eyed soldering SMD components again.

I also bought a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for 20 quid, including two controllers and a light gun. The light gun won’t work on my TV, but this is OK since the NES itself doesn’t seem to work either. It flashes the power light at me. Yes, this means the cart isn’t connecting properly and I need to repair the contacts. I’ve added that to my list. I’ll swap the cartridge slot from a working NES just to make sure the main circuit board isn’t faulty though.

I then bought a couple of books (a Red Dwarf book and a William Gibson), a cheeseburger and managed to block the toilets. Amy bought several of those TV games units that contain an FPGA emulation of an old console and its ROMs. She’s got a Sega Megadrive one that has Sonic the Hedgehog, Columns and other games, and a bizarre Tetris game.

We very nearly bought an Amstrad PCW1512 word processor, but having no money and no desire to carry it across the field stopped us. We also successfully resisted buying another Sega Megadrive, but David did buy a Sega Saturn. There were also many Gameboys for sale and those amusingly illegal “52-in-1″ games carts.

We will return another day looking for games and junk. I think I’ll have to start looking for a bigger house too

As is usual for some weekends, I’m at Amy’s again. I also took Dave, another Llamasoftie, along too as he had some retro hardware to give Amy. She’s now got a colour monitor for her Amstrad and while cooking tea had a fun bit of gaming in the kitchen with the Amstrad set up next to the cooker.

Tea was made to the squealing tune of Manic Miner scraping its way off tape, Commando and KickStart 2. All amusing games that after spending five minutes loading, we were going to get our money’s worth. If a game takes [i]x[/i] minutes to load, you have to play it for at least that much time - a hard task when some of these old games are just utter rubbish. We found some space shooter that was truly awful, both technically and as a shooter game. They really did peddle some gash back then.

We’re off to the giant Hemswell car boot again, but earlier in the hope of scoring some bargains.

Yeah Me and Amy have just been to Lincoln to meet another Llamasoftie, and once again to collect yet another piece of junk retro hardware. This time it was an Atari 1040STFM. I’ve also had a Philips 14″ monitor and several hundred Amiga floppies from Amy too. It’s like I’ve just been handed the whole of 1990 in the boot of my car

Today was also a tactical way to allow Amy’s highly irritating housemate to leave quietly without causing hassle. She told him to get out by Saturday night, so we went off to Lincoln and had an excellent day, and came home to an empty room which we can now turn back into a front room.

We win all round

My retro computer collection (hoard?) is about to gain a few new members. Amy has a pile of Amiga disks that need keeping safe and an Amiga monitor. Someone on the YakYak forum is offering an Atari 1040STFM too. I’ll have that thankyou

No, I have no idea where to put this stuff either… Well, there’s the bathroom and kitchen I guess. With all this old tech inhabiting my house I really should find a way of networking them. Serial ports seem like the best way.

That is the reason for this weekend’s mad 600-mile round trip, stopping off at four people’s houses on the way to break up the trip and make it a bit more interesting. It’s a 42 inch Toshiba rear-projection telly.

Getting it into my car was a mission and a half. We spent the journey home with the front seats slid forwards, and the back seats flattened. The telly just fitted in my car but did very horrible things to the fuel economy. Getting it out required help from my neighbour, but me and Amy managed to lift it onto its stand by ourselves. It’s a big bugger, coming almost up to my shoulders.

I got it free for one reason; it has convergence problems and will randomly decide that the red, green and blue images shouldn’t match up.

Rear projection tellies are strange beasts. There’s three CRTs in the bottom part of the TV, they project their image upwards and through a complex system of lenses and mirrors the three images are converged on the back of the screen. The screen is a giant piece of plastic that has been tinted. If something happens to the convergence ICs, or some part of the optics, the image starts to look like one of those anaglyptic 3D images with mis-aligned red and green images.

However, when working, the picture is pretty good It’s big and doesn’t have any weird artefacts like LCD displays show. I have tested it out with some TV, a bit of Crackdown and Space Giraffe.

I’m strategically ignoring the convergence problem until it becomes permanent or starts to irritate me. The Internet is full of people saying their rear projection tellies, and the fix seems to be to gut the telly and replace the driver ICs with new ones. Apart from the lethal death voltages the replacement is a simple soldering job.

I shall have to closely watch the telly for a few hours and make sure it works properly I don’t think I can go back to a “small” TV any more though. Maybe two player Halo and Mario Kart will be better on such a large screen too

Here is a collection of pictures I took over the weekend. The first is of my Amiga 1500 on the desk Amy gave to me. It’s a fairly standard PC desk with the usual shelves and stuff to hide your bits of PC and mess in. I was going to use it for my PC, but one look at the neatly arranged wire under my desk put me off pretty quickly. Everything under my desk is cable-tied together neatly and then hung from hooks to prevent me standing on it.

The next picture is something I took while in the Meadowhall Shopping Centre. It’s a good old crashed machine image. This seems to be an XP machine running Powerpoint. The dialog explains a serious error has occurred and that Microsoft are very sorry about it. The Meadowhall Centre is a very confusing place to walk around, the maps aren’t that accurate and the general throng of headless chickens parading about makes stopping to find your bearings tricky.

We did find another amusing thing to take a picture of though. The main food centre has a fresh juice bar with possibly the most silly name on the planet. The people behind the counter looked at us with resignation as we whipped out our cameras to take a photo. I’m sure they keep a tally of people who point, laugh or take photos of their stand. I know I would.

I present to you… LoveJuice…

Please ignore the ‘creative’ image placement. WordPress’s visual editor has weird issues with image placement. It also now seems to strip the LJ tags from my posts, which is a bit irritating.

My Macbook has a slightly irritating fault somewhere in the screen or connecting cables. When pressure is applied to the back of the lid, or the screen’s angle is altered a pattern of “incorrect” pixels appears. It looks like the machine decides all the ‘red’ pixels should be ‘green’ for no obvious reason.

Given the choice between sending the machine to PC World who’d simply look confused, go “duh it’s a Mac… err…” and end up shipping it off to Apple and to finding a real Apple store, I chose the second option.

My Mac is now checked into the Genius Bar in the Meadowhall Centre on Saturday. I will show the fault, and hopefully something useful will happen afterwards. Go on Apple, give me a good customer experience. Don’t do a PC World and ship my laptop off to Holland for three weeks and not tell me much.

Spending the weekend at Amy’s. As usual I have my Macbook with me, and once again it’s being really rather useful. This time it isn’t remotely connecting me to a VPN, or anything special like that; this time it’s doing some video editing with iMovie.

Amy’s digital camera records video, but only in 1 minute segments. She’s recorded some video from a live music session in a local pub and wanted a way to stitch them back together to put onto YouTube. My first reaction was to use Windows Movie Maker since it comes free with XP and is fairly easy to use. However, after half an hour of faff we came to the conclusion it didn’t like her computer or camera’s video.

First we had to find the software which, unusually, wasn’t available by default on the machine. Then once it was installed, it happily complained that .mov files aren’t valid Windows Movie Maker files. Yeah nice one Microsoft!

iMovie, on the other hand allowed us to glue the videos together, add cheesy titles and render back to a video suitable for sending to YouTube.

My Mac seems to be developing a fault, or is just being strange. If I show a fairly complex image on the screen and twist the lid hinge (as though adjusting the screen so I can see it better) the display corrupts. It’s not major screen corruption, but the odd random pixel will display the ‘wrong’ colour. It’s as if the screen draws all pixels of one colour the inverse of what they should be. I have a feeling it’s a heat issue.

I came across a really interesting hack to power, control and run a wireless access point, all from one piece of Cat5 cable. It relies on the way 100 meg ethernet only uses two pairs in the cable, leaving two other pairs unused (a fact exploited by some network admins who need to run more machines than they have cable runs for by using a splitter).

I don’t have a wireless access point on my roof that needs power, serial and data comms. However it got me thinking. Currently my serial terminal is sat on a table next to my server, which is a bit pointless. It’d be much more useful downstairs. I don’t want to run a long serial cable around my house though, the place has enough wire creatively hidden as it is.

So what I plan on doing is creating two ’splitter’ boxes; one end will have a standard RJ45 socket for a long piece of ethernet cable, the other end will have a short ethernet cable with plug, and a short serial cable with plug. Two of these devices, one on each end of a regular ethernet cable, will allow me to squirt serial and ethernet down a single cable run.

I’ll have to use software flow control though, and probably lower the baud rate to overcome any interference, but it should be good enough for a text terminal. If it works, I may build another pair to send serial comms into my office to hook my A1500 up to my server for file transfers.