Summer Projects: part of my 3-week vacation was spent in hospital for an operation and then resting in bed at home. Still, I had some fun: music drivers in Konami SFC games, where are they in ROM, how do they get put into the SPC, can I hack a sound test in? I didn't get very far

Summer Projects 2/3: Another was cleaning up my Neo-Geo MVS whose battery had leaked. This resulted in Bit 3 of the music command to the Z80 always being 0. Perhaps also the foam pads on the bottom of the PCB also become conductive with age? Fixed!

Summer Projects 3/3: I also added a mini IEC (disk interface) breakout to my C64 DTV in a mini-keyboard, and played around with switching the hardware between NTSC/PAL timing. NTSC Demos like "Entropy" still crash, so I'm still missing something that DTVBOOT is doing correctly.

The Super UFO 8 copiers, both the 90s and 2010s vers, contain X-Terminator cheat codes in a similar data format to the X-T itself. When a SNES game is loaded, its *inverse* checksum is compared (so no game titles.) Each code uses only 4 bytes plus 1 byte for a generic description

Okay, since there were no programs that printed SNES internal header checksums into the console/text output, I programmed up my own. That's the first step done for matching UFO/X-Terminator codes up to their game names.

I picked a "Supercom Partner" for pretty cheap with its box. It's your standard copier with a few quirks. It does have slow-motion, X-T code support (but none built-in?) and realtime savestates, which work, but not as well as the UFO in terms of glitching. Still, very cool!

Very strangely, the Supercom Partner copier dumps SNES cartridges accurately if you choose the "CARD->SAVE CARD" option to write to disk directly, but it adds this 65816 code somewhere in some free (or not-so-free) bytes of the ROM if you go the "CARD->DOWNLOAD MEMORY" route. 🤔

I don't know who this benefits, but I continue to work on a little program that extracts X-T cheat codes from various SFC/SNES device ROMs, and matches them to a game name. Currently I found the code locations+pointers for the UFO 7.3, 8.1, 8.3j, 8.8c, UFOSD & X-T Param Cassette.

Time for... Old Photos of Mystery Locations in Japan. Super Play mag had some articles by Peter Evans, and I was curious where the photos were taken. One had a monorail, a canal, a left curve in the road, and a sign pointing "??ヶ丘". The monorail is long gone, but I found it!

The tough one is this tiny & blurry photo. A train station on the Chuo line, but which one? They have all been built up and had tremendous makeovers since 1993...

Mystery Locations in Japan continue... This photo is from early 1993 from the same Super Play issue with Peter Evans writing about Akihabara. This photo shows his 'neighbourhood', which could be around Noborito Station, or Mukogaoka Yuen Station. Hmm...

And now the fun and easy sleuthing: Super Play issue 9 from 1993 had a humorous article with Japanese correspondent Peter Evans apartment-hunting in the Mukogaoka area, with pictures of suburbs and that classy monorail which would cease operations in 2000.

Mystery Locations: It was not so hard by triangulating from his pictures to discover that the monorail photo and some other photos of suburbs were likely taken from the apartment he and his lady companion were checking out. ☺️

OK, I've made a page where you can view the Action Replay/X-Terminator SNES cheat codes stored in UFO copier BIOSes, and the tools used for it are there too. chrismcovell.com/UFO-Cheats.html

I had a nice quiet day off at home all to myself, so I had fun playing FDS games, and re-writing disks & doing data transfers the old-fashioned way. :) #FDS #ディスクシステム

Hi, folks, I am over here too.

I had to chase this memory down... around 1987, my family went camping at a favourite spot: Grand Coulee, WA. An idyllic place for camping & swimming. In town, the hardware store sold a portable radio that tuned in AIRplane signals(!); I pestered my Dad until he bought it for me.

I hope everybody is having a pleasant New Year's Eve going into 2025! Right now, the wife & kids are downstairs watching YouKnowhaku, and I'm getting some quality time in with great video games! 良いお年を!