Despite the sharp increase in covid-19 cases in Tokyo, we braved a meetup. It was again rather intimate, with six members in attendance. That’s probably for the best right now. We got the big conference room on the 4th floor again, all to ourselves. New members Michelle and Tom came to join in the fun.

Sean had CRT duty so for the first time did not bring any computers of his own. He set up a nice little display of the random items he brought for testing around the CRT, which made for a fairly boring first 15 minutes, but Edoardo soon showed up and plugged in his very customized Amiga A600. Demos and gaming ensued!

Soon after came Curt with his Apple IIc and National JR-200 to show off. Justin joined shortly after. Not too long after, Michelle and Tom showed up, each lugging an MSX machine with them, Michelle with a first-gen Wavy by Sanyo, and Tom with a MSX2 WX by Panasonic. Tom brought a handful of cool MSX games, including some modern-day homebrew games. Some were indeed really unique and impressive.

Sean took advantage of the presence of a first-gen MSX machine to test some games that wouldn’t run easily on his MSX2, including Ghostbusters and an impossible-to-figure-out game called Relics. I mean, like, you battle stuff, that part’s easy to understand, but the game also wants you to do stuff to progress, but it doesn’t tell you what, not even in the manual!

It is our sincerest hope to be able to do this again in September, but with covid-19 infection numbers continuing to rise, we’ll have to play it by ear. Stay safe everyone!

By admin

2 thoughts on “Meetup #7 – 2020-08-01”
  1. Yeah, the Apple IIc didn’t get too much use, and the JR-200 even less. I should probably put together some better games collections for each.

    However, Justin and I did manage to work out the Apple IIc’s video timings, which was a very interesting exercise, and we also learned various new things about video triggering and other features of the Rigol DS10504Z oscilloscope (none of which are mentioned in the manual).

    After that Michelle and I worked out the pinout for the RGB mod on her PC Engine and I used my breakouts and a breadboard to get it hooked up to the monitor, which does not have the SCART input required for Michelle’s cable. This turns out to be pretty easy and quick (once the pinout is worked out), so my new system for handling this seems to be working reasonably well. This breakout also allowed us to do some debugging on the sound outputs from that mod.

    1. I was thinking of soldering up a female SCART cable with BNC plugs hanging out the other side for R,G,B, c-sync and maybe even composite and have it plug into my PVM. This way I’d basically have a PVM with SCART input and it should take any standard SCART (male) I have to, say, hook up my Playstation 1, etc.

      PS: Thanks Sean for documenting the meet-up for me to enjoy it in retrospect too.

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