Day: November 28, 2024

The Japanese Console You Maybe Haven’t Heard Of

November 28, 2024 by 2 Comments

The games consoles which came out of Japan in the 1980s are the stuff of legend, with the offerings from Nintendo and Sega weaving themselves into global popular culture. Most of us can recite a list of the main players in the market, but how many of us would have Epoch and their Super Cassette Vision on that list? [Nicole Express] is here with a look at this forgotten machine which tried so hard and yet missed the target when competing with the NES or Master System.

Before the arrival of the Sega and Nintendo cartridge based systems, one of the better known Japanese consoles was the Epoch Cassette Vision. This was something of a hybrid between single-game TV games and an Atari 2600 style computing device for games, in that it used pre-programmed microcontrollers in its cartridges rather than the ROMs of the 2600. For the late-70s gamer this was still hot stuff, but by 1983 as the Master System and NES hove into view it was definitely past its best. Epoch’s response for 1984 was the Super Cassette Vision, a much more conventional 8-bit console with on the face of it some respectable graphics and sound hardware.

The article looks at the console’s capabilities in detail, highlighting the multi-colored sprites and smooth sprite movement, but also the tilemap limitations and the somewhat awful sound chip shared with handheld games and sounding very much like it. Coupled with its inferior controllers and TV game style aesthetic, it’s not difficult to see why it would be the last console from this manufacturer.

If forgotten consoles are your thing, have a read about the Fairchild Channel F, the machine that gave us console cartridges.

Homebrew Phosphorescence Detector Looks For The Glow In Everyday Objects

November 28, 2024 by No comments

Spoiler alert: almond butter isn’t phosphorescent. But powdered milk is, at least to the limit of detection of this homebrew phosphorescence detector.

Why spend a bunch of time and money on such a thing? The obvious answer is “Why not?”, but more specifically, when [lcamtuf]’s son took a shine (lol) to making phosphorescent compounds, it just seemed natural for dad to tag along in his own way. The basic concept of the detector is to build a light-tight test chamber that can be periodically and briefly flooded with UV light, charging up the putatively phosphorescent compounds within. A high-speed photodiode is then used to detect the afterglow, which can be quantified and displayed.

The analog end of the circuit was the far fussier end of the design, with a high-speed transimpedance amplifier to provide the needed current gain. Another scaling amp and a low-pass filter boosts and cleans up the signal for a 14-bit ADC. [lcamtuf] went to great lengths to make the front end as low-noise as possible, including ferrite beads and short leads to prevent picking up RF interference. The digital side has an AVR microcontroller that talks to the ADC and runs an LCD panel, plus switches the 340 nm LEDs on and off rapidly via a low gate capacitance MOSFET.

Unfortunately, not many things found randomly around the average home are all that phosphorescent. We’re not sure what [lcamtuf] tried other than the aforementioned foodstuffs, but we’d have thought something like table salt would do the trick, at least the iodized stuff. But no matter, the lessons learned along the way were worth the trip.