Redeem Your Irresponsible 90s Self

October 18, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

If you were a youth in the 90s, odds are good that you were a part of the virtual pet fad and had your very own beeping Tamagotchi to take care of, much to the chagrin of your parents. Without the appropriate amout of attention each day, the pets could become sick or die, and the only way to prevent this was to sneak the toy into class and hope it didn’t make too much noise. A more responsible solution to this problem would have been to build something to take care of your virtual pet for you.

An art installation in Moscow is using an Arduino to take care of five Tamagotchis simultaneously in a virtal farm of sorts. The system is directly wired to all five toys to simulate button presses, and behaves ideally to make sure all the digital animals are properly cared for. Although no source code is provided, it seems to have some sort of machine learning capability in order to best care for all five pets at the same time. The system also prints out the statuses on a thermal printer, so you can check up on the history of all of the animals.

The popularity of these toys leads to a lot of in-depth investigation of what really goes on inside them, and a lot of other modifications to the original units and to the software. You can get a complete ROM dump of one, build a giant one, or even take care of an infinite number of them. Who would have thought a passing fad would have so much hackability?

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Show That Sega Saturn Save Battery Who’s Boss

September 20, 2018 by Drew Littrell 26 Comments

Breaking out the Sega Saturn out of the closet for a hit of 90’s nostalgia comes with its own set of compromises: the wired controllers, the composite video, and worst of all that dead CR2032 battery behind the backdoor. Along with the death of that battery went your clock and all those precious hours put into your game save files. While the bulk of us kept feeding the insatiable SRAM, a friendly Canadian engineer named [René] decided to fix the problem for good with FRAM.

The issue with the battery-backed memory in the Saturn stems from the particularly power-hungry factory installed SRAM chip. Normally when the console is plugged-in to a main power source the CR2032 battery is not in use, though after several weeks in storage the battery slowly discharges. [René’s] proposed solution was to use a non-volatile form of RAM chip that would match the pinout of the factory SRAM as close as possible. This would allow for easier install with the minimum number of jumper wires.

Enter the FM1808 FRAM chip complete with a whopping 256 kb of addressable memory. The ferroelectric chip operates at the same voltage as the Saturn’s factory SRAM, and has the added benefit of being able to use a read/write mode similar to that of the Saturn’s original memory chip. Both chips conform to a DIP-28 footprint, and only a single jumper wire on pin 22 was required to hold the FM1808 chip’s output-enable signal active-low as opposed to the active-high enable signal on the Saturn’s factory memory chip. The before and after motherboard photos are below:

After a quick test run of multiple successful read and writes to memory, [René] unplugged his Saturn for a couple days and found that his save files had been maintained. According to the FM1808 datasheet, they should be there for the next 45 years or so. The only downside to the upgrade is that the clock & calendar settings were not maintained upon boot-up and reset to the year 1996. But that’s nothing a bit of button-mashing through couldn’t solve, because after all wasn’t the point of all this to relive a piece of the 90s?

For more Sega Saturn goodness, check out how the Sega Saturn was finally cracked after 20 years.

Payphone Boombox Straight Out Of The 1990’s.

December 1, 2016 by James Hobson 10 Comments

Due largely to the overwhelming dominance of mobile phones, payphones are a sometimes overlooked relic from the 90’s and earlier eras. While seldom seen out in the wild these days, they can however still be acquired for a moderate fee — how many of you knew that? Setting out to prove the lasting usefulness of the payphone, Instructables user [Fuzzy-Wobble] has dialed the retro spirit way past eleven to his ’90 from the ’90s’ payphone boombox.

Conspicuously mounted in the corner of his office, a rangefinder sets the phone to ringing when somebody walks by — a fantastic trap for luring the curious into a nostalgia trip. Anyone who picks up will be prompted to punch in a code from the attached mini-phone book and those who do will be treated to one of ninety hits from — well — the 1990’s. All of the songs have been specifically downgraded to 128kbps for that authentic 90’s sound — complete with audio artifacts. There’s even a little easter egg wherein hitting the coin-return lever triggers the payphone to shout “Get a job!”

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