[modrobert]

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Welcome! I’m happy to see people finding their way back here.

This blog has been running since 2008 but I registered the domain and setup the forum in 2025. First I was thinking of starting a new site but since this blog had been running without getting hacked during this whole time it was worth a shot to let WordPress handle it. The forum is kind of simple but runs fast and is relatively easy to maintain.

I’m not trying to recreate eurasia[.]nu where the main attraction was the download section and news, not sure what this will turn out to be but feels like it’s moving in the hobby direction, with retro consoles, electronics, sharing projects, helping out, etc.

For a while it seemed like mainstream social media services would take over individual sites like this completely, and perhaps that’s still true, but there’s a lot of censorship, intrusive ads and other bullshit going on where people are getting banned for arbitrary reasons. I think under these circumstances it’s more relevant than ever to run independent sites.

[modrobert]

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Yes, looks promising.

I have bad experience with longevity regarding soldering PCB directly against PCB, because boards tend to flex differently due to heat and size the solder joints crack over time after many power on/off cycles. I guess if the PCB is really thin (thinking flexible) it will hold better, but still prefer doing it by wire. If there is no other way than using a supplied board I prefer soldering it with short wire snips between PCBs rather than directly by via to solder point.

[modrobert]

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On xrey1 wrote

I am kind of new to this topic, as I was just looking for PS1 mods the last 2 days. I got a PS1 for free with a PU-8 board, but the early model 1658-467-11

SCPH-1002, GPU: CXD 8514Q, CPU: CXD8530BQ

It says that the Pico Mod would work for the PU-8 but I noticed there is an early PU-8- 11/12 and late PU-8- 21/22/23/41 board with small different layouts.

I was only able to find the DIAGRAM PicoStation 100X PU8 for the late version. I guess there is no solder point diagram right now for the early version? So I was looking around to find another solution.

I saw that the previous mod with xStation could work with both models, and they had 2 versions of their mod quick solder boards for early and late boards.

I got a little hooked there to figure it out.

So I compared the xStation late board with the PicoStation soldering points.

I was quite happy to find these pictures. So I started tracing the different positions back and forth

They were quite similar, I think I found all the points there, purple letters should be all the Pico Connections.

01= C= GND
02= J +8V
03= E
04= Q
05= N
06= K
07= L
08= F = Lid button
09= A
10= NC
11= GND
12= M= CLK
13= B
14= I
15= P
16= H
17= G = Reset
18= GND
19= O
20= D

After that I compared the xStation late board with the xStation early board, as the 20-pin connector should be the same layout, and traced them back out again.

Numbers from the 20-pin connector, letter should be Pico

M is the clock at another position, and F is the Lid button, maybe J the +8V can be connected like in the early Pico manual some elsewhere, and you have to remove some resistors and lift the 4 pins from the IC, so all the things it says in the EARLY_PU-8_Install_Guide.

I am not ready to do this mod right now, as I need to buy the components first, so this is just a thought experiment for now.

What do you think? Could this work if I connect a Pico like this to a -11 board? Or is there something I overlooked or made a mistake on?

Feedback is highly appreciated.

Thanks for sharing. Your plan looks solid, but I haven’t tried this so can’t confirm. Perhaps Snaker (OP) knows more. As long as you make sure ground and voltage points are correct on your motherboard it should be safe to try without destroying anything.

[modrobert]

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I tried some example code found here:
https://github.com/sipeed/TangNano-20K-example

The HDMI example works.

[modrobert]

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On bonerboy69 wrote

On June 5, 2026 at 16:02 modrobert wrote

There were no visible leaks from the electrolytic capacitors but several of them measured bad using the ESR meter so it was high time to recap.

Around C64 and C63 it looks like capacitor leakage?

Yes, good catch, easier to see in the following image.

 

[modrobert]

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Finally settled on a medium size knob. ;)

[modrobert]

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Here it is with bigger knob.

 

[modrobert]

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On VilmantasT wrote

May you answer my question. I read that wires is important for this mod, so I dont want to spend hour of soldering and get not working mod without a clue what happening. Is these are good:

I use wire wrapping wire 30 AWG (which is thinner than 26 AWG) when modding most stuff, but it’s probably OK with 26 AWG thickness, not sure if 20cm pieces will be long enough for this project though.

[modrobert]

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Nice work, that RTC should last a while now. ;)

Would a 1W 330Ω resistor do the job instead of three 1/4W 1kΩ resistors in parallel regarding the 12V load? Perhaps it’s too big to fit nicely on the GDEMU board.

[modrobert]

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[modrobert]

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On bonerboy69 wrote

I like AI, don’t you?

No, but I might reconsider if it could give correct answers. ;)

I think this GenAI bubble will be like a 100 times worse than the 3D TV flop when it bursts. The LLM error rate scales up with production, it’s not going away unless research finds some radically different approach, and they haven’t so far, it’s seems to be a hard problem mathematically which none of those who are invested wants to hear about.
 

[modrobert]

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On gr04ts wrote

i am back, too :)
greets – Luth3r

I remember, welcome back.

 

[modrobert]

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I think the reason dark matter hasn’t been found is because its particles are not part of our space-time continuum, if it were to be detected it is no longer dark matter. In other words, until determined by superposition it remains dark matter.

[modrobert]

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My bad …Cue File was incorrect… Ignore my last

Don’t worry about it, I’ve had that several times also. Good you found the problem.

[modrobert]

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On bonerboy69 said

Does this DFO board make it NTSC with 60Hz for all disc images, or does it detect PAL disc images and set 50Hz for those?

The DFO board switches automatically depending on region.

I’m also curious how Picostation handles games where the disc dump have one cue file but several bin files (e.g. audio tracks). Assuming those games have to be converted somehow.

A game with several bin files need to be converted into one bin file. There are tools for that, like this one:

https://github.com/putnam/binmerge

Thanks. How does it handle games spanning several discs (for example Final Fantasy VII)?

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