Boku no Hero Academia - You Say Run! - ProTracker Cover

This doesn't really have anything to do with electronic tinkering or software development.
But still I'm pround of this result and also want to share it here.

picoPSU + Adapter + Thingiverse Case = Amiga Power Supply

As I've already lost two 1200 units for unknown reasons (Well at least one of them) and because original Amiga power supplies seem to be crafted in Hell by Cacodemons I decided to get for an ATX PSU instead.

People on the internet and on the DoReCo this year seem to replace it very often. So why not? All you need is 12V, 5V and -12V and you are done. Every usual PSU for PCs can deliver this at high currents.

I'v stumbled across this website. This guy analyzed various options for replacement and also delivers some hardware to support it.

I've bought one picoPSU ATX adapter from him and ordered the picoPSU90 from Amazon.
On Mr. Stedmans page there is also a suggestion for a printable model of a shrunken down Amiga PSU suited to contain the circuit.

I don't own a 3D printer as I was in believe that I wouldn't need one ever.
(It's also my opinion that something like this should be shared in a group as one person would probably print too seldom to justify the costs.)
But I have a friend who has one and was able to print this thing overnight on an Ultimaker 2+.

The whole result is far from perfect and not as good as shown on Thingiverse. But the printer was set on 1.5x speed so maybe this is the reason why.
I'm still happy as this is the first time I've ever 3D printed something.

What is there still to say? I'll let the pictures talk.

This beast is powered by an external 12V adapter giving 5A resulting in 60W.
The picoPSU could do more but I didn't have a fitting adapter around. But 60W is still a lot, even for an Amiga.

I've tested it and I was kinda confused. The voltage ramps of the power up seem to be different compared to the original PSU as the screen goes green and the audio gives a clicking sound after powering up. Shortly after that the screen goes black like it should when an A1200 is booting and after that the system is running.

I hope this is just an unimportant side effect. I'm not an experienced analog guy.

Apart from that this is a really nice and clean solution.

Super Turrican MSU 0.4 + Super Turrican Soundfix 0.1 released

As Super Turrican MSU 0.3 kinda lead to confusion for a few people and I've stumbled onto some other stuff I decided to release a new version.

Changes for v0.4:

• Assumed to fix Soundglitch (Removed 16 bit writes to $2140, further tests needed)
• Fix swapped music of stages 1-2 and 1-3
• Replaced IPS by BPS and more cleaned up package
• Moved volume boosted sd2snes version for revision F and older into subfolder.
  As I no longer possess a revision F sd2snes active support for this revision is kinda sorta dropped as testing is not possible for me any more.

Download Super Turrican MSU 0.4

Also the Super Turrican Soundfix proposal needs further test data.
The patch is now also available for the NTSC version of the game.

Download Super Turrican Soundfix 0.1

Known bugs
During my testing it kinda happened again once. So the sound fix sadly doesn't work. My guess is that this never will be fixed which is quite sad. If enough people provide testimony for this modification to not help at all, I will make a version 0.5 which removes this hack as it might lead to unwanted side effects.


Disclaimer:
Please keep in mind that I'm growing more and more tired of testing this game with a full playthrough every time I update this. Especially now with 6 different ROM files resulting from both these hacks.
This is why I cannot guarantee proper function.
If this package deals damage to your hardware I'm not responsible for it.
If you encounter any bugs or uncertainty please use this blog to contact me.

Super Turrican Soundfix proposal

It seems not a lot gamers have played Super Turrican. This is my assumption and it has to be true as not much information is available on a significant bug this game has.

While playing the game more frequenty on the sd2snes to do the MSU hack I ran into issues sometimes. The sound glitched up. I was pretty certain that this was not caused by my hack as I had the same issue very rarely with my original PAL cartridge and blamed it for this. There is actually a video on YouTube showing off how it could sound like. Please turn down the volume as headphone user :3

There also do exists some discussion on that topic on some forums:

http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=37267
http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=40996


Let sum this up here:

• It happens on the NTSC and the PAL version. (I've tested this)
• It never appeared to me on higan while developing my MSU Hack.
• It is caused by a soundeffect and not music. (As my hack doesn't have music on levels)
• The glitch only happens on 1chip SNES hardware. (Assumed)
• Chances for this bug to happen are quite low. It's possible to make a complete run of the game without having issues at all.

Also there do exists a theory that the blue laser makes this happen more frequently. I can not approve that as it happend to me with the spread shot once too.

It's a mystery why this was unnoticed so long as the game has aged for quite a while and it seems to be unnoticed until 2010.


I never really intented to try to solve this issue as I can't debug it with an emulator. But a few weeks ago I've read this article.
It says:
Hardware Quirk! When writing in 16-bit values to 2140 / 2141, a noise pulse (or some technical thingy) may write data to 2143 too! Always write to 2140 / 2141 with 8-bit writes if this is undesired.

So that's some interesting stuff to look into.
I've modded higan for that purpose to detect 16 bit writes to 2140. As it turns out games like Super Turrican 2 and Super Bomberman 4 didn't have these while Super Turrican uses these writes for loading SPC data between the levels.

I've removed these instructions and replaced them by subroutines which write these values as separated bytes. I did one playthrough and no bug happend yet.

What I now really need are players that love to play Super Turrican and willing to test this patch to give me some test statistics.

Here is the download link for the PAL versions patch.
Apply using flips or some other patch tool.

Please keep it mind that this is ONLY a soundfix patch. No MSU hack is applied here. I will update the MSU version of my hack with this fix when I've finished resolving issues with sd2snes revision differences on volume levels.

The NTSC version will follow if we are able to proove that the fix is actually working.

Here the md5sums for checking:
90c9fe8386a7f69de475c58bb8de01f7  Super Turrican (Europe).sfc
d17a07bd58bf295fe09ff6d88f7d0151  SuperTurricanSoundFix_PAL.bps
5d214342d2eb3beae115471e4dbc1a6e  SuperTurricanSoundFix_PAL.sfc