A second Dreamcast controller stopped working, with what looked like pushed-in connector pins — turned out to be a cheap, no-solder fix.

Why I went looking for a capture card built for video walls and broadcast, rather than retro gaming — and ended up with a pair of Datapath VisionAV-HD cards.

A hand-hacked GameCube VGA cable from the early 2000s lost its red channel. Working out what it even was turned out to be impossible — fixing it turned out to be easy.

A RetroTINK HD15 dongle, a monitor with a rare 15kHz-capable VGA input, and a hunch that shouldn’t have paid off — but did.

A “PAL” SNES that wouldn’t power on turned into a teardown revealing a Japanese Super Famicom motherboard hiding under a European shell, a reverse-polarity power supply, and a stealth region-free mod wired into the RESET button.

Choosing a macOS version, a GPU, and an upgrade path for the classic Mac Pro 5,1 — there’s no single perfect configuration, just tradeoffs.

Turning a CompactFlash card into hard drive storage for an Amstrad PC1640 — the failed attempts, the Serial Drive detour, and the recipe that finally worked.

A cheap used Radeon X800 XL turned up with a seized, screaming fan. Quieting it took three goes — new bearings, then a new fan, then a whole aftermarket cooler.

I don’t have PCI slots on my Z97 motherboard anymore — so I used a cheap PCIe-to-PCI adapter to bring a 3dfx Voodoo 2 back to life inside a modern Windows 10 PC. It took a full-height mounting workaround, an unsigned x64 driver from the 3dfxzone forums, disabling Windows 10 driver signing, and a very unlikely Windows XP fix for a “trying to map memory” error — but native Glide, on real 3dfx hardware, on a 2020s PC, is real.