Installing a GC Loader Optical Drive Emulator in My GameCube
Retiring the optical drive on a Japanese GameCube in favour of a GC Loader — an SD-card ODE that replaces the drive assembly entirely.
I Rescued a $12 Dreamcast Found on the Side of the Road
A Hong Kong roadside electronics stall, some haggling, and a genuinely grubby Sega Dreamcast — cleaned up, brought back to life, and rescued from an early retirement.
Where to Shop for Retro Games in Akihabara (and Shinjuku)
A store-by-store guide to retro game shopping in Tokyo — Super Potato, Book Off, Retro Game Camp, BEEP, Surugaya, and where the tourist-pricing traps are.
Fixing a Broken Dreamcast Controller
A second Dreamcast controller stopped working, with what looked like pushed-in connector pins — turned out to be a cheap, no-solder fix.
Finding the Best Capture Card for Analog Video
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.
Fixing a Snapped Wire in a Rare GameCube VGA Cable
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.
Plugging a SNES Directly Into a VGA Monitor Actually Works
A RetroTINK HD15 dongle, a monitor with a rare 15kHz-capable VGA input, and a hunch that shouldn’t have paid off — but did.
I Just Wanted to Power My PAL SNES in America…
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.
Mac Pro 5,1 Upgrade Guide
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.
