Archive for March, 2008

5v regulator breadboard

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Yes !!!

This weekend I finally got the thing working and not blowing up the LM7805 once again. Yesterday I re-opened my little box filled with my electronics parts. This time it was all set in my head, I need to follow the indications by the letter. 30 minutes after ripping all the wires left on the breadboard, I was ready again to test the thing.

DAMN !!! the fucking LM7805 is still getting way too hot in a few seconds. Damn, Damn, Damn …. What is the next step now ? My good friend Torlus don’t seem active on the IRc chan … Hmmm …

Well, in fact there is something that might be bad since the beginning : the “Nintendo Wall Wart”. That one is supposed to output 9V 1.3A. So after a 5 minutes digging in the “wall wart box” at home I found a 12v 500mA from big “outside” light that was left a few ago behind me and now loose. Well I’m gonna try with that, anyway I have nothing to loose.

image of the 2 wall wart [picture coming in a few days :p]

Hmmm…. Working like a charm. Yes Yes Yes I finally managed to get my 5V output working. I really blame myself about the Nintendo adapter. Anyway I’m now ready to rock with real electronic stuff. Here is a picture of my breadboard at the moment.

5v regulator breadboard

Next thing should be playing with a 8bit comparator, dip switches and a led. I keep you updated as soon as possible.

EDIT : I found what is the problem with SNES “wall wart” … is outputing alternatif current. 🙁

++ Lint

Almost blowing it again …

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Hmm not a so nice evening yesterday. Well not that bad neither, just some bad experimentation with my electronic parts. On monday I went to the shop getting a new 5V regulator (in fact i got 2 in case of burning one gain). After getting simple instruction from Iguana Labs, I was reading to turn the current IN. After about 10 seconds, some smoke was coming out the LM7805, not really from the regulator itself but in fact from the breadboard that was melting. The fucking thing was hot like hell, hopefully i managed to get a tool to get it out and not my bare fingers. So new some holes of my breadboard are melt.

So what is the fucking problem this time ? I went to my favourite IRC channel and asked Torlus (the masterchief in electronics, go visit his website, the guy is incredible). At first sight everything was ok for him, since i tought that my input might be the cause since I’m using the AC adapter from one of my SNES. Then the fatal question : “Did you put the capacitor ?” hmmm … NO …

When reading the tutorial at Iguana Labs it didn’t went to my mind that the capacitor was needed. Then i got back to the sparfun tutorials that is way more complete. Yes they also talk about the capacitors. Following also the good advice of RTFDS (Read The Fucking Data Sheet) from Torlus, I figured out that the capacitors were REALLY needed. Here is the abstract from the Data Sheet showing that.

LM7805 extract from datasheet

So at lunch time im once more going to the electronic shop to get some capacitors. I will also look for a good book explaining the basics of electronics. Electronics are way not like Software. With software you just got you software, compile it and test it. If something go wrong there is no harm done. With hardware messing up often means blowing up stuff. I need to think a bit more about that.

++ Lint

“Illusion of time” SNES GET !!!

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Oldstar GamesToday during lunch time i went to Oldstar Games and got myself “Illusion of time” for my SNES. Not that I really wanna play “Illusion of time”. It’s more the fact that the cartridge is an easy hackable one. Go see yourself here. I will come with more details soon…

See ya,

++ Lint

First burnout

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Well this weekend, I burnout my first electronic composant. Poor LM7805… Today I’m going to the shop getting 2 of them. Then I will follow with great attention the sparkfun tutorial, and not going all crazy by myself like i did.

++ Lint

The hardware approach !

Friday, March 21st, 2008

Well to be honest, hardware is not my thing. I have been always more obsessed with software. Getting to understand how the software is working, to reverse it, rewritting it, finding flaws in it, exploit those flaws. But since few years now, since my last biggest hack (GC hack with PSO protocol hack), it’s loking like software on next-gen console is toomuch for me. Well maybe not too much .. but i’m really loosing interest in it.

So since i’m getting back to my first love (aka the SNES) I’m strangely interested into hardware stuff. I started getting interested on how is the “Pro Fighter Q +” is dealing with parallel port communication. I will talk about it now … that might be a subject for a few other posts.Then i got interrested on how are the cartridge working, how the cpu pinout are dispatching stuff the the other processor. Might it be possible to make a debugger on the real SNES hardware. As you see that’s many questions…

So im currently reading lots of technical docs about the SNES, and also reading lots of stuff about the basics of electronic. My main goal is to have some hardware parts to help developpers on the SNES.

See you soon for my first experimentation,

++ Lint

A nice site from japan

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

I have discovered about a week ago a nice website talking about SNES dev from Japan : SNES研究室.

The most interesting stuff is certinly the code examples in C using CC65 and the WDC C Compiler. I have never used CC65 and i was a bit surprised to see SNES code for it, since i was quite sure that CC65 wast supporting 65816 cpu. I was a bit familiar with the WDC C Compiler, since I had been playing a few months ago with him.

Now what is missing the most is a SNES library. The library should be coded in C but rather in assembly. But then it would be simplier for people to start learning SNES programming since the library should bring helper functions to help young programmer who have difficulties with 65816 assembler, or bring another range of console coder. It maybe good or bad … who knows.

Anyway it’s a nice site and the author told me that he will continue to update it time to time.

See ya, ++ Lint