My mom is usually not too enthusiastic about me spending a fortune (and lots of time) on the invention and production of novelty gadgets, instead of finishing my PhD and getting a real job. This time, however, she surprised me with this neat collection of Retrode dust protection pouches made from some old comic fabric she found in the cellar. How much more “retro” can it possibly get? Maybe I can convince her to make a bunch for the true Retrode aficionados :D

Good news: the final cases have arrived. They turned out a bit more golden than I expected, and they’re of really nice quality. As promised, here are two photos. After sealing the boxes again, I took them to the post office right away, so in a few weeks they should come back from the machining guy with beautiful CNC cutouts.
By the way, did you notice that there is not a single red item remaining in the Status section on the right? It won’t be long until we can indulge in the nicest Retrodes (Golden Edition, of course) the world has ever seen.

Thanks to [FelixV] for the video!

Guess what I just picked up at the post office! That’s right, an awful lot of cartridge connectors (14.5 kilograms, to be precise). I will use a few of them to populate the remaining prototype boards, and then send the rest to the company for the PCB assembly. And more good news: They tweaked the SEGA connectors some more (remember, they were a bit tight before), so now they feel a little smoother than before and pretty much like the SNES ones.

Meanwhile, the cases are waiting at the factory to be shipped, but they should be picked up anytime soon. The webcam these folks are using is just awful… in order to get to the picture on the right, I had to do some serious white balancing, so it’s probably not anywhere near the truth. I’m eager to see what they really look like.

And some more goodies: the Retrode firmware now supports all four gamepads. For maximum compatibility, the user can map controllers 1 and 2 to the keyboard interface, like before. Otherwise, all four controllers are simply treated as USB joysticks.

In the last few months, I had been focusing more on the SNES side, since my console gaming friends have mostly SNESes. Enter this stack of fresh Mega Drive carts—looks like I’m in for another testing marathon. Keep your fingers crossed that the Compatibility page can withstand the sheer amount of newly proven compatibility :D

Update (2009-12-15): Looking good so far. Out of the 24 games I tested, 21 are working flawlessly. 2 show a checksum error, and one (Virtua Racing) doesn’t work at all, which I had kind of expected. I would have loved to see the Sonic&Knuckles lock-on feature working right away, but perhaps I was a bit optimistic. Maybe I can figure out how the thing works internally. For the record: testing these 24 games took me roughly half an hour. Try to beat that with your favorite cart copier :) Compatibility page still not exploded. More tomorrow.

Update 2 (2009-12-16): Good news: according to GoodGen, the checksum errors are meaningless because the dumps are 100% true to the originals and hence recommended for playing. I tested a whole lot of new games today, and they’re all working fine. For the Sonic&Knuckles issue there might be a simple solution, so I hope to be able to fix this soon. Compatibility page still alive. Hooray. The end. For now.

Update 3 (2009-12-18): Sonic & Knuckles lock-in feature now working, tested with S1 (Blue Sphere) and S2 (Knuckles in Sonic 2). This requires two extra wires on the PCB, a really simple mod. Thanks to Rizzo for his good old S&K schematics that helped quite a bit. DIY instructions can be found here.

Alright, so we’re still waiting for a few essential things, and what better way to spend that time than figuring out how to do the “logo print” I promised? :-) So I gathered a handful of euros and had a pair of stamps made – one for white on dark, one for black on bright background. Given that it’s pretty much the first time ever that I’m holding a stamp, I’m quite pleased with the outcome. On paper, everything works just the way you’d expect, but the metal surface doesn’t absorb the liquid, resulting in that certain “lo-fi” touch that might even go well with retro gaming :-) (Though I am confident that with some fine-tuning I can get the “fi” to be a little less “lo”.)

Update: The print will be done professionally, via silkscreening.