Last week some good friends came over and we fired up Vice64 and played the old, classic Games from our childhood. Funny that you still know some of the moves in California Games although I haven’t played it for over 15 years. It was lot of fun. We hooked up the Acer ONE to my fat LCD tv and used two of those USB Competion Pros from Speedlink. Pure pleassure… they did a good job in resurrecting this classic.

Only having OS X on my ONE and the external Videoport is not working - hackintoshs have their flaws, you know - I was thinking about my good old xbox with Gamebase64 installed. No windows to wait for, no freaking ugly interface like Gamebase has on PC, not much hassle with configuration and twiddeling with the USB ports… sounds like a lot of reasons to get a Competition hooked to it.Asking google revealed that many people have already hacked their contorller and put a D-SUB9 in place. On xbox-scene bek postet a little tutorial. Sadly the pictures were far from usable and in his text he is mixing up left and right when talking about the D-SUB port and the solderpoint for the firebutton is TP76 instead TP78 which I couldn’t find at all on the both controllers I hacked.

Anyway, his tutorial is great for a electrical noob like me. I zoomed aroud in photoshop till I found the point he used for the firebutton… with a little luck, off course. So here is my little help fix for you, If you would like to play old games like they where meant to. This is for the original xbox crontroller, the big version.First off all the pinout for Atari/Amiga/C64 compatible ports, seen from the soldering side.

1 Forward - 2 Back - 3 Left - 4 Right 5 - not connected - 6 Button 1 - 7 +5V * - 8 GND - 9 - not connected

________________
o5 o4 o3 o2 o1/
 o9 o8 o7 o6 /
 ___________/

Unscrew the controller - 7 Screws on the outside, additional 6 on the inside, on the board. Here’s a picture that should be self-explanatory. Behind the “>” you can read the pin of the D-SUB plug.When soldering be careful not to stay long on the pins of the controller chip - I just killed my second controllers d-pad with too much heat.

Off course I will not take any resposability for any damage to you, your console, or controller. Try this at your own risk! If you are not familiar with soldering tiny spots, you better look for someone to do it for you. Like I should have done with the second attempt.

So, I will take my chances - which are by far now better than with the d-pad - and kick some reds ass on International Karate.Have fun!

EDIT: I recently got myself into the arcade stuff again and while browsing for some infos I found this neat tutorial, with all solderpoints listed…. far better than mine while easier to solder to. Thanks to Xerxes3rd for this one.

http://www.xerxes3rd.net/staticpages/index.php?page=GenesisControllerOnXbox

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…probably one of the most used headlines, when it comes to blogging. Everyone running a blog knows, that it is a bit work to keep it up to date and writing sometimes doesn’t come easy. So what has happened the last month?

First of all, we moved up one level. Nadine are now in our new residence on second and thrid floor… still in the same house. There is still a lot to do in our new home.

Second thing and also a long time running was finishing the budocan.com webpage. Yes! I know… it looks a bit like this page… but hey, it looks better than most of those martial arts pages.

And before I disappear again I give you a little sample, from an old C64 game that kept me and my cousin playing all evening. Do you know which game it is taken from than post a comment. >> sampel.mp3 (160kb)

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Do you remember the first time you got in touch with a computer? Speaking for me I still know when it was and what it was like. I was about 10 years old - must be around 19985 - and it was at Alex (nowadays the man behind mobileread.com) place. His father is some kind of early geek and had the whole house stuffed with latest gadgets, so it was no surprise to find a brand new Commodore 128D there. It strucked me like lightning, when Alex grabbed a joystick and controlled that little, jaggy guy on screen. I knew I had to get such a wonder machine for myself.

Long before mom and pop said yes, Alex passed me a floppy disk - my first floppy disk ever - with list dump on its back, printed with the old MPS 801, that made such a noise that the whole street knew when you where printing something. I remember flailing this disk in front of my dad, till he finnaly went on to buy a C64. This was my step into computing and for sure one step to this blog.

A couple of years ago I converted all my disks to D64 format and preserved them on a CD. Recently I tripped over an announcement on c64.com asking for old disks. I uploaded my full archive to their server and couldn’t resist to browse a few of my fist files. My very fist disk was also in there and on it I found some basic animation, that I almost forgot about. Back, when it all was so new and exciting, those basic stuff tought me alot of programming - thanks to whoever made them. Now they seem to be some sort of first demos/intros, written in basic; a precursor to all those popular flash movies nowadays.

Feel free to grab this early ancestor of digital animation. >> Basic anims.d64.zip

And please support c64.com with your old disks.

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