I found an IKEA Spöka nightlight with a missing power adapter. Apart from it being 5V, I did not know which might fit. It has the round socket, but is it center positive or negative? Let's open this thing to find out what's inside... ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_3ThjWHd6c

I am not very content with the original CX40 joysticks that came with my Atari 2600. While they are iconic pieces of hardware, actually playing with them gives me hand cramps and their innards are prone to breaking. Instead I am using a custom arcade controller right now. For two player games a second one was in order. So I picked an arcade joystick kit by Monster Joysticks. It recently arrived, so what else to do than assemble it and take it for a spin! No soldering required... Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/root42 Support me on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/root42 8bit Joystick Kits: https://monsterjoysticks.com/retro-gaming-joystick-kits/8-16bit-retro-joystick-kits ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sraNqm4CWks

In this episode I assemble the "Snark Barker" Sound Blaster clone. This card was reverse engineered and created by schlae of tubetime. The same person who also did the AdLib replica which I covered in a previous episode. The Creative Sound Blaster was the successor to the Creative Music System, which was a commercial failure. The Adlib card was more successful, so the Sound Blaster combined both cards into one. It also added a relabelled Intel 8051 microcontroller as a "DSP" to play digitized samples and speech, and also added a combined MIDI and joystick port. This was what probably made the biggest difference and led to Creative dominating the sound card market for many years. It also led to the ultimate demise of Adlib, a few years down the road. This project is much larger than anything I have done before. I was thinking about splitting the video in two parts, but due to current time constraints, I opted to make one long half hour video. I hope you still like it. The whole project is open source and you can download the design files, order the PCBs from your favourite vendor and parts from Mouser, digikey or other component sellers. The only components that are EOL are the Yamaha ICs YMF3812 (OPL2) and Y3014B, the 558 timer IC, the SAA1099 synth chips and the TEA2025 amp. You can get all of those on eBay from Chinese sellers for small money. You also have to make your own slot bracket, which I did not yet make. This will be covered in a future episode. Cost for the whole card is about 80-100 USD, depending on the PCB manufacturer you choose. Github project: https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker Support me on Kofi: https://ko-fi.com/root42 Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/root42 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9df2g3YivY

A couple of years ago I got a PET 3016 from 1979. The machine comes stock with 16KB of RAM and back then we upgraded it using a RAM/ROM expansion, giving it 32KB of SRAM and BASIC V4 ROMs. However it never ran stable in this configuration. It turns out the SRAM was not playing nice with the system. So in this video we will use new old stock 8116 DRAM chips to upgrade the mainboard to its maximum and hopefully get a stable system. Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/root42 Support me on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/root42 Support me on PayPal: https://paypal.me/ArneSchmitz Support me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPjFa_UZBUDzdJTIEdyGjIQ/join Music: A Little Wonder by Spino2006 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niGEik8a2Xk