68K ISA project

Someone on the list wrote: No, they really aren't. I used to be able to get piles of them from US Arcade Amusements auctions (the local ones were held a long walk time back. In terms of 68K arcade hardware, I do have a fully working Xenophobe ($200 at a USAA auction a few years back) but the hacking I've done on it is cabinet hacking, not board hacking. I added in an RS170-to-RGBI board and an external cable to tap off an unused L and R audio input (my audio board is the 4-channel version, of which 2 are used by the game) and can hook an external laser disc player to the cabinet, which I've used to play Space Ace and Dragon's Lair (from the original discs as well as the Reproduction last-ever-pressed-laserdisc version) using the Daphne emulator running on an old P133 laptop running RedHat9. As for hacking the Xenophobe hardware, I'd probably rather keep it intact and try to do more with additional gameplay from the same cabinet. If I _really_ got bored, I could try to hack up an old COMBOARD (8MHZ 68K, 128K DRAM, 128K EPROM, MC6821, COM5025 sync serial, Unibus DMA interface that's just taking up space...) into a game platform. It's the one I keep staring at and thinking what it would take to turn into a Unibus disk controller - the answer is usually more hacking and stretching than I have time for even though I have full manufacturing data, schematics, ROM source, etc. In the long term, I should see about a new tube/monitor for it - the Xenophobe screen burn is rather bad. It's an ordinary RGB arcade display with H and V sync - not rare in the slightest - the sort of thing that was commonly emulated in MAME cabinets 10 years ago with $200 TVs from Walmart. I have many more teeth than I have Sega game consoles (24 vs 1 - I've had a bit of dental work done ;-) Seriously, though, I do see them from time to time in consignment shops, but nowhere near as many as I see Sony PS/1s, the current favorite to dump from what I can tell. For the past year, I could pick up at least one PS/1 per week, but only one Genesis over the entire year. I've occasionally thought about hacking the Dragonball processor in old Palm Pilots (I have almost as many of them as I have teeth, and they take up less room than game consoles), but in the end, I might as well just write an app for PalmOS as try to repurpose the platform and hack on the bare metal. If Palms had more I/O than a screen, an IR port (for Palm III and newer) and a serial port, they might be more interesting to repurpose, but so far, the best "classic" re-use I've found for an old Palm is PalmOrb, an app that emulates a Matrix Orbital 20x4 LCD display down to the command set and optional keypad. An old Palm V with serial cradle (so it's easy to view and easy to keep powered) is cheaper than a "real" LCD. -ethan