Chris M. Covell<p>This March, I had to say goodbye to my father, Richard Donovan Covell. Among the cool things he did in his life were:<br />• enter a rally race in his Volkswagen Beetle when he was still an articling lawyer, before I was born<br />• co-write the horror novel "Headhunter" with his law partners (as Michael Slade)<br />• rent some of the best, and trashiest, movies in the '80s, most of which I probably shouldn't have seen at my age<br />• take me and my brother on peace marches, and to Bob Dylan & Tom Petty concerts though we were a bit too young to appreciate them<br />• walk into EA Canada's offices in the early '90s, have a look around (because he was such a fan of their Genesis sports games) and take a newsletter from the lobby desk<br />Dad clearly had passions and dreams both before and after I was born. I hope I can make half as much time in my life to find and do such cool things.</p>
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Chris M. Covell@chriscovell@techhub.social
I'll be posting retro gaming, retrocomputing, and retro dev stuff.
Canadian living in Japan
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Chris M. Covell<p>I found this Sony CFD-A110 CD/tape deck for very cheap and picked it up, since I wanted a stable stereo cassette player. It has lovely soft-softtouch buttons for every feature. This unit is clearly designed for "elderly" users but its looks are starting to grow on me. One downside: no stereo AUX input! Only a mono MIC port. Does anyone know of a way to patch in stereo audio inputs?</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>1980s Pony Canyon hologram; and the back of the "Zapas" blank cassette. The back wrapper has a little red sticker affixed over where it says "Made in Japan by KST Co.", the sticker now saying "Importer: KST Co." Maybe naughty KST was caught in a fraud and had to relabel and/or dump stock.</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>A few little pick-ups at Hard-Off today: Kitaro: Best on cassette, a supremely ugly generic blank tape, and a DIN cassette interface for computers. I've been meaning to modify a C64 cass interface Motor ON signal into the standard computer tape player REM jack connection (maybe by using a relay?) - has anyone tried such a thing?</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>With a day off at home, I thought I'd be playing games all day. Instead, I tried to fix my deaf C64 datasette (can save to tape, but detects nothing... (help?)) then got deep into disassembling the familiar tape alignment software for better colours and a larger waterfall readout. Not there yet, but still fun.</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>Long holiday means I can take out more systems like the Saturn and MSX2 & play with them. (Also, I was inspired by Adrian Black's video where he pulled out his MSX to do a bit of a repair.)<br />Today I made a quick trainer for Psycho World for MSX2, fumbled about with 720K floppy disk writing, then had fun playing through the game.</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>I hope everybody is having a pleasant New Year's Eve going into 2025! Right now, the wife & kids are downstairs watching YouKnowhaku, and I'm getting some quality time in with great video games!</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>I had to chase this memory down... maybe around 1987, my family went camping at a favourite summer spot: Grand Coulee, WA. An idyllic place for camping & swimming. In town, the hardware store had a portable radio for sale that tuned in AIRplane signals(!); I was fascinated by what it promised, its look, that little LED; and I went back to the shop a couple of times and pestered my Dad until he bought it for me. (Thank you, Dad.)</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>I had a nice quiet day off at home all to myself, so I had fun playing FDS games, and re-writing disks & doing data transfers the old-fashioned way. :)<br /><a href="https://techhub.social/tags/FDS" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>FDS</span></a> <a href="https://techhub.social/tags/%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AF%E3%82%B7%E3%82%B9%E3%83%86%E3%83%A0" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>ディスクシステム</span></a></p>
Chris M. Covell<p>OK, I've made a page where you can view the Action Replay/X-Terminator SNES cheat codes stored in UFO copier BIOSes, and the tools used for it are there too.<br /><a href="https://www.chrismcovell.com/UFO-Cheats.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">chrismcovell.com/UFO-Cheats.ht</span><span class="invisible">ml</span></a></p>
Chris M. Covell<p>Mystery Locations: It was not so hard by triangulating from his pictures to discover that the monorail photo and some other photos of suburbs were likely taken from the apartment he and his lady companion were checking out. ☺️</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>And now the fun and easy sleuthing: Super Play issue 9 from 1993 had a humorous article with Japanese correspondent Peter Evans apartment-hunting in the Mukogaoka area, with pictures of suburbs and that classy monorail which would cease operations in 2000.</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>Mystery Locations in Japan continue... This photo is from ~late 1992 from the same Super Play issue with Peter Evans writing about Akihabara. This photo shows his 'neighbourhood', which could be around Noborito Station, or Mukogaoka Yuen Station. Hmm...</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>Turns out this is Noborito, not on the Chuo line.</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>The tough one is this tiny & blurry photo. A train station on the Chuo line, but which one? They have all been built up and had tremendous makeovers since 1993...</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>Time for... Old Photos of Mystery Locations in Japan. Super Play mag had some articles by Peter Evans, and I was curious where the photos were taken. One had a monorail, a canal, a left curve in the road, and a sign pointing "??ヶ丘". The monorail is long gone, but I found it! Mukogaoka Yuen amusement park is also long-gone, but next to it was a bowling alley which is now the Fujiko F. Fujio museum.</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>I don't know how many people this benefits, but I continue to work on a little program that extracts X-Terminator cheat codes from various SFC/SNES device ROMs, and matches them to a game name. Currently I found the code locations+pointers for the UFO 7.3, 8.1, 8.3j, 8.8c, UFOSD, & X-T Param Cassette.</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>Very strangely, the Supercom Partner copier dumps SNES cartridges accurately if you choose the "CARD->SAVE CARD" option to write to disk directly, but it adds this 65816 code somewhere in some free (or not-so-free) bytes of the ROM if you go the "CARD->DOWNLOAD MEMORY" route. 🤔</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>I picked a "Supercom Partner" for pretty cheap with its box. It's your standard copier with a few quirks. It does have slow-motion, X-T code support (but none built-in?) and realtime savestates, which work, but not as well as the UFO in terms of glitching. Still, very cool! (Now, does anyone have a BIOS upgrade or "Special Partner" BIOS that they can upload?)</p>
Chris M. Covell<p>Okay, since there were no programs that simply printed SNES internal header checksums into the console/text output, I programmed up my own. That's the first step done for matching UFO/X-Terminator codes up to their game names.</p>
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