A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

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Pullmyfinger
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A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by Pullmyfinger »

We following this guide and it's going well so far. Sadly I didn't take any pics during the process, as the camera wasn't working, but here's our current progress.

Image

Here's the cart slot, we did a neater job on it, using an IDE cable split into groups of 5 to 7 cables instead of having a whole bunch of individual wires. Getting the cart slot was a pain but it came out eventually.

For some reason, when testing up to this point, the controllers were acting weird, buttons were mixed up and others would not work at all. It went away at the next step and perhaps I'll never understand why.

Image

The red cable there is to remove one power brick, the others are to replace the Genesis to 32x cable. These wires are sloppy because we were like 6 hours into this by then and also we soldered one wrong and the genesis refused to turn on at all.

On top of the bare 32x is the removed video out. It took a good while to remove the one in the 32x and the one in the Genesis, both had lots of solder and were a tight fit.

So far everything works and most of what is left is removing a heatsink and a couple of capacitors and hope that everything will fit back inside, pretty hard to screw up at this point. If all goes well, that will be done some time during the weekend and there will be more pictures.

Wish me luck!
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nickfil
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Re: A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by nickfil »

what are you going to use for a case? cool project by the way.
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Pullmyfinger
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Re: A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by Pullmyfinger »

Everything is supposed to fit back into the genesis 2 casing and it should look just like a normal genesis 2, although the carts will stick out a little more
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nickfil
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Re: A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by nickfil »

wow. That is going to be a tight fit, should look great though. I can't speak for you, but putting it in an existing case is probably a better idea than making one. I could never do that kinda thing.

The ribbon was a great idea by the by. I'd love to see pics of it in action at the end and along the way.
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Pullmyfinger
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Re: A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by Pullmyfinger »

I'll take some pics of it in action today, a custom case would be nice but I think it would be really expensive to make one and I really wouldn't know how or have the tools to do it. In fact what kept us from finishing was (besides smelling melted solder for 10+ hours) that we didn't have a dremel or anything to file the cart slot down.

By the way, most of the metal shielding of both the 32x and the Genesis was removed, I really don't know if I should try to replace it (probably via aluminum foil and packaging tape), the system seems to work just fine without it. Anyone know something about this?
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t0yrobo
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Re: A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by t0yrobo »

You really don't need the shielding for anything. If for some reason you're watching tv with an antenna while having the system on it might get some interference but that's all.
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Re: A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by Droid party »

I salute you. I've been considering this project for a while but don't have the time for it.
JT wrote:Yeah, like vampire aliens invade and hit us all with a ray beam that paralyzes all of our arms. The only way to deactivate the ray beam and fight back the vampire alien threat is with a complicated series of foot patterns on the device's control board that looks remarkably like a DDR pad. We will all praise this man for saving our lives and buy him a mountain of stuffed animals.
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Ramatut4001
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Re: A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by Ramatut4001 »

That's so rad.
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deathred
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Re: A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by deathred »

i tried doing thing as well, but stopped because of certain problems i ran into.

my setup (genesis2 + 32x) would only work with one ac adapter, the genesis 2. if i plugged in the 32x adapter, i couldnt power off the unit. so that was a biggie, i didnt know whether or not something was wrong with my machines.

the other problem was that the heatsink on my board was in a different position (different rev. board) and i couldnt locate a proper spot to relocate it to.
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Ziggy
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Re: A friend and I are building a Sega Neptune

Post by Ziggy »

Hey, that's pretty cool. Neat idea.
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