ADDING PERSISTENT MEMORY as well as ETHERNET TO vintage ARCADE MACHINES
If you are a regular reader, you are certainly familiar with hacker [Sprite_tm]. He has been working with fellow members of the TkkrLab hackerspace to get things prepared for their official grand opening on may 28th, as well as composed in to share a job he just recently completed to kick things off.
As part of their preparations, they have been stocking the joint with all kind of hacker-friendly goodies including lots of tools as well as Club Mate, in addition to a vintage ‘1943’ arcade cabinet. The game is a group favorite, though every time the power is turned off, it loses all of the hard-earned high scores. [Sprite_tm] understood he might enhance on the present paper-based score register, so he pulled the machine available to see what might be done.
He utilized an AVR to tap into the machine’s Z80 logic board, enabling him to checked out as well as compose to the whole of the game’s RAM whenever he pleased. This enabled him to keep tabs on the high scores, restoring them to memory whenever the machine is powered back on. The addition of the AVR likewise enabled him to add a TCP/IP interface, which is utilized to send high scores to Twitter whenever somebody beats the previous record.
His modular bus tap can be utilized in all kind of Z80-based hardware, so if you have some vintage devices laying around, be sure to swing by his site for a more detailed look at the develop process.