After digging up 3 Game Gears recently, I have one that is short a few parts and has a bad brightness dial or related parts (dim display to black) and pretty near impossible to play with it. I've thought about getting RGB kit and making it for my TV. This one GG seems like a good start. To lose: LCD panel, brightness dial, and a few parts related to those. Also lose the internal speaker. I've already started on the controller adapter. One of the common issues with consolized GG is the start button. Using SMS pad or other Sega controller, the signal is often not passed without hacking the controller. I wanted to be able to use any regular unmodded controller so using regular SMS pad is out. Using Genesis pad would work as I could wire the start button but I would need a converter to decode the controller data because it uses shift to support up to 6 buttons over a few wires. And in my experience, non-shifted controller don't play nice on some systems like C64 and SMS. Only the controller I got with the Altered Beast system worked well, the other Sega 3 button controller and most of 3rd party controller just wouldn't work on early consoles for some reason. Since I would have needed controller adapter to use a controller that has total of 3 or more buttons, I decided to use NES controller instead. (*ducks and runs from Nintendo hating Sega fanboys*) A quick solution is arduino to read NES pad and pass it to GG board. There exists NES library and I've already coded a working script. The dog bone controller is nice to hold, and NES Advantage would be blatantly cheating in some games not designed for rapid fire or slo-mo Once I get the RGB board in and tested working, I'll start on the case forming. I do have a general idea of how it would look and did some prelim math on the measurement of the design. I just hope my woodworking skill hasn't rusted over.
Nice, LCD replacement hack. But what if I wanted to play with my 32" LCD TV? It's a bitch to carry it around to play games and I doubt batteries will last long.
Keep clicking on Next. http://www.lcv.ne.jp/~mgs1987/sega/gg2.html http://www.lcv.ne.jp/~mgs1987/sega/gg3.html ...
The craftsmanship on that build is top notch. Seems like he only built two at the same time which is a sensible thing do at the time. Unfortunately the scratch-build nature of the project probably means no additional units will ever be built.
Ooooh I didn't see the next part (should have used Chrome's translate feature). That custom RGB board looks huge, glad someone came up with a smaller version using CPLD rather than a bunch of chips. I just may have to steal his design for the console. The SMS-esque look is nice. Dremmel, some plastic sheet, bondo, and a little trigometry to calculate triangle panel size and angles. I'm glad I survived trigs back when a $100 high end calculator was one that can do square root, cube, sine, cosine, and tangent. Some student still had to use slider ruler for more complex equations and didn't have the money for a good calculator. EDIT: and forget the dust flap. It might make sense if the console is expected to sit out uncovered for a long time but mine's going to have ED-GG plugged in full time.
