Recent Posts

As a general rule of older electronics - capacitors have the shortest life expectancy, especially the electrolytic ones (the cylindrical ones). If you see one with a bulging top, it should be replaced. Some even visibly leak their innards on the pcb.

I also had an O2 with a similar problem. Worked fine for a bit, but got funky after it warmed up. I never got around to fixing it, though. I think I used it for donor parts, actually.

I modded (Retrofixes) my childhood O2, and it is now unstable. It starts up find cold, but if I leave it on for 10-15 minutes (on the Blockout attract screen) it eventually resets. From there on, it will give me the gray screen as if the cartridge wasn't connected. It stays like this until I leave it off for 30 minutes or so. It doesn't seem to be the cartridges themselves, as even a relatively new C7061 is having the same behavior. Here's what I've tried so far.

* Cleaned cartridge connector with isopropyl and with Deoxit.
* Reworked solder points on the cartridge connector.
* Confirmed voltage on the 8048 at 5.05V, both before and after the failures start.
* Cleaned legs and sockets on the 8048 and 8244.
* Confirmed continuity from the cartridge port to the CPU.
* Swapped the 8048 and 8244 from a different working O2.

I suspect there's a cold solder joint somewhere or a component failing when it gets warm. I could use some pointers on tracking it down. I do have a logic probe and a DSO Nano to test with. I'm hoping to not have to remove the mod, because it looks great, but I suspect I'm headed that direction. Any ideas?

I'm in the US and to get my G7400 running I bypassed the whole internal PSU. If I remember correctly, the boards in a G7400 require 5V and 12V (the G7000 might only require 5V, not sure).
I had a broken external CR-ROM player whose external PSU gave 5V and 12V (I think all hardrives/cds need 5v/12v), so I ripped out the jack of the CD and wired it to the G7400. It's an ugly hack and fragile hack, but it works. I really should mount it somehow.

The G7000 console needs 5V regulated supply (when you don't use the internal or external power supply)

The G7400 console needs 5V and 12V regulated supply (when you don't use the internal power supply)
The internal power supply (240V) works on 120V too (no step-up converter necessary).

My dream was to make all the roms available, but when you see games like Incomming hitting the market before it's even finished, you can only regret it. Maybe if someone could put an emulator online on this site, and on https://experienciaodyssey.com.br/,  where people could play the games, without having access to the roms ...

Unfortunately, René has left the Videopac scene a couple of years ago.

Thank you very much for your answer. I followed your advice and by scouting this forum, I found many "work-in-progress" binaries to review and try out. Very cool !!!  

Overall, I get the impression Videopac homebrew dev is mostly focused on releasing limited-edition collector cartridges. That's perfectly fine of course, but it may explain why that scene stays niche? (compared to some other retro communities sharing a lot of open source which boosts knowledge and quantity/quality of releases)

Anyway, from Github, I also found two demos: "ODC2"(https://github.com/lameiro/odc2-demo) and "Rash"(https://github.com/petersobolev/rash).

Fixing an internal power supply of a G7000 console is not easy if you have little or no experience with these kind of things (switched-mode power supply or SMPS), but since a G7000 needs only 5V you could replace the built-in power supply by a 5V adapter. (at least 1.5A)
For a G7400 you would need an additional 12V adapter.

.. so what your saying if i have a G7400, a U.S Odyssey2 plug in adapter could by pass a power supply?  do you have the procedure?

Hi.

You can find some roms in the hoembrew section, maybe.

Hi! I'm Florian, from France, but living in Finland. I've been fond of the Videopac since the early 80s, but new here on this forum  . My Videopac (I have a French Radiola Jet 25 console) and my cartridges are currently >2500 kilometers away. Unfortunately I'm not able to access those for at least as long as the coronavirus crisis will continue  . So for the last few months I have got the ROM collection from "Rene's VIDEOPAC page" (great collection, it includes all the classics I had, plus a few more titles and prototypes) and have been playing Videopac (with my girlfriend) on an emulator (O2EM compiled on a Raspberry Pi).

My question is: Are there more ROMs I can play with?