James Mackenzie

I Love Software Rendering Sharp pixels, gritty colour banding, and DOS games running at resolutions their own era couldn’t manage.

Disassembly vs Decomp vs Recomp vs Port: What's the Difference?

Rescuing Files From a Dying Amstrad PC1640 Hard Drive When my Amstrad PC1640’s original hard drive started throwing file allocation table errors, I needed its files off fast — over a null-modem cable, with Procomm’s Kermit mode on the Amstrad side and Ter…

I'm building my own native PC port of Star Fox. 🦊🚀 Pure C, no emulation.

How to Play Gran Turismo 5 Across Three Screens with Three PlayStation 3s Gran Turismo 5’s Multi Monitor mode links three PlayStation 3s into one continuous view across three screens — no special hub, and it works in full GT career mode instead of just Ar…

My Xbox Series X Keeps Shutting Down, Part 2: The Fix Back inside the Xbox Series X that kept shutting itself off — this time going all the way to the die itself to find out if the theory from Part 1 was actually right.

My Xbox Series X Keeps Shutting Down, Part 1: Chasing the Fault My Xbox Series X started powering itself off mid-game, but only in some games.

I Got a Modern Radeon GPU Running on a Raspberry Pi 5 A Sapphire Radeon RX 580, then a PowerColor RX 6600 XT, wired into a Raspberry Pi 5 over OCuLink — a custom kernel, a patched memcpy library, and Half-Life 2 at 4K on a $60 computer.

How to Play Gran Turismo 3 Across Three Screens with Three PlayStation 2s An i.LINK Battle mode hidden inside Gran Turismo 3 links three PlayStation 2s into one continuous view across three screens — and, later, one genuine ultra-wide picture stitched from

I Made Half-Life 2 Run Natively on a Raspberry Pi 5 A GitHub find, a beefy USB-C power supply, and an official Active Cooler — the full story of building Valve’s Source Engine from scratch and getting Half-Life 2 running natively on a Raspberry Pi 5, no e…

Installing a GC Loader Optical Drive Emulator in My GameCube Retiring the optical drive on a Japanese GameCube in favour of a GC Loader — an SD-card ODE that replaces the drive assembly entirely.

I Rescued a $12 Dreamcast Found on the Side of the Road A Hong Kong roadside electronics stall, some haggling, and a genuinely grubby Sega Dreamcast — cleaned up, brought back to life, and rescued from an early retirement.

Where to Shop for Retro Games in Akihabara (and Shinjuku) A store-by-store guide to retro game shopping in Tokyo — Super Potato, Book Off, Retro Game Camp, BEEP, Surugaya, and where the tourist-pricing traps are.

Fixing a Broken Dreamcast Controller A second Dreamcast controller stopped working, with what looked like pushed-in connector pins — turned out to be a cheap, no-solder fix.

Finding the Best Capture Card for Analog Video Why I went looking for a capture card built for video walls and broadcast, rather than retro gaming — and ended up with a pair of Datapath VisionAV-HD cards.

Fixing a Snapped Wire in a Rare GameCube VGA Cable A hand-hacked GameCube VGA cable from the early 2000s lost its red channel.

Plugging a SNES Directly Into a VGA Monitor Actually Works A RetroTINK HD15 dongle, a monitor with a rare 15kHz-capable VGA input, and a hunch that shouldn’t have paid off — but did.

I Just Wanted to Power My PAL SNES in America… A “PAL” SNES that wouldn’t power on turned into a teardown revealing a Japanese Super Famicom motherboard hiding under a European shell, a reverse-polarity power supply, and a stealth region-free mod wired in…

Mac Pro 5,1 Upgrade Guide Choosing a macOS version, a GPU, and an upgrade path for the classic Mac Pro 5,1 — there’s no single perfect configuration, just tradeoffs.

Getting XTIDE Working on the Amstrad PC1640 Turning a CompactFlash card into hard drive storage for an Amstrad PC1640 — the failed attempts, the Serial Drive detour, and the recipe that finally worked.

Fixing Fan Noise on a Radeon X800 XL A cheap used Radeon X800 XL turned up with a seized, screaming fan.

I made 3Dfx Voodoo2 work on a modern PC!

The Three-Screen Ridge Racer Quest: Chasing a Cabinet Nobody Could Emulate Namco built an arcade cabinet that stitches three screens into one race.

I Tried to Turn a Dell Dimension E520 into a Windows 98 Retro PC A case-study post on why the Dell Dimension E520 looked promising for Windows 98, but turned into a more mixed DOS, Win98, and XP experiment.

I Tried to Turn a Dell OptiPlex 760 into a Windows 98 Retro PC A case study on why the Dell OptiPlex 760 looked promising for Windows 98, but turned out to be much happier as an XP and DOS machine.

Minecraft “Vibrant Visuals” on Xbox Series X – They Look Great!

Xbox Remote Play — From a Web Browser?

Capturing Native-Resolution Video Without a Scaler You don’t need a RetroTINK or Framemeister to get sharp, native-resolution capture of a classic computer — with a good capture card and deliberate post-processing, you can reconstruct the original pixel g…

Reviving an ASUS EeeTop as a Linux Kitchen PC A practical step-by-step guide to turning an old ASUS EeeTop ET2010PNT touchscreen PC into a modern Linux kitchen calendar and email kiosk, covering legacy BIOS installs, GRUB fixes, touchscreen drivers, and n…

The Ugly Dell That Became My Dream Retro Gaming PC I wanted a retro PC that could do the full “greatest hits” tour of retro gaming: native DOS, Windows 98, and Windows XP — without spending silly money, without hunting rare parts for months, and without e…

I bought a projector!

I Accidentally Turned My Projector Into a 3D Cinema I discovered my projector secretly supports full-resolution 3D.

CGA Gaming on an MDA Monochrome Monitor The 1987 ATI Graphics Solution SR is a retro graphics card with a unique trick.