Earlier this year, there was some drama around the shutdown of the Nintendo Wii U’s online gaming. Team 0% had a goal of making sure that every level created in Super Mario Maker was beaten at least once. If you’re not familiar with Mario Maker, it’s a video game that lets you make your own levels in the style of several classic Mario titles and share them with the rest of the world to play. Well, it did until new uploads were disabled in 2021. By that point in time, the sequel Super Mario Maker 2 had come out on the Switch and that’s where most people were creating their levels.
The clock was ticking for Nintendo’s servers and Team 0% was so close to their goal. Eventually what it came down to was a single uncleared level: Trimming the Herbs by Ahoyo. As you can see in the video, it only takes about 15 seconds to beat. But in order to win, you have to do some crazy, precise tricks that casual players like me simply can’t do.
Some of the most talented Super Mario Maker players in the world were focused on trying to finish it before the April 8th cutoff, including sanyx91smm2, Thabeast721, and LilKirbs. It was very, very difficult. People started wondering if cheating was involved. In order to upload a level to Nintendo’s servers, you have to beat it yourself first. This serves as a way to ensure that impossible levels can’t be uploaded (although some cruel people use glitches or hidden blocks to still upload “impossible” levels).
I’m not really much of a gamer these days, but this story caught my eye at the time and inspired me to do some hardware tinkering with my own Wii U.
This post has a little bit of everything. Hardware diagnostics, some suspiciously similar datasheets from two separate Taiwan chip manufacturers, and firmware reverse engineering. Read on if that sounds like fun!
Lately, I’ve been enjoying watching random electronics repair channels on YouTube. There’s something oddly satisfying about watching someone take a broken device from totally nonfunctional to perfectly working, all by replacing a $0.05 capacitor that has failed shorted or maybe a blown $0.75 IC. Two of my favorite channels about this topic are Buy it Fix it and StezStix Fix?.
The videos inspired me. I thought, “I should totally try this!” So I went on eBay and looked for broken devices. I have a pretty decent understanding of how video encoders and decoders work, so I thought it would be a fun project to try to fix an HDMI capture card. I found a broken Elgato Game Capture HD60 S USB 3.0 device. The listing said that nothing happened when you plugged it in.
When it arrived, I was able to verify exactly what the listing said. Nothing showed up on my computer when I plugged it in. I cracked it open and had a look at what was happening internally when it powered up. I started by poking around at voltages on the board with it plugged in, and it was pretty obvious that something was dragging the power rails down. Little did I know at that point what I was getting myself into.
What follows is the story of how I fixed not one, but two, different flawed Altera USB Blaster clone devices that never worked correctly after I bought them.
I recently built a few Time Sleuths for HDMI input lag testing. Time Sleuth is a neat little open-source project that allows you to measure the time it takes for your TV or monitor to display an image. The way it works is an Altera/Intel MAX 10 FPGA creates a video signal that is mostly a black screen with some blinking white boxes. It feeds the image off to a TI TFP410 DVI transmitter, and also looks for a pulse on a photodetector. It measures the difference in time between when the white box blinked on and the photodetector saw it, and displays it as a number on its generated video signal with some min/max/average stats. Pretty cool! If you’re not into soldering, you can also buy them fully assembled.
Several months ago, Will from CayMac Vintage reached out to me looking to resurrect my old Mac ROM SIMM programmer project. As a quick summary of that project, it provides a convenient way to program custom 64-pin ROM SIMM modules for vintage Macs from the late ’80s to early ’90s. There are several reasons you might want to do this, including: replacing an original ROM module that has gone bad, disabling the startup RAM test to decrease boot time in systems with a lot of RAM, bbraun’s amazing bootable ROM disk hack, or my startup chime hack. JDW recently made a cool YouTube video explaining custom ROM SIMMs if you’re curious about them. He even included some footage from 2003 of me playing basketball!
I used to make programmer boards and programmable ROM SIMMs and sell them to hobbyists, but it burnt me out. In particular, assembling the boards and the logistics of shipping were not fun to deal with. Thankfully, in 2016, Steve from Big Mess o’ Wires stepped in to take over. He made his own customizations to the programmer and made some really neat improvements to the bootable ROM disk driver. He still sells the Mac ROM-inator II SIMM to this day, but he stopped selling the programmer board. In the meantime, many other players have entered the market with custom ROM SIMMs, but nobody has been making the programmer available to the community, likely due to my non-commercial license on the PCB design.
Will was looking to fill that void. I helped him get going, but we discovered that the AT90USB646 microcontroller that I originally used was hard to find due to the chip shortage. At the time, it was easier to find the AT90USB1286 instead, which is essentially just the exact same chip, but with 128 KB of flash instead of 64 KB of flash.
