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Modern replacements for old Wacom tablet pens

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Whilst researching the Wacom ArtPad II for my Macintosh Classic, I stumbled across some information that the Samsung Galaxy Note S-Pen is compatible with the pen used on the Wacom ArtPad and other tablets from that period. I love that the same technology is being used almost 30 years on.

So after buying a Wacom ArtPad II, which came with an original pen, out of curiosity I bought a few different types of S-Pen to confirm the information I had read.

I hope his is useful to somebody who has an old Wacom tablet but is missing a pen.

From top to bottom:

The original pen that came with my Wacom ArtPad II.
“Samsung S-Pen with Eraser” (here black, with eraser, about three quarters of the size of the original pen) cost £10. Works well, including the eraser. I would class it as a very good replacement for the original pen.
“S-Pen For Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1” (here black, a little smaller again, about a third or so the size of the original pen) cost £5. This works just fine with my ArtPad II. The nib has ever so slightly more friction than the original pen but it’s a good stand in. The shape is slightly flattened so it’s comfortable for pointing, but not for drawing.
“S-Pen NOTE 1” (here white, about the size of a Nintendo DS stylus) cost £2. Too small to use for writing. However the one I received was broken, in that it was always clicking.

Notes

Toshiba Tablet-PC pens are also known to be compatible
There are many other third party Samsung-compatible pens available
You might be able to rehouse the S-Pen, for example in a larger, 3D-printed body

Pen compatibility between models

UltraPen, Cintiq pen, “Penabled” pen, ArtPad / UD / CT pen, or S-Pen are interchangeable (this is what I needed)
Bamboo pens and Graphire pens are interchangeable
Intuos3 pens can only be swapped with other Intuos3 pens

References

68kMLA forum topic
greg-kennedy.com (plus comments)
Bongofish wiki (archived page)
Wacom Asia (archived PDF)

Macintosh Classic logic board recap

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Difficulty: 7/10
Cost: < £20

I last used my Macintosh Classic a few years ago. At that point everything worked OK. Switching it on this month I find there’s no sound and it won’t boot. This is par for the course with these 30-year-old machines. Time for a service!

I decided quite early on that I would not rush any part of this, which turned out to be the right decision!

The first thing to do is to check that the PRAM battery hasn’t leaked or worse, exploded, which would cover the logic board in acid and would be uneconomical to repair.

Took me a while to find my long torx bit to open up the Macintosh case. But good news - no battery leakage!

I removed the 30-year-old battery and bought a replacement.

Surprisingly the replacement battery (not pictured) was already 5 years old, manufactured 2017. Not ideal, but it’ll do for now.

Next, I figured I would make a quick system disk as I had figured out that I could boot it from floppy disk if I held down Cmd+Alt+Shift+Del, which is the first odd thing.

Trying to reset PRAM on boot resulting in nothing happening, and there was no startup chime. Two more odd things.

Somebody suggested maybe the keyboard wasn’t working. I booted the System floppy and tested all keys and they were fine.

Next, I disconnected the hard drive to see if anything changed and I was able to boot using the system ROM (a feature only ever found on this specific model). This gets me into a bare-bones System 6 and from here there’s a hidden way to reset PRAM. I did that and there was no change to symptoms.

Time to stop delaying the inevitable and take a look at the capacitors. Having never seen a leaking capacitor before I thought that everything looked fine from a cursory glance at the PCB. But with some guidance from 68KMLA forum, and a bit more time, I could see that there was a thin film of almost transparent dried residue surrounding almost all the caps, and some corrosion at the caps near the main power connector. Recap is needed!

Removing the capacitors is the big challenge. I don’t have any dedicated soldering stations or heat flow gear, just a portable soldering iron, a pencil soldering iron and a twinkle in my eye.

I spent a few days looking at YouTube videos and asking for opinions on methods of removing capacitors. Under advice, I found a practice board in a dead AV AMP that had a gazillion capacitors and I used that to practice. In the end I decided I would use the “twist and go” method (that’s what I’m calling it!) which involved using long nose pliers to grab the capacitor from above, and whilst pushing towards the board gently rotating the capacitor back and forth around its centre point. On the practice board some caps were more difficult that others, but I never lifted a pad in some 20 or so capacitors.

I’ve no doubt you could lift a pad if you used a different technique or you went about it recklessly, but I found this seemingly brutal method worked very well. In years gone by I would have rushed this part!

If I can do it on a practice board successfully, on-demand, with one hand, it should be more than believable that it’s possible to do it successfully in better circumstances.

On the Macintosh board they were much easier, and fewer, and I also never lifted a pad. I was left with the odd leg that was easily removed with some excess solder during the cleanup phase.

In total 8 capacitors were in need of replacement, and I swapped them with tantalum capacitors which I understand will never need replacing in future. They look different, but I don’t mind that it makes it more obvious that they have been replaced IMHO.

Oh, and I bought some new rosin/flux-core solder of a reputable brand, and that really improved my soldering technique and results compared to when I was using the old/cheap/free solder I had in my tool box. You get what you pay for!

The results are not my finest work, but I would say above average and the machine is now booting well with sound and a faster replacement drive so we’re good to go!

I picked up an extra 2MB of RAM from eBay to take this machine to a maximum of 4MB! That’s megabytes!

All that remains is for me to configure my SD card with the apps and games I like to have around. I’m going for multiple System installs that I can switch between after a quick reboot. Plus Japanese support. This task is made easier and quicker by using emulators to do the hard work many times faster than hardware, and finally copy the prepared disk image onto the SD card.

Then, at last, I will be able to play games on this little thing once more!

Famicom Mahjong/Hanafuda controller USB keyboard mod

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 09 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Difficulty: 7/10
Cost: < £20

I play a lot of Hanafuda games. In the arcade these games share a control panel with Mahjong. It’s basically a keyboard featuring the first half of the alphabet, presented as a long row of keys in alphabetical order. This makes playing Arcade Hanafuda games a bit of a chore without a bunch of keyboard remapping and emulator faff.

Some people were using arcade control panels connected to their PC. In Japan you can buy a custom electronics kit to make a USB Mahjong/Hanafuda controller, but it’s expensive at about €85 plus shipping and import duty. There had to be a better way!

I saw that a couple of old Famicom Mahjong games by Capcom were bundled with a custom controller. It was essentially two controllers in one, so won’t work with my controller adapter cables. So I wondered how easy it would be to convert one to USB? Posting on a NES developer forum helped me verify that it should be possible.

Christmas 2019 I bought a bunch of games from Japan and added a Famicom Mahjong controller to my order. It arrived, I put it on my to-do list, then a global pandemic happened.

Almost a year later I picked it up and decided to figure it out. I would need a little Arduino, a usb cable with data and power, and I’d have to write some Arduino code to poll the buttons a couple of times every update. Back in 2019 nobody had done this mod so I was in my own.

Just before I started to write code, I figured I’d do a quick Google search to see if anything had changed. And, unbelievably, somebody else had done this exact mod in February 2020 and open sourced their code. I thanked them and that meant the project was instantly half done.

I bought an additional Pro Micro (Arduino compatible) and set it up on a breadboard that made it easier for me to wire up a prototype and check everything was working.

Finally I cut the old controller cord and wired my new setup into the controller. It worked perfectly. I went back in to trim some supports and add some alternative reinforcements to prevent the controller bending and creaking.

Using this controller makes playing these games so much easier, and I’ve discovered a couple of games that have made this well worth the time and investment.

Dreamcast GDEMU installation

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Difficulty: 5/10
Cost: ~ £100

My Dreamcast is an NTSC-U model that I bought in the middle of the Dreamcast’s short life. It was a special order from UK mail order firm Madeira Games based out of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and is chipped to play import games. It has a replacement UK PSU and has served me well over the years. I’d resisted GDEMU, making do with a serial USB Micro SD adapter. But I eventually decided the ease of use and ability to play certain WinCE games like Super Runabout was enough reason to upgrade.

I ordered a bunch of stuff and then fitted it. There’s not much to say. The replacement lid release mechanism was the most difficult part to fit.

After install I wasn’t impressed by the noise reduction but after measurement it is as advertised on the fan box. But it’s far from “silent”. So, I’d say that the GDEMU is the only essential upgrade. You can probably live without the fan, riser, etc.

Whilst trying a few things I noticed when putting the lid on that it increases the noise levels due to echo in the now much emptier shell. Quick measurements showed somewhere around 3dB. So I put some plastic board along the edge of the GDEMU effectively halving the inside space whilst creating a direct passage from the fan directly to the PSU. This idea isn’t mine, it was something I’d seen/read that came back to me when I heard the noise increase as I put on the lid. I believe it’s done for air flow reasons but I did it for echo noise reduction reasons. New fan noise measurement <20dB which is as Noctua advertise.

Replacing bitmap graphics in a PlayStation game

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A version of this article was originally posted on my Patreon

I found an old Hanafuda Koi-Koi game that I can no longer easily play due to… sigh… what they call progress? It’s called Koikoi Komachi and was released around 2005 for Mac OS X (initially for PPC, and later Intel).

I really like the cards images that it has, and was able to extract them using File Juicer which is a kind of Swiss Army Knife for easily extracting files that might be embedded in an app, archive or disk image.

But just looking at the cards is not enough. I really needed to play a video game with them, you know? So I thought it would be cool to transplant them into the PlayStation game Youkai Hana Asobi.

Here’s what I did

Split the new card image into individual cards
Resize/shrink the individual cards to the dimensions used in the PS1 game
Extract the images I want to edit from the PS1 game
Edit the extracted images to add the new cards and make any other changes
Replace the images in the PS1 game with the new ones

Image Manipulation

To do the image splitting and resizing I used Retrobatch which makes this kind of stuff really easy. I created a workflow to crop out the individual cards and do the resizing all in one batch. Very cool!

Image Editing

PlayStation images are palette-based so you need to use an image editor that respects the embedded indexed colour palette. There may be other capable editors, but Adobe Photoshop is very good at this sort of thing so that’s what I used. Any old version will do, you definitely do not need the latest version.

I pasted each of my small card images into the two images used by the game, replacing the spectre/monster cards that are default. I also took time to change the options screen to modify the thumbnail that signifies which card design you’re using, and I also added a “NEW” label to the title screen.

I stopped short of changing the “help” card images because that would have been a lot more work and I do not personally look at those whilst playing.

ROM Hacking

There are many ways to get images out of a PS1 game, but I settled on Tim2View because it offers an all-in-one solution for extraction and insertion. It is as easy as:

Export PNG… (F4)
(do your image editing elsewhere)
Import PNG… (F5)

Warning: Tim2View writes to your PS1 bin file at each operation—without prompting—so always keep a backup just in case something goes wrong!

Gotcha: be sure to respect whatever colour is marked as transparent when making your image edits. In my case this was the colour black (0,0,0) so I had to make sure to use an almost-black colour in my new graphics to avoid unwanted transparent pixels. You can quickly check the state of your image by toggling the background transparency type at the bottom of the window. If it’s wrong just tweak and re-import.

That was fun!

I then used MultiPatch to create an IPS patch file from the changes, so I could make this mod easy for other gamers to enjoy.

The finished patch is available at: www.romhacking.net/hacks/4593/