Any homebrewers/8 bit hackers part of any good forums/mailing lists?

[jim50]

Hi all, a bit off topic, I know, so sorry about that!

In a very unexpected twist of fate, I've inherited from the last owner a small box of old video game console internals. It seems he (or someone) at some point fixed games consoles by cannibalising other ones (or just got REALLY mad when he lost). Most of it is damaged and useless obviously but it seems that the parts that you'd expect to fail are what's been harvested, meaning the CPU's and memory chips are there (one was definitely a sega genesis, other unknown, suspected master system/sinclar's) I've identified 3 Z80's (none made by zilog) and a motorola 68K CPU, and it seems like a sign I should give these dinosaurs a second chance at life, and am reading up on home brew computers.

Only problem is I'm dealing with CPU's made just a couple years before I was born, so whilst finding documentation isn't as hard as I thought, especially for the Z80's, a lot of that information has become obsolete, meaning having to find modern hardware solutions. I'm also having a hard time finding active on-line communities, if any of you are part of or know of any, please don't hold back!

Jim

[tgalati4]

Don't forget that some pinball machines used the same proprietary chips to function. The CPU's were solid, but the RAM chips, memory controllers, and other odd bits would fail without any spares available. So look for pictures of a particular game board on google images and try to identify the chip number (of the missing chip) and then do a search on that.