Toy Story 3 Bootleg Dvd
Valiant Puga
When I entered junior high school in 1956, I purchased a NC-109 National shortwave radio. I would sit with headphones over my ears for hours, listening to ham operators talking back and forth and relaying messages for the Armed Forces Radio Network. I would set my wristwatch to the change in tone broadcast from the National Bureau of Standards WWV. I began collecting QSL cards by the hundreds.
Four years later I was in senior high school taking my required second semester of physics. Mr. Stanley, my physics teacher, told us we could earn extra credit if we completed a physics project. We were studying elementary electronics, magnetism and radio. That is when I came up with the idea of building an AM radio transmitter.
My dad was the pastor of the local Methodist Church; we lived in the parsonage and my bedroom faced the church. It had a very high steeple and would provide a fantastic opportunity to gain height for my radio station antenna.
I knew from my physics course that placing an antenna high up would provide better range for the signal. I also knew that a long length of wire attached to my shortwave radio brought in more signals than a short wire. Therefore it made good sense to use a long wire for my transmitter antenna. My plan was to run a lead wire from the phone oscillator out of the bedroom window up to a long wire attached to the very top of the church steeple.
Unsure if we could get inside the steeple, the three of us proceeded into the church and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The ceilings of the church were high. Straight up about 16 feet directly over the top of the staircase was a small door to the steeple. There was no way we could get inside without erecting a very high ladder or scaffolding. We had to rethink our antenna installation.
By early afternoon the new antenna was in place. It turned out different than originally planned and now included a bare copper wire that ran from an insulator nailed to a telephone pole directly behind the city police department all the way to the window on the second floor of the church, about 100 yards.
Next we attached the lead wire from the antenna to the phone oscillator. The microphone was attached where the schematic indicated and the unit was plugged into the wall socket. The filaments of the little one-tube phone oscillator began to glow. We were ready to give it a test.
I turned my bedroom AM radio and dialed it to the top of the band. Then very carefully I began turning the variable capacitor of the phone oscillator, turning it ever so slowly and listening to the radio for a signal.
What I did not know were the physical principals of radio harmonics and resonated frequencies in relationship to length and height of antennas. That is where a little knowledge of radio physics can become big trouble.
Dad introduced me to the engineer, who repeated his statement. I explained that I had built a phone oscillator for extra credit in my physics class and had been using it to broadcast music within the community; I thought it was perfectly legal.
On that warm fall day in 1960, the FCC pulled the plug on K-town Radio. No more bootleg radio with its rock and roll music for Knightstown high school students. I will never forget watching the white van with its circular antenna and logo driving away, with my phone oscillator inside.
For the next two years, about every three months thereafter, I received a first class letter from the FCC with a simple one-page flyer enclosed. No letter, just the flyer. It described the rules and regulations of FCC Part 15 and how operating an unlicensed radio station could result in severe fines and penalties.
Had a bootleg TNZS board on the operating slab recently; never met one of these bootlegs before, will be happy not to meet one again! A royal pain in the arse is how I would describe this board, at 1st glance it looked to be a nicely made bootleg, but on closer inspection it was quite a hacked about board, whether it was hacked about from new or not is impossible to say.
Tracks on the gfx board had been cut through with a drill, chips cut from the board and tatty bits of wire joining pins together, bits of wire badly soldered across chip legs, and chips in sockets made up out of snapped up bits of old sockets, nice single wipe jobs, guaranteed to cause troubles on old boards. One of the problems with bootlegs is that often these bodges were there from new, the PCB print may have been buggy or the bootleggers saved money by hacking another PCB design around to avoid starting a new one.
The original fault was that the board would only display a white screen, but previously it had run but the gfx were upside down and badly mangled. Well when I powered it up the board was running, but the image was all torn up, inverted and sliced up vertically too, the screen also looked like it was momentarily losing sync from time to time, this is likely to either be sync or a crappy connection to video ground. The rough edges of the image are due to the constant and violent shimmering of the image.
As the board was working I went straight for the sync signal on on the JAMMA connector and it was pretty messy on the scope. This buzzed all the way back to one of the ribbon connectors and appeared on the top board at which point it looked ok. The ribbon cable was causing the problems, multiple plug/unplug reseats on the cable fixed the shimmery issue, crappy old connectors!
The next problem was the inverted image, an original Taito board has 2 of the dip switches configured to set whether the game is in an upright cabinet or a cocktail cab and whether the image flip is on or off. The dip blocks on this board had both switched wired closed with PCB tracks, these had been cut through, probably with a screwdriver and some brute force.
When the now-active switches were closed the chopped up image came good, but the inversion remained. I spent some time looking for a fault that would cause the inversion but came up blank, finally I got confirmation from Andy at andysarcade.com that these bootlegs are hardwired to flip the screen as they do not have a working flip option, so until someone redesigns the board to read the field store in reverse, or recodes the program ROMs to fill the field store backwards the problem will remain. Both are beyond my powers anyway, I soldered wire bridges to close the dips for good again.
At this point I figured I was done, except when I moved the PCB to my cab for an upside down test play I got the dreaded white screen, moved it back to the test bench and got the same, the board would no longer boot.
In some ways a totally crashed board is a better patient than one that is running badly, in this case I could see the signals passing through a couple of the 74ls245 chips were bloody awful, as the board was jammed the signal controlling the direction of these transceiver chips was stuck in one position, so I could easily compare the signal into the chip with that emerging on the other side, they should be pretty much identical. But
More scopery showed crappy signals on the data lines on the TMM2064 chips, so I desoldered one but it tested fine. Moving upstream I found a 74LS374 chip with similarly messy signals to the 245s so I replaced that chip. There are no silkscreen grid locations on the main board but the 245s and 374 are all clustered around the pair of CPUs.
The board was now back in business, at this point it kinda wound down, the game was running, stable and pretty good. There were minor gfx artifacts that seem to be very power supply dependant and tend to fade away when the board is warmed up, but nothing really obviously wrong on the scope. The final fault was just as I was about to pack it up, I plugged it in for one last test and got a yellow screen again, this time with a very faint error message on the screen, white text on a yellow background, VDC RAM ERROR, or maybe UPC RAM ERROR (the font is somewhat hard to read), which may also mean CPU RAM error if the message is mangled. This turned out to the be the crappy ribbon cable connection again, if I had 4 new 50 way connectors I would probably have replaced them but a going over with a bud of brasso in some pliers seems to have done the trick.
...if I had a gun to my head on this one I probably would remove every single wipe socket on the board and replace with a machined pin, and replace the ribbon cables, this may finally remove the gfx artefacts, but with bootlegs its impossible to predict, it may not have been that great from day 1, there are a load of untestable PALs on the board and with all the hacks and patches its impossible to know what is correct and what is not. Give it a decent power supply around 5.2V and it is happy.
Still its now very playable again, but the feed to the vertical deflection coils in the monitor would have to be inverted to flip the screen, but its possible to through the 1st world and get to the Whale boss while upside down, but only because I know where the warps are to skip most of it ;)
In this episode, we met up with Courtney and Kyle, the former owner of Bootleg Pizza and talk about the story of a partnership gone wrong . Together we also discuss the challenges and triumphs of making sourdough on a commercial level. They emphasize the importance of precision and consistency, revealing their unique starter maintenance routine and dough recipe. They also share tips on finding affordable used equipment, such as ovens and mixers, as well as how they found their current location through a broker
Last week, a gentleman named Eddie McNamara hit up my No Echo email to pitch me a story that instantly grabbed my attention. In turns out, in the mid-'90s he played bass in what he referred to as a "fake BOLD reunion show," and wanted to tell the funny story behind it.
Whoever was supposed to play drums for us flaked, but Mark Shutdown was there and ready to step in as needed on drums and vocals. (When has this guy ever not been there for hardcore?) It was showtime.
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