The Spice Must Flow

First it was heavy rains, now it’s heat and I’m unable to do any serious assembly. I did manage to more or less finish Rhea queue but GDEMU is still lagging behind. The work has not stopped completly though, I hope to wrap it up within two weeks or so.

I will be reopening preorders for Rhea next week, probably as early as Monday. I have but a few PCBs left and the new ones haven’t even arrived yet so expect some waiting time. I will also take preorders for a small batch of Phoebe units – that is the 21-pin variant of Saturn ODE. As with every new offering consider it a higher risk item, so if you’re not comfortable with that just wait for the early bugs to be ironed out. That being said the device seems to work just fine.

Note that since there are several different variants of the 21-pin drive the ODE needs to be configured for the exact model you have. That in turn requires soldering 1 or 2 jumpers on the PCB. I might also offer to do it for you if you can provide all the necessary details but it remains to be seen if I can keep it up (and not confuse the orders for example). Plus on some units the flex cable will need to be twisted properly since SEGA changed the connector orientation – the original drives had the same problem. For the initial batch I will supply a spare cable though so it should make things easier.

On the PCE front things are less rosy, let’s just say I had another design scrapped. Might be for the better, I had some other ideas in the meantime and now I’m going to pursue those. ODE itself doesn’t look all that complicated but what I need now is a prototype unit with some extra functionality, a pass-through function if possible as well, and I have to get it right on the first try. I really don’t want to hunt down another set of connectors if I can’t unsolder these again.