I guess I haven't mentioned what it actually IS since I'm so in the weeds on this shit lol. It's a stick that plugs into a TV & plays emulated games (NES/SNES/MD/GB/GBC/GBA/PS1/Arcade/Atari). The emulators run OK but nothing is configurable and it's forced 16:9. Versions of this thing get everywhere
BUT they have an undocumented feature where if you connect the stick to a PC via a Micro USB data cable it mounts a 1GB partition which corresponds to a section in the stick's menu, so you can indeed add games. (The USB cable in the box is power-only so it does not work for this ๐)
The other thing I wanted to do was figure out if there was a way to make the cards normally readable in a PC so you could add your own games. Turns out that's impossible because the stick's bootloader is where the partition table would normally be, so you can create one but then the stick won't boot
I didn't want to sell them with defective cards, so I decided to rip one of the good ones & clone it to some new cheap-but-ok cards
In this process I found that only 2 of the 10 cards were good ๐
Here's the good rip I got after MANY tries https://archive.org/details/M8-8001100-V8.0-20240828-64G
ใใถใคใณใ่ฏใใใใใคใญใฎๅพใๅงฟ(ใฏใฃใใโ) #็ๅฒกๅธๅ็ฉๅ ฌๅ #ใใณใใฎใใ
Bogdan, who is sadly not on Mastodon, built a web server from a disposed vape.
On the one hand, what has the world come to, treating 32-bit processors faster than our youth's computers as disposable...
OTOH, the sheer amount of cool we can do by just repurposing the trash shat out by rampant consumerism!
https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
#Permacomputing FTW
New blog post! The Sega Master System... Girl? Another variant of Sega's 8-bit console that I haven't looked at before; I hope you enjoy! https://nicole.express/2025/sega-mistress-system.html